Creating a bootable USB drive

I’m a little overdue on a couple of entries, but they will be coming shortly 🙂

Awhile back now, after burning far too many build cd’s and dvd’s, problems with coasters and so on, we moved to placing the build image onto a bootable 8gb USB drive.  This meant we could make small script changes on the fly and rebuild a new machine without having to update distribution points and reburn media.  In order to do this we used diskpart to format the hspeed USB sticks.

Now, on many occasion I’ve needed to reformat the USB key and completely forgotten the sequence of commands, so I am going to place them here and if anyone else happens to find it useful… fantastic! I can say that our experience has shown it can significantly speed up a build when you do not have to wait for the machine to copy a large image from an optical drive.

The one downside of using USB boot media for your builds is the fact that they can potentially be altered in an uncontrolled fashion, therefore I would suggest you either keep it within your development and build team, or potentially utilise an MD5 hash, and verify it against a value in a database at the beginning of the build process.  I did begin to write this script, but unfortunately it isnt in a state to share the code, there are a few command line applications available to incorporate into a simple script if you want to pursue this.  If I get the chance to revisit it sometime, I will also post the final code here.

ok, so how do I make my USB drive bootable?

open a command line window on your Vista machine then type the following sequence of commands:

• Diskpart
• list disk (you should be able to spot your USB stick by the size, take note of the number listed against it)
• select disk n (where n is the number from the previous step)
• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=ntfs quick
• exit

And you are done!

Copy over the contents of your build DVD and the next time you boot from this USB stick winPE should appear and do its thing.

I’ve been attempting to carry this concept over to linux live cd’s / live usb distro’s, but this hasnt been going to plan… if I get that working, I’ll update, I have a feeling that may be due to the high capacity USB drives.

Unified Communications: Choosing the right method of communication

Synopsis

Nothing causes me more psychological pain in the morning than the outlook status message “updating inbox (3.35mb)”. On the up side this grants me the time to go get myself a coffee and some breakfast.

The last thing I want to do is wait for 20 minutes or more whilst outlook downloads a 2 or 3MB file, before I can read the rest of my email. It’s worse if I have only been a CC on a 2 or 3MB presentation or document sent to someone else for their review, and I don’t remember signing up to those 1MB weekly PDF newsletters I keep getting? 

I suppose it could be worse, it could have been an excel spreadsheet being sent to the team, and each team member may have responded attaching his/her copy with their comments and changes applied.  We will be tackling this situation in detail in the follow up posts on SharePoint Vs Excel.

Maybe I’m being a little unreasonable, this sort of thing happens en-mass in almost every company I have ever worked in. Basic computing lessons teach us how to use email and how to attach files, so why wouldn’t it be the most commonly done thing?

What can be done?

Email is one of the most inefficient ways to transfer files, and one of the quickest ways to utilise storage all over your enterprise. Typically each file sent via email exists a number of times within the enterprise, be it on your local machine in a PST file, your Mail server, your Enterprise Mail archiving solution or backups of any of the above. When you apply this logic to emails larger than 1MB it soon stacks up.

It’s no surprise then that one of the most appealing benefit metrics of collaboration & unified communication software is the reduction of email attachment sizes and enterprise storage requirements.  However user adoption is critical to the success of these factors.

If user adoption fails, what can we do by policy? well, we can always look to limit attachment sizes via exchange of course we then force the impact over on to the collaboration tools, however these are designed to manage such burdens via site quota, user quota & retention policies etc.

What can we do better?

As an individual however there is a number of things that can be considered when thinking about sending a communication

table of consideration

The above table only really works when you are considering a single factor, when you begin to combine them the decision over which medium to send your message becomes a little more complicated. 

Email: Often best placed when a reasonable size of message is required to be sent beyond that of “can you remember to send over your status report please?” or even for those smaller messages when the recipient isn’t online, lowest file sizes possible

IM: Typically much shorter than an average email, at least per message sent, sometimes transcripts of conversations can seemingly go on forever! These messages are usually conversational or consist of short one line notifications i.e. “do you have a minute to run through this spreadsheet?”, “yeah, shall we grab a coffee first?”.  Another useful feature of instant messaging is the ability to transfer files between two users, either Peer to Peer shared folders (as in Live Messenger) or one to one file transfers, these file transfers can also handle a reasonably sized file depending on your connectivity and the amount of time both you and the recipient will be online for.

