I'm a UC Blog

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Toolkit provides a set of tools and documentation to simplify capacity planning for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The Capacity Planning Toolkit can be used as a complement to the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Planning Guide.

This release of the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Toolkit contains tools and documentation to simplify your hardware planning, provide you with increased knowledge and best practices for performance tuning, and improve your ability to verify the performance of your intended Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployments.

The Capacity Planning Toolkit is intended for use by IT professionals in a test environment prior to production deployment. These tools should never be used against a live production environment.

The tools in this Toolkit are designed to be used with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 only. If you are searching for tools that work with Live Communications Server 2005, please download the Live Communications Server 2005 Capacity Planning Toolkit from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=107a5e83-ca59-4bcb-a3bc-27efd97a477d&displaylang=en

Issues addressed in this release of the Capacity Planning Tool:

Issue Fixed: UserProfileGenerator load problem for AV and Appsharing scenario
Explanation: As mentioned in the release notes for the previous OCS 2007 R2 Capacity planning tools release, UserProfileGenerator was generating incorrect load for AV and Appsharing scenarios. This QFE fixes this issue and UserProfileGenerator should generate correct load for various load settings: low, medium & high.

Issue Fixed: Ocsstress needs a _Total instance
Explanation: A “_Total” performance counter instance was added to Ocsstress. This new instance makes it easier to monitor Ocsstress performance counters.

Issue Fixed: Ocsstress should not update the CallsFailed counter for 486 , 603 etc decline specific responses
Explanation: Ocsstress was wrongfully reporting calls which received valid responses such as 486 busy, 603 decline as calls failed. These calls are no longer marked as failed and are considered a successful call-routing scenario.

Source: here

See Windows XP put up against Windows 7 RC in a detailed review by Legit Reviews.

Excerpt:

Many in the industry are counting on Windows 7 to bring the netbook market to the next level. Having netbook manufacturers ship netbooks with 7+ year old Windows XP pre-installed surely deterred some from joining the ranks of households with the small, light and portable netbooks. It seems Microsoft has addressed most of the pitfalls of Windows Vista on a netbook by increasing battery life and performance to be very close to that of the lighter weight Windows XP.

We were happy to see that we did not experience any performance issues running Windows 7 on our ASUS Eee PC 1005HA seashell netbook. On some of our earlier netbooks we’ve reviewed, we noticed an occasional delay in responsiveness while simply typing an email. We did not notice any of this while running Windows XP or Windows 7 on the 1005HA.

Legit Bottom Line: Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system can and will be run on netbooks without a significant performance difference in most areas when compared to Windows XP. Consumers will be able to enjoy the enhancements had since 2002 without fear of turning their netbook into a clunker!

Source: here

Well it looks like Yahoo! is about to gain a better search engine via a deal struck today with Microsoft (at long last!)

For more information read this Microsoft press release.

Patching Adobe products like Flash and Reader in the enterprise are a pain, especially when 57 CVEs are out (in some cases for up to seven months prior to being addressed). My consumer recommendation for an Adobe Reader alternative has always been Foxit, primarily because it is lightweight unlike the bloaty Adobe version. Read more on Hardware 2.0.

Source: here

Since the introduction of Windows Geniune Activation (WGA) in XP, Windows piracy has become seemingly more difficult (and quite rightly so!) Pirates have previously worked around WGA by obtaining OEM certificates and updating the SLIC table within the computer BIOS (very risky, especially if you BIOS does not support SLIC v2.1).

Today Windows 7 WGA was breached using a similar exploit and unlike previous Vista attempts this time using a master OEM disc leaked by Lenovo (guess these guys will be waiting until it hits the shelves next time). The question I would like to ask “is it really worth it”, within days, weeks or months Microsoft will patch this leak via Windows Update and to those that don’t update – do you really want to run the risk of using an unpatched OS?

Apparently, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, the search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has now been made.

Taken from AllThingsD:

“Sources said Microsoft search technology will be used on Yahoo sites, although it is not clear if it will be branded as “powered by Bing”–Microsoft’s handsome and innovative new search offering–or not.

In addition, sources said Yahoo would still sell search ads on its sites and on Bing too, although Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising sales technology will be underneath it.”

Source: here