The Windows Vista Customer Preview Program will close to new orders on the evening of Friday, June 30th June.  For registered customers who have received a Product Key the download sites will remain open until Friday, July 14. This also includes all TechNet Beta Central registered users who did not yet get a Product Key as have reached our program capacity. We apologize for any inconvenience.

For those of yuo who have yet to register for the beta you can still do so here (for the moment): http://www.microsoft.com/emea/technet/beta/ireland/default.mspx

This week you could be in with a chance to win a Windows Vista Capable tablet PC.  All you have to do is to take part in our security survey: Answer 4 simple questions online, provide your contact details and we will enter your name into a draw for the latest Toshiba M400 Tablet PC (spec: 1.8GHz, 2GB memory, 70GB HDD, 64MB graphics card).  All surveys must be completed before June 30th 2006 and Terms and conditions [http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/technet/security/terms.asp] apply.  I’m looking for your feedback to ensure that we here on the TechNet Ireland team can deliver the security information and resources to you in the best way possible.  Watch this space from some more useful resources on their way as security is of paramount importance to us.

The next meeting of the SBS Ireland user group on June 27th. The agenda is being finalised at present but will look at integrating SBS and ISA as well as look at firewalls and data protection from SonicWall.

For more detail and registration please visit the SBS website.

Often people contact me as they might have missed an event or are looking for additional content on a particular product or technology.  Usually webcasts form an important past of my follow up with them as they really are great for drilling into things.

People can attend live webcasts and ask their specific questions to the experts online or they can download an achieved webcast and simply skip to the bits that are most relevant for them - either are good depending on you need.

To enable you to root out the specific webcasts that might be of use to you out I wanted to provide you a link to this very practical tool that enables you to search by product/audience/on-demand/live webcasts.

If you have any other questions or comments in this regard don't hesitate to contact me.

We recently had a great security event in Belfast.  Rafal Lukawiecki, the renouned international speaker presented Identity and Access Management for a hetrogenious environment to a packed house.

I'm sure a lot of people who didn't make it to the event would find the presentations of value so I've loaded them onto the security homepage.  You’ll find them under the heading Rafal Lukawiecki - IT Security Event.

I’ve also included some useful security resources on that page like the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool,  which you can install it on your PC to obtain information and recommendations about best practices to help enhance security within your IT infrastructure. 

Rafal also mentioned a number of security webcasts on the day so I've included a link to some of those also.

If there is anything else I can help you with please don’t hesitate to let me know.