Thoughts on Japan

I have been here for over a year now, and I have come to appreciate a lot of the little things about Japan. Sure Tokyo is a noisy place, things are a bit crowded but there are so many things that make life easy:

• Our condo has 24x7 automated lockers. When a delivery comes and we're not home, they put the box in this locker and code in our address. We can open it with this special card when we get home. You can use that locker to send boxed and dry cleaning, too, and they auto-bill our credit card.
• Chiho found a company called Yoshikei ヨシケイ千葉 that does grocery delivery. The offer a menu of four meals per day and you order whichever one you like and they deliver the pre-measured ingredients to your day. There is almost no additional cost and there is no wastage.
• We have a bread store at our train station and at a nearby grocery store that is way better than anything you'd find in Seattle. All of the French people in my office say that Japanese bakeries are as good as Paris bakeries - some are even better.
• Most utility bills can be paid by direct bank deposit but you can pay all the others at any convenience store - with immediate credit for payment and no additional fee.

And that is just a short list. I will add some of the nice things in Japanese houses later.

Found an answer to my SharePoint question

I posted earlier about the odd behavior of the Advanced Search web part and I think I found my answer. That webpart assumes that you have a Enterprise Search site that was deployed from the MS stock template. There is a results.aspx page that works correctly.

Now, for my next project is to figure out how to get that to work without the Enterprise Search site, since that template is not available.

Clever Workarounds

I found a good SharePoint and IT Project Management website recently called Clever Workarounds http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/. Really a good read on the project management side. Some of his SharePoint tricks are slightly out of date but 90% of them are really good. His project management stuff seems to be pretty much dead-on to me.

It is spring in Tokyo now

Things have been warming up and it is cherry blossom season here in Tokyo. We hit 19 degrees C so right around 70 degrees F yesterday and today. It is quite pleasant around here - almost time to pack up the sweaters and the heavy coats. I didn't take any pictures of the cherry trees and it is already past the best time for pictures - maybe next year.

Indexing PDF files with SharePoint

By default, neither MOSS 2007 or SharePoint Service v3.0 will index the contents of PDF file. The setup process is pretty simple and is outlined on Steven Van de Craen's Blog on an old post of his. I'm made sure to keep of copy of that one around.

Bought a Netbook

We just picked up a netbook for Chiho to use for studying. We picked up a ASUS 1000HE from BIC Camera and took advantage of a promotional from EMOBILE. They are a cellular data provider and if you sign up for a two year data contract, they discount the netbook - just like buying a cell phone, really. The list price of the laptop was just under $450 USD and by signing up for the data plan, the cost was about $30 instead.

EMOBILE's service is Tokyo is really pretty good and they offer 7.3mbs connections. I routinely speed test mine at over 5mbs which seems very good to me. The coverage area is cities only, not up on the mountains, but it covers all of the areas we are likely to travel.

Is Microsoft's technical documentation gettting worse?

I've been assigned a new project, recently, trying to assess Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and I've been digging through the TechNet information. I'm just doing an inital pass, really, nothing in depth, and the documentation is kind of depressing. They have several reference topologies and these little case studies scattered about and they are just pitiful. The reference topolgy diagram is missing some important info - like the number of employees that the topology was designed for? Kind of important to know if the diagram is applicable to 5,000 users or 50,ooo users but that is not there.

I wanted to find out just a few things:

• Is virtualization supported (hyper-v or vmware)
• If so, which roles are good candidates for virtualization
• As you move from simple to complex or small to big, which role can be combined onto one server and which should never be.

Isn't that fairly basic information? Or am I expecting too much for something that is new?