Collaboration workspace:  interactive, known size of team / participants, drives process or aim for production of document(s) and collation of supporting materials, suitable for the majority of team focused documentation up to around 50mb. Blogs and wikis

Portal: basic interaction, large numbers of viewers, reasonably varied file sizes

Static Intranet: zero interaction, large numbers of viewers, any file size 

Phone: sometimes, just sometimes, its good to talk.

Moving between mediums

The more integrated your product set, the easier it is to shift between mediums. smart tags allow seamless integration between instant messaging presence information and a multitude of other products, using the Microsoft suite as examples, the smart tags can be found in office side panels, outlook To: and From: fields, sharepoint lists

When it all works well together the following little ramble of events is possible:

You could be editing a document in word and see the original authors presence information in the side panel or on the sharepoint site you are editing the document on.  You can click on their name and within seconds be instant messaging, a link to the document in sharepoint gets pasted or the document is shared in real time via application sharing… The conversation starts to flow a little and a couple of clicks later you can be in a Voice over IP call to their IM Client, desk phone or even Mobile phone.  All your changes are made and you save the document back to the sharepoint site, you set the status of the document to final in the document library’s meta-data and walk away…

The status change triggers a workflow, reviewers assigned to your document set are notified by email that a final version is available… they spot a couple of issues and want to talk to you about it via:

1. Email including link to document?
2. Email with document attached
3. Collaboration tool?
4. IM?
5. VoIP/phone?

Questions and queries can often be made quickly and discussed easily via IM or Phone, if the user is not available, then mail is still a very good option.

Comments are discussed, the reviewer finishes their review but still feels more work is required, summary feedback is given via:

1. Email including link to document?
2. Email with document attached
3. Collaboration tool?
4. IM?
5. VoIP/phone?

If the workflow has been set up as described above, it is fair to assume that further workflow will be in place to handle the feedback / approval process, probably with in built email notification. In order to ensure traceability of the review IM or Phone  are not necessarily persistent and many people use their inbox to drive their daily tasks, remembering a long since past conversation could cause confusion at some point.

I’m sure many of my future posts will include more thorough examples of collaboration scenarios and how they can be best utilised to improve employee performance.

Regards,

Steven

Differences between social and workplace technologies

I was glad to see that my previous post provoked an interesting article by David, a good friend of mine who’s blog you can find in my blogroll. David posted an article on fractured online identities.

David made some valid points on the drawbacks of many social networking sites in the public domain, which in turn triggered another essay of an entry by myself on what differentiates public and workplace targetted implementation of social & collaborative technologies.

I will apologies in advance for using both facebook and sharepoint as examples, they are both platforms I am familiar with, and in many cases I will only be using these as illustrations of the points I am making.

One of Dave’s key points that I would like to talk about is the walled and closed off communities that online social networking sites employ and the fragmentation of your online identity by the creation of accounts on each of these. In the workplace this is less of an issue, Active Directory and identity management systems tend to be used to ensure the integrity of an employee’s identity within the workplace systems.  If we then treat each company as a walled community, federation of services allows other trusted company’s to utilise these identities and overcome such problems.

A good example of this is the federation between the company I work for and a partner company, if I log into my corporate instant messaging client (Office Communicator) I can add users from within my own company and that of the partner. When using sharepoint on projects using resources from both companies all of the user information is consistent. 

-If you are using both Office Communicator and SharePoint then you also get embedded presence information and a multitude of communication options, I will cover these in another post soon on Unified Communications which will be the real successor to my previous post.-

There are many ways in which the above one true identity goal has been attempted within the public domain, Microsoft Live IDs (also known as xbox live and MSN Passport), OpenID etc…

However, many social networking sites choose not to use these… why? lets begin with our facebook example:

I would imagine facebook makes a significant amount of revenue from its advertising and application partners, the latter I am uncertain of, but it’s easy enough to spot the facebook applications which actually charge money for features (i.e. the gift application that costs $1 per gift).

So lets focus on the advertising, a typical business model for many websites.

In order for a social networking site to make money from advertising it must have a known userbase of people that will actually see the ads, a simple way to do this is to monitor the number of users you have in your community… and how do you implicitly increase this number? by making anyone who wants to use your site or access the information on your site create a new account, its a lot easier than analysing your web logs.

Great, another login you need to remember, but another statistic for selling adspace: “We have a userbase of X and are growing at Y% each month… wouldnt you like to advertise your products against people with Z in their list of interests?”

