Ramblings from another nerd on the grid
I can’t believe this is actually for sale. Wow.
The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) brings together the brightest IT professionals from around the world to increase their technical expertise through deep hands-on training, best-practice sharing, and interaction with innovators in desktop, device, and datacenter management, as well as cloud technologies.
When we say deep, we mean it – with session content delving into the 300 and 400 level. Only hard-core geeks will feel comfortable in this exclusive setting. With keynotes, sessions, hands-on labs, certification opportunities, and face-to-face access to Microsoft and industry experts, MMS provides a “can’t-miss” opportunity to be among the first to learn about new technologies.
See http://www.2013mms.com/register for registration information.
The Remote Desktop Services team just published some great videos explaining the new Remote Desktop Services available in Windows Server 2012. You’ll find new videos on the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, VDI wizard, RDS VDI Deployment, and more.
See the full blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/12/11/new-windows-server-2012-remote-desktop-services-showcase-videos.aspx.
Here’s the VDI Overview video
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments, including ROI analysis for server consolidation with Hyper-V. Learn more.
MAP is one of the tools provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Security Compliance Manager provide tested guidance and automated tools to help organizations plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies—easier, faster, and at less cost. All are freely available, and fully-supported by Microsoft. Learn more. The MAP Toolkit includes the following components:
Go get it @ http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?&id=7826.
See http://www.mercier-jones.com/index.html for more information and the cool gallery. I’d like a red one.
When the winds and waves of Hurricane Sandy bore down ferociously on New York City, at least two Microsoft SMB customers were ready. Microsoft partner WorkITsafe had just helped these customers upgrade to the Windows Server 2012 operating system with the new built-in Hyper-V Replica feature. As a result, their IT systems experienced minimal interruption as the hurricane flooded the surrounding area and required employees to hunker down at home. In this post, WorkITsafe President Steve Rubin tells how Windows Server 2012 protected his customers’ businesses—and has the potential to protect many more.
See the rest of this story on Microsoft Vice President Cindy Bates blog.
At the Social Innovation Summit in Silicon Valley, Microsoft announced the five winners of the second annual Imagine Cup Grant. We’re particularly excited as four of the winners developed their apps on Windows Azure.
Grant winners all participated in the Imagine Cup 2012 Worldwide Finals, a global competition that invites students to develop a technology and create a business plan while gaining a keen understanding of what they need to do to bring their concept to market. Winners will receive funding to jumpstart their projects into mainstream nonprofit and social enterprise opportunities.
See the full blog post and details at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/12/04/windows-azure-powers-imagine-cup-experience.aspx.
There are also two fantastic tutorials available in the mobile dev center. The first provides a walkthrough of the basics of configuring your iOS app for push and sending push notifications. The second details how to use a table to store APNS tokens that can then be used to send push notifications to an app’s users.
Just as important as understanding how to use these push notifications, is understanding when to use a push notification versus an SMS versus an email. The easy answer is that it depends on the app.
See this informative blog post in it’s entirety at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/12/10/best-practices-for-using-push-notifications-sms-and-email-in-your-mobile-app.aspx.
Merry Christmas! Hope everyone has a great holiday! See you next year.
From time to time Microsoft VP, Frank Shaw, likes to do a blog post that has some numbers to indicate the scope of what we do at Microsoft. We thought you might enjoy a few numbers around our Cloud services. If the graphic above is too small, go ahead and click it and the full sized version will be fetched. Enjoy.
Client Hyper-V® is the virtualization technology built into Windows® 8. Client Hyper-V is the same virtualization technology previously available only in Windows Server®. A similar functionality in Windows 7 is called Windows XP Mode. Client Hyper-V enables you to run more than one 32-bit or 64-bit x86 operating system at the same time on the same host computer. But instead of working directly with the computer’s hardware, the operating systems run inside a virtual machine (VM). Hyper-V enables developers and IT professionals to easily maintain multiple test environments and provides a simple mechanism to quickly switch between these environments.
There’s a great starter guide at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36188.