Tegenlicht - Google : Behind the screen

A quite fascinating view on Google as a technology, as a company, and maybe even as a philosophy. It is slightly critical, or at least thought-provoking at times.

It's a Dutch program, but the interviews are in English (with Dutch subtitles), so I think it should be of some interest to non-Dutch speakers. Except the one interview in Italian, which talks about the way Google Earth helped in discovering the remains of a Roman villa.

EDIT: Found the subtitled version, so replaced the video with that. The original can be seen here.

Windows Live Writer

In an attempt to write blog posts here somewhat more regularly, I've decided to install Windows Live Writer as an offline tool to type and collect my thoughts before posting. The latest beta (which it apparently still is) for Windows Vista and XP can be downloaded at the download page.

It also connects to Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) weblogs (which is something we have available inside the firewall at the company I work for), so I will try it out against that platform as well.

(And, of course this post is written using Live Writer.)

Microsoft BI : new and improved

Microsoft made some significant Business Intelligence (BI) announcements at it's BI conference, held in Seattle, WA, USA from 9-11 May.

In his keynote speech, Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, declared “a new day for BI,” as he rattled off a string of announcements relating to new products, a small technology acquisition, and deepening alliances with implementation partners.

On the product front, Microsoft gave some details about the next version of its SQL Server database, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, formerly codenamed “Katmai”. SQL Server 2008 adds greater data scalability, developer functionality, and new policy-based management tools to enable more broad-scale deployment of BI across the enterprise, referred to as “pervasive BI.”

Significantly for BI, SQL Server 2008 tightens up integration between SQL Server’s back-end and Microsoft’s Office 2007 front-end tools like Excel 2007, Excel Services, SharePoint Server, and PerformancePoint Server 2007 platforms. The goal here is to enable SQL Server BI data to be pushed out to information workers via familiar and easy-to-use tools and applications on the desktop. For example, BI data can be accessed directly via Excel for a rich experience, or rendered “thinly” via Excel Services.

For developers, SQL Server 2008 also offers an integrated Visual Studio and .NET Framework development environment that Microsoft said will provide a higher level of abstraction to speed up applications builds. Tools are also provided to synch data from remotely connected devices to the central SQL Server data store.

Microsoft’s new Office-based PerformancePoint Server 2007 software is planned to be released in the second half of 2007, and is Microsoft’s first serious offering in the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) space, offering integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and scorecarding capabilities. It builds on the previous Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, recently acquired ProClarity technologies and new innovations in business modeling and planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 will be licensed following the same traditional single server and single Client Access License (CAL) model that it uses for Office – at US$195 a licence. The product is now in its second community technology preview.

Microsoft also announced the acquisition of SoftArtisans, a relatively small developer of a managed report authoring tool for Office environments. SoftArtisans’ OfficeWriter tool will now be combined into Microsoft Office 2007 and SQL Server’s Reporting Services software to help non-technical users author and consume reports in Office environments using simple drag-and-drop.

Microsoft also discussed its network of BI partnerships with systems integrators, announcing deepened alliances with Accenture, Capgemini, and Tata Consulting Services (TCS). All three have pledged to commit greater resources to developing on the Microsoft BI platform.

Microsoft and Accenture have already set up a joint IT consulting venture called Avanade that has 400 dedicated Microsoft BI professionals provided from both companies. The consultancy is currently developing a new sales planning application for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM suite. It is also working to align its existing budgeting, forecasting, planning, and scorecard applications more closely with PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Capgemini and Microsoft have jointly launched a global “Intelligence Enterprise” initiative to train 2,000 on Microsoft’s BI technologies. Around 500 of these will be trained in PerformancePoint Server 2007. Capgemini has also pledged to create five new development centres, with a strong focus on developing Microsoft-based BI applications for verticals like financial services, retail, telecoms, and utilities.

Links:
Microsoft Business Intelligence
Microsoft President Jeff Raikes Declares, “It’s a New Day for Business Intelligence”

The riddle of svchost

Yesterday, I chatted with my fellow author on this blog about some problems with a home PC, and this morning my desktop at home decided that starting up was fine, but doing anything sensible (except running IRC) was beyond it for the moment.

The common thing in both cases seemed to be that the process svchost.exe was taking a huge amount of processor power, as well as a large amount of memory.

I managed to kill the (apparently) runaway process, but that made me wonder.. what was it doing ? Googling for svchost turned up the following information:

Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from
dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).

The Svchost.exe file is located in the %SystemRoot%\System32 folder. At startup, Svchost.exe checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This grouping of services permits better control and easier debugging.

From A description of Svchost.exe in Windows XP Pro on the Microsoft site.

Using the actions and commands described in the knowledgebase article linked above, I could figure out what was running, and which subprocesses / services were hosted by the too-busy svchost process.

