The virtual Small Business Server 2008 backup problem

By tim, on December 10th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2008 is supported running as a Hyper-V guest; but there’s one nasty problem. The built-in backup expects external USB drives, and a Hyper-V guest does not have direct access to USB.

Here’s a solution I’ve come up with. It lets you use the built-in backup wizard, and lets users simply

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Salesforce Chatter: Twitter-like status updates for the Enterprise

By tim, on December 8th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Today I attended Cloudforce in London: essentially the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference on tour. The platform marches on: CEO Marc Benioff says the company is growing at 20% per year, and in general the customers I spoke too seem pleased with their choice. Benioff was as usual full of jabs at the “old stuff” –

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How Microsoft adds COM to everything

By tim, on December 7th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve been writing a retrospective on Microsoft and noticed an intriguing pattern.

When Microsoft was fighting the browser wars, it first of all developed its own web browser, and then added COM (ActiveX).

When Microsoft was countering Sun’s Java, it came up with its own implementation, Visual J++. Key differentiator: COM integration.

When Microsoft

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Review: Sansa’s iPod alternative

By tim, on December 4th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

The number of shelves dedicated to non-iPod music players in the average electronics retailer seems to shrink with each passing year, and as I write the top 10 bestselling MP3 players at Amazon.co.uk are all iPods, so it’s good to note that Apple alternatives still exist. As it happens, I’d been using an iPod

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Fear of Google

By tim, on December 4th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Shares in Rightmove, a UK web site for house sales, have dropped by move then 10% over the last couple of days, following a report by the Financial Times that “Google is in talks with British estate agents to launch an online property portal.”

I do not know what chances of success this venture

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Importing folders to SharePoint

By tim, on December 4th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve been working with Small Business Server 2008 recently and one of the tasks was to import an existing shared folder into SharePoint.

You would have thought that would be trivial, but it turns out it is not quite so. The normal suggestion is to open a SharePoint library in Explorer and do the

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Google Gears out, HTML 5 in: what this means for offline web apps

By tim, on December 1st, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I was interested to read that Google is abandoning Gears in favour of HTML 5.

While that makes sense, it is a hassle for developers who have developed for Gears, since there are differences between features such as HTML 5 local storage and Gears LocalServer. The Gears API was tidy and effective so in

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