J. Peter Bruzzese

There's no doubt about it -- Facebook has people's attention this week. With an IPO going live and public stock trading due by Friday, it's no wonder everyone is getting ready for one of the most exciting public offerings to date. A hot IPO doesn't ultimately matter to IT, but the implications of Facebook's business model do.

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There's no doubt about it -- Facebook has people's attention this week. With an IPO going live and public stock trading due by Friday, it's no wonder everyone is getting ready for one of the most exciting public offerings to date. A hot IPO doesn't ultimately matter to IT, but the implications of Facebook's business model do.

How's that? The Facebook revenue model is based on self-serve advertising, engagement ads, and games -- all ways that will let employees waste even more time at work while consuming your network resources. Consider the time-wasting nightmare you might be allowing into your company if you unlock those firewalls and let Facebook in. On top of employees updating their timeline and jabbering about life when they should be working, they are also being marketed to and playing Mafia Wars on company time.

I don't live in a bubble. Daily, I go to a variety of periodicals to fill me in on the facts and opinions floating around the stratosphere. This week, I read Serdar Yegulalp's post in the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog titled "How Microsoft's 'silent majority' hurts Windows," which brought up serious concerns users have been expressing about UI changes in Windows 8 and Office 15. It highlights the term "user telemetry" and explains that many changes are based on data coming in from users' actual behavior in Microsoft software, such as when search is used or which menus are accessed and in what order. Some people believe the term serves as a buzzphrase to give Microsoft carte blanche to do whatever it likes with the UI, regardless of users' complaints.

I came away feeling down. Then I read the CNN Money post "Microsoft's master plan to beat Apple and Google" by David Goldman. It looked not only at Windows 8 but at three products that, collectively, could change the game in Microsoft's favor: Windows on the desktop and tablet (that is, Windows 8), the Xbox gaming console, and the Windows Phone mobile operating system.

I remember when IP-based videoconferencing first became an option in the enterprise. It wasn't cheap or very good in the early days, though at the time it seemed awesome (remember CU-SeeMe in the early 1990s?). Today, we have more capable tools such as Skype and FaceTime that shrink the distance between people like never before. It's easy to see why these tools are widely used: I'm heading off to Microsoft next week for the MVP Summit and will be away from my family for four days. My son is at the age where a parent's absence can be unsettling. For him, FaceTime videoconferencing is a lifesaver. He walks around with my wife's iPad and talks to me via FaceTime as if I were right there, which calms his separation anxiety. To me, it's the best thing about an iPad.

Similarly amazing videoconferencing technology can be used in your business, yet few take advantage of it.

I recently received a call from a California library with about 15 employees; they had a problem connecting to their on-premise Exchange environment. After a few questions, I determined it was a brand-new installation of Exchange, and there were connectivity problems through Outlook Web App involving certificates, as well as ActiveSync issues. What started as a simple pro bono assist turned into hours of troubleshooting to see where Exchange was improperly set up. It's clear that these small-business IT guys don't have the training to deploy a system as complex as Exchange.

At some point I asked the library head, "Why didn't you go with a hosted solution, like Office 365?" He'd never heard of it. That didn't surprise me, but I wondered if his IT admin had known of it or understood how it would've saved money on new hardware and software, along with the frustration that goes along with it. This incident marks the third time I've experienced such Exchange drama and Office 365 ignorance in just the past week.

In mid-2010 I had the pleasure of being introduced to the possibilities of Windows Intune -- Microsoft's cloud-based desktop management service for Windows XP SP3, Vista, and 7 PCs -- at a special workshop at TechEd for journalists. It was finally released early in 2011, then updated in October 2011 to version 2.0. Intune lets small and medium-size businesses (those with as many as 500 users) manage systems through an $11-per-user-per-month subscription cloud service accessed through a browser. It's convenient for companies concerned about having to manage an on-premise server like System Center Configuration Manager.

Microsoft is now working on Version 3.0 of Intune and taking the opportunity to fix some of the remaining gaps in the service.

Although it isn't even in beta, the Windows 8 Developer Preview edition is already getting tweaked and having its hidden features exposed by fanboys (and girls) and developers alike. Here are eight tips, tricks, and tools that are worth knowing about if you plan on playing with Windows 8 today.

Tip 1: Get back your Start menu
If you are like me, you installed the preview on a desktop (in my case, I installed it in a virtual environment) and not a tablet. On a touchless PC, the new Metro UI may not be the most comfortable method of working with Windows 8.

You might imagine that the best place to go for improving your Microsoft server-side experience is to the mothership itself. In many cases, you would be right. But the truth is there are a meaningful number of open source tools that go above and beyond what Microsoft has to offer in support of Windows Server, Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint. Many of these alternatives provide -- for free -- more powerful capabilities than what you'd get with third-party retail products.

Microsoft itself has acknowledged this fact, facilitating the availability of open source tools for Microsoft admins through its CodePlex site. Microsoft, too, can be relied on for a few clear winners when it comes to free tools.

You might imagine that the best place to go for improving your Microsoft server-side experience is to the mothership itself. In many cases, you would be right. But the truth is there are a meaningful number of open source tools that go above and beyond what Microsoft has to offer in support of Windows Server, Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint. Many of these alternatives provide -- for free -- more powerful capabilities than what you'd get with third-party retail products.

Microsoft itself has acknowledged this fact, facilitating the availability of open source tools for Microsoft admins through its CodePlex site. Microsoft, too, can be relied on for a few clear winners when it comes to free tools.

For those of you running a voicemail system in addition to an Exchange 2007 or 2010 on-premises environment, perhaps you haven't heard the news. Exchange provides a voicemail system that can not only take the place of your voicemail but provide for a universal inbox that puts voicemail notifications right in your mailbox. It can also transcribe the messages using its speech-to-text engine and allows you to connect to your calendar, phone directory, and email through Outlook Voice Access.

Despite all these features, Microsoft's unified messaging is not being deployed as rapidly as you would expect. Although companies are deploying Exchange 2010 rapidly, for some reason they're not doing unified messaging at the same time.

Ever heard of the term "money pit"? Dictionary.com defines it as "any entity or venture which requires more money for maintenance and drains financial resources." Some would say that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), despite promising great savings over individual desktops, is nothing but a money pit.

That claim seems odd because VDI on paper is incredibly cheap -- so where is the money going? It turns out that much of it is heading toward storage. Three storage factors conspire to goose VDI costs: the excessive amount of storage needed, the lack of storage optimization for VDI, and the fact that storage throughput becomes an expensive performance bottleneck.