So couldn’t social networking sites leverage unified identities? sure, some probably do, even beyond Microsofts own live spaces which integrate in the same way across all Live services (xbox live, live mail, live messenger, live spaces etc…). You only need to create a single list of your interests and when you create a new account on a social networking site and grant permission for the site to pull this information from your identity provider of choice, fantastic.

I can only see a few drawbacks to this ideal, firstly competition between identity vendors, secondly, their adoption by social networking (and other) sites and finally user adoption… the average non techy user who makes up the majority of the internet, who may only log onto a computer in their home once or two times a week… would they know about or care to use such an identity provider, when at the time in question they only want to use one website that all their friends are talking about.  In a couple of months maybe they will want to use a different one instead? if they wanted to use another site would they want to be seen as the same person? or would they want a new alter ego? what if a friend invites you to view something on a site they are signed up to, but you do not trust the site with your contact information… do you want to give it access to your information? and what if your identity provider dissapears off the web?

I personally have two distinct identities, my professional identity and my personal one. A good example of this is that I have two Live Messenger accounts, one for talking with colleagues and one for communicating with friends and family. I can turn the personal one off when at work to ensure I do not get messages during meetings with clients about which pub we will be going to that night.

– I will be covering this further in the next UC post mentioned earlier, control and appropriate methods of communication that is… not which pub we are going to tonight… we’ll be deciding that over sushi later-

Within the workplace, the IT department will typically pick a platform for collaborating.  From a knowledge management perspective it makes sense to unify your information sources, even if you use best of breed platforms at each level, some cohesion between the products is desirable.

To allow multiple platforms with the same functionality and/or dispersed collaboration environments would complicate things greatly… where do you go for that critical information? how many different places do you have to learn to go as a new joiner to the company? which geography and user groups are using what technologies/servers/sites? some world class products still retain this problem if inefficiently implemented.

Thats why companies invest in technologies such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to pull together your corporate repositories that are created with more readily a cheaply available software like the Windows SharePoint Services component of Windows Server 2003/2008 or even smb network shares… The single corporate identity makes this possible, permissions and access levels are retained across systems and your single point of entry is smart enough to filter what you see accordingly regardless of source.

In my opinion the roles of technology in the workplace are better defined, Windows SharePoint Services can be used to create and generate information, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server acts as a portal that pulls together your information into a one stop shop, outlook acts as a think client viewer of your portal or content source to keep the important aspects at your fingertips, RSS is always present to grease the wheels of interoperability… how are these defined outside of the workspace?

Facebook attempts to cover most of these, an individual creates content, the home page provides you with a portal view of all of your friends and your email client / facebook inbox acts as your receptical for messages.  These are all determined by the facebook website and there is no seperation of functionality, there are only a few slight hints at interoperability with RSS feeds for notifications and status updates.

At least in the corporate environment this architecture is determined and planned, technologies evaluated and functionality chosen to suit the needs of the business, a known user group… hardly the be everything to everyone approach online communities are attempting in order to grow the userbase and drive ad revenue.

In my previous post I glossed over the public networks where possible, and used it purely as an example of evolution of the users mindset and acceptance of change, It is a very different game to the corporate environment.

I think a common theme in both Davids post and my own is user adoption is critical to the success of any implementation, be that driven by fad or training. Implementation of a technology will not ensure success within the workplace, users must be willing to accept change, be trained appropriately and it helps if they have a reason to use it… how does it directly make their life easier when they embrace it?

Hopefully I can provide some examples of the latter in future blog posts.

Regards,

Steven

upcoming posts:

Unified Communications: Choosing the right method of communication

Collaboration: Excel V SharePoint (i) with custom views, concurrent editing & notifications

Collaboration: Excel V SharePoint (ii) with workflow, RSS and Outlook integration

Isnt it odd…

…how some people check facebook more than email these days.

It’s a good thing from my professional point of view, but this is quickly becoming a blog post rather than the short facebook message I was about to send a friend.

More and more I find myself communicating with friends via facebook / social networking platform of choice or by reading RSS feeds from their blogs, or by a combination of both: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=23.

From a collaboration point of view, the indirect dissemination of information is fantastic, typically emails are only sent to those the sender thinks wants to see it, however with well constructed social networking platforms the readers can also choose to be told about such things happening in their relevant circles of interest. The obvious benefit of this is that the content is also readily available on a website rather than having to ask someone to forward an email.

