Are you a developer looking to launch your new web application? Or perhaps you are an IT Pro trying to understand what “the Cloud” means to you.  Or maybe you have a need for some compute time to run some computations.

Regardless of who you are, or why you are thinking about the cloud, Microsoft [...]]]>

Are you a developer looking to launch your new web application? Or perhaps you are an IT Pro trying to understand what “the Cloud” means to you.  Or maybe you have a need for some compute time to run some computations.

Regardless of who you are, or why you are thinking about the cloud, Microsoft is making it easy for you try out Windows Azure as well as SQL Azure and AppFabric.

If you visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/ and select the introductory special you will be able to try a limited amount of the Windows Azure platform at no charge. 

This offer is available through October 31, 2010 and is limited to one per customer.  For full details and disclosure take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/popup.aspx?lang=en&locale=en-US&offer=MS-AZR-0001P

If you are in Canada and have question about Windows Azure, my team and I are here to help and can answer your questions.  We would love to hear what you are using Azure for.  Please feel free to email us at cdnazure@microsoft.com.

Some of the programs that you may [...]]]> As you saw in my previous post, I have taken on a new role and in doing so have left a vacancy in our marketing team.  If you are a passionate customer advocate with a strong marketing background then the role below might be a good fit for you.

Some of the programs that you may have heard of, TechDays, EnergizeIT, and AlignIT are just some of the programs produced and executed by my team, and are all directed and led by the audience managers.

If you are interested in being part of a great team that has outreach to technical professionals across Canada to create lasting relationships, then keep reading.

Senior Technical Audience Manager – Microsoft Canada

Are you driven by the need to make things bigger and better? Does making others great make you feel great too?

Audience Marketing Managers (AMMs) drive the local engagement strategy, plan and execution framework for how Microsoft builds sustainable and meaningful breadth and depth relationships with our technical audience. AMMs focus on the following audiences: Developers, IT Pros, Designers, Architects and Students worldwide.

The goal for an Sr. AMM is to help find Technical Professionals better ways to use technology to greater benefit. We do all we can to earn the hearts and minds of those Technical Professionals, by focusing on their needs and by helping them to be successful in their jobs and in their careers. Our goal is industry-leading satisfaction and favorability because highly satisfied/ loyal customers buy more of our products and will recommend them to others.

Success of the Sr. AMM role is determined by the individuals’ ability to work collaboratively across the subsidiary/area playing a key orchestration role with internal partners and stakeholders including Developer & Platform Evangelists, Product Marketing, Customer & Partner Experience and Business & Marketing Organization resources including the Corporate Marketing Group and segment marketing leads.
Sr. AMM’s ensure one Microsoft voice is heard and the interests and needs of the audience are considered and integrated across all campaigns and activities.

Key Requirements for the role Include:

• Serves as the recognized “go to” custodian, advocate, and respected authority for audiences across the subsidiary. Maintains and supports product managers and other internal stakeholders with audience intelligence and guidance
• Serves as a local resource for audience intelligence use to drive, shape and influence key strategic messages, content, and programs across local marketing efforts (i.e., customer campaigns, events, purchase process and deployment). Synthesizes audience and market information to derive key audience insights and affect strategic direction and planning process.
• Consistently tracks programs to measure business impact including engagement, adoption, advocacy and scale
• Assesses market and audience standing to develop or refine marketing strategies that are responsive to market trends, audience perception, competitive pressure, product adoption and net new engagement opportunities
• Aligns with global audience strategy, programs and approach with execution based on local market and audience intelligence. Effectively assesses viability and value of existing, new and emergent channels/programs for improving audience outreach/scalability.
• Understands and leverages through effective project management, connection points across media and channels (both online and offline), to drive audience objectives.
• Reviews all programs and activities against metrics and goals to prioritize and make informed business decisions.

People who are successful in this role and in this team have a passion for the customer. They are consummate cross-company collaborators, and they are driven by the challenges of change. They balance the excitement of continuous innovation with the need to deliver consistent, predictable, reliable, and repeatable experiences for our customers. They are builders, motivators, and team players extraordinaire!

