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Building on 28 years of Grey Matter know how
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Welcome
Editorial
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Editor:...................................................................... Matt Nicholson
Technical Editors:... Sean Wilson, Paul Edwards
News Editor:....................................................... Paul Stephens
Publisher:................................................................... Andrew King
Contributors:.....................................................Tim Anderson,
Kay Ewbank, Jon Honeyball, Graham Keitch,
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Advertisers Index
2
Visual Studio 2010
10 Microsoft BI
13Mindjet
14ComponentOne
21Adobe
23AVG
24ABBYY
27 Symantec Backup Exec
29 Bing Maps
31Paessler
33QSR
35Infragistics
36Intel
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Contents
Just recently I discovered a couple of things that brought
home to me just how much this industry is changing, and
just how much Apple’s influence has grown. The first concerned
Amazon’s Kindle. I have been using the Kindle eBook app for some
time on my Windows Phone and, more recently, I’ve been using the
Kindle itself. One thing that has impressed me is the ease with which I
can browse the Kindle Store for books and ‘1-Click’ buy straight from
both the device and the app. However, this experience is no longer
available to owners of the Apple iPhone or iPad. This is because Apple
has changed the rules governing the applications available through
the iTunes App Store, explicitly prohibiting apps that have “external
mechanisms for purchasing content... such as a ‘buy’ button that goes
to a Web site to purchase a digital book.”
The second concerned Adobe’s announcement, made on the
morning that I was writing this column, that it is abandoning further
development of the Flash Player plug-in for mobile devices. Again the
blame can be largely laid at Apple’s door - specifically at the open
letter that Steve Jobs posted on the Apple Web site in April last year,
explaining why Apple was not going to allow Flash on the iPhone or
iPad, and suggesting that the future lay with HTML5.
These two things are interesting for different reasons, both
revealing much about the nature of Apple as a company. In the case of
the Kindle app, there are two reasons we have arrived at this situation.
The first is down to a clash of business models. Apple makes money by
taking a 30 per cent levy on purchases made through its App Store,
and in February this year made it clear this applies not only to code
but also to content, such as eBooks. Amazon, on the other hand, is a
distributor. It gives away the app for free, making money by taking a
proportion of the sales of the content.
The second reason is more telling. Apple has its own iBooks app,
allowing you to download books from the iBookstore, and it does not
want competition. What is interesting here is the contrast between the
two companies. Amazon is a bookseller, and a very successful one. Yes,
it does make the Kindle, but this is simply to provide another
form-factor for the reader. It has not crippled the user experience of
the app in order to promote sales of the hardware, instead making the
app available on as wide a range of devices as possible.
Apple, on the other hand, is monolithic, keeping a tight control
over the whole user experience, from the hardware through the
operating system and on to the apps and the content. This has
resulted in some amazing products: the Macintosh, the iPhone and
the iPad. However it is very different from the approach of, for
example, Microsoft, which has never ventured into PC production.
Microsoft supports HTML5, but is quite happy for Adobe to deliver
Flash on its platforms, leaving the market to decide which survives.
Apple is not, because it wants more control.
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4
Latest News
AVG, ComponentOne,
GFI, Paessler, Red Hat
and much more.
8
Reinventing Windows
Tim Anderson reports from
Microsoft BUILD.
12
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£Inside Data
How BI can benefit
development projects.
12Competition
Win MindManager 2012
Professional!
15
Windows Azure
Are your applications
ready for the cloud?
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18
Better by design
Choosing the right tools
for your creative output.
25
Storage management
Backup solutions for the
modern world.
30
Straight talking
Microsoft’s move towards
‘cloud plus device’.
32
And Another Thing
Jon Honeyball ponders
the implications of the
Mac App Store.
34
Short Cuts
Time out to honour the
work of Steve Jobs.
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Grey Matter • 01364 654 100 • HardCopy
3
Grey Matter
Latest News
AVG goes ‘faster, lighter and easier’
AVG • www.greymatter.com/avg
Security vendor AVG has launched
Internet Security 2012 Business Edition,
with improved performance, a smaller footprint
and new tools aimed at speeding up
downloads and controlling browser memory
hogging. Other improvements include
enhanced Web security and a reorganised user
interface.
Aimed at SMBs, the package includes
antivirus, anti-rootkit, a firewall, Online Shield
(Instant messaging protection), anti-spyware,
email protection and anti-spam. Identity
(password) protection, anti-phishing protection
and social network protection (pre-scanning
links on Facebook pages, for example) are also
included, plus a server protection module and
remote admin tool.
Detection of evasive Web threats has
been improved, as has rootkit detection with
added support for anti-rootkit exceptions,
while a simplified user interface has
components grouped together to reduce
clutter. AVG claims a 50 per cent faster
download and install time, 45 per cent
reduction in disk space and 20 per cent less
processes and memory usage.
New in the 2012 edition is AVG
Accelerator which reduces waiting times for
large files such as Flash videos by splitting
them into four simultaneous downloads. Also
new is AVG Advisor, which monitors Web
browsers (Chrome, Firefox and IE) for
excessive memory usage, popping up a
warning when consumption is likely to slow
the system down.
“AVG is the most compelling product on
the market for businesses that want protection
without impeding performance. Customers can
essentially set and forget” said Robert Gorby,
global head of SMB strategies at AVG. Internet
Security 2012 is also available in a standard
version which omits the server and remote
admin modules.
• AVG’s 2011 SMB Market Landscape report,
produced by research company GfK, has some
uncomfortable conclusions about smaller
businesses’ attitude to security. It found that
SMBs recognised social networking as a sales
and customer engagement opportunity, but
tended not to take precautions against
social-media threats such as information theft
and ‘social engineering’, instead remaining
focused on traditional vulnerabilities like e-mail
and Web viruses.
ComponentOne super-bundle is simply the Ultimate
ComponentOne • www.greymatter.com/componentone
Controls vendor ComponentOne has
shortened the name of its all-products
mega-suite from ‘ComponentOne Studio
Ultimate’ to ‘ComponentOne Ultimate’, at the
same time adding five of its recent releases to
the bundle. Heading the list is Studio for
Windows Phone (see HardCopy issue 53),
New to ComponentOne’s Ultimate bundle is a set of controls for the
company’s Wijmo jQuery UI library.
4
Winter 2011 • Issue 54 • HardCopy
followed by Studio suites for ASP.NET Wijmo
and Entity Framework, plus OLAP controls for
LightSwitch and Silverlight.
Launched this summer, ComponentOne’s
Mango-compatible Windows Phone suite has
already been upgraded, with new controls for
reading and writing Excel (.xlsx) documents, a
‘simple yet powerful’ data bound FlexGrid
control, a collection of five gauge controls
and an imaging bundle that includes JPEG/
PNG editing and animated GIF playback.
Also included in the suite’s 18 controls are
Chart, Maps, PDF, Rich Text editing and
iPhone-style Coverflow components.
Studio for ASP.NET Wijmo offers 30
client-side controls based on
ComponentOne’s Wijmo jQuery UI library.
New in the 2011 v2 release are interactive
HTML5 charts, a customisable jQuery grid
and collections of CSS3 and jQuery
themes, plus a new ‘Themeroller’ theme
builder. The new Studio for Entity
Framework provides simplified
development and improved performance
for Microsoft’s ADO.NET entity object-relational
data mapping framework, as well as for the RIA
Services ASP/Silverlight application model,
including design-time data sources,
asynchronous data loading and smart
client-side caching.
ComponentOne’s new OLAP suites add
Business Intelligence controls to Microsoft’s
Visual Studio Lightswitch application builder
and Silverlight RIA platform, with functionality
similar to Excel Pivot tables and charts. The
Lightswitch bundle includes a drag-and-drop
Panel interface for designing data views, while
the Silverlight version adds a tabbed page view
for presenting Panel, Chart and Grid controls
together.
ComponentOne Ultimate continues to
include all the company’s other control suites,
including collections for Winforms, SharePoint,
iPhone, WPF and Silverlight, as well as
Doc-To-help Enterprise, DemoWorks screen
movie recorder, IntelliSpell for Visual Studio and
the XapOptimiser Silverlight optimiser/code
obfuscator.
Grey Matter
Paessler supports IPv6 in upgraded network monitor release
Paessler • www.greymatter.com/paessler
German network monitoring specialists
Paessler AG has released PRTG v9, a
major upgrade of its flagship monitoring
package. New features include support for the
IPv6 protocol, a redesigned Web interface plus
cross-installation Enterprise Console,
vendor-specific hardware sensors, Active
Directory support, automatic software update
and a long list of new monitoring features. The
company has retained its all-in licensing policy,
with a standard price buying all the product’s
features.
PRTG’s redesigned Web control interface
now allows users to build their own drag-and
drop device tree views. Other UI improvements
include a rewritten Welcome Assistant, better
AJAX performance and support for Google
Chrome Desktop Notifications. The new
Enterprise Console can aggregate views from
multiple PRTG installations, effectively removing
the limits of the number of sensors that can be
monitored.
New dedicated hardware sensors are
provided for devices from Cisco, Dell, HP and
other vendors, along with specialist sensors for
EXS Disks, Hyper-V virtual network adapters,
WSUS Statistics and others. Paessler says that 70
per cent of its sensor types now support IPv6,
including Packet Sniffer and most TCP-based
sensors.
PRTG user login accounts can now be
managed by Active Directory, while software
updates are now automatic. Device autodiscovery is improved with vendor detection by
MAC address, while improved cluster functions
include cluster node maps and a ‘Master
Heartbeat’ script that makes sure users always
connect to the current Master node.
Other new features include a two-way QoS
sensor, the WinPcap packet sniffer engine and
Paessler’s updated console for its PRTG network monitor lets you build
your own device trees using drag and drop.
support for Amazon SNS notifications. “We’re
confident you won’t find this level of
enterprise-grade functionality at this price
point from any other monitoring solution
provider,” said Paessler CEO Dirk Paessler.
Adobe heads for the Cloud with MAX announcements
Adobe • www.greymatter.com/adobe
Adobe’s annual MAX developer’s
conference, held this October in Los
Angeles, attracted over 5,000 attendees and
delivered the expected stream of product
announcements. The theme was clear – Adobe
sees the future in the cloud and on the mobile/
tablet platform, and has taken steps to get there
with the launch of a new Adobe Creative Cloud
tools/services/community platform and the
acquisition of PhoneGap, the front runner in the
‘write once, deploy everywhere’ mobile
application development market.
Adobe describes Creative Cloud as “a major
new initiative that radically redefines the
content creation process.” Aimed at design
professionals, it will offer the Creative Suite
Adobe Ideas: one of six Touch applications
that are available for iPad and Android tablets
via its Creative Cloud service or stand-alone
for just $10 each.
applications (due early 2012)
alongside six new Adobe
Touch tablet apps, plus 20GB
storage and a community/
marketplace. The Touch Apps
– Photoshop, Collage, Debut
(presentations), Ideas (vector
drawing), Kuler (colour
themes) and Proto
(wireframes) - will also be
available as stand-alone
Android tablet and iPad products, priced at just
$10 each in the USA. Adobe has also bought
the Typekit online Web font library, and will
offer it via stand-alone subscription and as part
of Creative cloud.
Apple may have relented over its banning
of CS5’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler, but Adobe
has nevertheless hedged its bets with the
purchase of Nitobi, creator of the open source
PhoneGap HTML5-to-mobiles toolset and
PhoneGap Build online packaging service.
These products will become Adobe’s
commercial offerings, while the PhoneGap
codebase goes to the Apache Software
Foundation as Apache Callback.
Adobe also announced tie-ups with
Samsung, LG and TiVo to put Flash applications
(via Adobe AIR) on TV and digital home devices,
The real show stealer is Adobe’s new Deblur tool for PhotoShop.
while in another partnership deal, tablet
publications authoring specialists Woodwing
Software are abandoning their own Content
Delivery Service and Reader application,
instead becoming VARs for Adobe’s Digital
Publishing Suite. Meanwhile content
developers targeting just the iPad now have
the option of Digital Publishing Suite, Single
Edition, which allows them to produce a single
content-rich iPad App (for example a brochure
or portfolio) for $395.