Socially this change has been happening for some time, I rarely check my personal emails as most of the time I am contacted through IM or some social networking site that I check via RSS.

How soon is this to being reality for businesses? Microsoft being one of the biggest players in the workspace / productivity arena are making some distinct paths into this approach, SharePoint as a platform is extremely flexible, provides RSS feeds and readers by default and places much more control in the hands of users rather than that of the webmasters, allowing much more relevant content to be disseminated as described above.  Outlook 2007 now has an RSS reader built in, and various other interesting ways to view sharepoint content. 

Note: I am trying really hard at this point not to list out all the extremely cool functionality of both these product sets.

I know there are other players out there, but again, I do not want to go into too much depth and this point and wish to use MS as an example that almost everyone out there has heard of, and most have used MS Office in some shape or form.

So as we now enter the era of Windows Vista (with the release of SP1) and Office 2007 (well, why not if you are upgrading the OS?) will we see more and more take up of alternative communication methods? Probably, but this will not mean the end of email.

Growth of IM in the business is almost a certainty, as happened in the homes of many some time ago. 

Adoption of social platform like intranets, most probably, as we can see happening in peoples homes right now with blogs like these and the massive amounts of social networking users on facebook, myspace, live spaces, bebo, etc…

Email will more than likely than not stay on the table, and the previously mentioned alternatives should certainly not be viewed as replacements, they are complimentary products that provide more options that may often be better suited to the type of communication required for a given purpose than that of a typical email.

One of my biggest bugbears is the emailing of large documents and especially spreadsheets around a project team to “collaborate”, when web based workspaces are available that allow concurrent editing and dynamic viewing.

Again to use the Microsoft example, Excel spreadsheets -> SharePoint Lists.

There are some key benefits to converting excel spreadsheets to a sharepoint list when collecting information from several people, the lists can still be exported to excel for more advanced reporting options, but within sharepoint the concurrent editing, multiple views, event triggers and workflow type behaviour (and even RSS feeds of changes!) add a huge amount of functionality, especially when these types of documents are related to ongoing business processes.

I could even be monitoring all of this from outlook 2007 right alongside my email.

Once (and if) a final set of data has been created, I might IM the large file to a manager, or Email the file to a customer if I need a formal record and proof that it has been sent / received, and also allows for interoperability should they not be using IM or collaborative workspaces.

The signs are all positive that this will happen, and soon we will find those who have grown up with such technologies will easily and readily adopt them in a professional capacity, and greatly enhance their productivity.

Personally, I find this an exciting prospect and I begin to wonder what is next? what new toy will the next generation grow up with that will some day end up in the workplace? what technologies will make some everyday tasks practically dissapear and allow us to spend even more time delving into the important value add activities that hopefully offer some level of personal gratification, reduced learning curves due to wealth and structure of knowledge available.  According to Time Management courses I attended in the past, this could potentially offer reduced stress, better enjoyment of work and ongoing job satisfaction.

I’m sold 🙂

SharePoint site Backup / Migration

[I wrote this entry a little while ago, and is aimed at WSS v2] 

Another frequently asked question, this time around the backup and restoration of a sharepoint site.

Generally the STSADM approach is the best way to do this, as all aspects of the site (including permissions) are backed up.

However there is an alternative using SMIGRATE, which only backs up the site data, and upon restoration all permissions will be reset to default.

SMIGRATE

To backup a site with smigrate:

Smigrate -w http://portal/sites/oldsite -f c:sharepointbackupsitebackup.fwp

To restore a site with smigrate:

create a new site but do not apply a template i.e. when asked for Team Site, Document Workspace etc… close Internet Explorer

Then run

Smigrate -r -w http://testportal/sites/newsite -f c:sharepointbackupsitebackup.fwp

STSADM

I was also going to write a “how to” for STSADM but this link says it all really 🙂

http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/ericc/archive/2006/09/06/3557.aspx

Note: SMIGRATE can be found in “Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions60Bin ” on the sharepoint server or download from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3df85705-5635-40db-adbe-e13ab8684a60&displaylang=en

N.B. I must stress that STSADM should be used instead of SMIGRATE if possible in 99.9% of backup senarios.

