Service Costing Model & Financial Management Process - IT Charging
Let's open the discussion?
Khalid Hakim | IT Operations Consultant | MOF Trainer | ITIL Service Manager | ISO20000 Consultant | MSF Practitioner | PMP
Reply:
Very nice topic, my friend, lets discuss about this. Here in Brazil we have many suppliers and we compare all offers, one by one and through this the Service Costing model is built. For internal cost we use a consulting for fist time and to other times we use historical models. Part of Financial Management is do on Excel (for basis process) and for all other integrated methods for financial we use ERPs like SAP or Microsiga (The most used ERP on Brazil).
Best Regards,
Cleber Marques
MOF Brazil Project
www.clebermarques.com
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Reply:
I am not seeing that much of a move to IT charging in the organisations I work with....Cost accounting yes, but not so much around charging. I think that this is still a difficult topic for IT to effectively address with their business. And this is driven both by IT not having the confidence to push it and the businesses not wanting to move to a charging model.
Certainly businesses are requiring increased transparency and accountability for spending, but there seems to be a resistance to going to a whole cross charging implementation. I am seeing an increased requirement to manage benefits though - historically IT discretionary spend has been full of promise but realisations normally fall short - and so now there seems to be more business involvement in the project side of things. And where it stopped once the project deployed, they seem to be more across the ongoing governance. All very good things. And this will drive the focus on financial management higher.
Today though I see the charging aspect being driven by partners, providers, outsourcers, etc. And it will become increasingly important as businesses start moving towards the SaaS. So IT organisations have a way to go yet. But I'd be keen to hear if my experiences are consistent with what others are seeing?
Cheers
Gary
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Where are all the forums?
Reply:
William (Bill) Vaughn -- Mentor, Author, Dad and MVP
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Reply:
So Andrew, can I tell the VB Insiders when these are going to come online? The reason that I ask is that the 2.x forums at this point are unusable. To answer a single question a few minutes ago incurred 5 40+ second waits. I can't afford to donate that much time when the newsgroups are far, far more efficient--not as pretty, but work faster and are easier to deal with.
William (Bill) Vaughn -- Mentor, Author, Dad and MVP
Hi William-
We have released some fixes to the existing Forums 2.4 platform to deal with the slow performance and the unknown error messages. We are posting updates to: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3300328&SiteID=1 http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3312165&SiteID=1 and http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3306074&SiteID=1. There is information also being posted to the bug reporting forum at: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=53&SiteID=1
Give them a try now and let us know if you continue to see problems.
Thanks!
Alicia
Program Manager, Sustained Engineering Team
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Reply:
The new forums look great and seem to work well. I can't wait to start using them.
JoelP - SharePoint Developer and C# MCP
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Reply:
Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com
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Alternative Purchase option
In other threads on this forum I have mentioned purchasing E-learning vouchers as a workaround to the problem of some customers not being able to purchase E-learning through the E-learning cart. In another thread I've recently disclosed that I'm now having problems redeeming these vouchers against the training material that I wanted.
There is another way...
While flicking through this months PC Pro magazine, I found a full page advert for Dennis Publishing's online bookstore, ( http://books.pcpro.co.uk/ ) now offering Microsoft E-learning.
I've just bought collection 2544 with my UK credit card and received an email with my account details within seven mintes. I've logged on and opened the first module in the collection... all seems to work correctly.
For a limited time, Dennis Publishing are offering 10% off the cost of e-learning products.
The website is a little clumsy - but if you use the search box and enter the number of the course / collection you want, chances are they have it.
Although based in the UK, if you are resident in one of the following list of countries, you can create an account with the PC Pro Bookshop and buy E-learning products:
Albania, Andora, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegowina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Jersey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Philipines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russion Federation, San Marino, Serbia & Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, UK, USA, Uzbekistan, Vatican City State
And for completeness, Dennis Publishing's bookstore is supplied by Computer Bookshops Ltd - and surprise, surprise, you can also order your elearning from them - but at a slightly higher price.
http://www.computerbookshops.com/Expert/Home/en/expert.jsp
Hope it helps.
-Gavin
- Edited by Gavin Meiklejohn Friday, May 23, 2008 12:59 PM Added full list of countries from which people can register with the PC Pro Bookshop
Plans for a "Dashboard"?
