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You can make decisions as you design and deploy your Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that will have an impact on how quickly your Windows desktops start and become usable to your users. Some of these decisions are obvious, while many are not. This post will guide you through some of the ways Group Policy...

Hyper-V 3.0 in many ways is the crown jewel of our enterprise virtualization and private cloud strategy and is the heart of where many of the improvements in our flagship Server OS reside. So we should probably talk about what has improved since our previous Hyper-V releases, and what you can do with...

Make Windows Azure Your Datacenter! This Jump Start will help you understand how you can use Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, such as Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks, to migrate, extend, run, manage and monitor common workloads in the cloud. The jumpstart will be led by Microsoft Lead Azure...

Yesterday we announced that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, including 125 million that are accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile...

The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) brings together the brightest IT professionals from around the world to increase their technical expertise through an intensive week of training led by experts in desktop, device management, datacenter, and cloud technologies. Checkout the ASKCORE listing of selected...

It’s here. It’s here. It’s here. Yep, the 2013 Windows PowerShell Scripting Games are finally here, and today is the official kickoff. Launched this morning at the first community organized International PowerShell Summit taking place in Redmond, Washington this week, the 2013 Scripting...

This morning we announced the general availability release of our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) support for Windows Azure – including our new Virtual Machine and Virtual Network capabilities. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support...

Microsoft’s 2013 Spring CIO Summit takes place April 9-10 and will host more than 200 CIOs from companies across the US. Registration for the in-person CIO Summit is at capacity, but that doesn’t mean any of Microsoft’s customers have to miss out. This year the virtual CIO Summit is...

A datasheet recently published by VMware makes an argument for why organizations should choose VMware View over Remote Desktop Services (RDS). The datasheet ignores that RDS is a proven technology in use by millions of users every day. Microsoft's approach to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (or VDI) is...

For small and mid-sized businesses, the expanded capabilities of Windows Server 2012 provide significant benefits that far outweigh the investment, keeping the focus on growth. By Nick Parker, CVP WW OEM Division If you’re assessing whether to switch to a Windows Server system or upgrade...

Identity management used to be a much simpler matter. But today's architectures have made it a far more complex game. You've got systems tied together using separate identity providers, identities managed both internally and by public identity providers, external partners who need access to data, and...

This past week, System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 was made available. This was an important step for our Cloud OS vision . The Cloud OS provides a consistent platform for infrastructure, apps, and data that can reside in any datacenter — be it a private datacenter, a service provider’s...

Earlier this year, we announced the availability of HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for Windows Azure Core Services. I’m sure many of you are excited about the opportunity to leverage the efficiencies of the cloud, and are considering running your SQL Server instances in Windows Azure...

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...

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...

At Microsoft, we have been on a transformative journey to cloud computing and we have been working with customers every step of the way. Millions of customers have embraced the cloud and we are excited to share the news that we’ve reached a major milestone in cloud scale computing. Since the inception...

Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 include a new set of performance counters that can greatly help understand the performance of the SMB file protocol. These include new counters on both the server side and the client side. In this blog post, Jose Barreto calls your attention to the new client-side counters...

The Azure development team continues to make improvements to various aspects of the management portal. You find new capabilities that include localization support for 6 languages, operation log support, support for SQL database metrics, Virtual Machine enhancements (quick create Windows + Linux VMs)...

Some of you that know me (through my www.gpoguy.com and www.sdmsoftware.com sites), know that I spend an inordinate amount of time exploring, developing against and helping customers with Group Policy. So I was anxious to see what changes Microsoft made in Server 2012 with respect to Group Policy. Of...

Recently we came across the updated VMware cost per application calculator and discovered what our customers and partners have been telling us all along – VMware vSphere 5.1 costs more than Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 combined. And we’re not just talking about license acquisition...

You may have noticed a steady stream of technical blog posts from the our Premier Field Engineering team covering a variety of Windows Server roles, features and functions. One of the members of that team, Adrian Corona, did an excellent blog post on Active Directory (AD) indexing. The information pertains...

In Windows 8, we reimagined the browser with IE10. We designed and built IE10 to be the best way to experience the Web on Windows. With the IE10 Release Preview for Windows 7 consumers can now enjoy a fast and fluid Web with the updated IE10 engine on their Windows 7 devices. The release preview of IE10...

Today at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, we shared significant updates to these tools, with a range of improved support to make building new Office 2013, Office 365, SharePoint 2013, and SharePoint Online in Office 365 more flexible and productive. Over the last few months we’ve been...

This is an exciting time in the world of data. Big data is growing. The cost to store and process data is rapidly dropping. The scale and economics of cloud computing is enabling broader access to incredible levels of computing power for large and small organizations. Combined, these trends underscore...

Three weeks ago the Exchange Server team announced the RTM of Exchange Server 2013 on their team blog . Since that time the team has been working diligently to get the product ready for general availability via the various channels. We’re happy to say Exchange Server 2013 is now generally available...