Posted by Colette Stallbaumer
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

In the thick of Hollywood’s awards season, the Screen Actors Guild debuted its Drupal-based website hosted on Windows Azure.  The SAG Awards site is a highly visible, high-traffic website and hosting it on Azure provides an open, scalable, public cloud environment.  SAG can tune up or down the compute and storage requirements according to expected website loads, thereby getting a more scalable, manageable and cost-effective solution for running its site. 

During the SAG Awards event, the site saw more than 300,000 visitors, supporting multiple uploads of pictures and news articles, and handling the spike in site traffic with ease.  Erin Griffin, CIO of SAG described the solution: “Understanding the best usage scenario for us took time and effort, but with help from Microsoft, we successfully moved our site to Windows Azure and the biggest traffic day for us went off with flying colors.”

Go to the Openness site for more on the broader efforts by Microsoft and Drupal to provide customers with interoperability solutions, as well as the Port25 blog for more details on SAG's Drupal on Azure website.  Let us know in the comments what other content management scenarios you'd like to see supported.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager – Worldwide Marketing and Operations

In the past, developers using HTML5, CSS and other open web technologies have consulted multiple sites for guidance on how to effectively use these technologies across the world of browsers, operating systems, and devices – a time consuming chore that drove increased development costs.

Today the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in collaboration with Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others, announced a solution to this developer dilemma with the alpha release of Web Platform Docs.

Web Platform Docs is a new wiki-style community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. Web professionals can save time and resources by consulting the trustworthy repository for current, cross-browser and cross-device coding best practices, including informative tutorials for existing and new technologies.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Windows Azure Media Services is now generally available for customers looking for a platform to create, manage, and distribute media in the cloud. With this new service, businesses can now quickly build a media distribution solution that can stream audio and video to Windows, iOS, Android, and other devices and platforms.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Business customers around the world can now purchase the on-premises versions of the new Office products – Office 2013, Exchange Server 2013, Lync Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, Project 2013 and Visio 2013. The new Office gives customers a comprehensive set of productivity tools to help them do their best work in a world of devices and services.

Here are a few highlights of the new Office:

• Works beautifully with touch, stylus, mouse or keyboard. It gives you the best experience on Windows and brings the familiar Office experience to a wide range of new devices, including Office Mobile apps on Windows phone, as well as OneNote and Lync Mobile on iOS and Android phones.
• Inherently social with real-time news feeds for people, documents and discussions, high-definition video conferencing, shared notebooks and virtual whiteboards.
• Provides security features, including data loss prevention, compliance management, built-in malware protection, and flexible deployment options across on-premises and in the cloud.
• Is in the cloud. Coupled with new cloud services available next year, the new Office will save your documents to SkyDrive by default, and your personalized settings, templates and documents will travel with you.

The on-premises Office 2013 products are available now, with their cloud counterparts coming early next year. Give the new Office a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Posted by Darryl Welch
Principal Program Manager, Windows Server Interoperability Engineering Team

Over at The Register this month, Trevor Pott praised Windows Server 2012, detailing his favorite features all culminating in what he calls the “crown jewel of [Windows] Server 2012”: SMB 3.0. SMB, along with its predecessor CIFS, are the most widely-used file-access protocols in the world.

However, SMB 3.0 isn’t a Microsoft-only endeavor. A critical aspect of Windows Server 2012 development is the ecosystem dedicated to shipping SMB 3.0 capable systems. We have been working closely with many companies and organizations by participating in “plugfest” events that provide opportunities for testing and feedback, as well as providing extensive protocol documentation.