• Despite the emphasis on cloud and mobility,
the item which drew the biggest gasps at MAX
came from the desktop – a new image
de-blurring tool for Photoshop with seemingly
magical abilities. Insiders say it’ll appear in CS6,
but it’ll no doubt be on a tablet near you too.
5
Grey Matter
GFI goes it alone in EventsManager 2012
GFI • www.greymatter.com/gfi
Security specialist GFI has released
EventsManager 2012, an upgrade to its
Windows-based event log monitoring,
management and archiving suite. To gain
capacity for storing and analysing ever larger
amounts of log data across networks, it’s ended
the product’s dependence on Microsoft’s SQL
Server database, replacing it with its own
file-based storage engine. Other developments
include a new reporting engine, a new browser
with drill-down and global search, and log
scanning and parsing via regular expressions.
GFI says that the move to a proprietary
storage engine was prompted by performance
issues with SQL Server databases containing
more than 15 million event records, adding that
the new system offers good performance even
on databases with hundreds of millions of
records. The new system also provides data
encryption and simplified maintenance, and
can import data from the previous version.
The previous version’s fixed-layout
ReportPack is replaced with a new Reporting
Engine, integrated into the main control panel
and able to produce custom reports in HTML
and PDF formats. Multiple type-specific log
browsers have been replaced by a single
browser able to show all log types, with
customisable columns, drill-down and
integrated search. Both the Syslog and W3C log
collectors now support customisable parsing
schemas, including multiple regular
expressions.
Red Hat adds intelligence to its jBoss middleware
Red Hat • www.greymatter.com/red hat
Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat has
overhauled its jBoss middleware
platform, adding ‘situationally aware” decision
making, an improved Business User interface,
cloud-oriented BPEL language support and the
company’s high performance MRG-Messaging,
as well as additional data sources, REST
architecture compatibility and WSDL/XML
Schema support.
The upgrades roll out across three jBoss
products, all now at version 5.2. jBoss Enterprise
Business Rule Management System (BRMS) now
supports Complex Event Processing, in which
business rules can be aware of, and influenced
by, relevant business events. Also new is a
Web-based Decision Table interface aimed at
business analysts building rules-driven
applications. The release includes a technical
preview of goal-seeking Enhanced Rules Logic,
which allows users to specify a desired end
result and have the system find conditions
which deliver it.
jBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.2 supports
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL),
used for orchestrating workflows across Web
and cloud services. It also gains support for Red
Hat’s Enterprise MRG-Messaging, based on the
open Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
(AMQP) and providing interoperability with
mobile and non-Java devices.
JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.2
can now work with Teradata, Ingres, Mondrian
and JSON data sources, and publish services
based on Representational State Transfer
(REST). Metadata repositories can now be
managed using Web Services Description
Language and XML Schema formats.
“Organizations are updating their IT
infrastructure to become more agile, and
leverage active decision making,” said Craig
Muzilla, Red Hat’s Middleware Business Vice
President and General Manager. “With the next
versions of these platforms, we’re offering tools
for businesses to automate rules-based
decisions, business process execution and
complex event processing, helping to improve
the speed and quality of their business
operations.”
Embarcadero offers Delphi professional certification
Embarcadero • www.greymatter.com/embarcadero
If you work with products from Apple,
Microsoft, Oracle or Red Hat, then you
can sit a professional certification exam which
proves to the world (and most importantly
employers/clients) that you know your stuff.
Now Delphi developers have the same
opportunity as vendors Embarcadero introduce
a two-stage Delphi Certification Program.
The entry-level qualification is Delphi
Developer Certification, which tests general
knowledge of Delphi fundamentals such as
data types, classes, memory management and
database concepts. The online exam consists of
60 randomly-chosen multiple choice questions,
with 60 minutes to complete them and a
6
demanding 80 per cent correct answers
required for a pass. A typical question is “What
is the underlying type of the TDateTime type?”
(answer: Double) so you do need a fair amount
of quick-fire knowledge.
Delphi Master Developer Certification uses
the same 60-question format but tests you on
advanced knowledge of Delphi programming
concepts, software architecture choices, and
the depth and breadth of Delphi XE’s software
development capabilities.
A typical question asks
how you’d navigate
through multiple result
sets returned by a
TSQLStoredProc call (answer: Execute
NextRecordSet method), and a pass will,
according to Embarcadero, identify you as an
elite member of the global Delphi community.
The Delphi Developer Certification exam
costs just $49 (free with purchases of Delphi
XE2 or RAD Studio XE2), while Master
Developer Certification is a still reasonable
$149. Certification lasts for two years. For more
details visit www.embarcadero.com/
certification.
Grey Matter
News in Brief
Software Know How • www.softwareknowhow.info/news.aspx
• Grey Matter and Symantec are co-hosting a
Tech Day at Exeter Racecourse on Tuesday 13
December. The event runs from 9am to 6pm and
includes hands-on sessions with Symantec’s
Endpoint Protection and Backup Exec products
plus Cloud presentations and more. Lunch and
refreshments are provided. The event is free and
places are limited. Register now by emailing
[email protected].
• The Silicon Cup is an annual IT industry
charity sailing event held at Cowes, Isle of Wight,
and this year Grey Matter proudly entered its
own (chartered) yacht. Crewing the ‘Ballistic’
were staff from Grey Matter plus partners
including Microsoft, AlfaPeople, Cognite and
Yokogawa, under the experienced eyes of
Skipper John and Mate George. The team took
part in 2 Spinnaker races and came 11th overall,
while the Charity Gala dinner raised over
£50,000 for good causes. A fantastic effort by all
with bruises to show for it!
• Visitors to Grey Matter’s stand at
the Business South West 2011 show
in Exeter in October were treated to
a first look at our Web site’s new
Office 365 section, dedicated to
Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity
suite. With product details, advice
and clearly laid-out tables showing
all the available options, it will help
you to decide which of the Office
365 subscription plans best suits
your business, then try or buy the
product. Visit the new site at
www.greymatter.com/office365.
• A new Web site worth noting is
www.parallel-universe-online.com
where Grey Matter and Intel will be
The Grey Matter team with the good ship ‘Ballistic’ at Cowes for the Silicon Cup.
providing information on Intel’s
software tools. Contents will include issues of
and Getting Started guides. The site is due to go
Parallel Universe magazine, the latest product
live just as this issue of HardCopy hits your desk,
guides, white papers, benchmarks, case studies
so bookmark it now!
7
Development
Reinventing Windows
Tim Anderson reports from BUILD where Microsoft lifted the
veil on Windows 8, WinRT and more.
TIM
ANDERSON
A freelance journalist
since 1992, Tim
Anderson covers
a wide range of
technical topics.
His recent work
has appeared in
publications including
Guardian Technology,
The Register,
Computer Weekly,
Hardcopy, vnunet, IT
Expert and ITJOBLOG,
as well as his popular
ITWriting blog.
[email protected]
www.itwriting.com
Microsoft’s September BUILD
conference in Anaheim, California took
place at a critical time in the company’s history.
Competitors from Google to VMware are talking
gleefully about the post-PC era; Windows
Phone has so far failed to win the market share
Microsoft was hoping for; and Apple’s iPad,
together with sundry Android devices, have
quickly made Windows an also-ran in tablets.
BUILD was also flagged in advance as the
moment when Microsoft would reveal its future
development strategy for the Windows
platform, with rumours that .NET would be
downplayed in favour of HTML 5.
All this led to considerable anticipation
when Windows Division president Steven
Sinofsky took the stage to present the
developer preview of Windows 8. That first day
keynote was a spectacular success, and not only
because attendees were promised a rather
smart Samsung tablet on which to try out the
new operating system. Microsoft showed a new
user interface called Metro, inspired by the
design work for Windows Phone, which is
smooth, responsive and, above all, touchfriendly. Microsoft’s catch-phrase ‘Windows
reimagined’ is justified: the Metro-style
interface feels like a new operating system. It
does not even support overlapping windows,
one of the key characteristics of old-style
Conference attendees try to make sense of the literature in the
sunshine outside the Anaheim Convention Center.
8
Windows, though unlike Apple’s iPad you can
have two applications side by side.
Just to be clear: traditional desktop
Windows is also present in Windows 8, and if
you do not want to use Metro you can ignore
most of it other than the Start screen, which
replaces the Windows 7 Start menu. There are
new features in desktop Windows 8, including a
ribbon UI for Explorer and an improved file
copy dialog, but they are minor compared to
the Metro revolution.
The consensus at BUILD was that Windows
8 Metro is a delight to use. Talking to developers
at mealtimes though, it was apparent that most
will not be switching their development efforts
to Metro-style applications any time soon. In
most cases, that switch would mean a complete
rewrite of the user interface. Further,
Metro-style apps are sandboxed to the extent
that some features which Windows developers
take for granted are not available. There is no
SQL Server driver, for example; all data access is
meant to be done through Web services. This
tension between the prettiness of Metro and its
immediate usefulness was one dampener on
the enthusiasm generated.
The developer story
Much of BUILD was focused on the developer
platform for Metro in Windows 8. At its heart is
a new runtime called WinRT.
Although conceptually this is a
layer between applications and the
underlying operating system,
Sinofsky was keen not to present it
like that: “everything we’re showing
you today is built into Windows – it
is Windows. We’re not building
layers on layers. We’ve built
everything natively into Windows.”
One way of looking at this is
that the Windows team learned
from mistakes made with Windows
Vista, originally codenamed
Longhorn. Vista introduced
Windows Presentation Foundation
(WPF), which is a .NET API, resulting
in an overhead for WPF code versus
native code. Microsoft’s ambivalence toward
WPF was obvious, since little in Windows Vista
or Windows 7 depends on it. Earlier prototypes
of Longhorn used WPF more extensively, but
performance was terrible, and work on
Longhorn was reset at great expense in time
and money.
WinRT has no .NET dependence, and we
were told that under the covers it is similar to
COM, the old Windows object model which .
NET was intended to replace.
That said, WinRT borrows two key features
from .NET. It uses XAML for its presentation
language, and it uses the same metadata
format as .NET IL (intermediate language) to
describe the WinRT API.
Next, Microsoft added an interop layer to
both the .NET runtime and the Internet Explorer
JavaScript engine so that the API looks like a
.NET API if you are coding in .NET, and like a
JavaScript API if you are coding in JavaScript.
This means developers have three choices
for Metro development: C/C++, .NET or
JavaScript with HTML/CSS. Although there is a
slight performance edge to C/C++, it is small,
and all the samples seen at BUILD performed
well irrespective of their development
language. There was high attendance for
session on developing Metro apps in .NET, and
any wild predictions that .NET would be
deprecated in Windows 8 were proven false.
WinRT is intended to be a safe application
platform, to an extent that desktop Windows
will never be able to match. WinRT applications
do not have access to the file system other than
to isolated storage, and to user-controlled open
and save actions though file dialogs. Only a safe
subset of the Win32 API is available, whether
through C/C++ or via Platform Invoke in .NET.
Reading and writing data is normally done
through Web services, as in a Silverlight or
Adobe AIR app, rather than through a
traditional database driver. That said, you could
use a local database that is isolated to your app.
Another key feature is that WinRT apps
cannot communicate other than through
pre-defined ‘contracts’ of which there are five:
Search, Share, PlayTo, Settings and Picking
Development
make sense, but the company will not confirm
the idea yet, no doubt to avoid giving the
impression that Windows Phone 7 is based on
an old platform.
A tale of two keynotes
The road to Windows 8? The new Metro-style control panel.
(which lets your app access files belonging to
another app, subject to opt-in).
more than once in the same function: the
compiler will manage all the nested
continuations that result.
Async in Windows 8
One of Microsoft’s smartest moves in WinRT was
to make all API calls that might take more than
50ms into async-only functions. Microsoft
considered having synchronous alternatives but
rejected the idea in order to force developers to
do the “right” thing.
Async functions return immediately, delivering
results later via a callback function. The goal is to
have a user interface that is always responsive.