- Merged by Andrew BrennerMicrosoft employee Thursday, May 22, 2008 4:08 PM similar request
- Merged by Brent Serbus Thursday, May 22, 2008 5:49 PM merging
Reply:
http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/thread/03c026ea-a823-441a-9db1-6589d4f38586
Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com
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Questions and Suggestions
I am not expecting a response to these questions. All I am attempting to do is make you aware of items I do not comprehend and suggestions for improving this forum.
Thank you for taking my questions and comments under consideration.
Saint_Bernard
P.S. The downward arrow to the right of 'United States (English)' appears to have no effect. I am not in the United States.
Programmer for Visual C++ 6.0, and Microsoft Office including Access
- Edited by Saint_Bernard Saturday, May 17, 2008 10:52 PM Noticed an Apparent Error in the Forum.
- Moved by Andrew BrennerMicrosoft employee Sunday, May 18, 2008 3:21 AM suggest
Reply:
-Andrew
Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com
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Use plural tense rather than past tense for "Replies" and "Views"
<alert comment="technet newbie but extensive experience with vBulletin, SMF, phpBB, wikis, etc.">
At least with other forums, the norm seems to be "Replies" and "Views" rather than "Replied" and "Viewed".
HTM
my 2¢
</alert>
Reply:
Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com
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does not look very good in low resolution
Reply:
Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com
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Looking for Cluster Training?
Are you new to Clustering and looking for instructor lead training? Looking to ramp up your skills to the new changes in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering?
Announcing a new Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) course where you can get Cluster training from your local Microsoft Certified Partners for Learning Solutions. Click the link below for the course syllabus and to learn more.
Course 6423A: Implementing and Managing Windows Server 2008 Clustering
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/syllabi/6423aprelim.mspx
Windows Server 2003 questions to the correct forum
Hi
This forum is for General questions on Windows Server 2008 and there are very many posts on other Operating systems. I suggest we try to post Windows Server 2003 into one of the newsgroups on this site instead : http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/newsgroups/serveros/win2003.mspx
The newsgroups can either be reached with a NNTP client or through the web. The URL to the General Windows Server group is: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/newsgroups/dgbrowser/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.server.general
Brjann
Reply:
To moderator for the forum, you might want to make this post sticky so that it's visible to new forumner.
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Reply:
I do not mean to be rude but I did click on the link for the windows 2003 forum, so you might just want to look into this to avoid further problems
Thanks
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Reply:
What's the problem you encounter?
I just click on both links provided. It look OK for me.
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Reply:
Hi Frnd,
I am trying to club Windows Server 2008 with Vista. Can you guid us...?
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Reply:
What kind of guidance? Maybe you could open a different thread on this question?
is it information around Windows Server 2008 and Vista together - then quick overview is available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/evaluation/overview.mspx#EIF
Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Better Together
Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 originally began as part of a single development project, and as such they share a number of new technologies across networking, storage, security and management. Although the development of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 have branched into separate releases with different release cycles, many of these enhancements apply to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. When organizations deploy both operating systems, they will see how the combined client-server infrastructure provides even greater advantages.
Features
IT professionals who are administering a Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 infrastructure will notice many improvements in how they control and manage their environment.
| • | Maintenance is greatly simplified by the use of a single model for updates and service packs across client and server. |
| • | Client computers can monitor for specific events and forward to Windows Server 2008 for centralized monitoring and reporting. |
| • | Windows Deployment Services provides much faster and more reliable operating system deployment. |
| • | Network Access Protection features on Windows Server 2008 ensure that Windows Vista clients connecting to the network are compliant with security policies and restricted from accessing network resources if not. |
The reliability, scalability, and overall responsiveness of the infrastructure are greatly increased by improvements made to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
| • | Clients can render print jobs locally before sending them to print servers to reduce the load on the server and increase its availability. |
| • | Server resources are cached locally so that they are available even if the server is not, with copies automatically updating when the client and server are reconnected. |
| • | Applications or scripts that need to run on both client and server can take advantage of the Transactional File System to reduce the risk of error during file and registry operations and roll back to a known good state in the event of failure or cancellation. |
| • | Policies can be created to ensure greater Quality of Service for certain applications or services that require prioritization of network bandwidth between client and server. |
Windows Vista clients connecting to networks where Windows Server 2008 has been deployed can experience greatly improved communication speeds and reliability.