Join us if you are inspired by driving change!

A couple of months ago I got IPv6 up and running at home,  now that I have that working, the next logical step was to [...]]]>

UPDATE: As I have changed hosting providers, the following information no longer applies, however, is left as a reference for others who may be trying to get IPv6 up and running.

A couple of months ago I got IPv6 up and running at home,  now that I have that working, the next logical step was to setup a server that I could connect to using IPv6.  Over the last few weeks I have been working on getting http://barnabyjeans.ca to not only speak IPv4 but also be accessible over IPv6.  The good news is that this is now working and you can access this site over IPv6.  If you are experimenting with IPv6, you should automatically connect over IPv6 as there are both A and AAAA records setup for that server.  However, if you have IPv6 setup but name resolution isn’t working you may want to try accessing the site via the following http://[2001:470:1f04:39a::2] (depending on your operating system, this may or may not work).  You should notice down at the bottom of the page (under the community server logo) is the IP address you are connecting from.  If you are hitting the server over IPv6, you should see your IPv6 address down there, if not, you will see your traditional IPv4 address.

Now that I have that out of the way, how did I go about getting the server to talk IPv6?  I’ll try to outline the steps below, but as with anything, you will probably want to try this out in a controlled environment before rolling this out more broadly.

1. Decide how you are going to get your IPv6 address.  For this server, I decided to try Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker which you can find at http://tunnelbroker.net.
2. Once you have registered and signed into the tunnelbroker.net site, you will need to request a new tunnel and provide the current IPv4 address of your endpoint (server).  As we are setting this up on an Internet facing server, you will likely have a public IP so this step should be pretty straight forward.  If your server sits behind a firewall they you will need to use the firewall IP address and, very importantly, make sure that your firewall passes protocol-41 traffic. 
3. After you have requested your tunnel, you will be provided with some important pieces of information, specifically:
   

   Server IPv4 address:72.52.104.74  — note this isn’t your server IP address – this is the tunnel server endpoint

   Server IPv6 address:2001:470:????:???::?/64

   Client IPv4 address: aa.bb.cc.dd — this should be the public IP address of your server

   Client IPv6 address:2001:????:????:????::?/64  — this will become the IPv6 address for your server

4. you will also notice some instructions on how to configure various operating systems to use the information above.  In our case we’ll select Vista/2008 (this seems counter-intuitive as we are using Server 2003, however, this option provides you with the “netsh” commands that you will need to get this working.
5. Enable IPv6 on the server.  In this case Windows Server 2003 so the following command should do the trick
   

   netsh interface ipv6 install

6. once you have ipv6 installed on the server, you can make use of the commands as mentioned in #4 above.  They will likely look like the following (I’ve replaced the actual values with $ClientIP, etc):
   

   netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel IP6Tunnel $ClientIP $ServerIP
   netsh interface ipv6 add address IP6Tunnel $ClientIPv6
   netsh interface ipv6 add route ::/0 IP6Tunnel $ServerIPv6

7. once you have completed these steps, you may want to try the following commands to see if you are connecting via IPv6:
   

   ping -6 www.kame.net and ping -6 www.sixxs.net.  unless you have a firewall that is blocking ICMPv6, these commands should be successful

8. lastly, if you have any websites currently running, you will need restart IIS to have it listen over IPv6.  The following article discusses IIS and IPv6 specifically: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6ad3cff7-10f7-4499-8673-e866795607d1.mspx?mfr=true

There is a great page on Technet site that covers a lot of the background on IPv6 and is worth a read – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/network/bb530961.aspx

If [...]]]>
I have just found a very cool new application on the Microsoft site called Microsoft Tags (http://www.microsoft.com/tags).  Basically what this does is allow you to encode either a vCard, a URL, or a phone number into a 2D image that can then be read and decoded with a camera phone.

If you visit http://gettag.mobi from your mobile phone (including Blackberry and Android) you’ll be able to download the reader that will decode this file and provide you with my vCard.  For iPhone users you can visit the App Store and download Tag Reader.

If you want my work contact info, all you need to do is scan.  I may just have to include one of these on my next business cards.

With two weeks to go until we kick off TechDays in Toronto, the team is doing the final preparations to deliver an amazing experience to everyone who attends.

One of the things that I’ll be taking care of during the events is photography.  I’ve already got the Nikon D200 and D300 ready to go, and with [...]]]>

With two weeks to go until we kick off TechDays in Toronto, the team is doing the final preparations to deliver an amazing experience to everyone who attends.

One of the things that I’ll be taking care of during the events is photography.  I’ve already got the Nikon D200 and D300 ready to go, and with any luck I’ll have Nikon D90 in time for the conference as well.  The guys at Nikon are absolutely amazing and make sure that my team have access to the latest gear to capture and share the experience at the event for those of you who aren’t able to attend.   Of course I’ll be posting the photos to my flickr page as well as to the TechDays group on flickr.  I’ll also be tagging everything with TechDays_CA.

One thing I have learned from previous events is that sometimes you need to be in more than one place at once.  Normally as a photographer that is hard to do, however, with the help of a little technology life just got easier.  I have been using PocketWizard Plus IIs for a while now to trigger remote flashes, but after reading the PocketWizard blog and Vincent LaForet’s blog post on remote cameras at the Olympics, I realized I had only been using my PocketWizards for half of what they could do.  A quick search turned up FlashZebra.com and the cables that I was looking for – the ones that allow me to remotely trigger a camera.  I have placed my order so I just need to wait for the package to arrive and I’m one step closer to being in two places at once.

If you are attending TechDays and want to chat about cameras, I’ll be the guy with all the Nikon stuff hanging off me.  If you haven’t already bought your ticket there is still time to get your ticket before the early bird pricing ends on October 15th – visit http://techdays.ca for all the details.

One of the things that is keeping me busy right now is the upcoming Heroes Happen {Here} launch wave that kicks off in Toronto on February 27th at the Direct Energy Centre.

My team and I are heads down putting the finishing touches on both the Community Connection Events and the main Launch and Technical Readiness [...]]]>  

One of the things that is keeping me busy right now is the upcoming Heroes Happen {Here} launch wave that kicks off in Toronto on February 27th at the Direct Energy Centre.

My team and I are heads down putting the finishing touches on both the Community Connection Events and the main Launch and Technical Readiness events.

However, as these events are for you, the audience, we wanted to provide a consistent way for you to participate and share your thoughts and experiences.  If you are planning on blogging about the events, if you are taking photos, or if you are uploading videos to YouTube or SoapBox, there is one standard tag that we are using to aggregate all this content: HHH_CA.  We will be launching a community site in the next few days that will aggregate anything we can find that is tagged with HHH_CA.  Additionally, our PR team has already launched their online digital newsroom for these events at http://launchwave.ca/ and they will also be on the lookout for content tagged with HHH_CA to include on their site.

Having said all of that, here are some of the places you can either contribute content or find out more about the events:

Flickr photo pool: http://flickr.com/groups/hhh_ca
Toronto Event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8420923311
Digital Newsroom: http://launchwave.ca/

Team (member) blogs:
Community Connection Events – diamond in the rough
Heroes Happen Here, eh- What's going on up north for Launch 2008 Activities

For the first show I talked with host Ann Rohmer about Popfly and what you could do with it.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage talking about Popfly

For the second [...]]]> Over the last few months I have had the chance to visit the good folks at CP24 and appear on their Homepage show to talk about Microsoft Popfly.

For the first show I talked with host Ann Rohmer about Popfly and what you could do with it.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage talking about Popfly

For the second interview I showed host Jee-Yun Lee how you can embed your Popfly creations into your Facebook profile.

Barnaby Jeans on CP24 Homepage (again) talking about Popfly and Facebook

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, and don't forget to try this stuff out.  It really is easy to use.