This means that Metro developers will be
writing a lot of async code, often a challenge
than makes it hard to structure your code
sensibly. Fortunately there is a new feature in C#
5.0 which makes this easier. The ‘await’ keyword
instructs the compiler to exit the current
function while making any code you wrote after
that line into a continuation that runs when the
awaited function returns. The details of the
callback are hidden from the developer.
The beauty of ‘await’ is that you can use it
What about Silverlight?
Microsoft developed Silverlight, its crossplatform .NET runtime and browser plug-in,
with great energy between the first version in
2007 and version 4 in 2010. There was
speculation that it could eventually merge with
WPF as a primary way to deliver applications on
Windows. Then, at PDC in October 2010,
Microsoft talked up Internet Explorer 9 and
HTML as its Web strategy, barely mentioning
Silverlight: “Our strategy with Silverlight has
shifted,” confessed Bob Muglia (then VP). With
hindsight, it is obvious that this followed the
decision to focus on WinRT rather than .NET as
the foundation of Windows client programming.
There is no Silverlight runtime in WinRT, not
even in the Metro-style Web browser.
On one level then, the fears for Silverlight’s
future were justified by what was announced at
BUILD. That said, another way of looking at this
is that key features of Silverlight,
including XAML and the .NET runtime,
are alive and well in WinRT. Silverlight
developers will have the easiest of
transitions to WinRT, since the
sandboxed model is close to what they
are used to.
Silverlight continues in desktop
Windows and its browser, with version
5.0 to be released in late 2011. It also
remains as the development platform
for Windows Phone 7.
Will Microsoft eventually replace
Silverlight with WinRT in a future
Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky at BUILD Windows Phone release? That would
BUILD was not just about Windows 8. The Day
Two keynote focused on the server and cloud
side of Microsoft, both the public Windows
Azure cloud, and private clouds based on
Server 8 and a greatly enhanced Hyper-V
virtualisation platform. Server 8 will share code
with Windows 8 and presumably be released at
around the same time. (Both Windows 8 and
Server 8 are codenames, and the final releases
may be called something different.)
Microsoft had run a strong press preview
of Server 8 the week before BUILD; yet the Day
Two keynote lacked the energy of the previous
day and failed to show off the new server
features effectively, though VP Scott Guthrie
received a warm welcome in his new role
managing the Windows Azure development
platform. CEO Steve Ballmer appeared at the
end, emphasising the importance of this event
to the company.
There was a preview of Team Foundation
Server (TFS) running on Azure, which may well
make sense for many teams given the difficulty
of configuring and maintaining TFS.
The most over-subscribed session at BUILD
was from C# inventor Anders Hejlsberg on the
future of C# and Visual Basic. The main focus
was the asynchronous capability (see above),
and a forthcoming project codenamed Roslyn
which he described as “compiler as a service”.
Another way of describing it is an API for
the compiler and its semantic analyser. Using
Roslyn, it is easy to execute C# or VB
expressions generated at runtime. It also makes
writing smart IDE features easier, so developers
can look forward to more powerful refactoring.
Hejlsberg demonstrated how you can take a
block of C# code and “paste as VB”, or vice versa.
Roslyn will not be in Visual Studio 11, but is
now available for Visual Studio 2010 as a
technical preview.
Another BUILD highlight was Herb Sutter’s
two sessions on C++, especially the second on
writing modern C++ code. It was a mythbusting talk on how, contrary to its reputation,
writing C++ code is now safe and fast thanks to
features like automatic lifetime
management and auto type deduction.
i
Find out more...
All the sessions from the BUILD conference are available
to watch at www.buildwindows.com.
9
Database
Inside Data
Graham Keitch explains how business intelligence
can benefit development projects.
Application Lifecycle Management
(ALM) is the process of managing an
application or project over time. The lifecycle
phases typically include requirements definition,
development, testing, deployment and
maintenance. There are a number of tools that
assist with general project management and
some that handle the more specialist demands
of IT workers who need to collaborate and deal
with issues specific to a development project.
Dedicated ALM technologies such as Microsoft
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 are
tightly integrated with the tools that developers
use. They are equipped with specific features to
assist with things like version control and
metrics that can give early warning of potential
problems and allows informed decisions to be
taken to keep things on track. OLAP technology
is deployed within the data warehouse for rich
reporting using Microsoft Excel and SQL Server
Reporting Services. The OLAP cube is refreshed
every two hours by default, and the rate is
configurable. The dashboards are delivered
through SharePoint Server.
TFS monitors and automatically logs
information regarding the access and use of
work items and source code. There is a
warehouse adapter in the data tier which caches
data from the underlying database in tabular
form suitable for consumption by SQL Server
Using Microsoft Team Foundation Server technologies to monitor how quickly bugs get fixed.
change management. The data they capture can
also provide intelligence on how a project is
going. Let’s take a closer look at how Microsoft
uses business intelligence (BI) to tackle this.
Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS)
provides access to specific functionality for
controlling work items and managing
collaboration between project members. It has
an API that exposes the functionality as Web
Services that can be consumed by applications
like Visual Studio 2010.
TFS employs a SQL Server data warehouse
to store information about key project
components such as tasks, bugs and test results.
The repository is used by BI technologies to
reveal trends and provide traceability, while
dashboards and reports display real-time
Analysis Services. The reports are compiled
using SQL Server Reporting Services and can be
exported in various formats including Excel,
XML, PDF and TIFF. More than 30 reports are
provided out of the box and there is provision
for further report creation and customisation.
The data can also be exposed to other
analytical applications via a Web Services
interface which broadens the scope for tailoring
reports to your needs. The analysis services are
able to identify trends that span multiple work
items including code error, churn and build
events. Version control changesets store
information about check-in events and this data
can be combined with information relating to
Team Build, Test Agents and other components
to provide a variety of reports. These might
include the rate of code change, untested bugs
and regressions involving previously passed
KEITCH
tests. The TFS project and its data can be
synchronised with Microsoft Project Server as
well as other systems which might include
finance or human resources applications.
In the context of ALM, you should not
think of BI as a reporting and analytical tool that
is only concerned with immediate project
logistics. The capturing and analysis of data
relating to IT systems and the business they
support is important throughout the lifecycle.
Graham is the database
TFS provides full traceability that enables you to
pre-sales specialist
track progress and quality against business
at Grey Matter and
has worked in IT for
goals and customer requirements. You can
over 20 years. He also
specify and report on relationships between
helped co-ordinate
requirements, work items, test cases and builds.
the European groundbased efforts that
Long development timelines are more
supported the space
likely to be affected by shifting goal posts and
missions to Comet
BI can feed valuable information about the
Halley. In his spare time,
Graham uses computer
current state of the business into the project
sampling technology
team. In an Agile environment, this will enable
for music composition.
the project to be realigned and respond to
changes in business requirements or
grahamk@
hardcopymag.com
conditions. TFS supports Agile and other
development methodologies such as SCRUM
through the use of different project templates.
Team Explorer Everywhere also provides support for Eclipse, and
extends the collaboration and reporting benefits to heterogeneous
environments. Post-deployment, BI can take on a capacity planning
role, highlighting trends that signal a need for system changes
involving code or infrastructure. It is often helpful to put things in place
that ensure the application continues to deliver end user satisfaction
and efficiencies while still meeting the current and projected needs of
the business. The data can come from numerous disparate and perhaps
less obvious sources including help desk systems and other feedback
mechanisms such as forums, user groups and online facilities like
Microsoft Connect. For the IT department, this is useful
intelligence which can inform the whole application lifecycle.
GRAHAM
i
Find out more...
For more on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation
Server see www.greymatter.com/p661901. Details of
Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere can be found
at www.greymatter.com/p661649.
11
WIN a full licence of
#
Competition
MindManager 2012 Professional!
entry form
All you have to do to enter is correctly answer
the competition question below, fill out the rest
of the form and send it to:
Mindjet Competition
Grey Matter Ltd
Prigg Meadow
Ashburton
Devon TQ13 7DF
We will also accept entries submitted online at
www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition
issue 54
MindManager 2012
Professional
Competition question: What is the newest feature for
Brainstorming in MindManager 2012 Professional for Windows?
q Guided Brainstorming
q Perfect Brain Raining
q Improved MindStorming
#
Mindjet has long been known for its
brainstorming software MindManager, and
now you can win a licence to the 2012 Professional
version! This is packed with new features, including
Analysis View which helps you make decisions
by mapping topics onto predefined sectors, and
Guided Brainstorming, a three-stage process
that starts with defining the challenge before
moving on to tools to help you generate new
ideas and refine the results into an action plan.
Your details
Name___________________________________________________________________________________
Company________________________________________________________________________________
Address_________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________ Postcode___________________
Telephone_______________________________________________________________________________
Email___________________________________________________________________________________
q I would like to receive HardCopy magazine.
q I would prefer not to receive information on products or services that I might find useful to my work
(note that we keep your information private and will not sell or rent your data for marketing purposes).
1. 2. 3. 4. No purchase necessary for entry to this competition.
The prize is a full licence of MindManager 2012 Professional. There is no cash alternative.
Completed entries must be received by 20 Jan 2012.
Entries submitted online at www.softwareknowhow.info/hc/competition or completed on a
photocopy of this page will be accepted.
5. Only one entry will be accepted per person.
6. The winner will be decided by a random draw from the correct entries received by the closing date.
7. The winner will be announced on 23 Jan 2012 and will be notified by email or telephone.
12
8. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the
decision.
9. Employees of organisations connected with this competition are not eligible for entry.
10. Mindjet and Grey Matter reserve the right to use the winner’s name in promotional
materials.
The competition promoter is Grey Matter Ltd, Prigg Meadow, Ashburton, Devon TQ13 7DF.
#
TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF ENTRY
£
Cloud Computing
$
Windows Azure
£
$
Are you ready to put your applications into the cloud?
Matt Nicholson finds out what Microsoft has to offer.
Cloud computing is entering a new
phase, moving beyond the simple
‘servers in the sky’ to something rather more
sophisticated and even more useful. Microsoft
has thrown huge resources into this new arena
and come up with Windows Azure.
Of course cloud computing itself is not
new. It has long been common for small and
even medium-sized businesses to host their
Web sites externally, paying a monthly fee to an
Internet Service Provider (ISP) for access to a
Web server and perhaps a database on which
they can run their Web applications. This could
be an ASP.NET application talking to SQL Server,
or something written in PHP or Perl that
interacts with MySQL. The ISP looks after the
operating system and the hardware, keeping it
updated and properly backed up, leaving the
customer to look after the application.
What is new, and quite genuinely changing
the landscape, is the application of virtual
machine technology to such services. Microsoft
Hyper-V, for example, allows a customer’s
installation to run in a virtual machine that can
be scaled in terms of memory and virtual
processor cores according to demand, or
seamlessly moved between servers or even data
centres for the purposes of load-balancing and
maintenance. This is cloud computing in a more
literal sense in that the physical location of the
server is less well defined and can change
moment-to-moment. This is what Microsoft is
using to deliver Windows Azure.
Size matters
The first thing that strikes you about Windows
Azure is its sheer size – and the magnitude of
the investment it represents for Microsoft. The
service is currently delivered from six data
centres: two in North America (Chicago and San
An aerial view of the Windows Azure data centre under construction in Dublin.
Antonio), two in Asia (Hong Kong and
Singapore) and two in Europe (Amsterdam and
Dublin). The Chicago centre alone cost $500
million and occupies 700,000 square feet. The
servers themselves are housed in shipping
containers, each containing around 2,000 Dell
machines. The Chicago centre currently houses
56 such containers, and is scheduled for a
second phase which will add another 56,
amounting to some 224,000 servers in all. The
Dublin centre represents a similar investment,
although it is smaller at 300,000 square feet. It
is expected to contain 100,000 servers by the
end of 2011.
In addition to this are the 24 nodes used
by the Content Delivery Network (CDN), with
eight in the US, nine in Europe (including one in
London), and seven serving Asia, Australia and
South America. CDN is an additional service,
incurring a small charge per gigabyte
transferred, that allows you to enhance
performance by caching suitable application
components nearer to your users.
