Skype for Business Announced

We finally know what the next iteration of Lync will be. Today Microsoft announced Skype for Business. A decade ago Skype brought down the barriers by making it easy to talk to someone anywhere in the world. A few years later, Microsoft bought Skype and introduced a lot of speculation about what that would mean.

Microsoft has now fully merged Lync and Skype, enabling what should be near seamless communication between the two. Skype for Business will be launched the first half of 2015. Existing Lync on-prem customers will be able to upgrade to the new Skype for Business server, and Office 365 customers will be automatically updated.

For more information, click here for the blog or here for the YouTube promo.

~ brad

"While only one day of the year is dedicated solely to honoring our veterans, Americans must never forget the sacrifices that many of our fellow countrymen have made to defend our country and protect our freedoms." ~Randy Neugebauer

SysAdmin Cheat Sheets

In most of our jobs, we touch a lot of different technologies. If you are like me, I have notes everywhere; in text files, OneNote, EverNote, bookmarks and who knows where else. A colleague found this site which has compiled a lot of cheat sheets, one-pagers, whatever you want to call them.

~ brad

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”  ~ Steve Jobs

OT Article: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

In a rare move by any business these days, Tesla Motors has opened their patents to anyone who wants to use them. They are doing this to help promote the electric car market as they simply cannot keep up with demand.

From the blog:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

 We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

 You can read the full article over here.

~ brad

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." ~ Albert Einstein

Article: Microsoft emulates Star Trek, turns Skype into a Universal Translator

Microsoft is once again taking the world by storm. At the recent Code Conference in California they announced the newest service offered through Skype, Skype Translator. The service provides real-time translation of the spoken word.

From the article:

Yesterday at the Code Conference in California, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Skype corporate vice president Gurdeep Pall, introduced Skype Translator. It’s the first time that this new feature has been demonstrated publicly, and involved a Skype conversation between Pall speaking English in California and Diana Heinrichs speaking German in London.

More info is also available from the Microsoft blog. This will be available as a Windows 8 beta app by the end of 2014.

~ brad

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Article: Sony develops tech for 185TB tapes: 3,700 times more storage than a Blu-ray disc

Just as everyone is moving away from tape backups, Sony decides to change the game.

There was a time, in computing’s not-so-distant past, where magnetic tape was the best way to back up large amounts of data. In the mid-90s, tape could store tens or hundreds of gigabytes, while hard drive capacities were still mostly measured in megabytes. That would soon change, of course, with the advent of writable optical media and cheap, large hard drives, but even today tape drives still hang around as one of the best options for mass data backup. Now, Sony has developed a new technology that pushes tape drives far beyond where they once were, leading to individual tapes with 185 terabytes of storage capacity.

Read the full article here.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog.  The man will be there to feed the dog.  The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. " ~ Warren G. Bennis

Article: You've Seen This Photo A Million Times -- Now Learn The Story Behind It

If you have used a computer in the last decade you have probably seen it, especially if you are in IT. I'm talking about the default Windows desktop 'Bliss' that has been used since Windows XP. Check out this article on Huffington Post for the full story on this iconic desktop.

~ brad

"If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."  ~ Henri Poincare

Article: Lync Finds Its Groove in 'Universal Communications' Era

Scott Bekker from Redmond Channel Partner has an interesting article about Microsoft Lync Partners and the Keynote from the Lync Conference. The adoption and interest in Lync is growing, and Microsoft has no plans to slow that growth.

You can read the full article here, but here are a couple pieces that I found interesting.

Carol Spowart spent a moment at the recent Microsoft Lync Conference exchanging high fives with a peer on the show floor.
Spowart is the CEO of House of Lync, a Costa Mesa, Calif.-based professional services firm, which, as you might guess from the name, is 100 percent dedicated to Lync deployment projects. "I have a very friendly competitor out of Houston, and the president said, 'It's raining Lync.' I said, 'All you have to do is put out a bucket,'" Spowart recalls.

and later on...

"The era of universal communications is here to stay. That's what the next decade is going to be about. It's going to change your and my life. In fact, 1 billion people in this decade will use Microsoft universal communications," said Pall, who recently returned to Lync from other parts of Microsoft's business.

and still later...

McGillen notes that Microsoft has made installation of Lync so simple that customers often go too far in enabling features without understanding the underlying network requirements for quality of service. "It's a big problem when somebody tries to install Lync on their own," he says. "It's easy enough to click next, next, next and install it, and the [call] button shows up. That's when we get called in a lot. The voice quality is crummy. It was easy to install, but that doesn't mean that everything is magic."

Enjoy!

~ brad

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something” ~ Plato