Windows Live Mesh – Tech Preview June 19, 2008
Posted by balajinjl in Live Mesh.Tags: Cloud, Live Mesh
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Windows Live Mesh is Microsoft’s new ‘In the Cloud’ service. It currently provides the following services
- Connects your devices to the cloud and remotely controls them from any of the connected devices. Devices are PCs and Mobile phones. Currently only PCs are supported.
- Creates a ‘Desktop’ in the cloud. Meaning you can store files on a remote share
- News – not sure about this yet.
This service is by invitation only. Once you are approved, you need to download and install the Live Mesh software. Installation is breeze, just a few clicks and you are done. You can connect to the cloud in two ways. Via browser and using Live Mesh client installed on your machine.
Connect devices and remotely control them
- You can add a device by clicking the + sign. Once added, you will get an icon assigned for that device. You can notice that I have added my Work and Home laptop to the cloud.
- By clicking on the device and ‘Connect’ button, you can remotely connect to the device.
- The remote computer gets a pop up “Requesting permission’ to connect. By default permission is granted to connect to the device.
- Once connected the screen exactly looks like ‘Windows Remote Desktop Connection’ screen. You can click the ↗ icon and expand the screen to cover the entire desktop.
- To disconnect the remote desktop just close the window by clicking the x in top right corner.
I love this than any other remote control programs in the market. Connection is fast, seamless and works across corporate firewalls. If you are used to ‘Remote Desktop Connection’ in Windows, you will be at home with this. Best part is cut & paste works across the remote desktops.
Desktop in the cloud (Shared folders)
- When you click the ‘Desktop’ button on the top, you get the Cloud desktop.
- Currently it lets you to create folders and store documents in them.
When you install Live Mesh, it installs a notification window in the bottom right notification area. Clicking the Live Mesh icon pops up a window as show below.
You can also use this to remotely connect to your device or desktop.
So far I like the remote desktop feature and having fun with it.
More later,
-Balaji NJL
Customizing Access Denied Page in MOSS 2007 June 18, 2008
Posted by balajinjl in MOSS 2007.Tags: MOSS 2007
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Sometimes you get a requirement to customize the default ‘Access denied page’ in MOSS 2007. For beginners, don’t confuse this page with IIS 401 ‘Access denied’ page. They are completely different. Request for customizing access denied page generally means, having the same look and feel of the rest of the site. In my experience this is easier said then done.
After researching I found the following options available on the net
1. If you want to just change the content of the access denied page then modify the resources text in resources pages (http://blogs.msdn.com/sridhara/archive/2007/04/14/customizing-placeholder-values-in-moss-2007.aspx) . This won’t help our scenario. We want to customize the entire page and it should have same look and feel of the rest of the site.
2. Change the ‘Access denied page’ completely as mentioned here (http://blogs.tamtam.nl/mart/CustomizingTheLayoutsFiles.aspx). But this is not MS recommended scenario as future updates may replace the access denied page. Microsoft published a workaround for this (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944105) but again doesn’t look very clean.
3. Create a HTTP module as mentioned here (http://blogs.msdn.com/bgeoffro/archive/2007/11/12/branding-a-moss-corporate-intranet-portal-part-3-layouts-pages.aspx) . This one is too tedious.
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t recommend changing this page because these are system pages and any future updates may overwrite these changes. So I choose the workaround as suggested by Microsoft and created a backup of the ‘Layouts’ folder. Then
- Backed up ‘accessdenied.aspx’ page as ‘accessdenied_original.aspx’
- Created a new ‘accessdenied.aspx’ page
- We cannot inherit this page from existing default.master page because master page is not in the file system and the security context for master page is different from access denied page. So there is no other option than copying the entire master page code into the new ‘accessdenied.aspx’ page.
- We need to then physically delete master page controls in the access denied page. Go through the code and delete all the asp:ContentPlaceHolder code.
- In Visual Studio switch between design view and code view and remove all the control errors
- Add the required content in the accessdenied.aspx page
- Save the page and now browse to the new accessdenied.aspx page directly (http://<yoursitename>/_Layouts/AccessDenied.aspx)
- Everything looks good? – Good! You think you are done with access denied page. No not yet.
For some reason re-login feature (“Sign in as Different user”) is implemented via access denied page. Click on your name in the top right corner and select ‘Sign in as different user’. You will get access denied page. Strange but it is true!! No idea why it is done this way (other than someone took a shortcut approach).
So now, you need to implement the ‘Sign in as different user’ login in your new accessdenied.aspx page. This can be done in two ways
- You can choose to implement the entire logic including the javascript and other controls in the new accessdenied.aspx page
- Or redirect users to ‘accessdenied_original.aspx’ based on the value in querystring for ‘loginasanotheruser’.
I choose the later approach in my implementation. We tested different scenarios and everything looks good so far.
HTH,
-Balaji NJL