That said, Windows Azure is not specifically
aimed at large-scale applications serving
millions of users across the globe; it is also
cost-effective at a small scale. A solution
involving one virtual machine (single virtual
core, 768MB memory and 20GB storage)
working with a 1GB relational database hosted
on SQL Azure would cost around £30 a month
under a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ scheme, with the
added bonus that you can scale up as the need
arises, and pay for the additional capacity on an
hourly basis.
Such a business model can also be
attractive to larger organisations. Dan Scarfe of
Dot Net Solutions, which has helped a
>>
MATT
NICHOLSON
Matt is editor of
HardCopy magazine
and has run the DNJ
Online Web site since
1998. Prior to that he
published Developer
Network Journal, ran
the Visual Basic User
Group (VBUG) and has
edited more computer
and hi-fi magazine than
he cares to remember.
http://blog.mattmags.com
[email protected]
15
Cloud Computing
<<
lot of companies move to Windows
Azure, cites the online fashion retailer ASOS.
com which was attracted to Azure because it
allowed them to scale up their infrastructure to
handle the high volume of transactions in the
run-up to Christmas, without having to pay for
idle resources through the summer months.
A major benefit of any cloud-based system
is its negation of the need for capital
expenditure on in-house systems, and the
associated running cost. Azure specialist two10
degrees has been working with Temenos, which
provides software for use by customer-facing
bank tellers, to move its solution to Azure. As
Jeremy Barnes explains, this is a codebase that
goes back to the 1980s with some components
written in BASIC, others in C and the more
recent in Java. It is served up by Apache Tomcat,
so it’s about as far from a Microsoft .NET
application as you can get. By moving the
application to Azure, Temenos has been able to
sell into smaller organisations across the world
that would not normally be able to afford the
in-house installation required: “Customers can
be anywhere in the world, and the software can
be deployed within hours rather than months.”
The system has now been rolled out to some 12
banks in Mexico.
£
$
Degrees of abstraction
Windows Azure is sometimes described as
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to distinguish it
from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
The alternatives
There are a number of companies that compete with Windows
Azure, however the most significant (if only by size) are Amazon
Web Services and Google App Engine.
Amazon Web Services is a collection of hosted services of
which the most relevant in this context is Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 is more of an IaaS provider, requiring you
to become involved in some of the mechanics of load balancing
and scaling. Initially based on Linux, EC2 now supports Windows
Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
Google App Engine operates at quite a high level of abstraction
– you don’t need to worry about the number of servers you are
using, for example. It comes with runtimes for both Python and
Java, and there is a Java implementation of PHP available. It is free
for small scale applications that use up to 1GB of storage and up to
5 million page views a month. There are no facilities for relational
databases, although there is a data store that responds to a syntax
similar to SQL.
An interesting project that is currently in Beta is Cloud Foundry,
operated and managed by VMware and billed as the “world’s first
open PaaS offering” for Java-based applications.
Do bear in mind that all these services, including Windows
Azure, are operated by American companies and so are subject to
American law when it comes to data protection. You may need to
make your users aware of this.
16
offered by most providers. The distinction is not
obvious but comes down to the degree of
involvement that the user needs to have with
the underlying platform.
Imagine that you are looking to deploy a
high-volume Web application to eight virtual
machines, four in a UK-based data centre and
four overseas. If you are using a conventional
IaaS provider you would need to log on to each
virtual machine in turn, installing and
configuring your application on each one. Now
imagine you need to patch the application once
or twice a month. You would need to schedule
downtime so that you can log in and update
each installation. You can be confident that
your providers will keep the underlying
platform up to date, and the virtual machines
backed up, but the actual mechanics of
deploying and patching your application are
left to you.
Windows Azure works at a higher level of
abstraction. Under Azure, you only need to
upload one instance of the update. Behind the
scenes, Azure will take down each virtual
machine in turn, install the update, start the
server up again and check that everything is OK
before moving on to the next instance.
Furthermore, Azure has considerably more
understanding of the application that you are
running. In the case of a Web application it
knows that it is meant to respond to requests,
and periodically tests that each installation is
working properly. If it detects a problem Azure
will automatically provision a new installation
for you, take down the problematic installation
and seamlessly insert the new one into the mix.
And if you decide to add more virtual
machines, in order to handle increased traffic,
Azure will automatically provision the new
installations and ensure they are properly
load-balanced within the data centre. As Dan
Scarfe puts it, “It’s all completely seamless. You
don’t have to worry about servers any more:
you just think about services and the number of
users who are going to be accessing them. You
don’t need IT operations staff anymore – you
don’t even need people who know what IIS is.”
Under the cover
The Windows Azure Platform comprises three
main components. The first is the underlying
operating system which is based on Windows
Server 2008 R2 and a customised version of
Hyper-V. Your application runs in an abstraction
called Windows Azure Compute, and you rent
Compute Instances by the hour. A Compute
Instance comes in five sizes ranging from Extra
Small (described earlier) to Extra Large which
gets you a machine with eight virtual cores,
14GB of memory and 2,040GB of storage. Your
application is installed as one or more
components that each run either in a Web Role,
for front-end Web applications that require
IIS7, or in a Worker Role for background
processing or non-Web applications.
Accompanying Compute is Windows
Azure Storage which gives you persistent
storage in the form of BLOBs (Binary Large
Objects), Tables or Queues. Storage elements
are replicated between two data centres on the
same continent, and can take advantage of the
CDN for faster delivery. Storage can also be
accessed through REST APIs, or directly from
any application that can send an HTTP or
HTTPS request.
Barnes has been working with a company
that develops software for manufacturing and
design processing. This is a thick client that is
capable of some quite intensive graphics so, as
Barnes explains, “It’s not about wrapping it all
up and loading it into a virtual machine.”
Instead they are saving to Windows Azure
Storage which takes away any backup
concerns and opens up possibilities for
collaboration. Barnes adds, “Storage is a trivial
fee – it’s pennies per month per gigabyte.”
The second component is SQL Azure.
Unlike most such offerings, SQL Azure is
effectively one enormous SQL Server 2008 R2
cluster distributed across the world; and you
pay by size of database, rather than edition.
This makes it very cost efficient: most Web sites
probably operate with a database of less than
1GB, which costs just £6 a month, but because
it is running on a cluster it is highly available,
fault tolerant and automatically backed up.
Currently available as Community Technology
Previews are SQL Azure Reporting and SQL
Azure Data Sync (for synchronising an in-house
installation with SQL Azure).
The final component is Windows Azure
AppFabric and, as Scarfe explains, “There is no
equivalent to AppFabric from any of the other
vendors.” AppFabric itself breaks down into
three main services. First is AppFabric Service
Bus which is effectively a distributed
messaging system, allowing you to connect
Azure applications to in-house applications
and so create hybrid solutions, or to any kind of
external device.
AppFabric Service Bus gets around the
need to configure firewalls and routers to
accept incoming connections by using a
technique known as NAT traversal. Effectively,
both ends of the connection make calls out to
AppFabric Service Bus which acts as a broker to
facilitate communication. Services are
discovered using standard Internet protocols,
and support SOAP, Web Services and REST.
Applications can publish multiple endpoints
£
$
Cloud Computing
$
£
£
Consumers
Businesses
Internet
Worker Role
Web Role
VM Role
SQL Azure
Compute
Queue
Blob
Table
Service Bus
Access Control
Caching
AppFabric
Storage
Windows Azure data centres
The various components that make up the Windows Azure platform.
that can each serve multiple subscribers, and it
all comes together to make for an extremely
flexible solution.
Hitachi Consulting made good use of the
Service Bus for the departure control
application it built for easyJet, which runs from
Windows Azure. This application needs to
service the handheld devices used by easyJet
staff, but airports are naturally reluctant to open
ports on their firewalls. AppFabric Service Bus
allows the application to communicate with
these devices through the firewall without
compromising security.
Then there is AppFabric Access Control
which handles log-in credentials. Access Control
integrates with a wide range of identity services
from Active Directory Federation Services to
Windows Live, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.
With Access Control you can let people log in to
your application from Facebook with just one
line of code, and from Active Directory with
another line of code.
Dot Net Solutions worked with The Body
Shop to build a global customer loyalty Web
site using Windows Azure. The Body Shop was
particularly keen on Access Control as it would
give them access to the Facebook accounts of
their customers.
The other important component is
AppFabric Caching which facilitates the caching
of state information across a multi-server
solution. This is a distributed in-memory cache
that works with both Windows Azure and SQL
and sell both Azure-hosted applications and
specialist datasets. This already includes over
500 applications covering a wide range of
industries, and over 100 datasets ranging from
average house prices by borough as supplied
by the Greater London Authority, to historical
daily observations from all WeatherBug tracking
stations going back to 1993.
Coming soon is the Windows Azure
Platform Appliance which gives you all you
need to deploy Windows Azure in your own
data centre. This is currently in Limited
Production Release, but so far Dell, eBay, Fujitsu
and Hewlett Packard have stated their intention
to offer cloud services based on Azure.
However the immediate benefit for many
companies, and particularly Independent
Software Vendors (ISVs), is the ability to take an
existing application and deploy it to Azure. This
can be a relatively painless exercise and bring
immediate benefits in terms of extending the
reach of their software to clients who have not
been prepared to make the capital investment
required for more traditional deployments.
With this in mind, Barnes’ company has
been running three-day Acceleration Labs,
bringing together three or four non-competing
ISVs with the aim of getting their application up
and running in Azure by the time they finish. So
far they have put 25 to 30 ISVs through this
process, and Barnes is claiming a 100 per cent
success rate. He admits, “That’s perhaps not
something that on Day Four you’d want to put
out to a customer, but you can go into the
boardroom on Monday morning and state that,
after three days, you now have your application
running on the Windows Azure platform.”
Barnes adds, “We are seeing a bit of the old
1980s IBM effect here. If you’re betting your
business on a cloud model then you want to
put the responsibility for delivering it on
someone you trust, and people can see the
level of investment that’s going into
Windows Azure.”
Azure, and transparently with .NET applications.
AppFabric Caching is priced on a daily basis
depending on the size of cache you use, starting
at just over £27 a month for 128MB.
Working with Azure
As you would expect, Microsoft provides
comprehensive support for those using its
development tools. The Windows Azure SDK is a
free download and includes Windows Azure
Tools for Visual Studio which allows you to build
and debug Azure applications offline; the free
Visual Web Developer 2010, if you do not have
Visual Studio; and SDKs for Windows Azure itself
and for Windows Azure AppFabric. You can also
download SDKs for working with Azure from
Java, PHP and Ruby, and Microsoft has
announced the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS,
Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, Windows
Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 and
Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games.
Then there is AzureRunMe which was
created by Barne’s colleague, Rob Blackwell. This
is a free bootstrap program that you upload to
Windows Azure Compute for the purpose of
running programs written in the likes of Java,
Ruby or Python. It could, for example, be used
to run a Tomcat-hosted Web application, a
JBOSS application or a legacy C or C++
application.
And Microsoft is adding features to
Windows Azure. Up and running now is
Windows Azure Marketplace where you can buy
$
Find out more...
i
Dot Net Solutions is at www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk
two10 degrees is at www.two10degrees.com
AzureRunMe is at http://github.com/
RobBlackwell/AzureRunMe
Find out what Grey Matter can offer
at www.greymatter.com/mcm/azure-product-page
For more on Azure see www.microsoft.com/windowsazure
and www.globalfoundationservices.com
Microsoft is currently offering 90 days free trial of a Small
Windows Azure instance with 1GB SQL Azure database.
17
Design & Media
Better by design
Whether designing for page or screen, using the right application saves
time and effort. Simon Williams looks at the leading contenders.
SIMON
WILLIAMS
Simons Williams has been
a technology journalist for
over 25 years, writing for
many leading magazines
and Web sites. He also
Design software used to imply
paper-based documents pretty
exclusively. Whether it was desktop publishing
or the photos and illustrations used to brighten
the pages, the finished document was likely to
end up in print. While this is a still an important
medium, design for eBooks, video or the Web is
now just as important and many applications
can handle more than one type of output.
Here we look at the most impressive
applications for print, video, photos, illustration
and the Web. Although this market is
dominated by Adobe, which made its name
with products like Photoshop, Premiere and
InDesign, there are other well-known players
such as Quark, Corel, Pinnacle and even
Microsoft.
writes and tutors poetry
and runs monthly open
mic sessions in pubs.
