Microsoft

I saw this and wondered if anyone wants to attend? Microsoft Webcast: Security Intelligence Report Debrief: July to December 2006 (Level 200) Thursday, June 14, 2007 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada) This public webcast is designed to bring you up to speed on some of the latest threats that Microsoft’s customers and partners are dealing with today. The webcast is presented by the former vice president of the Anti-virus Research and Vulnerability Emergency Response Team (AVERT) for McAfee, Vinny Gullotto. For the past year Vinny has been working as the General Manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (formerly known as MSAV). Please feel free to attend the webcast and to invite customers and/or partners as well. Simply use this link to register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032340085&Culture=en-US ttfn David

It has been around for a little while now, but this is a MUST do for us - whether you think things are great or poor. Please fill in the survey and then we can stay up all night and look at the results using the latest holo-projection equipment to understand the multi-dimensional nature of what it takes to please our small business partners. If you don't fill it in, then my R2-D2 projection system will not be used and we will take the 3 replies (two posted by me as a test) and you only get one answer this year. OK, so this is a little humorous, but I hope you get the idea - we need the feedback to make things even better. Don't think you only need to answer it if you need to moan, or you think things are great. Confirming things either way (or even the fact that we have more than one type of partner out there) is all "goodness" as one of my managers used to say. Have I said enough yes? Fill it in, send it off, spank us if we don't respond! Announcing the SBS Community Survey for 2007! The...

I will be updating the OS that UKSBSGUY.com runs on in the next 24 hours, so expect a couple of hours downtime later. ttfn David

There was a short burst on e-mail the other day about this, but I thought I would share. The situation was that someone was adding SBS to an existing domain, not a problem, but the existing domain had some trusts set up. Since SBS does not support trusts things did not go well. So, to follow up we need to remind everyone that when doing this you get a short period of time to make everything within the SBS constraints or things stop working. Details on how to do all of this are documented in the Knowledge Base (KB)article mentioned below. Here are the bones of the internal notes: You can add one SBS to an existing domain, but the SBS requirements have to be met within a certain grace period. (14 days, according to KB 884453 .) By the end of that grace period: The new SBS 2003 computer must be a domain controller that is installed on the root of the domain. The new SBS 2003 computer must hold all the Flexible Single Master Operation (FSMO) roles. The new SBS 2003 computer must be a global catalog server and must...

Again from the Trends Blog . Big, color e-paper E-paper Still Coming Soon: LG.Philips LCD Teases World With A4 Color Electronic Paper “This is their all-new, world-first A4 electronic paper, a 4,096-color flexible 14.1-inch page made using “metal foil and plastic substrates rather than glass.” They only use power when the image changes and since they are reflective like real paper, they can be seen perfectly from any angle. Even under direct sunlight.” Slightly-flexible displays LOLED: Sony Flexi-OLED Screen Is Trouble Waiting to Happen “Today Sony showed off some 2.5-inch OLED screens that are capable of being slightly bent. It is made out of a glass substrate and is only .3mm thick. Supposedly the display has been created for lightweight, bigger and “softer” electronics” Interactive paper Digital paper with interactivity and sound “By combining paper with printed graphic codes and electronically conductive ink that is engineered to be sensitive to pressure. When the paper buttons are touched, the sound is played...

Microsoft Announces Product Offerings and Customer Early Access Program for Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM - This could be huge - $44 per calendar month per user for Professional CRM and $59 for Enterprise edition (Professional Edition plus offline support)!!! Then, when you thought it was not so good for partners, look at the models: With the new Live service, partners in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM ecosystem will have new opportunities to deliver value to their customers and to drive revenue for their businesses by developing and deploying solutions across the three deployment options — Live, on-premise and partner-hosted models . For revenue in the new Live model, partners will be compensated on a recurring basis, not a one-time basis; each year they will receive 10 percent of the yearly Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription revenue for each customer for whom they are the partner of record. During 2008, a special incentive will allow partners to receive 15 percent of the SaaS subscription revenue for that year...

I saw on the OneCare blog that a new beta is out this can be signed up for at Windows Live OneCare 2.0 Beta . I like OneCare - while it has it cranky moments (like I have to manually remove the old product to install the beta) it works better than some others I could mention without killing my machine or network. It is the product that I have bought for my home to protect it. According to the sign up site, this is what OneCare does. Windows Live OneCare 2.0 Beta - All-in-one security and performance for all your PCs Windows Live OneCare is an automatically self-updating PC care service that's on whenever your PC is on, helping provide persistent protection against viruses, hackers, and other threats. It also performs regular tune-ups to help keep your PC running at top speed, and helps you back up important documents. Runs quietly in the background, providing anti-virus, anti-spyware, online identity and scam protection (anti-phishing) and firewall protection Updates itself to help you keep ahead of the latest...

The Video I have delivered a number of Vista and Office demos over my time, so I decided to record a number of them for others to borrow, use, learn from or anything else they choose. This video covers the following subjects in enough detail for people to hopefully understand what they need to know on how to use these features in Windows Vista and understand how to be a little safer online: Phishing protection in Internet Explorer ActiveX blocking in Internet Explorer Windows Defender in Windows Vista To see the video played using Silverlight (just try it) click here *. I am hoping that in the near future that the WMV file will be available at new bCentral - the UK Small Business Center on MS.com. At the moment it is not available there, but a copy can be found here * it will take a few moments to open if you have Silverlight installed and require you to download Silverlight if you don't, but it is a 1MB download How I made it I simply ran through part of my normal demo talking as I went. When presenting to...

M icrosoft Windows Vista: Doing Deployment Right! This one-day session is a combination of presentations that focus on growing services opportunities for partners, and a series of new technical exercises that highlight some of the compelling new design enhancements in deploying Windows Vista desktops. Click here to enrol. ttfn David Technorati Tags: Vista , Deployment , Training

[updated to correct grammar in title - thanks to Warren Jacobi for pointing it out to me] I have been hearing about these at work - I don't have them yet, so can't comment on them, but apparently they will be going to trial soon and then out via updates. 938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are: • Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver. • Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista. • Resolves an issue...

Hi folks, this is a really simple one - I had the pleasure of answering some questions at a TechNet chat a few weeks back - that chat has now had a polished transcript published on the web at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/sbs/07_0713_tn_sbs.mspx . thanks David Technorati Tags: SBS , SBS 2003 , SBS 2003 R2 , Technet , Chat

From the register I saw the article " Virtualization Software to Crush Server Market " and it sort of made me laugh. Last year saw a dramatic drop in growth of Server shipments, both Microsoft and non-Microsoft. One explanation given is that virtualisation has increased so much that less servers are being bought, but the growth was still strong, just not in actual servers. I have seen the growth of virtual servers, but don't think it really accounts for the hundreds of thousands of servers that fill the gap that appeared in the research last year. VMWare's growth does not account for this, nor does the impact on Windows licensing that would be seen. Analysts and executives came out this week and declared that x86 server shipments will likely decline as VMware, Microsoft, and a host of startups push their virtualization wares at speed. In a rare feat, Schwartz and Sacconaghi also happen to agree about another trend that virtualization will drive. They're claiming that customers will buy larger...