• The driver downloads on the 32-bit system do not contain the 64-bit drivers to download to Windows 7.
• The 64-bit driver downloads from many of the printer manufacturers come encapsulated in a 64-bit executable file that install the driver while detecting the local printer. These don’t work unless the printer is attached locally. When the driver is encapsulated in 64-bit executable, it can’t be installed on the 32-bit print server.

This is a procedure that has often worked for me when installing network printers and the normal install doesn’t work properly.

• Open “Devices and Printers.”
• Select “Add a printer”.
• Choose “Add Local Printer”.
• Select “Create a New Port” and set the drop down selection to “Local Port”.
• Click Next.
• Windows will display a small dialogue box asking for a “port name”.
  Key in: \\computer_name\printer_name
  where
  • computer_name is the name (or ip address) of the network computer with the printer attached.
  • printer_name is the share name of the printer on the network computer.
• Click OK.
• Windows will show a list of printer manufacturers and models. Select your printer manufacturer and the printer model from the list. If your specific printer isn’t shown, you can click on “Windows Update” to obtain the latest list of printers or “Have Disk” and browse to the folder where you have the unpacked drivers for your printer.

  If you still can’t find the driver, but one from a similar model is listed, you can try it.

This procedure should also allow you to print to any Windows Print Server where the Windows 7 64-bit drivers have not previously been installed. This procedure does depend on the ability to obtain a driver for 64-bit Windows 7.

Actually we rediscovered it . I had looked at Liferay in August 2008, to establish a community for another company; however they decided, that they could not provide the resources to host an “active” community. Part of providing a community is the nurturing and feeding of the community by providing content on a “regular” basis and responding to comments.

From 100,000 feet, Liferay is essentially an open source version of SharePoint written in Java. Liferay embraces document collaboration, Web 2.0 and social collaboration. A Liferay portal provides one or more organizations with one or more communities. Each community and user has public and private pages. Users can be assigned roles within multiple organizations and communities. Liferay plugins, portlets, can be added to any page by any user based on their “scoped” role. Liferay themes and layouts can be established at the community level or applied to each page.

Liferay provides wiki and blogging editors that can be configured to support either the FCKeditor or TinyMCE. This allows users that are already familiar with other Social media tools to be immediately productive. One of our litmus tests for wiki and blog usability is: can a user “easily” learn to how create an attractive blog or wiki that is media and content rich without having to result to editing raw HTML? This should be possible without formal training. Yeah, I expect the user would read some documentation and view some training videos; however, since more and more users are using social media sites, they are looking for their corporate tools to resemble their other tools. The workflow in these tools should allow the user to work top-down as they are thinking. Although not perfect, we find that Liferay passes this test.

One of the disruptive behaviors of internet-based systems and web 2.0 is that corporate systems and vendor applications lag many internet applications in technological advances. This means that users are often waiting for the applications that they use at work to catch up with the ones they use personally.

Liferay allows the use of existing content or the dynamic upload of content while you are are writing. SharePoint 2007 only supports use of previously stored content while editing.

Okay, I know that you can open another browser window; upload some content; and then switch back to your wiki/blog window to complete the wiki or blog entry. However you cannot imagine how many users do not think of this or understand this. I been around long enough to realize that means that there is likely a disconnect between the user’s desired workflow and the product workflow.

The Liferay wiki and blog editors work equally as well with Internet Explorer,IE, and FireFox. SharePoint 2007 provides a more robust experience to IE users. With SharePoint, in my opinion, wiki and blog editing in FireFox feels like an “unwanted disease”. This is unfortunate. There are standard JavaScript libraries that abstract browser dependencies. There is simply no technical reason that SharePoint can’t provide a first class experience to most browsers. The Liferay content portlet can contain javascript, this allows easy integration with a plethora of other social media and web-based applications. Ironically, I placed my Windows Live status with a button into a Liferay content portlet and it behaves correctly. I could not do this with SharePoint. The SharePoint editors deleted the javascript code. The Liferay Wiki can be configured to support Creole or Camel-case wiki editing.

You know, SharePoint could learn a lot from Liferay.

• Vendor Support
• Performance

To be frank, when possible, I don’t tell users if the machine is virtual or physical. I’m not hiding this, but I don’t volunteer non-relevant information. Part of planning an application has to do with the sizing of the production environment. You read the system requirements and prepare the infrastructure accordingly. The application requirements usually state memory, cpu and OS requirements. They don’t state that you must run the system on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual Intel(R) XEON(R) E5420 @ 2.5 GHz quadcore cpus using “blue” network cables. Part of planning the application is taking the vendor’s information and adjusting it to account for your own infrastructure. Many companies run standard infrastructure such as: SNMP, VIRUS/MalWare protection and Systems Management software on all of their systems. They must account for this in terms of cpu and memory when sizing for a new application. Virtualization is “just” one more variable in the planning and sizing equation. Therefore informing the user that the machine is virtual is simply non-relevant.