(Photo: Amy Boswood)
[email protected]
Print publishing
Despite many predictions of a screen-based
society, a vast amount of information is still
published on paper. Desktop publishing (DTP)
applications are ideal for putting together
anything more complicated than the internal
report which can be knocked up in Microsoft
Word. These are essentially assembly tools,
taking words, graphics and photos and laying
them out on a page.
Having said that they’re largely about
designing for paper, most DTP programs can
also be used to repurpose material, allowing
you to use the same content and design for
electronic distribution on DVD or on the Web.
Adobe’s InDesign desktop publishing tool
superseded PageMaker and was created as a
What we use
Here on HardCopy our art editor Jason Stanley is usually to be
found buried in Adobe CS5.5 Design Premium, using InDesign
to design the magazine itself, and both Dreamweaver and
Fireworks on our Web sites. Jason also uses Photoshop and
Illustrator extensively, and Adobe Flash to create online
promotions. In the past we did use QuarkXpress together with
Photoshop extensively, but the integration offered by the
Adobe CS suite prompted us to switch.
18
Microsoft Publisher is a surprisingly sophisticated desktop publishing tool for use at home
and in a small office, and remains easy to use.
direct competitor to QuarkXPress. In many
publishing houses, Adobe has usurped its rival
by pushing the tight and increasing integration
between Adobe InDesign CS5.5 and the other
Adobe tools found in the CS5.5 suite.
InDesign 5.5 adds extra features for eBook
publishing and can create for Flash or HTML5
(important if you’re designing for iPhone or
iPad). Different sizes of page can be created in
the same document and there’s extensive
support for long documents (cross-referencing,
conditional text, bullets and numbering). It also
includes strong typographical control, thanks to
Adobe’s historical
strength in font
design and
formatting.
Often dismissed
as too basic,
Microsoft Publisher
2010 has many of the
features needed to
produce day-to-day
documents in small
and home offices. This version is the first to
incorporate the Ribbon interface, bringing it
into line with the other members of the Office
suite.
The Ribbon doesn’t exactly suit a desktop
publisher, where a toolbox is often more
convenient, and some odd changes have been
made, like removing the possibility of scanning
an image directly into a Publisher page. Even so,
the program is generally easy to use and
includes direct PDF, HTML and XPS creation, as
well as integrating well with contact lists from
Excel, Outlook and Word for mail merging.
Object alignment is much easier, with
guide lines popping up to show when
horizontal or vertical edges align. Typographical
support has also been improved, with
OpenType fonts now supporting alternate
character shapes, true small caps and ligatures.
The longest lasting professional page
design software is QuarkXpress, now on version
9. It started as a Mac-only product but has been
cross-platform for many years. As well as
providing output to print up to broadsheet and
Design & Media
Pinnacle Studio HD offers a cleanly designed screen, ideal for video editing, with a timeline
at the bottom, preview above and to the right, and a tools panel to the left.
beyond, it now supports the ePub ebook format,
Blio rich media eReader and iPad through the
free App Studio add-on.
Particular strengths of QuarkXPress include
typographical controls, comprehensive shaped
text-wrap tools, image grids, easy cloning and
linking of page elements and a separate story
editor to help modify text in complex layouts.
Conditional styles make it easy to repeat
formatting rules, such as changing the font or
size of the first word in stories throughout a
publication.
Others to consider include Adobe
FrameMaker, PageStream, and Serif PagePlus.
Video production
Editing film or video electronically is a key part
of film, TV and corporate presentation
production alike. Video editors import unedited
video clips of all lengths and present them on a
time line or storyboard,
showing separate lines for
video clips, titles, sound tracks
and stills. Combining all these
elements creates the finished
video which can typically be
output in a variety of formats
and to DVD, CD or directly
online to services like YouTube.
Probably the best-known
of all video editors, Adobe
Premiere CS5.5 is available in
two distinct versions:
Professional and Elements. The
Elements product is designed
primarily for home use, while
the Professional version
extends through semiprofessional and into the
professional market.
The big improvement in
version 5.5 is the introduction
of the native 64-bit Mercury playback engine.
Using this tool gives much smoother playback
while editing, without the need for so much
separate rendering.
It’s now much easier to switch between
Premiere Pro and other systems, such as Final
Cut Pro or Avid software, which may be in use
on a collaborative project. As well as being able
to use the keyboard shortcuts of either of these
video editors, you can also move video to and
from Premiere Pro using an XML format as a
go-between.
Aimed at the enthusiast and semi-pro
video market, Pinnacle Studio HD 15 is a video
editor with many of the same core features as
Premiere Elements, for which it is a direct
competitor. Pinnacle is a subsidiary of Avid, one
of the main providers of professional video
editing software for TV and film.
The program is aimed at video enthusiasts
to help in the editing and distributing video on
DVD and CD, and for uploading to the YouTube
Web site. It has a wider range of supported
formats than some higher-end products,
reflecting the range of different platforms in the
consumer video market.
The new features in version 15 include
archival, so you can save all the files used in a
particular video project together in one place.
This could be to an internal or external hard
drive, DVD or memory stick, or an online
storage service.
Aimed at the same general market as
Pinnacle Studio, Corel VideoStudio Pro X4
Ultimate is a video editor for the enthusiast. It is
designed to cope with a wider array of uses
than some of the mainstream professional
applications out there, though not at such
exacting levels.
VideoStudio Pro X4 Ultimate adds a couple
of interesting features to its set in the latest
version. It now handles stop-motion animation,
so you can shoot videos frame by frame, and
handle time lapse easily, either by removing
frames from a video or by combining a number
of stills to make a movie. The package includes
proDAD Mercalli SE image stabilisation and
Boris Grafitti 5.3, which helps create all kinds of
sophisticated titles.
Others to consider are Avid itself, and
Apple’s Final Cut Pro. There is also Camtasia
Studio from TechSmith which lets you record
and edit what appears on the screen of your PC
for training or presentation purposes. It can
export to a wide range of formats including
H.264/MPEG-4, MP4, SWF, WMV and MOV, and
comes with presets for YouTube and devices
>>
like the iPhone or iPad.
By combining different photos of the same subject, you can use Adobe Photoshop
to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image which looks very vital.
19
Design & Media
Photo enhancement
<<
The increasing use of photographs in all forms
of media has boosted the importance of photo
editing software, so it is one of the key tools in
a designer’s kit. From the basic ability to resize
and crop images, modern tools can often take
the place of camera settings to enhance or
apply effects to photos. They can be stitched
together to make panoramas and objects can
be removed by ‘airbrushing’.
More recently, the ability to edit RAW
photos, which take data directly from a
camera’s sensor without applying any
compression or other modifications, has made
the digital darkroom a reality.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the best known
of all photo editing applications, so ubiquitous
that the verb ‘to Photoshop’ is now listed in
some dictionaries. Version CS5 includes several
new features designed to speed up treatment
of photos. Tools like automatic lens correction
can use an image’s EXIF information to
automatically correct for distortions like
chromatic aberration and vignetting. Drawing a
straight line over a photo and snapping the
photo to the line corrects a crooked image in
one move.
Other features, like Content-Aware Fill can
remove unwanted objects, like signage and
utility cables from photos in a few swipes of a
brush, and knockouts are now much easier to
set up and adjust, even when dealing with fine
detail, such as hair.
Although ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6 is a
budget application in comparison, it still shares
some similar tools. Both can work with High
Dynamic Range (HDR) images, which
PhotoStudio creates by combining multiple
shots of the same subject, bracketed with
different exposures.
It also has a software engine which can
intelligently remove noise from images taken in
Designing in 3D
Designing in 3D is a good deal more complex than designing in 2D as it involves a combination
of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and rendering software, but it has major applications in
creating objects for games and film.
Creating compound 3D models depends on being able to manipulate standard shapes,
such as spheres and cubes, and being able to create new ones from scratch. New shapes can be
generated using a virtual lathe to spin 2D shapes, or a mesh to model shapes from a series of
linked triangles.
Once the basic model has been created, its surface can be smoothed, painted and texture
mapped to make it appear more real. Models can then be laid out to build up a scene for a fixed
image, or fed into a games engine for animation. Computer Generated Images (CGI) are used in
film, video and TV, for both feature and advertising content.
The main commercial 3D modelling tools come from companies like Autodesk, originally
known for AutoCAD but more recently the creator of the Maya 3D design and animation suite.
Autodesk has several related tools such as Softimage and 3ds Max.
In a different area, specifically to help modelling landscapes, Bryce 7 is both easy to control
and capable of producing very naturalistic or extravagant fantasy landscapes. A series of
plug-ins for adding people and specialist characteristics to Bryce landscapes are available.
Originally from the stable of Kai Krause and available only on the Mac, it’s now supported on
both Mac and PC.
If you want to try 3D modelling before making what can be a substantial investment, there
are many freeware offerings that are worth having a look at. For example, Wings 3D describes
itself as an advanced sub-division modeller and is used by some professional 3D designers as a
handy scratchpad. A list of 25 freeware 3D modelling programs can be found at www.hongkiat.
com/blog/25-free-3d-modelling-applications-you-should-not-miss/.
low light. Photo noise can be a considerable
problem with less expensive cameras and at
lower ISO levels. Like Photoshop, PhotoStudio 6
supports RAW camera formats, so it can work
directly with sensor images.
PaintShop Pro used to be a rival to
Photoshop and although more recently it has
fallen behind, Corel has continued to develop
the application. With PaintShop Pro X4 you have
an economical but well featured photo editing
tool. Like the other two, it supports RAW images
and can create HDR shots with vibrant or
accentuated colours.
It can also achieve selective brightening of
parts of an image and combine
similar images to create blends
with the best elements of each
image combined into one. If
you’ve seen those funky
cityscape shots, where
everything looks like tiny
models, you can also simulate
the effect of a tilt-shift lens, to
achieve this.
The new version also
enables you to add adjustment
layers to images, allowing you
to experiment with changes
and effects without altering
Borrowing a feature from Corel Painter, CorelDraw X5 offers the original image.
artistic brushes which mimic the use of natural paint media
Other applications to
in a vector environment.
consider in this field are GIMP
20
(the GNU Image Manipulation System), Serif’s
PhotoPlus X5 and Photoscape.
Illustration software
Drawing or illustration software is different
from photo editing software in several
respects. The main one is that photos are raster
graphics, defined by the colours of the rows of
pixels that make them up, while drawings are
vectors, controlled by the coordinates of their
nodes and the equations of the lines that
connect them. Vector images can be resized to
any level, without affecting their sharpness –
they never pixellate.
Drawings are more often created from
scratch within an illustration program and are
usually used by designers who have artistic
training. Illustration applications are often used
with graphics tablets, which provide more
natural interaction than using a mouse.
Originally a partner to Photoshop, Adobe
Illustrator, now in version CS5, has been rather
overshadowed by its tearaway sibling. The
program enables smooth curves to be drawn
with mouse or stylus and can simulate various
natural media, such as bristle brushes.
It can cope just as well with perspective
drawing, providing grids for 1, 2 or 3 point
linear perspective. The Blob Brush can be used
to draw areas with a single vector outline in the
same way you might paint a raster area in a
photo editing program. With multi>>
Design & Media
<<
platform design becoming more and
more important, drawings produced in Adobe
Illustrator CS5 are resolution-independent and
will scale correctly to any screen size.
Perhaps better known than Illustrator, at
least in the Windows world, is CorelDraw. Now
CorelDraw X5, the program includes a new
colour-management engine for better colour
matching across different media, and new Web
graphic design tools which make it easier to
put clip-art together quickly.
You can fix the radii of curved corners on
objects, so that resizing them doesn’t disturb
the corners. The PowerTrace tool, which
converts raster images to fully-scalable vectors,
has been improved again and creates more
accurate reproductions.
Sold as a suite, CorelDraw includes copies
of Photo-Paint, PowerTrace, Capture and
Connect, so providing a pretty comprehensive
set of design tools in the one package. The
Premium version includes VideoStudio Pro,
adding video to still image production; and
SWiSH Max for Flash animation.