And now I know that .. what next ?

More when I find out myself !

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Found via Boing Boing.

Terminal Services provisioning from a web page

The question: is it possible to set up a webpage to provide access to a Terminal Services based application ?
The answer: Of course ! And without using Citrix, even.

Microsoft offers the Remote Desktop Web Connection as a free addition or download for Windows XP or Windows Server.

This is a Web application consisting of a COM component and a sample connection page. When you deploy Remote Desktop Web Connection on a Web server, you can provide client connectivity to Terminal Servers and other computers using Internet Explorer and TCP/IP.

And the COM component is fully scriptable, making it possible to set up a page on which the user only has to click on a link or a button to go where he or she needs to go.

Links:
Remote Desktop Web Connection
Remote Desktop Web Connection Reference - programming reference

Web Identity and Authentication

I have been reading up on the subject of Web-based Identity, Authentication and Authorisation solutions and options, trying to put together enough of a vision to create a possible architecture to use in a corporate web presence situation.

Constraints are:

• Primary target is to give the customers of the corporation a SSO (Single Sign-On) or at least a reduced sign-on experience on the corporate webpresence.
• It must be Microsoft Windows based on the server end (following the corp's "Microsoft all the way" motto).
• It must be "open" in that it supports any browser on any operating system on the client end.
• It must be able to support 100.000 users or more.
• It's just for the Web, so solutions that (also) support client-side SSO are most likely not needed, or things like integration with legacy Oracle systems (for example).
• The corporate webpresence consists of the main website, in combination with a per-customer private area ( "My Site" ), some forms and sub-applications requiring authentication, and possibly in the near future, a number of community features like forums, weblogs, etc.

From what I have read, and given the constraints above, using an Active Directory based architecture will be the best solution. Most likely, the "stand-alone" ADAM directory server will prove to be the best option to serve as the "identity provider".

There are no storage limits. I recalled a 40.000 entry limit per AD container, but that's only the case if Active Directory is used together with Windows NT Backup Domain Controllers (as the SAM database format on that platform had its limitations).

Storage Limits
There are no practical limits to the number of objects stored in Active Directory. The Active Directory database has been tested for up to 40 million objects. Performance tests show logon performance for a single LDAP client to be the same with 10,000 objects, 100,000 objects, and 1 million objects — that is, the directory service does not slow measurably when the size of the database increases.
Storage Limits, Microsoft TechNet site

ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) is part of the Windows 2003 Server R2 release. These two (out of four) possible scenario's fit very well with the requirements outlined above:

• Provide your employees or customers with seamless access to Web-based resources in any federation partner organization on the Internet without requiring employees or customers to log on more than once.
• Retain complete control over your employee or customer identities without using other sign-on providers (Microsoft .NET Passport, Liberty Alliance, and others).

See the ADFS Deployment Guide on the Microsoft TechNet site for details on how to implement this component.

Another possible part of the solution might be Windows CardSpace [Wikipedia], a part of the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework. It's very brand-new, so the question is how it fits in within the architecture, given that it should be possible to actually implement the resulting architecture in a reasonably short timefrom.

As far as I could determine, it needs (at this point in time) Windows Vista or at the very least IE7 on the client side, which means it doesn't quite fit with the constraints scetched at the top of this post.

There also isn't (yet) a direct way to use Active Directory as an identity provider for CardSpace.

Windows CardSpace and Active Directory
Active Directory is an obvious and important candidate for an identity provider. CardSpace is scheduled for release in early 2007, however, while no new release of Active Directory is scheduled until some time after that. Microsoft has said that Active Directory will eventually be able to act in the role of an identity provider, but no dates have been announced for when this functionality will be available.

A more immediate question is how CardSpace relates to Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). ADFS is available today, and it can initially seem similar to CardSpace. In fact, however, these two technologies are quite different. CardSpace provides an identity selector and a self-issued identity provider, both of which run on a client machine. ADFS is server-based software that allows an organization using Active Directory to federate its identities with other organizations by using WS-Federation. Another important distinction is that, while a browser using CardSpace plays an active role, as described in the previous section, browsers are oblivious to ADFS—their role is entirely passive. While both are concerned with identity, CardSpace and ADFS perform very different functions.
Introducing Windows CardSpace, Microsoft MSDN

No definite answer yet, but my advise is to look seriously into a solution with Active Directory (probably the ADAM variant of it) as the identity store, and ADFS to enable various web applications to use Web SSO.

Links:
A Developer's Introduction To Active Directory Federation Services (MSDN Magazine, nov 2006)
Eclipse, Novell near 'Big Bang' for identity (Infoworld, 29-jan-2007)

ADFS
ADFS Deployment Guide
Setting up ADFS - how to set up an IT Lab for ADFS

Windows CardSpace