| • | Searching Windows Server 2008 servers from a Windows Vista client avails of enhanced indexing and caching technologies on both to provide huge performance gains across the enterprise. |
| • | Native IPv6 support across all client and server services creates a more scalable and reliable network, while the rewritten TCP/IP stack makes network communication much faster and more efficient. |
| • | The new Server Message Block 2.0 protocol provides a number of communication enhancements, including greater performance when connecting to file shares over high-latency links and better security through the use of mutual authentication and message signing. |
| • | Terminal Services on Windows Server 2008 have many improvements, including providing Windows Vista clients with remote access to internal resources through an HTTP gateway and seamless remote applications that run as if on the local desktop. |
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Reply:
| Brjann Brekkan [MSFT] wrote: | |
|
Hi,
I went though the MS forums webpage looking for a windows 2003 forum and it directs you to this 2008 forum. This needs to be fixed!!
Cheers
John
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Reply:
Thanks John
i have notfied the team again
brjann
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Reply:
Hi,
I can't seem to find a W2K3 Server forum, only a newsgroup...has anyone thought to request an actual forum be hosted since this technology is still largely deployed across the enterprise? I'm not much of a newsgroup user.
Thanks,
B
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Reply:
| shdowflare wrote: | |
|
| I'm really surprised they have no forum to support probably the most widely used server platform out there. I kept looking and looking through the technet forums, and was really shocked to not see any kind of forum at all. Thanks for the newsgroup link, but both options should be available, and if anything integrated. |
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Reply:
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Reply:
Isn't this just the point that the forums.microsoft.com web "page" is so paltry and pathetic to be laughable but I suppose HTML was the language of choice at one stage or another.
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Reply:
I'd like to say Thank You for posting all the new improvements in 2008, I have looked for a list of them and have a very hard time finding them, guess I was not looking in the right place, haha. I am new to this forum, and definitely glad that I found it. I will be on here all the time, again Thank you.
Bryan
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Reply:
The newsgroups are completely unaesthetic.
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What do you think of the UnRead Filter?
Let us know what you think of this feature!
Sam Jarawan STO Forums Senior Development Lead
- Changed type Sam JarawanMicrosoft employee Monday, April 7, 2008 11:49 PM This should be a discussion not a question
Reply:
If we could only set 'Read' when reading by Preview.
And persisted user settings will be great to have.
You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
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Reply:
So far, me likely!
If we could only set 'Read' when reading by Preview.
And persisted user settings will be great to have.
You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
We do set to "read" when previewing. We just don't delete it from your view automatically if you're previewing that would be kind of annoying :-)
To test this, preview a couple items then hit F5 to page refresh and those items will no longer be in the list. Or close all your preview windows and wait 15-30 seconds and our live update will refresh the list and the items will be gone (we don't update if you're previewing since that would be a bad user experience).
We're definitely looking at persisting settings in the future. However what you can do right now is bookmark your favorite forums with the filter set, for example this forum would be: http://forums.expression.microsoft.com/en-US/suggest/threads/#page:1;filter:unreadreplies
and now whenever you visit this link you'll only ever see new stuff (of course you need to be signed in for the filter to work).
Sam Jarawan STO Forums Senior Development Lead
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Reply:
Mikey likely!!!
You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
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Reply:
What would make it even better for me is if I could set this as my default view of a topic or even the forum and this setting was remembered.
As it stands now, I visit the topic folder, click the unread filter, select a thread, read and/or reply and then return to the topic folder which I then need to re-filter into unread to see the next unread thread.
Further, I'd like for my sort to be "sticky" for a topic or the forum, too, so upon returning to the thread list, I don't have to redo the sort and filter.
-steve
Microsoft MVP Windows Live / Windows Live OneCare Forum Moderator
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Reply:
Since I've been doing my reading in the Live Mesh forum, I've been keeping up with new threads frequently, hence the filter limited the total number of threads with new activity to a single page.
I was otherwise engaged this weekend, so activity over the weekend was unread to me until today. The filter returns 2 pages. I realize that I could probably change the sort to display oldest to newest activity (I think I can...I should have this ability if I don't), however, I am leaving it with newest on the top of page 1 and oldest at the end of page 2.