If you need to create drawings for
business, such as floor plans, flow charts or tree
diagrams, you may find a purpose-made tool
like SmartDraw more convenient. This
vector-based application relies on a wide
selection of pre-configured templates which
you can quickly adapt to your needs, while
retaining a professional look and feel.
SmartDraw 2012 has a completely
redesigned project management tool which
enables you to squeeze a complete chart down
to a single page and to colour code tasks
automatically, to show when they’ve run late.
Other freshly designed templates include those
for hubs, meetings, timelines and
organisational charts.
Find out more...
Adobe software at www.greymatter.com/adobe.
Microsoft Publisher 2010 at
www.greymatter.com/p537381.
QuarkXPress 9 at www.greymatter.com/p744543.
Pinnacle Studio HD V15 at
Camtasia Studio at www.greymatter.com/p517596.
Corel software at www.greymatter.com/corel.
ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6 at
SmartDraw 2012 at www.greymatter.com/p835159.
Microsoft Expression Studio 4 at
Serif WebPlus X5 at www.greymatter.com/p557030.
Autodesk Maya at www.autodesk.com.
22
i
Aobe Flash
There are a number of technologies involved in handling designs for electronic distribution,
whether for phone, tablet or Web. Adobe’s Flash has arguably been the most important for the
last several years.
Flash is a multimedia platform, designed to bring animation, video and interactivity to
Web pages. It can be used to animate vector and raster images, and is the basis for many online
advertisements and a wide selection of simple games. The Flash Player is provided free by
Adobe with Adobe Reader and has well over 100 million installations.
The best-known application for building Flash materials is Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5.
This is a fully fledged creation tool for Web animation and interactive applications. It can be
bought separately, but is also included in all versions of Creative Suite except Design Standard.
Flash Professional uses advanced animation techniques, such as inverse kinematics,
tweening and motion properties like spring and bounce, to help realise complex scenes. It also
enables interaction, so customers for Flash-created projects can exercise comprehensive
control over object elements.
Flash is available for PC, Mac and a wide variety of portable devices, including
smartphones. Flash file formats are supported by several third-party applications, including
KToon and SwiSH Max 4. TechSmith’s screen casting tool, Camtasia, used to create screen-based
tutorials, producing Flash-compatible files. Its rival, Screencam, produces Shockwave Flash
(SWF) files by default.
The importance of Flash may have peaked as Apple has stopped supporting its use on
devices running iOS, which means iPhone, iPad and iPod. While this is only a small proportion
of available devices, HTML5 is also gaining momentum and may well be the platform of choice
for the next generation of mobile devices, whether or not they can run Flash.
Others to consider include Corel Painter
12, Microsoft Visio, OpenOffice.org Draw and
Xara Xtreme.
Targeting the Web
Designing Web sites is very big business, but
there are several different approaches, from
hand-coding of HTML and CSS to big database
tools which are all about displaying goods
online. In between these are Web design tools
which work much more like DTP programs.
These applications aim to make Web design a
matter of choosing and positioning elements
on a page, with all the hand code kept behind
the scenes. Many can handle simple
e-commerce, too, in the form of shopping
trolleys and access to PayPal and credit card
payments.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 is well suited to
targeting the growing range of devices capable
of displaying Web content. Not only does it
generate and support HTML5 and CSS3, but it
can display the same screen in several sizes
simultaneously on a PC so you can compare
how they all look.
The program also incorporates the
PhoneGap framework, so you can package any
application you design ready for the App Store
or Android Marketplace. As with InDesign,
Dreamweaver is well integrated with other
Adobe applications, though in this case it’s
Flash (see panel), Fireworks and Photoshop.
Dreamweaver is a good tool for hand
coding, as well as for designing from the front.
The program can help with coding, providing
code hints for HTML, JavaScript, Ajax and PHP.
Microsoft has come a bit late to the Web
design party and Expression Studio 4 Web
Professional is a little light in feature terms by
comparison. However it does have good
standards support and can handle HTML, PHP,
XML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, Ajax, Flash and (of
course) Microsoft’s Flash rival, Silverlight. The
Studio 4 Web package is a suite that comprises
the Expression Web site designer, Expression
Encoder for Silverlight, and the vector drawing
editor Expression Design.
Serif WebPlus X5 is perhaps a surprising
inclusion in this company but can be a very
sound choice for individuals and smaller
companies who want to create a presence on
the Web with very little outlay. WebPlus X5
works very much as the same company’s DTP
program, PagePlus X5, does for paper
documents. Unless you really want to get
down and dirty, you never need to see any
HTML in the complete design and running of
your Web site. Version X5 includes good
e-commerce integration together with the
ability to set up blogs, forums and online
booking, and to display Google Maps and
YouTube videos within pages. You can also
show slideshows and live Twitter feeds.
Other applications to consider include MR
SITE Takeaway, NetObjects Fusion XII
and Web Studio 5.
Systems
Storage management
Protecting your data is of paramount importance. Kay Ewbank
checks out your backup options in the modern world.
Data is one of the most valuable assets
a company owns, so it’s important to
keep it safe and well backed up. This used to
involve a few tape drives scattered around the
server room, but there are now many more
choices available, and the task of managing data
backups is in consequence itself more
complicated. The important thing is to ensure all
your data is backed up in a fashion that is
appropriate to the requirements, and that your
backup regime is manageable and auditable.
The problem lies in knowing and being able to
prove that you’ve backed up all the important
files, that they’re stored securely, and that the
backups could actually be restored if ever you
needed them.
The software covered in this guide will help
you manage your storage management, but you
still need to decide on the physical location of
your backups. Many companies choose to use
hybrid backup, where data is backed up first
onto disk, and then older or less important data
is moved to cheaper tape storage. This
technique is called Hierarchical Storage
Management (HSM). The important thing about
HSM is that the files are still available to the end
user: if a user needs to access a file that has
been moved to slower backup storage, they
should be able to do so without needing to
know where it is in the archive.
An increasingly popular alternative is
cloud-based storage, and this too can be part of
a HSM solution. Cloud-based storage gives you
the security of off-site data backup, which may
be a requirement for auditing or insurance
purposes. It can also be less expensive, and
avoids the trap of running out of space because
you bought a backup device that turns out to be
too small. The potential disadvantages of
cloud-based storage are that your data is stored
out of your physical control, and could quite
possibly come under the jurisdiction of another
country where the laws regarding data
protection are different.
One feature that has recently become
common is support for data deduplication. This
is a technique whereby multiple data blocks
that are identical are only stored once, with
subsequent copies pointing back to the full
copy. This can greatly reduce the space required
as most data sets have large amounts of
duplicate data.
Configuring your backup devices from the home page of the Symantec Backup Exec console.
The most important thing about storage
management and backup software is that it’s
easy to use, and that you use it. One day you
will need to restore your data: make sure you’re
ready for when that happens.
KAY
EWBANK
Symantec Backup Exec
Symantec’s main storage backup product is
Backup Exec, with its sister product Backup
Exec System Recovery as an alternative if you
want to be able to restore entire systems rather
than individual drives, files or folders.
Backup Exec can be used to back up data
stored on both physical and virtual machines,
and Exec 2010 added deduplication options so
you can make efficient use of the space. The
software has an easy-to-use console, and the
software integrates with other Symantec
products allowing you to set up rules that
trigger a backup on alerts generated elsewhere.
The most recent release has a plug-in for
VMware so that you can monitor VMware
backups from the vSphere or vCenter side,
showing information such as backup timing
and the sort of backups that were carried out.
You can backup to disk or tape, with the
option of a rolling backup where data is first
backed up to disk and then migrated to tape as
it ages. You can also choose to store a copy of
your data remotely in Symantec’s Online
Storage for Backup Exec. This gives you access
to off-site storage from the Backup Exec user
interface.
If you want to go for a completely
cloud-based system then you can use
Symantec Backup Exec.cloud. This service
automatically streams an encrypted copy of
your designated data to Symantec’s data
centres, and the service can be deployed on
both desktops and servers, and used to protect
Microsoft application data. The service is
subscription-based so you only pay for
>>
Kay is a database
consultant
specialising in EIS,
financial analysis and
GIS systems. While
much of her work
is based in London,
being a consultant
gives her the freedom
to sail, travel and help
out as a part-time
sheep farmer.
kaye@
hardcopymag.com
25
Systems
<<
the storage you use. There are no
per-user licence fees.
Backup Exec has good support for
Microsoft applications such as Exchange and
SQL Server. You can set up rules, for example, to
say which data or mailboxes should be
archived, and whether they should be deleted
from their original location. You can also set
retention policies to say how long data should
be kept in the archive. One nice new feature in
the latest release is an Outlook plug-in that lets
users see their archived emails directly from
within Outlook, so avoiding the need for end
users having to search for archived emails
outside their familiar applications.
CA ARCserve Backup
CA ARCserve is part of the large ARCserve
family of products that covers all aspects of
system management on a variety of platforms.
ARCserve Backup is available in an all-inclusive
version that can be used to protect both
physical and virtual file servers, email servers,
database servers and application servers.
Alternatively, versions are available specifically
by operating system, for file servers, or for
Backing up virtual machines
Some of the products covered here offer backup options for virtual machines, but in general these are additions to
software that existed before virtualisation became popular. Here we look at two products that were specifically created for
virtual machines.
Veeam Backup & Replication was created specifically for VMware ESX virtual machines. The software runs under
vSphere and can be used to take image level backups of complete ESXi virtual machines.
One of the advantages it offers is the way it uses incremental backup to reduce the time taken for creating backup
images. A number of products do offer this, but the way Veeam does it is quite clever. First a full backup is taken, after
which incremental backups are used. Veeam then automatically writes the incremental changes into the existing backup
file to create a new ‘synthetic’ full backup. You still get the benefit of incremental backups because it also generates a
reversed incremental rollback file which contains the data from the full backup that’s just been overwritten. So you get the
advantage of being able to go to the most recent file and get a full backup, but earlier data is still available if you need it.
While the software does back up entire VMs, you can also use it to restore individual objects at the file system or
application level. You also get the choice of backing up on-site or off-site.
One advantage of Veeam is that all backups are automatically verified, so hopefully avoiding the problem of believing
your backups work right up to the moment you need to get the data back. To do this Veeam makes use of the fact it is
running in a virtual environment. Each time you take a backup, Veeam automatically creates a virtual machine in your own
environment and runs that virtual machine from the backup file that’s just been created. The testing process starts the
virtual machine and its operating system, and makes sure everything is working. The virtual machine that it creates is
isolated from all your production and test machines, so the only drawbacks of this scheme are the overheads of having one
more virtual machine running for the duration needed for a successful start-up.
Quest vRanger Pro is also designed specifically for VMware, including ESXi, and can be used to back up a whole virtual
machine, an individual file or anything in between. You can also choose to back up just the changed information to make
the process less resource hungry. Backups can be taken while the source machine is still running, and you can use multiple
ESX hosts for simultaneous jobs, so minimizing the time spent backing up your systems. The product comes in two
versions: the basic vRanger lets you back up and restore your files, objects and applications; vRanger Pro adds support for
VMware replication to local or remote sites.
One advantage of vRanger Pro is that you can mix the type of backup you use to make best use of the licensing
scheme. You can have some servers licensed for backup and replication, while less important servers are configured to be
backed up but not replicated. This mix can still be managed from the one console, so you don’t lose track of what you’re
managing but don’t waste cash either.
You can run backups from CIFS, NFS, FTP, and SFTP repositories, and choose whether or not to compress to save space.
Backups can be run in real time, or scheduled to run under various conditions such as once every so many days, or when
the amount of data to be backed up reaches a particular size. Quest vRanger Pro gives you the option of how you choose
to make incremental backups. VMware does offer Change Block Tracking to work out which data has changed, but vRanger
extends this to Active Block Mapping. Change Block Tracking is used to tell vRanger which data blocks have been changed,
but this can waste time backing up deleted data. Active Block Mapping identifies and skips deleted and zeroed data blocks
to save time and space.
One attractive feature of vRanger Pro is a catalogue of all the images in your backup repository so you can find the
version you want more easily. You can search for specific files for restoration and right-click to select them for recovery.