Migrating a SharePoint List

I have been asked about this a few times, and recently I was very specifically asked about how to move a Survey on Windows SharePoint Services Version 2.0, however the following will work for any list in WSS v2 and the approach should also be valid with WSS v3, the exact navigation between settings pages however may vary:

If you navigate to the survey you want to move, and select the “modify settings and questions” in the left panel.

One of the options you will be presented with is “save this list as a template” (you will have the option to save the data as well as the actual set of questions)

Once this is completed you will have the option to create a copy of this survey at any time on your site… however, this template should now be available to download from the administration section of your site:

Site Settings –> Go to Site Administration –> Manage List Template Gallery

you should then be able to right click on the templates name and save the stp file locally.

on the site you wish to migrate the survery to, navigate to the same page:

Site Settings –> Go to Site Administration –> Manage List Template Gallery

and upload the template (.stp file)

This template will now be available when you click “create” on your site

OCS Localisation (ii)

So in my previous post, and over at Modality Systems we began looking at the localisation of Office Communicator 2007 to match the Office 2007 installation.  Over the last week I have updated the script to match the language of the OS.

However, this script is reliant on a task during the build of the client placing a variable into the registry.

Since we are using BDD (forerunner to MDT) and SMS OSD to deploy our client, we have several custom tasks and environment variables available to us during the build.  One of these is the “UILanguage” environment variable which contains the language pack to be installed during the build.  In the scenario we have this variable is populated by the BDD database depending on the role assigned to the particular client being built.

The following line of code writes the registry key that we query, this is run in the context of ztiutility.vbs, as a custom task created in BDD.: 

oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREClientIdentificationVistaLanguage", oEnvironment.Item("UILanguage"), "Reg_SZ"

During the install applications phase of the build, following the install of both Office Communicator 2007 and the Office Communicator MUI pack, we execute the below code to localise Office Communicator

Dim iRetVal

On Error Resume Next
iRetVal = OCSLoc
WScript.Quit(iRetVal)
On Error Goto 0

Function OCSLoc()Dim iRetVal
Dim UICode
Dim UILang
Dim strComputer
Dim oReg
Dim arrValueNames
Dim arrValueTypes
Dim strKeyPath
Dim i
Dim oShell
Dim FsoObj1

Const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000001
Const REG_SZ = 1
Const REG_EXPAND_SZ = 2
Const REG_BINARY = 3
Const REG_DWORD = 4
Const REG_MULTI_SZ = 7
Const Success = 0
Const Failure = 1

Set FsoObj1 = CreateObject("scripting.filesystemobject")
set File_out=FsoObj1.CreateTextFile("c:logginglocationOCSLocalisation.log")

set oShell = CreateObject("wscript.Shell")

'//set default/flag values
iRetVal = Failure
OfficeCode = 1033

'//----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'// Check for the UI language and apply to OCS
'//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

File_out.writeline("zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Looking for UI language ID in registry")

'//----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'//This script is executed following deployment from BDD/MDT via SMS OSD
'//During the deployment we tattoo the registry with the "UILanguage" environment variable
'//This is in the format en-US, fr-FR etc...
'//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

UILang = oShell.RegRead("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREClientIdentificationVistaLanguage")
'//Capture error
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
File_out.writeline("zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Office Language Key not found, defaulting to: en-US")
oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftCommunicator MUIDefault Language", 1033, "REG_DWORD"
iRetVal = Success

File_out.Close
Set FsoObj1 = Nothing

Exit Function

End if

File_out.writeline("UI Language Identified as: " & UILang)

'//----------------------------------------------------------------------------
'// Convert Language to LCID i.e. en-US -> 1033 for all supported languages
'//----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Select Case UILang
Case "en-US"
UICode = 1033
Case "nl-NL"
UICode = 1043
Case "fr-FR"
UICode = 1036
Case "de-de"
UICode = 1031
Case "it-IT"
UICode = 1040
Case "ja-JP"
UICode = 1041
Case "es-ES"
UICode = 3082
Case "ar-SA"
UICode = 1025
Case "zh-CN"
UICode = 2052
Case "zh-HK"
UICode = 3076
Case "zh-TW"
UICode = 1028
Case "cs-CZ"
UICode = 1029
Case "da-DK"
UICode = 1030
Case "fi-FI"
UICode = 1035
Case "el-GR"
UICode = 1032
Case "he-IL"
UICode = 1037
Case "hu-HU"
UICode = 1038
Case "ko-KR"
UICode = 1042
Case "nb-NO"
UICode = 1044
Case "pl-PL"
UICode = 1045
Case "pt-BR"
UICode = 1046
Case "pt-PT"
UICode = 2070
Case "ru-RU"
UICode = 1049
Case "sv-SE"
UICode = 1053
Case "tr-TR"
UICode = 1055
Case "bg-BG"
UICode = 1026
Case "hr-HR"
UICode = 1050
Case "et-EE"
UICode = 1061
Case "lv-LV"
UICode = 1062
Case "lt-LT"
UICode = 1063
Case "ro-RO"
UICode = 1048
Case "sr-Latn-CS"
UICode = 2074
Case "sk-SK"
UICode = 1051
Case "si-SI"
UICode = 1060
Case "th-TH"
UICode = 1054
Case "uk-UA"
UICode = 1058
Case Else
UICode = 1033
End Select