So, I go to page 2 and read the oldest thread. I use the browser back button to go back to the index which is still page 2, but now minus 1 thread that I just read. So far, so good - and I will add that I like the live refresh for the filter.
I repeat this until all threads on page 2 are read - I end up with a blank list and no link to go back to page 1 of the filter results. That doesn't seem right.
The solution is to go back to the top level of the topic folder and re-apply the filter. I think that the navigation links to other pages need to appear on the filter results after I've read all of page 2's threads or I should be presented with page 1 on back from the last thread read of page 2.
I can see where a filter result of more pages could mean a whole bunch of navigation back to top and then to highest number page of unread, and so on.
-steve
Microsoft MVP Windows Live / Windows Live OneCare Forum Moderator
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Reply:
Where is it?
CHO, HomePage Doctor
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Reply:
-Andrew
Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com
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Inventory tool.
With this tool you can scan computers and see what softgrid applications are "discovered" and if they have been started on the client among other things. It only supports 4.5 clients.
http://mindgrape.se/forum/download.php?id=39
BR
Pierre Eriksson
Mindgrape
Reply:
Are you using the new WMI provider?
/Kalle
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Reply:
Yes.
BR
Pierre
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Black screen with cursor after logging on to VISTA ****PROBLEM SOLVED****
I had this problem for a couple of days now and finally sorted it for good. I read a few threads pointing the problem to their nVIDIA or ATI drivers or even their hardware... well i tried it all and none helped. The way around the problem was to press the CTRL + ALT + DELETE, fire up the task manager and launch the explorer.exe and that's how you would get your desktop, but that is not a solution.
Right, here we go:
I downloaded the latest version of Spyware Doctor + Antvirus edition (which i purchased) and ran a full scan and Guess what? i had a few viruses calling themselves taskmgr.exe (located in "Users" folder), Screen svr.scr (located in the "Windows" folder) and some registry entries associated with those files. Once removed from the system i no longer see a black screen with white cursor, i get to see my desktop almost immediately after logging on!
I hope this is helpful
Reply:
My son experienced the same issue. His laptop (Vista ULTI) was infected with the Trojan Horse Generic10.UWU. He was alerted by suspicious activity on his USB. He stripped out the original anti virus suite and installed another which found the problem. The virus had altered the
HKLM\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
entry from c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe to it's own version of userinit.exe located in c:\windows. As the anti virus software had deleted the virus version of userinit.exe, the desktop interface (explorer.exe) was not initialised. Correcting the path fixed the problem.
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known bug: Visual SVN integration not fully working with RS/VS.net
Why not email them here
support@visualsvn.com
and get them to hurry up and fix it!
Reply:
Because I don't use Visual SVN...
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Reply:
Quite why anyone with a small team of devs (<10) needs to using anything beyond VSS is beyond me.
"lowest common denominator" for all the non MS devs methinks
grrrr
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sp1
THE FIRST TIME I TRIED TO DOWN LOAD SP1 ABOUT 40 DAYS AGO IT WIPED OUT MY HARD DRIVE.THE PC HADS TO BE SENT BACK TO THE MFG. UNDEER WARRENTY.
NOW I CANNOT DOWN LOAD IT AND I'M NOT SURE I WANT TO.ST ME MUCH TIME AND HEAD ACHES.{AS SOON AS I GOT VISTA I KNEW IT WAS PUT ON THE MARKET TOO SOON.
THE CONSUMERS HAD TO BE THE TROUBLE SHOOTERS.SOME HOW IT DOES NOT
SEEM RIGHT THAT WE PAY FOR A SERVICE AND WE HAVE IRON OUT THE BUGS.
I GOT ROPED INTO A DEAL BETWEEN HP,MICROSOFT AND MY SEWRVICE PROVIDER.
TO BUY A P.C. WITH VISTA INSTALLED.I WAS NOT TOLD SOOM OF MY GAMES WON'T
WORK OR MY CREATIVE CAM IS USELESS TO ME.I HAD NOTHING ON THE PC AND I HAD NO MEMORY LEFT.HP HAD JAM PACK MY NEW PC WITH 33 GAMES SOME WERE PAT GAMES ,HP PHOTO HP EVERYTHING.MY OWN EMAIL WHICH I WAS HAPPY WITH WAS
TURNED INTO AN ARMED FORTRESS TO GETR INTO UNLES I JOINED THE MAIL SERVICE
THAT WAS BEING PUSHED.
