Darren Neimke

Live Search Olympics Backgrounds - Windows Live SkyDrive

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:37:44 GMT

The following link provides a single location for all of the Live Search Olympic background files:

My personal favourite was the Hockey image:

Live Writer plugin from Zemanta adds information sources to your posts

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 02:57:07 GMT

The Zemanta plugin for Live Writer looks pretty interesting. If you haven’t seen or heard of it yet, take a look at the following screencast:

Essentially it makes it much easier to add things such as links, images, and related articles about a topic to your blog articles.

Using techniques such as linking to authoritative articles and posting related information can, in-turn make your own articles more authoritative and a tool such as this one makes doing these things a snap!

Update of the Live Messenger Facebook application

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:36:12 GMT

The image on the right was taken of the updated Windows Live Messenger control for Facebook which was just announced on the Windows Live Messenger Developer blog. Go and take a read of that post to learn about the improvements that have been made.

I’m glad that they removed the Human Interactive Proof (HIP) requirement from its use as it was definitely a barrier to using it. My favourite feature though would have to be that you can now allow Live Messenger to update your Facebook status. Could this be the beginning of a Twitter killer?

The only thing that I could have asked for above this is to have the ability to save conversation histories… oh yeah, in a Mesh folder of course!

The major benefit of these updates is that they improve usability which will hopefully increase acceptance (and therefore adoption) of the Live Platform. By getting my Facebook contacts familiar with using the Live services will make it easier to collaborate with them using other Live branded applications and services in the future – such as sharing stuff with Live Mesh or collaborating via Office Live Workspaces.

And it’s great that there’s a bridge building between my Facebook community of friends and my Live community of friends too.

Oh yeah, and if you really want to show Live Messenger some love, you can do what over 400K others have done and become a Fan of it on Facebook!

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, windows live messenger, facebook

Live Mesh - Microsoft’s augmented data synchronization offering

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 05:33:34 GMT

The core benefit is that users can synchronize data between multiple clients. This core benefit is provided by the basic product Sync Services.

At the next level, the Live Mesh provides a set of services in the cloud and on the client which allow users to synchronize data across multiple clients and to interact with the process via an API. At this level the product introduces features such as authentication, authorization, and secure transmission of data. User interface logic allows users to add conversation history to synchronization folders and to resolve synchronization conflicts easily.

At the third level Microsoft have supplied a Live Desktop in the cloud which allows users to manage folders and users and also to connect to and interact with connected clients.

The fourth level will occur soon when the SDK’s for working with Live Mesh are opened up and we can build our own unique user experiences on top of the platform.

Storing your OneNote Notebooks in your Live Mesh

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:56:16 GMT

Live Mesh is great for storing any documents and files that you need to access from multiple computers and also as a way to ensure that you have your data backed-up. Currently I’m using Live Mesh to gain both of these benefits when it comes to my OneNote Notebooks.

One of the decisions that you have to make when you use Live Mesh to store your content is how to map the links to physical locations on your hard drive. I tend to keep all content in its default location and map it from there. You can still get a single view of what content you have in your Mesh by looking at either the Live Mesh Folders view that gets created on your computer or by viewing your Live Desktop on http://Mesh.com.

One of the adjustments that I do make is to change the location of my ‘Unfiled Notes’ OneNote Notebook. I do this because the ‘Unfiled Notes’ is actually a .one file which, by default, gets stored in the root of your ‘OneNote Notebooks’ which is located in your Documents folder:

You can’t add individual files directly to your Mesh and so I either have the option of storing all of my OneNote Notebooks (by adding the root folder to Mesh) or changing the default location of the ‘Unfiled Notes’. And I don’t need to have all of my Notebooks linked to my Live Mesh. As you can see in the following picture, two Notebooks - ‘Kids Stuff’ and ‘Sharing’ – do not get added as Live Mesh folders.

Changing the default path for your Unfiled Notes Section from the root of your ‘OneNote Notebooks’ folder into its own folder so that you can mesh-enable it is easily done. You do this by accessing the appropriate dialog from Tools | Options | Save and then changing the path for the Unfiled Notes Section.

Find the meaning of a word using Live Search

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:55:44 GMT

I’ve now been using Live Search exclusively for doing searches on the web for one month. During this time I’ve been very pleased to learn that the Live Search team has included lots of features that make it a better user experience above and beyond simply being a great search tool.