I’ve been told that at Cisco all new systems are virtual and you must convince John Chambers, the current CEO, to allow you to use a physical machine.

Vendor Support
Many vendors have confusing support policies regarding virtual machines. I know of one vendor that does all of their development, testing and qa on virtual machines and then does not support running production on virtual machines.

In my mind, vendor support is an academic issue. I don’t volunteer the physical machine information to a vendor, so why would I volunteer hardware info about a virtual machine. If a vendor presses the issue, I can always reproduce the issue on a physical machine. To Date: I have never had to reproduce the issue on physical hardware.

Keep in mind that all major software vendors plan to support “Cloud Computing”. You can’t seriously support “Cloud Computing” without supporting virtualization. So if your vendor does not support virtual machines, they will begin to shortly or they will face technical obsolescence.

Performance
To be honest when it comes to performance, virtualization is your friend. That may come as a shock to you, so I’d better explain.

As I mentioned earlier, part of planning an application is sizing it for production. The sizing takes into account factors such as: memory, # of cpus, minimum recommended cpu speed, the number of concurrent users, the overhead of your common infrastructure and a “judgment factor”. The “judgment factor” attempts to account for business growth, typical usage patterns and historical vendor understatement of the hardware requirements . Over the years, I’ve seen many projects purchase way too much hardware. I’ve also seen projects that were struggling to run on the initial hardware within a year or two of the initial roll-out. This can be caused by a variety of reasons, including unexpected business growth or transaction volume due to a temporary business opportunity. Assuming that there are no application locking issues and that cpu or memory is holding the application back, then you are considering how to relocate the application to newer and more powerful hardware. When this happens physical machines become a “boat anchor” where virtual machines are a “lifeboat”.

• Why Physical machines become a “boat anchor”.
  It is often difficult and sometimes impossible to move an existing application to new hardware. In the best case scenario, you have to procure new hardware, install and configure the operating system,OS, “clone” the application to the new hardware, test the application to ensure the configuration is working correctly and then plan an outage to relocate the application permanently to the new hardware. This is at best a several week project. There can be some show stoppers. You may not be able to relocate the current version of the application, if you must use a later version of an operating system. This can often be the case with new hardware in order to obtain the necessary drivers. Now, you are potentially having to update your entire software stack as well as the application to run on a later version of the OS. You will probably have to retrain users on the new version of the application.
  What a nightmare!
  By the time you are done, you may have missed any temporary business opportunity or the business growth may have been impeded.
• Why virtual machines are a “lifeboat”.
  When you outgrow the virtual machine, you can allocate or dedicate more hardware to the virtual machine. If new hardware is required, then you simply migrate the virtual machine to the new hardware, intact. Often this migration can be performed live. Yes, it can be that simple. If you can’t perform a live migration, then an outage to copy the virtual machine from the old system to the new system will be required.
  With virtual machines, you really can throw hardware a some performance problems.

There are cases where you still need to use physical machines, but these are uncommon. In my opinion, you should always use virtual machines first and then determine that you really need dedicated physical machine.

If after all of this, your user still insists on having a physical machine, then are they also insisting that all programs be written in assembly language?

It appears that a “perfect storm” of events are “brewing” at the same time: Social Media, Web 2.0 and smart phones. I believe these forces will drive the delivery of application services to the cloud. What is clear, to me, is that “cloud computing” will use hardware virtualization as its foundation. Hardware virtualization turns a physical machine into a virtual machine, which resides on a physical machine. However, the virtual machine can be moved around. If the system requires more resources than what is currently assigned to it, then more resources can be added to ensure the system meets your customer’s service level agreement. One question in my mind is: are the underlying software licensing mechanisms keeping pace with these changes?

Prior to Linux and open source software, all commercial software was purchased and licensed by server and user. Many of the commercial software packages in use today use a cost structure that is based on some combination of the following:

• The number of servers.
• The number of cpus in a server.
• The total number of users that can access the system
  or the number of concurrent users accessing the system.

At least two of today’s leading software vendors, Microsoft and Oracle, obtain their revenue based on some combination of the above factors. In some cases, just adding a cpu to a server can make you responsible for a 2x increase in software licensing fees. Even if that server is an old Sun 420R with 480Mhz UltraSparc processors. For a service provider, in the cloud, managing licenses of software based on the above factors could be daunting. I imagine these providers will either use Linux and Open Source or negotiate some form of unlimited license. In order to understand why, consider the following scenario: you are a service provider and one of your customers is planning to run a promotion that requires 10 additional servers. They expect tens of thousands of users to access the promotion. The promotion will run for 3 months. After the that time they will not need these 10 additional servers. How do you the “service provider” acquire temporary licenses for this? What if that license is for a product that is no longer sold and marketed? I can hear the lawyers figiting in their seats.