IT WASW LIKE HAVING A SALESMAN INSIDE OF MY PC DRIVING F_____IN CRAZY.
DO NOT GET INTOI A NITEMARE LIKE THIS .IT IS NOT OVER YET.I FINALLY GOT RIDE OF ALL THE GAMES AND MADE SURE THEY WERE OUT O F RECYCLER.I HAD TO USE SYSTEM RESTORE A FEW DAYS LATER AND THE *** GAMES ARE BACK.AND I WAS TOLD THAT I ,THE ONLY USER AND ADMINISTRATOR,COULD NOT DELETE THE SECURITY SYSTEM THAT WAS INSTALLED .
I DON'T GIVE A RATS *** IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE THIS! IT IS TRUE.
VISTA IS GARBAGE WHO EVER PUT THIS
TOGETHER MUST HAVE SAT AROUND WITH THEIR BUDDY'S SMOKED A JOINT AND FIGURED OUT WAYS OF MAKING US CRAZY.WHILE THEIR LAUGHING THEIR BALLS OFF.
ROD FLYNN
VISTA AND NORTON NAV 2008 - Updates
It is a mickey mouse, but ennoying at long time.
I didn't get an answer at Norton.
Reply:
hi,
1. could you let me know the update name?
2. did you try to update Vista on Windows Upadte?
if an error code be received on windows update, please let me know the error code.
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Reply:
Hi
As this thread has been quiet for a while we will be changing the issue type to 'Comment'.
If you wish to return to this question you can go ahead and change the type back to 'Question'. Then you can edit your initial post and change the radio button at the top of the post editor window.
If the issue has been resolved, we'd love to hear your solution. By sharing your experience you can help other community members facing similar problems.
Thanks!
Tim Quan - MSFT
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Hyper-V RC1 Seems Nice!
I just wanted to give a big thanks to your team's commitment to quality. I think I have seen some PM's in here speaking of this mindset for your Hyper-V release. It is really starting to show now, since each release of Hyper-V seems faster and each one just feels more polished.
A small example: I was unable to install Integration components on a Vista SP1 VM using RC0, but the RC1 install of integration components on the same VM went off without a hitch. Also the perfromance of the servers that I have running as guests certainly seem faster. I also noticed that the mouse is working over remote desktop when using the VM manager (not sure of the right terminolgy here).
Keep up the good work! I run a small ISV and a single box with 2 quad core xeons and 16 gigs of RAM is now handling all kinds of things I throw at it thanks to Hyper-V.
I call it my personal cloud.
Thanks much,
Jon
- Changed type Mike Sterling [MSFT] Friday, May 30, 2008 10:56 PM General Comment, not question.
Tab index of main edit window should follow subject box
Anthony Jones - MVP ASP/ASP.NET
Reply:
http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/thread/cb8988f4-cd67-4cb9-825a-968bbea315f5
Matt Fraser, STO Forums Software Developer
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Boooyeaaah Ati Catalyst 8.5 driver suite available
Good day every one
At has released its Catalyst 8.5 driver suite. Just looked, but it seems my source was correct. Was going to post look for these this week. But safer to wait. Might have been available this morning but hey have to catch up on sleep eventually.
Please post back your Sp3 results. Rotatation of the monitor hopefully has been fixed. I do not have the Ati hardware necessary to check this out. But will look later anbd post the news results if any one is interested.
Please if you have Xp Pro create an ASR disk dd+SP= fault for the first people usually.
Also please re-install dot net 1. sp1 for reliability purposes. *Interferes with Media Center*Re run the media center install.
Havnt seen any other problems yet. Fully related but this will save some time.
Happy Computing
Keith
Reply:
NCIX source
This driver suite seems to have a lot of performance improvements, HDMI modes added. Sp3 support. Its WHQL Signed. *(google if you ae not familiar with word)*
Please remember to uninstall your previous version of the drive IAW directions.
Catalyst™ 8.5 introduces the following new features:
Catalyst™ Control Center Component Video
ATI Graphics Driver Un-install Enhancement
SECAM TV Out Support
1080p HDTV custom mode
HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes
Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst™ Control Center
1080p24 Mode Support
Windows XP Service Pack 3 support
Catalyst™ Control Center Component Video
This release of Catalyst™ introduces 480i and 480p support. These formats will be found in the pre-defined component video format list found in the Catalyst™ Control Center->Component Video->Advanced page.
