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 device using Exchange ActiveSync. MORE

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 Technical Evangelist David Tesar and Azure Group Technical Product Manager David Aiken. Get ready for a live online interactive experience highlighting the latest and greatest via numerous scenarios and demos all while answering questions from the audience. MORE

The mobile market is growing continuously, and in the near future, more mobile devices than desktop computers will be used to surf the web. To ensure a user-friendly experience, we must optimize Internet websites for presenting content across the different devices. SharePoint 2013 offers a number of options for optimizing public-facing websites for mobile devices. Depending on your requirements, you can choose one or a combination of several options. MORE

As many of you already know, at this year’s TechEd we’re going to take the wraps off a range of new products and services, and I am very excited to be delivering the keynote address at both TechEd North America and TechEd Europe.  I cannot wait to talk about – and demo! – some of the remarkable new capabilities and functionalities we are going to deliver to the IT industry. MORE

Today, the Business Intelligence blog continues their From Data to Insight & Impact blog and video series from Microsoft Finance Director Marc Reguera.  The inspiration for this demonstration stems from Marc’s diverse travels and his desire to better understand the crime rate of cities throughout the United States. MORE

Yesterday at the JP Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom conference, Microsoft Windows CFO Tami Reller shared that the next version of the Windows client OS will be Windows 8.1.  In addition, the Windows product group shared that there will be a public preview on Wednesday, June 26, 2013. MORE

Yesterday we launched a new Windows Dev Center.  You might ask “Why are you telling us about that, Brian?”  Well, the answer is that my team is responsible for MSDN and much of the infrastructure behind it.  We partner very closely with the Windows team team produce an awesome Windows Dev Center.  Yesterday was the culmination of months of work to really overhaul the dev center and make it serve our customers even better. MORE

Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) has published a series of great courses covering Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 over the last several weeks. This content has been so well-received that we’ve asked Senior Technical Evangelist Symon Perriman and Senior Program Manager Justin Incarnato to host a two-hour “MVA Live Q&A” session exclusively for our MVA community. This is an incredible opportunity to get answers to your System Center questions! This is a free session and open to anyone interested in Microsoft System Center 2012. MORE

REDMOND, Wash. — May 21, 2013 — A new vision for the future comes to life today as Microsoft Corp. unveils Xbox One , the all-in-one gaming and entertainment system created for today and the next generation. At Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., the company showcased how Xbox One puts you at the center of all your games, TV, movies, music, sports and Skype. MORE

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 our hypervisor technology out of the box in Windows Server 2012 today. MORE

For the past five years, Microsoft has been working with a diverse group of companies to develop the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. The group of 20+ companies consisted of tech vendors, including Red Hat and VMware, and enterprises like JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse. The goal has been to build an open, wire-level protocol standard for messaging that enables easy interoperability between different vendor products. Back in October 2012, the OASIS standards organization announced the approval of AMQP 1.0 as an OASIS Standard and, on the same day, we released a preview implementation of it with Windows Azure Service Bus. MORE

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 can impact performance as well as some of the improvements we made for Windows 8. MORE

It’s that time of year again.  Time to head south to the great city of New Orleans for TechEd North America 2013.  TechEd takes place June 3-6.  TechEd is the place to go to explore and learn about new technologies, connect with your peers, and eat some of the unique food the New Orleans area has to offer.

This year promises to deliver a whole new experience for attendees. You’ll see more products and technologies on display in the TechExpo with Partner Solutions and the Microsoft Solution Experience.  Check it out, ask questions, and have fun. MORE

Windows 8.1 will advance the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of PCs, tablets, and a range of industry devices, and the experiences customers — both consumers and businesses alike — need and will just expect moving forward. It’s Windows 8 even better. Not only will Windows 8.1 respond to customer feedback, but it will add new features and functionality that advance the touch experience and mobile computing’s potential. Windows 8.1 will deliver improvements and enhancements in key areas like personalization, search, the built-in apps, Windows Store experience, and cloud connectivity. Windows 8.1 will also include big bets for business in areas such as management and security – we’ll have more to say on these next week at TechEd North America. MORE

Today Microsoft Server and Tools President Satya Nadella posted to the Official Microsoft Blog, an email he sent to employees about the progress we’ve made completely transforming our products, culture and practices to be cloud-first.  See his “The Enterprise Cloud Era” video to hear his additional thoughts. MORE

Technology leaders love talking about the promise of technologies that are just over the horizon, but Microsoft is now in the unique position of doing much better than that. We are now delivering on our vision with a wave of enterprise products built with this cloud-first approach: Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2 and the update to Windows Intune bring cloud-inspired innovation to the enterprise, and enable hybrid scenarios that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the industry. MORE

We are entering the dog days of summer here in the south, but don’t let that fool you. TechEd North America 2013 is still in full swing with breakout sessions, hands on labs, Ask the Experts sessions, and more.  We want to draw your attention to some fresh blog posts from the Windows Server, SQL, and Intune teams as well as some sessions for day three. MORE

In our most aggressive botnet operation to date, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit worked with leaders of the financial services industry, other technology industry partners and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to disrupt a massive cyber threat responsible for stealing people’s online banking information and personal identities. With a court ordered civil seizure warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, Microsoft executed a simultaneous operation to disrupt more than 1,400 Citadel botnets which are responsible for over half a billion dollars in losses to people and businesses worldwide. MORE

TechEd North America 2013 took place last week in New Orleans, Louisiana.  There were many announcements, sessions and other activities taking place around this wonderful conference.  For those of you who visited New Orleans for the first time, we certainly hope you enjoyed the information, entertainment and local cuisine.

Having said all that, we wanted to take this opportunity to remind you that a vast portion of the conference is available on-demand so you can go back and watch the keynote and other important sessions.  Here are some important references as a starting point: MORE

​Malware authors and distributors follow the money. When you consider the growing popularity of social networking websites, it should come as no surprise that malware continues to maintain its presence in this area. Every year we are spending a growing proportion of our time online using social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. What does this mean for the malware ecosystem? MORE

Software-defined networking is about enabling software – rather than the hardware – to dynamically manage the network in a way that helps you better meet the requirements of your applications and workloads.  Microsoft’s approach to SDN is grounded in our experiences designing, building and operating global-scale datacenter networks for services like Windows Azure. MORE

SMB is getting a lot of attention with Windows Server 2012, and we’ve had questions from a few customers regarding the inter-play between SMB shares and Hyper-V Replica. In this post we’ll share our experience around setting up and using various configurations involving SMB shares and Hyper-V Replica. The issue we were expecting to run into is the apparent lack of authorization to use the SMB share, when using remote management. MORE

“Many of the CISOs I talk to tell me that “Advanced Persistent Threats” (APT) style attacks are among their top concerns.  As I have written about before, the problem with the term APT is that it doesn’t describe this category of threats very accurately.  This makes it harder to understand and mitigate this type of threat.  At Microsoft we find that a more accurate and useful term for this category of threat is “targeted attacks by determined adversaries”. MORE

The MVMC Automation Toolkit (MAT) provides a series of sample PowerShell scripts which automate the migration of large numbers of virtual machines using the MVMC.exe as the conversion engine. Since the MVMC.exe doesn’t provide a method for collecting virtual machines from the VMware environment, MAT will collect all the machines that meet the criteria for conversion. MORE

We’ve all heard about “Big Data” by now but what does it really mean? Big Data is the term used to describe the process of applying serious computing power and the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, to massive and often highly complex sets of information.  MORE