The latest version of vRanger Pro has a Fibre restore feature that lets you send data over a Storage Area Network (SAN)
Fibre Channel instead of clogging up your normal network with the extra traffic. This allows you to send several data
protection streams at once without bringing the entire network to a standstill.
26
application servers. Whatever machines you’re
managing are shown in a single console,
regardless of their physical location.
ARCserve Backup works with two other
members of the family to provide backup of
data from branch offices. ARCserve D2D can be
used to back up to disk incrementally;
ARCserve Replication can be used to replicate
Windows, Linux and UNIX data from remote
offices to a central location from where you
can use ARCserve Backup or ARCserve D2D to
take backups from the central Replica server.
ARCserve lets you choose the best
location for your data so you can work with
integrated disk, tape and cloud storage. There
is also ARCserve D2D On Demand, the result of
a partnership between Microsoft and CA
which combines an on-premise solution with
Windows Azure for added security and
flexibility.
Backing up applications such as SQL
databases or email servers can be tricky
because of open files, but ARCserve has good
support for such applications with protection
agents for all the big-name SQL databases,
SAP, Exchange, SharePoint and Microsoft
Dynamics. If you’re backing up virtualised
servers, ARCserve can be used with VMware
ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
The management console in ARCserve is
clear and easy to use both day-to-day and if
there’s a problem. Any potential problems are
highlighted and you’re offered choices as to
how to put things right. If something goes
wrong and you need to recover a particular
server, ARCserve suggests the best ways to
work to get you up and running. ARCserve’s
reporting is one of its strong points, with a
good range of graphs and pie charts showing
you at a glance data such as storage use,
deduplication information and historical data.
NovaStor NovaBackup
NovaBackup is designed to be easy to use,
offering a browser-based interface from which
you can manage a variety of clients.
Alternatively, you can control the software
locally from the clients. Either way, you view
your environment from a dashboard that
shows you the status of all the devices you’ve
defined as connected. If you want to carry out
an action such as scheduling a backup, you use
one of NovaBackup’s wizards.
NovaBackup comes in a number of
versions depending on the type of machine
you want to back up, with options ranging
from PC and workstation backup to data
centres with LAN, SAN, NAS and Virtual Server
environments. Licensing in a virtualised
environment is by physical server
>>
Systems
<<
rather than virtual machine.
You can set up backups for specific files
and folders, and in addition to working with file
servers and PCs you can also use the software
to back up SQL Server, Exchange and VMware
virtual machines. The latest version of
NovaBackup has support for differential
backup, so you can back up only the data that
has changed since the last time the backup was
run, so greatly reducing the amount of time
taken.
The options you get for storing your data
ranges from DVD drives through standard disk
drives and tapes to online storage across the
Internet. There’s a wizard to help you select
which disks to include in the backup, the
backups can be set to run on a time schedule,
and you can define schedules and then apply
them to a set of machines. Applications such as
SQL Server and Exchange Server can be backed
up while users continue to access the databases
or send and receive emails.
If you need to restore the data, you can
choose the version to restore using a Time
Slider view that essentially offers you a single
Scheduling a backup using NovaBackup’s Backup Wizard.
Find out more...
Symantec Backup Exec 2010 R3 at
www.greymatter.com/p311220
CA ARCserve Backup at www.greymatter.com/p264918
NovaStor NovaBackup at
Acronis Backup & Recovery Advanced Server at
Veeam Backup & Replication at
Quest vRanger Pro at www.greymatter.com/p709000
28
i
Scheduling a backup from the Acronis Backup & Recovery management console.
restorable file set without the need to select the
backup source device. Using the Slider, files are
listed based on the range of time the backup
was run. You can choose to restore specific files,
and you have the choice
of overwriting existing
files or restoring to an
alternative location.
In addition to
offering online backup to
single companies,
NovaStor has an option
for service providers.
NovaBackup xSP is
designed to give service
providers, system
integrators, resellers and
other IT companies the
means to offer customers
backup services such as
cloud backup. As a result,
services such as
Fasthosts’s Online Backup
can offer smaller
companies a secure and
easy way to use online storage for a low
monthly fee, giving customers the ease of use
of NovaBackup without the overheads.
Acronis
The Acronis range comes in versions for server,
small business server and workstation. Acronis
Backup & Recovery 11 offers both disk imaging
and data backup. The software works with both
Windows and Linux, and with physical and
virtual machines. The virtual machines can be
running on VMware vSphere, ESX or ESXi,
Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat
Enterprise Virtualization or Parallels Server 4
Bare Metal. All the versions use a management
console to give you control for creating and
running backup policies and specific backups,
as well as restoring data and managing backup
devices. If you want to store your data online
there’s a separate version in Acronis Backup &
Recovery Online which is fully integrated with
the other products and is managed from the
same console as Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.
The software can be used to create an
image of the hard disk of a machine, including
the operating system, applications, user
settings and all data. You then use this if ever
you experience a major crash to restore the
entire machine. Alternatively, you can back up
individual file types for particular applications,
or choose to exclude particular file types to
concentrate on business data. You can choose
to use incremental and differential backups to
reduce the time and space taken to carry out a
backup, and block-level deduplication to create
smaller backups.
If you need to restore specific data, you can
view the files to locate the data you want.
Acronis comes with integrated support for
applications such as Exchange and SQL Server,
allowing you to back up open files and if
necessary restore down to individual email or
record level.
Acronis has good support for virtual
machines and, like NovaBackup, offers
reasonable licence arrangements in such
environments. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11
Virtual Edition supports an unlimited number of
migrations to and from one physical host, and
you can use a single host-based agent for
VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to
manage all the virtual machines on a
host at once.
Back End
Straight talking
Tim Anderson discusses the implications of Microsoft’s
bold move towards ‘cloud plus device’.
Microsoft BUILD was the company’s
most interesting conference for years.
Windows 8 is not only a new version of
Windows, but brings a radically different user
interface and embraces a different model of
computing based on cloud plus touchcontrolled devices. It also promises to be a safe
environment in which applications are
sandboxed and communicate with each other
only through limited and controllable contracts,
while getting their data from cloud services.
If Microsoft manages to shift its customers
to this new form of Windows it will be an
extraordinary achievement. The question
though is whether this revolutionary approach
will work. Metro looks nice; but we have work to
do, and for most of Microsoft’s customers that
means running desktop Windows applications.
Fortunately Windows 8 also supports
traditional desktop Windows. But if we will be
spending all our time in desktop Windows, then
what is the point of Metro?
The answer is that Microsoft is trying to
break out of a tight spot. Windows is
imprisoned by its legacy; it will never be truly
secure or truly touch-friendly because it was
Inside Windows Server 8
Windows 8 client so thoroughly dominated proceedings at BUILD that grabbing attention for Server 8 was difficult.
However I was fortunate to attend a press workshop the previous week, where Server 8 was presented in detail. It is a
huge release, and while Windows 8 client is something of a journey into the unknown, the improvements in Server 8 are
solid progress which system administrators will enjoy. Here are a few of the main points:
l
Server Core, which lacks the Windows GUI, becomes the preferred deployment. Lead architect Jeffrey Snover told us,
“We don’t want management GUIs to run on servers – that’s a bad thing.”
l
Moving between Server Core and the full GUI is done by adding and removing features, and is no longer irreversible.
l
PowerShell is greatly expanded with over 2,300 cmdlets that work locally or remotely. Everything can be scripted.
l
Server Manager has been redone, with a slick new design and the ability to manage multiple servers. The intention is
that you run this remotely.
l
Hyper-V virtualisation is massively improved. A guest can have up to 32 virtual CPUs and 512GB of memory. Hyper-V
Replica means anyone with two Hyper-V hosts can have a fail-safe virtual machine. Live migration also works between
any two Hyper-V hosts.
l
Storage in Server 8 is changing. Storage spaces let you maintain a pool of drives with RAID-like resiliency, simply adding
and removing drives as needed. Disk volumes on storage pools can be thinly provisioned, so that you can create huge
virtual drives and add physical backing only when and if it is needed.
l
De-duplication is built into Server 8, making storage of files with large amounts of duplicate content (such as gold
images for virtual machines) much more efficient.
l
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) support has been redone with new tools that make it easier to setup and configure.
l
Server 8 is a better operating system for multiple tenants with strong isolation and throttling of shared resources in
both Hyper-V and the IIS Web server.
Server 8 is currently a developer preview and there are rough spots in this initial release, especially in the GUI tools. It
does look promising though, and will further speed progress towards running virtual servers as the norm for businesses of
any size. Better virtualisation is also great for developers, who can easily develop and test multi-tier applications.
30
designed before either of those things
mattered. Apple’s iOS has shown that there is an
alternative, based on a locked-down operating
system, a curated app store, touch control that
works, and overall design excellence. Windows
is slowly but surely losing market share to the
iPad and other tablets, and the primary intent
of Windows 8 is to recover that lost ground.
At the same time, everything that is in
Windows 7 is still there in Windows 8, with the
possible exception of the old Start menu. If you
start up a desktop app, it runs in the desktop
environment. There are even two versions of
Internet Explorer 10, a metro-style version
which runs full-screen and in which plug-ins
such as Flash and even Silverlight are
disallowed, and a desktop version which runs in
a resizable window just like IE9.
By delivering both Metro and desktop
Windows in one operating system, Microsoft
hopes to keep faith with its legacy while also
transitioning to a new model that could in time
dominate client computing.
The obvious difficulty is that if Windows 8
machines run full-fat Windows alongside Metro,
then users will need suitably powerful hardware
as well as keyboard and pen or mouse in order
to operate desktop Windows applications. That
will make Windows 8 machines expensive: the
Samsung tablet handed out to conference
delegates, complete with Bluetooth keyboard,
would likely cost over £1,000.
And what is the point of making Metro
secure when users can easily pop into desktop
Windows and bypass all its protection?
Microsoft’s iPad alternative
The answer (though this was not clearly
articulated at BUILD) is that Windows 8 on ARM,
not on x86, will be Microsoft’s iPad competitor.
ARM systems on a chip (SoCs) are the industry
Back End
standard for tablets and enable low power use
and relatively high performance.
Windows Division president Steven
Sinofsky said in his keynote that “the demos that
we’re showing you today are equally at home on
ARM and on X86.” Despite that, there will be
important differences. The first is that existing
Windows applications will need to be
recompiled to run on ARM. The second is that
Microsoft may be intending to lock down
Windows on ARM to a greater extent than on
x86. There were no BUILD sessions on
recompiling for ARM, and Microsoft is not
encouraging this; we even heard that the
Windows 8 online Store might be the only way
to install apps on ARM, and that they will all be
Metro apps.
If Microsoft follows through with this, then
Windows 8 ARM tablets will be pricecompetitive with Android and iPad, and will not
require keyboard and mouse or pen, because
none of the old applications which require this
will be present.
However this also implies that the only
reason to buy a Windows 8 ARM tablet will be to
run Metro apps, of which none currently exist
beyond a few samples. This means that
Microsoft will be keen to promote Metro app
development to populate the store for the
launch, and of course we heard plenty about
Metro-style development at BUILD. Every
Windows 8 machine will have Metro, ensuring
the ubiquity of the platform.
One point of particular uncertainty is what
will happen to Microsoft Office on ARM. It
seems implausible that Office will be ported to
Metro in time, though we may see efforts to
“Windows is slowly but
surely losing market share”
make the product more touch-friendly in the
desktop environment.
Incidentally, desktop Windows does exist
on ARM: we saw this in the ARM samples on
display. Metro is not yet a complete operating
system and access to desktop Windows is
necessary for some tasks, such as access to the
full control panel. It would not surprise me
though if Microsoft has in mind to remove
desktop Windows from a future version running
on ARM.
Personally I am looking forward to
Windows 8 tablets. They will solve the tricky
problem business travellers face: do you pack
the iPad with its convenience, instant-on and
long battery life, or a Windows laptop with the
applications you need, or both? If Microsoft do
it right, a Windows 8 tablet will be the ideal
combination, though I will be looking for x86
and its compatibility rather than ARM.
