Feeling a bit of a Twit?

Well if you're not then maybe you should be. 

The latest social networking tools are all about micro blogging and the most prominent is Twitter. If you have never been into FaceBook, MySpace or perhaps more appropriately for the business user, LinkedIn or Ecademy, then maybe the emergence of tools like Twitter will change your view.

Behind a very simple interface that does away with all the clutter of the major social networking sites lies a powerful tool that can do more than just entertain. Alongside the Twitter superstars like Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) and Jonathan Ross (@wossy) are networking guru's such as Ivan Misner (@imisner) who clearly see the value of reaching a potentially huge international audience.

The premise is simple, type a short message up to 140 characters long and Tweet it. Follow others and you see their Tweets and your followers see yours. The use may not seem immediately clear but non followers can also see your Tweets through searches, and by using tools like TweetDeck, the people you follow can be grouped and viewed separately.

So if you have a special offer, Tweet it. People searching for your product will pick it up and will be able to reply to you for more information. Want to keep in touch with a particular group of colleagues or friends, get them on board and following each other and put them in a group. 

All of this can be done while on the move with Twitter applications for iPhone, Windows mobile and most other mobile phone formats.

I almost forgot the best part - it's all totally free! So follow me (@kmeson) on Twitter and find out more.

SBS 2008 Premium install

I've just spent the last couple of days doing my first SBS 2008 install and to make it really tough I decided that this would be a dual virtual server configuration using HyperV.

The initial set up went very well and apart from a minor glitch caused by me inadvertently adding the same physical DVD mapping to both machines (soon spotted and resolved) I managed to get them up and running fairly quickly.

I used the second server physical licence to instal a basic server running HyperV role only and then created two virtual Machines for the SBS box and the Second server which is primarily to be used as a Terminal Server for remote users.

Once up and running there were the usual tasks of setting up users and mailboxes and configuring the Firewall to allow traffic through.

I had a lot of trouble getting the TS server to appear on the Remote web Workplace until I realised that there was a new feature in SBS 2008 that means you need to allocate users to the machine from the SBS Control panel (you used to be able to just add them to the RWW Users group but this did not work). 

Then there were a number of issues with the RDP ActiveX client which needed an IE Reset and re-registration of mstscax.dll - who knew?

I thought there would be a number of issues like this - there always are with new versions of Microsoft Products - but so far it's not been to bad and progress has been relatively quick.

It looks like the solution I proposed way back before the release of the software is finally coming to fruition and I'm pleased to say - it's going to work.

Annoying splash screen on remote desktop

If you are the proud owner of a Dell server you may have already found that running a remote desktop or terminal service session to it requires that the Dell desktop image has to load before you can log on. This is a pretty big file so it slows things down to an annoying level and you may want to get rid of it - here's how.

Log on to the machine and run regedit. Browse to the following key:

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop

Look for the String Value "Wallpaper" and either delete it completeley, delete the value or replace the value with a smaller bitmap file reference.

This will get rid of it and next time you log on - no more waiting.

This fix has been posted on numerous sites by numerous people - my thanks to those that posted before me. I figure the more people posting the easier for others to find a fix and that's what it's all about right?