There has been a lot of talk about Windows Azure since the announcement back at PDC. What does it actually mean for you as a IT Pro in your organisation? James Bannan aka Windows Warrior from APC Pro interviewed our Microsoft CTO Greg Stone around what Windows Azure really means for IT Pros. ”For IT Pros and CIOs, Azure presents some very different opportunities. In the past, implementing a new application or business service required you to think about all the supporting infrastructure you’d need to make it work. Then, once that application was up and running but needed a future change, you’d have to consider all the changes needed to that supporting infrastructure, and this can be particularly complex and onerous. With Azure, Microsoft are providing not only the bare metal, the operating system and the virtualized environment, but also all the tools needed for management and data persistence in a fully-distributed environment. This means that IT Pros are making more decisions in terms of trade-offs, SLAs, load balancing, resourcing, scalability and so on, rather than the current day-to-day practises which involve a lot of time spent in repetitive tasks like management and fine-tuning. For IT Pros, the net benefit of Windows Azure is that they will be able to push these maintenance and management tasks out into the global datacenters, and then focus on high-level issues. In concrete terms, we’ve done things like making the backend far more componentised and far more explicitly described. For IT Pros this means that rather than having to build infrastructure around the requirements of an application, they can now model infrastructural and application requirements and bring the two together in a business-specific SLA. Behind the scenes, this will be handled by the Azure platform.” Check out the full article here
We ran our first TechNet Live! event 2 weeks ago using Live Meeting and will be running another one this week.
Title: Deploying Windows Vista into you Organisation
Abstract: In this session we will look at how to automate deployment of Windows Vista for small, medium, and large scale deployment scenarios. The session explores applications that help IT Professionals assess existing resources before deploying Vista SP1 operating system such as Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator and System Center Essentials. We will cover application deployment and planning scenarios to ensure that the right applications are deployed and to accelerate deployment for Vista desktop computers. We will over Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0 to ensure productivity applications can be deployed on Windows Vista seamlessly and User State Migration tool to migrate existing operating system settings. The session will explore small organization deployment scenarios that will walk you through deploying Windows Vista SP1 using Windows Deployments Services, Windows Update, and Windows Automated Installation Kit. For midsize businesses we will deploy Windows Vista SP1 using System Center Essentials to existing Windows Vista computers and Windows Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2008 to provision new computers for Windows Vista SP1. System Center Configuration Manager will be used for large scale deployments and Windows Server Update Services for updating Windows Vista clients to Windows Vista SP1.
Date: Friday December 12th 2008 Time: 11:00AM – 12:15PM (GMT +10 Sydney Daylight Savings Time) Location: Live Meeting Click here to Register
With today's launch of the Customer Preview Program (CPP) for Windows Vista® Service Pack 2 (SP2), we wanted to provide a brief synopsis of the elements in this service pack, and encourage you to download and test this release. Windows Vista SP2 is a traditional service pack release with all cumulative released security updates available since the SP1 release in March 2008. In addition, Windows Vista SP2 includes support for new types of hardware and emerging standards that will grow in importance in coming months, along with fixes discovered via automated error reporting as part of our Customer Experience Improvement program. What makes the Windows Vista SP2 release unique is that it represents a single service pack which applies to both client (Windows Vista SP1) and server (Windows Server 2008) operating systems—since the code base for Windows Vista is shared with that for Windows Server® 2008, a single update can be deployed across your infrastructure. This service model also provides the ability to detect an incompatible driver and block service pack installation, or warn users of any loss of functionality during installation. Other highlights for IT pros include: Emerging Hardware Support