ATI Graphics Driver Un-install Enhancement
This release of Catalyst™ introduces an update to the ATI un-install utility. The utility now pop up dialogue box to show two options to the end user,
Remove ATI Radeon™ graphics software, leave chipset software (RECOMMENDED).
Completely remove all ATI/AMD (Graphics/Chipset) software.
SECAM TV Out Support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces support within the graphics driver to enable TV output adhering to the SECAM standard.
1080p HDTV custom mode
This release of Catalyst™ 1080p HDTV display mode. This feature will be available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.
HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes
This release of Catalyst™ introduces HDMI audio support for all TV timing modes and non-standard (CEA 861b) TV modes. If a non-standard mode is used, on initial connection to the TV, a pop-up notification should let the user know that the audio may be out of sync. A UI allows for the audio to be disabled by the user if desired. The UI in Catalyst™ Control Center would show the list of TV timing modes (both standard and non-standard) and the capability to enable audio for a given mode.
Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst™ Control Center
This release of Catalyst™ introduces Adaptive AA for Orca Driver, geometry for alpha tested objects are now submitted multiple times to the hardware using the multi-sample mask feature to update one sample at a time in the frame buffer using centroid sampling. With each pass of the sampling position for textures is shifted to be at the location of the sample that is being updated in that pass.
1080p24 Mode Support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces 1080p24 mode support This feature will be available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.
Windows XP Service Pack 3 support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces WHQL certified support for Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 update for all ATI Radeon™ Series products.
Performance Improvements
The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™.
Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases up to 12% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
Halo: Performance increases by 10-30% across all of the supported ATI Radeon™ series of products
Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases from 5 to 35% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
Stalker DX9: Performance increases by 20-50% when HDR is enabled in the game; across all ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of products
World in Conflict DX10: Performance increases up to 25% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD36x0 and/or an ATI Radeon™ 38x0 series of product. Higher performance gains are noticed on systems contianing an ATI Radeon™ 3870x2 series of product
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SP3 - First issues
Hi,
Just installed SP3 RC.
Installation went well, no crashes at all, but I'm starting seeing problems now:
- All network connections except "Bluetooth Network Connection dissapeared from "Network Connections" applet. I used to have three more - two for VMWare virtual adapters and one for my Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet NIC. I have no connectivity issues, ipconfig shows these adapters without any problems
- There is no single device listed in Device Manager, both from My Computer properties and Computer Management console
- Opening "My Computer" takes about 30s instead of 0.5s, but Control Panel is shown with no issues
I'm going to uninstall SP3 right now. I'll better wait for final version
Reply:
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Reply:
Tim
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Reply:
Hi,
I tested SP3 on virtual machine and there was no problems.
Unfortunately problems still appeared on my computer after uninstalling SP and doing system restore, so this is probably compatibility issue. I have no time to track what exactly causes problems, so I did full system restore from Ghost image to get it fully working again.
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Reply:
I just installed SP3 RC on a test computer outside of the environment. The machine only has the basics on it, but I'm about to start loading Office 2007 on it, then start working on putting the Novell client on there as well. So far, nothing major has happened. The only nuisance I've seen so far are all the prompts about changes made to the system. Logging in pompted me; opening IE prompted me; accessing Windows Update prompted me.
While this may seem like a minor issue hardly worth complaining about, I can see this being a severe headache when I roll out the file version of SP3 to the rest of my network. Am I really going to have to go through each client and take care of the prompts before the next work day? The users here are rather testy to new releases and I hear complaints all the time about minor adjustments. Essentially, I'd prefer to have a way to auto-aporove all of these prompts if possible.
Again, this isn't a huge deal, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
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Reply:
Should work fine for your clients
I put SP3 onto my production pc (i had installed all the updates from microsoft update beforehand)
Office 2003, VB6, VS.NET 2003 and 2005, Activesync, whatever.
It all runs perfectly fine. Noticed a small performance boost.
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Reply:
My network connections and device manager are also blank. I believe this occured on mine around the SP2 install.
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Reply:
I have exactly the same issues as described here plus the additional issue that in IE7 any page that uses the Adobe Flash player does not recognise that I already have the Flash player installed, reporting that I need to enable JavaScript or install the player.
