Greek chat in Lync

Hidden in Lync is a function where what you write in an IM is automatically translated into most of the world's languages. This works against your Lync and MSN contacts and works so well that via Norwegian you can have a chat dialog in real time with a person from, for example, Italy, Spain or China!

The translator behind it is a Microsoft Bing service similar to translate.google.com. The translations will of course not be perfect, but good enough for you to understand each other.

The location field in Lync

One of the big news in Lync is the ability to let users show the geographical location in the client based on automatic detection of network information. It may not sound powerful, but in practice it is a simple, automagical and good addition to an updated Presence!

The Location Information Server (LIS) can be used here, but this has not been implemented by us. Instead, we manually tell where we are, and Lync remembers it for the next time we come into that network.

Windows 7 deployment at customer

About a year ago, I started playing with the deployment of Windows 7 at a customer site. In the past we have used Ghost here, but increasingly newer operating systems combined with smaller and less uniform machine fleets have put Ghost on the sidelines. Now I run with only 2 images: 1 for 32-bit Windows7 and 1 for 64-bit Windows7. Refueling takes place using standard Microsoft software which is basically available to all our customers. 

The progress has been a bit half-completed for a year due to lack of time, but I have been forced to wrap it all up better. Basically, I use the Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows7. This has been combined with some acquired knowledge from Brian Lee Jackson regarding syspreping a Windows7 machine from start to finish. 

The starting point for running images in/out from a machine is to boot on a WindowsPE CD Rom. I have loaded this disk with a PE Autorun Script that connects a network disk and starts a self-made BAT file with a customized menu system.

These menus give me easy access to download images to the computers as well as the option to retrieve images from a computer, although the latter is not as tailored yet.

The advantage of having the menu on the network disk is that I can now freely change this along the way without having to create new PE CD-ROMs. In the long term, I envision adding a RIS boot option to get started. Time will show...

If others are interested in seeing what has been done here, I have documented the process from A to Z.