New and notable GMail features

by | Nov 13, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

1. GMail now does IMAP. This is signficant to me for two reasons: a) it works sweet on my iPhone — read this to see how to set it up, and b) I can now do GMail via Outlook against the same data store…now I’m much more likely to use Outlook as my offline (think “in flight“) email solution.


2. Improved contact manager. Just click on “Contacts“ and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’m not sure when this shipped but it must have happened very recently (I love it when things are so smooth, you’re not even sure when it happened). Here’s a screenshot to give you a taste:



3. New keyboard shortcuts. I love <ctrl>-s and “m“ (for mute). I’m not sure how new these two actually are but I hadn’t noticed them before. Mute is exactly what I’ve been longing for in some cases.


4. More space. Did you notice that the incremental space counter has sped up dramatically? I now have close to 5 GB of space available to me, which helps significantly because at one point I was getting close to running out of space (now I’m only at 40% of capacity). However, I also recenlty stumbled onto the pricing structure for additional storage. It’s really not that bad — $20/yr for 20 GB of additional storage — I would pay that.  


5. Improved speed. Here’s the scoop from The Official GMail Blog:



We have also been fanatical about speed. Even on a fast Internet connection, it can take a second to request and render a new web page, and when you read a lot of mail, these seconds can accumulate to hours waiting for email to load. We’ve spent a lot of time profiling all parts of the application, shaving milliseconds off wherever we can, and figuring out workarounds for some pretty deep-rooted issues with the current browser implementations. Some of the most common actions should be faster now. For instance, we prefetch messages in the current view, so when you open an email your browser doesn’t have to talk to Google’s server; it just displays the message. These techniques really shine on newer browsers and computers. Using an alpha version of Safari 3 on a MacBook, we’re seeing sub-200ms times when opening messages—pretty quick.


Cool beans all around.

Australia’s First MCT Summit is coming to town…

by | Nov 13, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Hi you hard working (non-surfing, bbq-ing) MCTs who dedicate a good portion of your
life ensuring that your classes run smoothly; no one runs out of the room crying;
all labs are do-able with work arounds when needed; notes have your scribble all over
them; some courses (of late) you may teach saying one thing on the title, only to
have an entirely different course between the covers 🙂

…. all in all as we all know, people in the class never get to see the work that
goes on in the ‘background’ (unless you’re prepping for a first teach each night of
the course and your eyelids are being held open by matchsticks 🙂

So come along and meet the others in MCT land.
Meet:
(a) the dinosaurs… who start off every sentence with “I remember when…”
(b) those that are passionate about the MCT program and have big voices.. (Steve did
I say that? 🙂
(c) other MCTs teaching MODL courses.
(d) and even more MCTs doing ‘secret squirrel’ stuff in Europe that could be a ‘new
form of learning’….(Kyle – I swear that was the truth serum working from my current
interrogators)
(e) other MCTs who find beds on top of grand pianos in lobbies…….I’m not going
there 🙂

What ever your reasons – it’s Christmas (or a little after), it’s holidays and Santa’s
been and gone.

See you there,

Mick.

Microsoft have announced a MCT summit

(from the Horse’s mouth)

….. For the very first time, Australia  will be hosting its very own MCT Community
gathering to gain and share knowledge!

This exciting Event is from Jan 29 – 31st 2008.

For more information, https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=993019&linvitation

New Co-Worker Blog

by | Nov 13, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

One of my brightest co-workers decided to set up a blog this week, and I encourage you to check him out.

The first post for Victor Fehlberg’s Tech Postings (about Victor) goes over the process of setting up Terminal Services access to a shared BizTalk environment. Besides being a newly minted BizTalk guru, Victor’s our […]

MsgBoxViewer 9.20

MsgBoxViewer 9.20

by | Nov 13, 2007 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I just released a new major build (9.20) displaying now in the SUMMARY REPORT a third column which contain, for most of the entries, a button to go directly the corresponding Detailed Report and sometimes a URL link to an MS KB or Tech Article avail on the Net. It should very fast so now to make the link between an entry in the Summary Report and the corresponding Detailed Report and access to some KB or tech articles can be done by one click.


 


 


Version 9.20


 


New features :


 


 


– The SUMMARY REPORT display now a third column containing, for most of the entries, a link to the corresponding Detailed Report


and sometimes a URL link to MS KB or Tech Article on Internet.


 


– Add now the Server Domain, Server Domain role, and Server Model in the Topology Report


 


– Raise a warning if a server found in the Topology is running in MS Virtual Machine


 


– Raise a warning if a “AutoClose” prop  is set for a Biztalk DB


 


– Collect all the registry values  under each Biztalk host Svc reg key  of all BTS and raise a yellow warning if some Throttling ones are found


 


 


Fixes:


 


No bugs reported since 9.10


 



 



JP