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Reply:
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Reply:
| Daisy15 wrote: | |
|
I've had these problems as well. Have had problems with Java/Flash pages, then suddenly a few days ago, after attempting to download my ISP's version of IE7, I no longer can access, uninstall, or "delete" anything related to IE. Programs that usually open an IE window instead of the Firefox I normally use, just sit there, and the window never opens.
I'm not sure what happened. And I've been looking all over the web (yes, I started at Microsoft), but haven't found an explanation until I found these boards today. Of course I still don't know what's up, lol.
But as my sig says...... Ya never know till ya ask. So I'm asking. Can anyone help?
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Adding Terminal Services Profile to New Active Directory Account
The only two methods that Microsoft seems to provide for reading/writing of Terminal Services attributes (e.g. TerminalServicesProfilePath and EnableRemoteControl etc) are the COM based TsUserEx.DLL and the .NET Class DirectoryEntry using the InvokeGet and InvokeSet methods.
Using either of these interfaces to write TS profile data to a AD account means writing code that directly accesses another systems outside the thread of MIIS - not to mention that the AD account implicitly needs to exist before the info can be written and therefore cannot be done at point of provisioining. In either case this would be a no-no and such code is typically frowned upon.
The problem with writing this data is that all the TS attributes are in fact all stored in a single attribute called userParameters, and if you inspect the data held in this attribute, you will find that it is a contiguous, partially encrypted Unicode string. The structure of this string doesn't seem to be documented anywhere so good luck trying to decipher it let alone directly updating it.
I would argue that the time to set these attributes for the first time, would be at the point of provisioning, any attempt to retrospectively update these during a sync could be risky. So the aim would be to generate this Unicode string and apply it to the userParameters attribute before the CS object is committed. It then dawned on me that there is an existing interface for generating this string - the DirectoryEntry class. What if we have a DirectoryEntry instance and use InvokeSet to apply the TS values we need, then read the value of userParameters back we can add it to our CS object. Therefore, all we really need is a valid DirectoryEntry instance.
Unfortunately you can't just instance a entry DirectoryEntry using the following syntax:
DirectoryEntry de = new DirectoryEntry();
Well, actually you can, but userParameters isn't one of the attributes that is available when you do this, so using InvokeSet will fail. This is where the only questionable code comes in. What you need to do is get a handle on an actual AD account, a template if you will. This might seem undesirable, but bear with me. If the account you get is the MIIS Service account itself, and of course you don't commit the changes, what you have is a memory only copy of an account that is guaranteed to be there (and in our case has no pre-existing data in the userParameters attribute). If it wasn't there then MIIS wouldn't be running, let alone your provisioning code.
Once you have your Unicode string, the DirectoryEntry instance can be disposed and forgotten about. The following pseudo code illustrates:
csADObject = mventry.ConnectedMAs["Active Directory MA"].Connectors.StartNewConnector("user");csADObject.CommitNewConnector();
DirectoryEntry de = GetADUser("miisservice"); //function to get DirectoryEntry using LDAP
de.InvokeSet("TerminalServicesProfilePath", @"\\TSServer\miisservice\TSProfile");
de.InvokeSet("EnableRemoteControl", "1");
de.InvokeSet("DefaultToMainPrinter", "1");
de.InvokeSet("ConnectClientPrintersAtLogon", "1");
csADObject["userParameters"].Value = de.Properties["userParameters"].Value.ToString();
csADObject.CommitNewConnector();
Any thoughts?
Reply:
The problem with this is that you would have to make an outside call using LDAP to get access....Which is not supported.
The better way would be to create an XMA and write to these objects that way...
With the XMA you could wait to write out the info until the account is actually in Ad.... by controlling the sync proces..
HTH,
Joe
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Reply:
What Joe recommends is probably the most efficient way to accomplish this task.
Another approach is to use a Post Processing XMA -- where you provision a task to this XMA, when you get back a SID from AD (so you know the user has been created in AD) and then the XMA calls a Batch file which the commands you need. This is an approach I have taught in the A-504 class, if you have taken the class then you would have access to that sample code.
In this case I think Joe is recommending a second MA to handle this rather than replacing the AD MA.
Joe: correct me if I misinterpret.
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Reply:
Totally correct my friend.....
Joe
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