There’s the picture of the day feature that I posted about recently. Today I found that you can look up the meaning of words by prefixing the word that you want to find the meaning of with the word “define”. For example, in the picture to the left of this text we might say that Michael Phelps looks ecstatic – but just to be sure, let’s check the meaning of that word first:

To find other tips, browse to the following site and take a read through their “tip of the day” archive - http://www.livesearchtour.com/

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse search how-to

Corporate use of Live Mesh

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:05:00 GMT

At work, I’m drafting a set of "Live Mesh Usage Guidelines" for work use. The reason for this is to ensure that we give our corporate users plenty of understanding about appropriate usage of Live Mesh before we commit them to using it.

Generally I'm suggesting:

Good for short term, ad-hoc file sharing
Good for long-term file archiving – see below regarding required access by business
Good for sharing files with external parties
Good for long-term of non-sensitive data - such as IM conversation history, images, One Note Notebooks, etc

Then there’s a whole bunch of "when not to" guidelines. Conditions around non-use include such things as:

Data that needs to be searchable by the organisation
Long term data that needs to be easily discovered or shared by diverse groups within the organisation

‎‎There will also be a condition which states that any long term, corporate data will have to get approval, and be required to invite a corporate managed Live ID account into the shared folder - ie: OurCorpUser1@live.com – so that we can retain access to important data - particularly for long term data.

My Inner Athlete

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:21:04 GMT

I just saw from Marcus’ blog that the Windows Live team have produced a cool application which helps to bring out your inner athlete. You can visit the following link to take a short quiz and find your own inner athlete.

http://revealyourinnerathlete.windowslive.com/

Mine was “BMX Rider”:

When you’ve taken the quiz, you get to share your athlete on Live Messenger as a Wink. Mitch tried it too… he’s a diver!

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, how-to, messenger

Live Search home page now showing images of Beijing Olympics

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:43:37 GMT

Market = en-us

Market = zh-cn

Note: if you want to get a list of the latest medal count at the Beijing Olympics, just type the words “Olympic Medals” into the Live Search box and you will get the following results presented back to you:

Windows Live Tags: Search

MSN’s Minimise-Me – custom avatar generator for Live Messenger

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:30:50 GMT

I found out about this via Marcus' blog, but the MSN guys have just put up a cool site for creating custom avatars for Live Messenger. To create your own custom avatar, just browse to the MSN Minimise-Me website and start the process.

On the website you basically start with a blank canvass and create an avatar by adding custom features such as: face, hair, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, and other features such as beards, sunglasses, shirt collar, etc.

When you’ve created your own custom avatar on the website, you will receive an installer which installs the avatar as your display icon in Live Messenger and also adds a bunch of new smileys to choose from.

And if you don’t feel up to creating your own custom avatar, then maybe you’d simply prefer to choose from one of the pre-made celebrity one’s:

Hrm, now there’s a hard choice; who to be? Amy Winehouse or David Beckham?

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, how-to, messenger, minimise-me, display picture, UK

Using Windows Live to manage your online Identity

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:46:52 GMT

There are many good reasons for having multiple online identities. For example, it is common to have an alias for your personal life, and another one for communicating in a business context.

Many years ago I created the online identity ‘ShowUsYourCode’ with Hotmail. At the time I was running a web site of the same name and it seemed appropriate to have that as my email address. I’ve since set up a blog and publish articles on a Spaces site of the same name:

http://showusyourcode.spaces.live.com

But times have changed, and it now feels a little awkward at times when I hand that email address out to my friends.

I’ve now created the new LiveID ‘darren.neimke’ and have associated a new Space with it (so please subscribe to my new blog):

http://neimke.spaces.live.com

I’m going to use the new blog to publish purely Live-branded content, as opposed to diluting it with myriad topics as I do with my ShowUsYourCode blog.

One of the really nice things about the Live platform is that the Live-branded applications have provided us with ways to easily change our identities. In the picture above, you can see just how easy it is for me to change between my ShowUsYourCode branded identity and my new Darren.Neimke one.

The way that they do this is by allowing you to link your online identities, which you do via the Accounts page on Live (https://account.live.com).

Doing this gives you ease of access to all of your identities from each of the Live-branded applications.

