In the same vein as my previous post on calendaring, and its application to the implementation of groups calendars for clubs and societies, I thought I would also make some mention of our Windows Live Groups solution (see http://groups.live.com).

The Windows Live team have just done an excellent job of blogging on this, and as their example are directly relevant to education, I would recommend that you take a trip over to their site and have a read.

In the spirit of road-testing this, we now have a group for Live@edu customers to try out here: http://liveatedu.groups.live.com.  You will need to request to join.

Jonny

It has been a little while since I blogged last... what with vacation, travel, holidays... so much to do, so little time; to borrow a cliché.  So perhaps it is appropriate now that I am posting on calendaring?  We all have different schedules that we need to keep, and if you are a student it is important that you keep appraised of the various schedules that affect your day to day activities.

I had a chat recently with a few customers and some students about this, and here is a non-exhaustive list of the kinds of things they are trying to keep track of:

• Class Calendars - when/where are the lectures happening
• Assignments - what is due when?
• Campus Calendars - term times, exam times, etc
• Club/Society Calendars - sports, organizations
• Social Calendars - what is student life without the off party?
• Family Calendars - birthdays, anniversaries, etc
• Their own personal calendars - funny, this is usually the last one that people think of :)

As a user of Microsoft technology, there are actually a number of options to consider when managing calendars in the Software plus Services world that we are building.  In this post, I wanted to take the opportunity to examine options with the Live Calendar Service, and how it interacts with Outlook.  Enjoy the demo!

Double-click to view in full screen.

Download

Enjoy!

Jonny

In the last week, I got a couple of emails from folks who simply wanted to know how to delete a mailbox from Exchange Labs.  They had listed the available cmdlets, and tried the one that looked right, but they got an error message when they tried it...  here is what happened...

Get-Command -CommandType All

This produces a list of the available cmdlets on the Exchange Labs PowerShell interface.  One of the cmdlets is 'remove-mailbox'.

If you simply try 'remove-mailbox <mailbox name>', you will get an error message.  This is primarily because there is a tie between the Exchange mailbox and the LiveID that is associated with it. 

What you actually need to enter is:

remove-mailbox <mailbox name> -DisableWindowsLiveID -Confirm:$false

So, I'll not hold you back any more, you might have mailboxes to delete!

Jonny

This new video is pretty cool, I thought, so if you want to know a little more about our datacenter strategy with the aid of some pretty pictures.

Give it a watch.

Talking about Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision

    
Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision