The best products Microsoft ever made, errr, I mean bought
There are a few times in a techy's life that you come across a product that you use every single day. I have two that I would like to nominate into this Hall of Fame, both happen to be from Microsoft (well they are now).
- LiveMeeting - this product, formerly known as PlaceWare, has replaced about 70% of the business trips I need to take. This tool lets me conduct meetings, and PowerPoint people to death, but more importantly lets me into customer networks where I would normally not be able to get to. When I am working with production systems, the customer and I want to make sure that the customer is completely aware or what I am doing. Since I can setup customers as a presenter in LiveMeeting, they can host the meeting and give me control to do what I need to do. You are probably thinking that Citrix and Terminal Server have let me do this for years, which is true. But ports 3389/1494 are not open to DMZ's or through jump hosts. LiveMeeting uses port 80, which in most systems that I work with is open somehow, so the customer can share the environment and watch what I am doing.
- Virtual PC/Server - this product, formerly known as Connectix, has litterally replaced $100,000's or equipment on projects. We have gone from buying developers a second box for server development to adding some extra memory and possibly a second hard drive. I have been creating self deploying images that are sysprep'd and either have all the software already installed or I install it on the fly (using a script engine) for those pesky apps that don't like it when the SID changes. If you are a developer, us it as a second machine. If you are an infrastructure person, use it to try out the latest OS without having to hassle with dual booting. Want to test out Visual Studio 2005 or Longhorn without detonating your laptop? Run it as a Virtual PC.