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, LiveID, story

Information about Live @edu

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 11:10:53 GMT

So what is Live @edu?

Live @edu is Microsoft’s offering of its Live services to the Education segment of the market. By combining its services from the Live platform it is able to offer an impressive package of collaboration tools for universities. These tools and services include Mail, Instant Messaging, Storage, and Collaboration Workspaces. Over the top of these sits a branded experience which offers custom domains and user provisioning services. You can read about the features of Live @edu here.

Features contained in the Live @edu package
http://get.liveatedu.com/Education/Connect/Apps/
http://get.liveatedu.com/Education/Connect/Reliable/

You can read some information about early successes of the program at the following locations:

Internal Press Release which provides information about Live @edu program
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-27NoCostLabsPR.mspx
Microsoft blog article talking about the Live @edu implementation for the University of Northamption
http://blogs.msdn.com/ukhe/archive/2008/07/04/university-of-northampton-and-live-edu.aspx

Edublogger on Spaces
http://edublogger.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

Finally, just as with hosting business solutions on the Live platform, you really need custom tools for managing users. As with other Live services, the domains SDK offers a web service API for managing users. While there are some early tools and articles on how to use these API’s, there’s still a significant opportunity for creating better provisioning and management tools. Here are some links to existing tools and articles on the topic:

eduExpress - a tool for provisioning and managing domain users
http://cid-477f0164ff14939e.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/eduExpress
Domains API Articles with examples for managing users
http://www.devx.com/codemag/Article/38478/1954
http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=0804112&page=2

Getting started with the Windows Live Custom Domains SDK
http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/CustomDomains/GettingStartedwiththeWindowsLiveCustomDomai.aspx

How to get started with Office Live Small Business

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:05:54 GMT

Recently I wanted to set up an online presence for my business. I needed a portal to manage contacts, a web site, and I certainly needed to be able to create collaboration workspaces as a place to store documents, images, and wikis. In short, this would be the sales and administration centre for my business. Office Live Small Business (OLSB) seemed to meet all of my needs and so I decided to give it a try.

The first thing to do was to login create a new OLSB account. This is a pretty simple affair, and took no more than a couple of minutes to do. Once I had my account, I had a series of tasks to complete:

Get a web address – I have a custom domain that I want to use with OLSB, and so I need to host that domain with OLSB so that I can use it for the web site and for managing employees. In my case I linked my domain (http://ambientPlaces.com) as the primary domain for my OLSB account.
Set up company email accounts – Each of my employees needs to have their LiveID linked with the account and their associated 5GB of storage with Live Mail linked to a company email address. I’ve set up a couple of email accounts for sales (sales@ambientplaces.com) and administration (administration@ambientplaces.com).
Build the web site – Finally, all that I need is a simple brochure style web site for now to advertise my products to our customers and to provide them with a way to contact us. Later on I can add more collaborative features, as well as some merchant tools too. Using the tools I was easily able to manage themes, navigation, and layout. I was also able to add new pages and add modules to them. In my case I added a new page for a blog and added a Live Spaces blog module to the page. I also added some meta keywords so that it would be more easily identified by search engines.

So there I am. I now have a small business set up with a couple of employees. I can collaborate with internal and external customers and I have an interactive web site.

Next I’ll need to look at how to properly manage my CRM activities online through the portal and I need to publish some of our internal documents from the collaboration spaces out onto our web site. I’ll also take brief tour of some of the online reporting and analytics tools that come with OLSB.

Office Live 1.1 Update Install Fails

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:55:26 GMT

If you have an Office Live Workspace, then you will almost certainly want to install the new Office Live updates. These updates allow you to work with documents in your Office Live Workspace directly from within Microsoft Office programs. The image to the right shows the new Office Live menu items which are present in Office software when you have these updates installed. You can get the updates from the following location:

Office Live Update 1.1

You can read about the benefits of using these updates from the following article:

Access Office Live Workspace from Office programs

When I attempted to install these updates, the installer failed. The error message that I received was:

Status of package 'Windows Vista update (KB 950759)' after install is 'InstallFailed'

After doing a bit of a search on the forums, I learned that this error is often caused when Visual Studio is installed. What I did to get the install to work was to uninstall the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component. Once I had uninstalled this component the Office Live 1.1. update installed fine for me!