In the above scenario, if the software was Linux and Open-source based, then managing the additional software licensing costs could be pretty straight forward. For Windows and non-open source software the “service provider” has a headache of managing server licenses and client access licenses, CALS. If users access the system anonymously then they do not need a CAL. However, if the users logon, then you must have a CAL for every concurrent user or purchase an unlimited license. The cost of windows and non-open source software licensing could add a nontrivial amount of cost to the “service provider” when compared to delivering the same application on Linux and Open source.

It seems that services on the “Cloud” will follow a “pay as you go scheme” similar to what the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud does. Does this give an edge to Linux and Open source software in delivering applications to the cloud? Probably. I do not know how significant this advantage is. I expect Microsoft, Oracle and others to adapt their software licensing to negate this advantage. No, it won’t be free. If they add $20 per user per month to a service providers base cost, then they will have a limited role in the “cloud”. Whereas, a 10 cent per user per month cost could be bearable to the service provider. If they don’t adapt their licensing, then this may mean that they are not going to be able to play a significant role in “Cloud Computing”. Oh, in case you were wondering, I haven’t even discussed the additional complexities that software activation brings to the party.

I’m pretty sure that Charles Darwin’s “theory of evolution” that was set forth in his book “On the Origin of Species“ applies to computer systems as well .

• The WSS 3.0/SharePoint 2007 WYSIWYG editor can’t upload images, video, audio clips and can’t insert Flash files.
  The workaround requires so many mouse clicks and web page interactions, that users look at me like I have “3 heads” when I show it to them.
• Working with tables is difficult, at best
• Any customizations such as:
  • custom file browsers,
  • link management,
  • syntax aware code viewers,
  • and much more

  are difficult to implement

From a Wiki perspective

• Explicit syntax [[]]
• No free form image inserts
• No server side include of other topics.
  Need an easy way to include content from another site. In Foswiki/Twki the %{link} tag can be used
• No easy upload and insert of attachments
• No Easy way to insert links.
  Foswiki/TWiki support WikiWord/Camel Case.
• No tagging
• WYSIWYG support for tables is ugly. You must know the number of rows and columns in advance.
  Foswiki/TWiki support simple “|” character based table definitions and an editable table plugin
• No printable vew
• No export to PDF/Word
• Limited Alerts support.
  Email alerts say something changed and include the full text. However, this can not be customized to tell you what changed. You must login and see the history for that.
  Foswiki/Twiki support a highly customizable WebNotify
• No easy support for multiple top level webs.
  There is only one flat “Wiki Pages” page with list view, no hierarchical view or some sort of sitemap feature.Wikis are made up of Topics that are interlinked in the form of a graph. Hence a specific Tree or Hierarchy structure is not the right representation. However, there must be a way to find all top level topics, i.e. Topics that are not linked to by any other topics. These topics will include
  • the starting points
  • new topics that have been added but not yet organized.

  I could not find a way to do this with this with the SharePoint Wiki. Even a simple way to flag a page as “add this page” to “Quick Launch” would help.

• Not easy to provide a standard footer
  No apparent concept of templates

The “MS/SharePoint 2007″ update approach does not seem to fit into this “revolution”, either. The current approach requires direct access to the servers to install and activate extensions. With “Cloud Computing” and web hosting on the rise; the direct server access approach is not a good match. SharePoint needs something like a Plug-in central for SharePoint. Ideally, this could work on a site level and not require Central Administration be updated first. Another issue for remote management is that “by default” SharePoint Central Administration and SharePoint Sites must run on different tcp/ip ports. I’m sure that if I work real hard I can find a way to run them on the same port using “host-headers”. However, if I do, then will this really be supported or would the next next patch or upgrade break my sites?

So my wish list for SharePoint 2010 starts with:

• A site focused web based upload, install, and management capability similar to that found in WordPress and Plug-in central for WordPress
• A Rich-Text Editor that is rich in function, easily expandable and replaceable.
  Consider integrating a freely available javascript-based Rich-Text Editor for all browsers including IE. My primary choices would be FCKEditor and TinyMCE or TinyMCE Advanved.
• A competitive wiki and blog, without having to buying 3rd party add-ons.

Perhaps Microsoft only wants SharePoint to be a document sharing facility. Maybe I should not be trying to bend WSS and SharePoint into the social media and web 2.0 “arena”. Maybe that “arena” should just belong to Apache, Linux and Open Source.