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

More and more governments around the world are making their data open and publicly available. Citizens benefit from a new level of transparency and real time information. Governments can tout increased engagement with their constituents and efficiencies in administration. Businesses and developers win with new opportunities to innovate and create value-added applications.

This Open Data trend is increasingly relevant to governments because of the substantial value in judiciously sharing data with constituents as a means to transform government services delivery. By enabling access to the data, individuals are empowered to draw their own conclusions and use the data to improve their communities. Sharing data across government departments also supports more insightful analytics and when data is open, departments update on the fly without initiating time consuming requests for current data.

Microsoft has worked with many government entities worldwide to “open up” their data repositories and implement Open Data solutions, providing innovative ways to drive transparency and engage with citizens, as well as realize the full benefits of mobile access, social media, and crowdsourcing.

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.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Microsoft is dedicated to ensuring that our software, services, and devices work easily across our platforms, especially with the global shift in IT toward the Cloud. With this in mind, we continue to work with other technology companies, both commercial and open source, to streamline interoperability and enhance functionality.

Among these companies is the team at OpenLogic, who have worked with Microsoft over the past year to bring their supported CentOS images to Windows Azure Virtual Machines, giving CentOS users a Microsoft public Cloud option in addition to the existing private Cloud support for CentOS running on Windows Server Hyper-V. With Windows Azure Virtual Machines, currently in preview, users can easily deploy and run Windows Server and Linux virtual machines in minutes in the public Cloud and migrate existing workloads without having to change existing code in the majority of the cases.

OpenLogic’s CEO, Steven Grandchamp, and Director of Engineering and Co-founder, Eric Weidner, recently offered perspectives on their work with CentOS and affirmatively answered the question “Linux…with Microsoft…really?”

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager of Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Yesterday’s preview release of VM Depot for Windows Azure marked an exciting milestone for the openness of Microsoft’s cloud platform, giving customers another way to transition to the cloud on their terms.

VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images for Windows Azure, including preconfigured operating systems, applications, and development stacks. Find your favorite open source software and deploy it in minutes, or join the community, build a virtual machine image, and share it with others.