File_out.writeline("UICode set to: " & UICode)

If UICode > 999 and UICode < 10000 Then

File_out.writeline("zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Writing language code to OCS key: " & UICode)
oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftCommunicator MUIDefault Language", UICode, "REG_DWORD"
iRetVal = Success

Else

File_out.writeline("zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Language Key not valid, defaulting to: en-US")
oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftCommunicator MUIDefault Language", 1033, "REG_DWORD"
iRetVal = Success

End If

File_out.Close
Set FsoObj1 = Nothing

OCSLoc = iRetVal

End Function

OCS Localisation

As mentioned by John Lamb in his blog over at Modality Systems, we have been looking into automating the localisation of Office Communicator client.

After a bit of thought it seems most obvious to match the language of Office Communicator to the operating system language rather than Office, however before this happened I put together the following code to match the office communicator client to office 2007:


 OfficeCode=oShell.RegRead("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\LanguageResources\UILanguage")
  If Err.Number <> 0 Then
   ologging.CreateEntry "zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Office Language Key not found, defaulting to: en-US", LogTypeInfo 
   oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator MUI\Default Language", 1033, "REG_DWORD"
   iRetVal = Success
   
  Else
   If OfficeCode = 1033 Or OfficeCode = 2052 Or OfficeCode =  1043 _
    Or OfficeCode = 1036 Or OfficeCode = 1031 Or OfficeCode = 1041 _
    Or OfficeCode = 1042 Or OfficeCode = 1046 Or OfficeCode = 3082 _
    Or OfficeCode = 1028 Or OfficeCode = 1030 Or OfficeCode = 1035 _
    Or OfficeCode = 1040 Or OfficeCode = 1053    

    ologging.CreateEntry "zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Writing language code to OCS key: " & OfficeCode, LogTypeInfo 
    oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator MUI\Default Language", OfficeCode, "REG_DWORD"
    iRetVal = Success
   
   Else
   
    ologging.CreateEntry "zAZCFG-OCSLanguage: Office Language Key not supported in OCS MUI, defaulting to: en-US", LogTypeInfo 
    oShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator MUI\Default Language", 1033, "REG_DWORD"
    iRetVal = Success
   
   End If 
   
  End If 

oshell is a windows shell object and ologging is a ZTIUtility file writing parameter.

In the near future I will update with a script to set office communicator to match Vista 🙂

 Steven

Another Japanese Keyboard update – Fix

Following up directly on the previous post, the following vbscript should add the required registry values for the japanese keyboard driver to be used by the Japanese IME:

Option Explicit
Dim ReturnValue
ReturnValue = FixJPKB()

Function FixJPKB()
DIM iRetValue
Dim WshShell

iRetValue=1
set WshShell = CreateObject("wscript.Shell")

WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\LayerDriver JPN", "kbd106.dll", "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\OverrideKeyboardIdentifier", "PCAT_106KEY", "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\OverrideKeyboardSubtype", 2, "REG_DWORD"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\OverrideKeyboardType", 7, "REG_DWORD"

Set WshShell = nothing
iRetValue=0
FixJPKB=iRetValue

End Function

WScript.Quit(ReturnValue)

Since this looks like it may also affect non Japanese IME’s I will update following some tests in case handling of the Korean keyboards is required or if this affects alternate IME’s

USB Japanese Keyboard Driver issue (with Vista)

Following up on my previous post about selecting the correct driver for the Japanese IME, the following microsoft kb article shows how this issue can come about with USB keyboards, and how to edit registry values to select the right driver:

 http://support.microsoft.com/?id=927824