So it is obvious that Microsoft’s new
direction is risky. Metro will be a hard sell to
businesses, many of whom will look at Windows
8, see little change in the part of Windows that
they actually use, and stick with Windows 7. It
took Microsoft ten years to displace Windows
XP, and I foresee an equally long life for
Windows 7.
As for the consumer market, even if its
OEM partners deliver attractive Windows 8
tablets at a competitive price, Microsoft will not
find it easy to displace iPad or Android.
Much depends on the quality of the Metro
apps in the store when Windows 8 tablets start
appearing in, I presume, autumn 2012. That in
turn depends on developers, which is why
Microsoft was happy to give them shiny new
machines at BUILD.
Whether Windows 8 Metro succeeds or
fails is uncertain, but the one thing beyond
doubt is that client computing is changing
radically and that Windows 7 is in one
sense the last of its line.
31
Back End
…and another
thing
Jon Honeyball ponders the implications of Apple’s
lock-down of the Mac App Store, and how far
Microsoft might follow Apple’s example.
Frankly, this is fantastic news for users.
Apple’s Mac Store has followed on from the
The email that just landed in my inbox
huge success of the iOS AppStore by allowing
made me perk up and take notice.
for extremely simple application purchase,
From Apple Developer with a title of
download and installation. It is normally just a
‘Sandboxing and the Mac App Store’, the email
one-click operation, and really couldn’t be
goes on to say:
simpler. Not only does this work well for small
“Sandboxing your app is a great way to
utilities as well as larger apps, it has worked just
protect systems and users by limiting the
fine for the huge upgrade from 10.6 Snow
resources apps can access and making it more
Leopard to 10.7 Lion OS versions too.
difficult for malicious software to compromise
For a user, it is a win-win. Simplicity of
users’ systems.
purchase and install, and then a one-stop shop
As of 1 March 2012 all apps submitted to
for upgrades too. Better still, almost every app
the Mac App Store must implement
in the AppStore allows you to install onto
sandboxing. Enabling the default sandbox
multiple machines provided they are owned by
environment is as simple as checking the
you and logged in with the same user account.
Enable Entitlements checkbox in Xcode target
Any developer will understand just how much
settings, allowing you to begin sandboxing
this has changed the landscape for application
your app. If your app requires access to
development on that platform.
sandboxed system resources you will need to
Now one key differentiator for the iOS
include justification for using those
AppStore was that it only allowed full
entitlements as part of the submission to the
walled-garden digitally signed applications
Mac App Store. Apps that are being refrom the beginning, with no exceptions. The
engineered to be sandbox compatible may
Apple desktop operating system, OSX, is
request additional temporary entitlements.
different. Just as with Windows, you can build
These entitlements are granted on a short-term
your app and sell it with no digital certification
basis and will be phased out over time.”
required. With the recent arrival of the Mac OSX
This could not be clearer. As of 1 March
AppStore, it still allowed for applications which
2012, any app sold through the Mac App Store
did not follow the sandboxing rules. But that
must use sandboxing to protect itself and other
changes shortly.
code on the computer.
The deadline from Apple is interesting – it
was originally going to be November
2011, so it has been delayed.
Demos that make your head spin
Doubtless this was a pragmatic
There was one demonstration at BUILD which made my head spin. Microsoft
decision based upon the uptake from
showed its forthcoming version of Hyper-V Server which can do a move from
the community. What will the
a local network to a cloud host. That’s clever enough, but is only the start. The
sandboxing limit? Well, you can kiss
move was of a virtual machine which was running at the time. And there were
goodbye to inter-application scripting
effectively no dropped packets – it just continued to work despite moving
and interactions, and you won’t get
several thousand miles in the process. And there was obviously no
system-wide file system access either.
shared-storage strung between the two hosts either.
In a Windows context, this might
mark the final death throes of OLE
32
Automation. It will be interesting to see how
Apple will handle the Automator scenario.
The question to be asked is this: how brave
will Microsoft be with the Windows 8 platform?
The 64-bit version of Windows 7 does not allow
for the installation of unsigned drivers by
default, but this does not extend to sandboxed
and digitally signed applications. Rumours are
circulating that Microsoft will be considerably
more robust about this on Windows 8,
especially on the ARM platform. With the ARM
platform, there is no prior history of existing
applications, of course, so the entire platform is
starting from a blank sheet of paper. This makes
it much easier to require and enforce tougher
requirements for developers. Whether Microsoft
will allow the same, or allow for a user-settable
value of ‘only run sandboxed and digitally
signed applications’, is something we will have
to wait to see. Personally, I would happily
enable such a setting on all of my day-to-day
computers without hesitation. It would make
them far more robust against malware attacks
and all the other nasties which seem to
consume much of our time on our computers at
home and at work.
Even if Microsoft is its usual handwringingly slow and apologetically tardy self
over such a matter, the writing is now clearly on
the wall. The movement is simply inevitable.
Application writers need to start thinking long
and hard about how their applications will run
in a new world order where operating systems
will lock down applications in a much tougher
walled-garden regime. It will not be enough to
ensure that the code is clean enough to
cross-compile onto ARM: we should expect a
whole host of extra requirements for security,
sandboxing and so forth. And also, quite likely,
an inevitable shift in licensing away from the
one-user/machine one-license world we have
had for many years. Maybe we will get one user
Back End
account, multiple machines as in the iOS and
OSX AppStores.
Or maybe it is time to look at innovative
pricing and runtimes. For example, last night I
had dinner with a group of senior developers
from a well-known high-end systems
management tools company. We talked at
length about new ways to license their product,
and I came up with the “give me access for an
hour” model. This would allow for on-the-fly
licensing for a restricted time period to use their
tool. After which, it would simply stop working
until “more money is put in the meter.”
For a tool that you might use only
occasionally, maybe once every few months,
this sort of innovative licensing becomes
interesting. My fellow diners are going away to
think about ways of implementation such a
scheme, and what the functional value is of their
tool on a per-hour runtime usage model, rather
than a convention “buy N seats covering M IP
addresses, plus an extra 20 per cent for a
support contract”. Pay for play is really just
around the corner for even mainstream
applications, and I am not sure enough
developers are thinking in a truly innovative way
about where their future revenue streams will
come from.
Is Microsoft listening?
deliver a feature-complete Beta in January,
Microsoft is running a major blog all about the
followed by something around April, with
Windows 8 development process at http://
completion fairly soon after that, then the clock
blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/ and it is getting a flood
is ticking at a quite furious rate.
of responses from developers and other
That said, I would far rather Microsoft use
interested parties. Even better, they seem to be
every second up till its internal lock-down
listening to the feedback and, to my surprise,
deadlines to make improvements rather than
acting on it. Why am I surprised? Well, Microsoft
stick its head in the sand and pretend its
has traditionally been really rather inward
customers don’t exist. A number of other
looking when it comes to the development
well-known software companies could benefit
process. I know it routinely trots out the line
from taking such a pro-actively open
that it listens to its customers, prioritises key
development process, even if some of it
features and so forth. But the reality is that
is inevitably marketing spin.
much of that is simply
validating what it was
going to do anyway.
Nevertheless, it is
somewhat fascinating to
see how they are
modifying and changing
the user experience,
especially for the Metro
part of the desktop. It
might be pertinent to
ask that this is
happening really rather
late in the day. If
Microsoft is aiming to
Looks like Microsoft might actually be listening to what its users want of Windows 8.
33
Back End
Short cuts
Short Cuts is normally irreverent (OK, rude) in
its coverage of industry figures, but just this
once we’re being serious, as we remember one
of the undisputed giants of the IT business.
Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011
(Photo: Matthew Yohe)
Memories are long in the Short Cuts office, stretching back to the
It was a decision which would relegate Apple to niche player for the next 25 years, as IBM’s
1970s and the birth of the microcomputer industry. Apple was
relaxed attitude to seeing others copy its design created the ‘PC Compatible’ industry which came to
always a part of it, and, except for a disastrous period without him between
dominate desktop computing. The long-term winner wasn’t, however, IBM, but Microsoft, who
the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steve Jobs was always leading Apple from
eventually saw ‘PC Compatible’ replaced by ‘Windows Compatible’.
the front.
Steve, meanwhile, stuck to his guns, producing superior operating systems that only ran on
Given Apple’s shut-tight hardware policy today it might seem strange
Apple hardware, and superior hardware that didn’t have a lot of application software to run on it
that they popularised the open-up-the-case, plug-in-what-you-like
apart from a half-hearted version of Microsoft Office and a few heavyweight media and design tools.
expansion bus slot with the Apple II, one of the most successful micros of
Eventually investors lost faith, and in 1985 replaced him with the man he’d hired to manage the
the 8-bit, pre-PC age. One beneficiary of this was a small outfit called
company, ex-Pepsi executive John Scully. This left Jobs jobless and Apple with the worst of both
Microsoft, who plied a trade in Z80 second processor cards complete with
worlds – a go-it-alone product line without Steve’s design flair and ability to inspire fanatic loyalty in
CP/M operating system. This allowed users to run applications, such as the
colleagues and customers alike. The company came close to going bust.
market-leading WordStar word processor, that Apple’s own OS didn’t
Jobs returned in 1996, purchased along with his NeXT company by a desperate Apple. He’d
support. However the Apple II turned out to be the
spent his time at NeXT doing what he did best
“For someone with a reputation for going – whatever he wanted to – and Apple’s stockholders
end of the company’s ‘Garage’ phase, based on the
engineering excellence of co-founder Steve Wozniak.
never again made the mistake of trying to make him
it alone, Jobs turned out to be pretty
From then on Jobs, no engineer but an intense
do anything else. This was just as well, as during his
good at getting key collaborators onside” NeXT period he’d stumbled accidentally into the
product visionary, took the lead.
He had his epiphany during a 1979 visit to
entertainment business (he initially bought Pixar for
Xerox’s PARC development centre, and became the Guru of the GUI. Then
its IT systems, not Toy Story), and what he’d learned there helped to make Apple’s fortune.
the greatest industrial mid-race horse-switch of all time took place as IBM,
First though there was the desktop to sort out, as the Apple board let him launch the iMac with
until then the high priests of closed architectures (and regularly sued
Bondi Blue casing and no floppy disk drive, and replace the venerable Mac OS with the NeXTSTEPbecause of it), produced the expandable and clonable PC (complete with
derived OS X. Then Steve turned his gaze to the music industry, and they let him go ahead with the
Microsoft OS), while Apple launched first the Lisa and then, in 1984, the
crazy idea that a computer manufacturer could take on the giants of consumer electronics in the
Macintosh, with not an expansion slot in sight and a warning that
fledgling portable MP3 player market. When he had the even crazier idea of taking on the giants of
unscrewing the case would invalidate the warranty.
mobile telephony, they let him do it with a miniature tablet computer disguised as a phone,
Jobs’s greatest coup was getting thousands of developers to fill his iOS
App Store with low-cost offerings, so turning the tables on Windows.
34
following it later with a full-size tablet that by then seemed to most people to be just like a phone
made bigger.
For someone with a reputation for going it alone, Jobs turned out to be pretty good at getting
key collaborators onside. His second-greatest coup was persuading a panicking, change-resistant
record industry to let him sell individual songs for a flat rate of 99 cents each, turning the iPod into a
one-stop music ecosystem (which shrewdly included iTunes for Windows).
His greatest, however, was persuading thousands of developers to produce apps for iOS and sell
them through Apple’s Store on Apple’s terms, at prices nearer to songs on iTunes than shrink-wraps
on software vendors’ shelves. Macs may have been short of applications, but Jobs made sure the iOS
devices had the biggest range ever assembled, before most people who had one even realised
they’d bought a computer.
Jobs’s legacy may turn out to be to have taken Apple’s mobile platform to the critical mass
where it can remain a permanent, major market-share player alongside Android (and perhaps one
other) in the cloud-connected appliance market – the only time a single-vendor consumer standard
has ever achieved that (as Sony, producers of Betamax, know only too well). Or it might not, and
Android may swamp iOS just as Windows did the Mac. Either way, no one person has driven
the industry in quite the way that Steve Jobs did, and almost certainly no-one will again.

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