Looks like someone in our office has ordered one too many PCs - and is giving it away. Must be something to do with it being summer?
All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning it, is fill in a very short survey (4 questions). Click here: http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/technet/security/ and follow the link to the IT Professional Security Survey.
There is a catch, and that is that all surveys must be completed before June 30th 2006.
Good Luck
Dave.
Just in case you didn't know, we've re-vamped our local security site www.microsoft.com/ireland/technet/security it now includes some great links to useful info & tools (like the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (MSAT) - It will help identify processes, resources, and technologies that are designed to promote good security planning and risk mitigation practices within your organization). There's also links to some good training, including the Top 10 security related webcasts as voted on by our TechNet audience (you).
Anyway, I encourage you to have a look and to have a 'play' with the MSAT.
Dave
It seems to me that not many people know that Microsoft have a VERY good virtualisation product and that it's FREE.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 (http://www.microsoft.com/virtualserver) knocks the socks off of other FREE virtualisation products and is getting close to its main rival (VMware ESX Server) - it even does things that ESX can't do at the moment (High Availability). And it only gets better...
When we first shipped Virtual Server it was comparable with VMware's GSX product (sitting very high up in the software stack) and it was new - so not many people looked at it (it was never seen as a big player).
With the release of R2, we now run a lot lower down (in the kernel) and we've introduced support for x64 host machines (still 32-bit guests) - which basically means twice as many virtual guest machines per physical server, Support for non-Microsoft guest operating systems AND support for Clustering.
Now think about ANY server you have running, where you didn't consider High Availability. Use our Physical-to-Virtual tool and run that server as a virtual machine. Because Virtual Server is now cluster-able, if you ever need scheduled downtime on the physical box, just fail the resource over onto another node (hibernate: memory to disk, fail over, restore from hibernation: disk to memory) and carry on - all in about 10seconds. If the physical server ever died (for any reason), ordinary clustering kicks in and one of the remaining nodes will spin up the server. High Availability for FREE.
I'll blog again soon about what's coming down the line (where we get better than ESX)..
Not sure if this piece of info ever made it public:
You can all get your hands on Beta 2 of Windows Vista, the 2007 Office release and Exchange Server 2007. All you have to do is register here: http://www.microsoft.com/emea/technet/beta/ireland/default.mspx
Hi, let me start with an apology: I'm bad & haven't been blogging for a month. I know I'm bad and will try to improve - honest.
So I attended an excellent session on Identity & Access Management the other day (week) presented by Rafal Lukawiecki (who, if you don't know, is one of the best speakers on the subject of security ever - he wins the best speaker at TechEd year on year). You'd think that such a session would only last a couple of hours and be pretty 'dry', but Rafal kept us all awake and attentive for an entire day.
I'll not attempt to distil a days content into a single blog, but will point you at the PowerPoints: http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/technet/security/ half way down the page.
That's it - more soon..