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
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
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
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
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.
See Brad’s full blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/in_the_cloud/archive/2013/05/31/after-today-cloud-computing-is-no-longer-a-spectator-sport.aspx.
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. An embedded player option is provided just below for your convenience.
Also today at TechEd North America 2013, Microsoft Corp. introduced a portfolio of new solutions to help businesses thrive in the era of cloud computing and connected devices. In today’s keynote address, Server & Tools Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson and fellow executives showcased how new offerings across client, datacenter infrastructure, public cloud and application development help deliver the most comprehensive, connected enterprise platform.
For additional information, see our news release at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/jun13/06-03TechEd13PR.aspx.
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.
See the full blog post at http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/05/30/continuing-the-windows-8-vision-with-windows-8-1.aspx.
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.
For more information, see the remainder of the post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2013/05/28/lay-the-groundwork-for-your-teched-north-america-experience-by-attending-foundational-sessions.aspx.
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.
See the full post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/grouppolicy/archive/2013/05/23/group-policy-and-logon-impact.aspx.
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.
See the rest of Scott Guthrie’s blog post at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/05/23/announcing-the-release-of-amqp-support-with-windows-azure-service-bus.aspx.
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.
See the full post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2013/05/22/cloud-broiler-hyper-v-a-platform-the-scales-out-for-building-the-largest-public-and-private-clouds.aspx.
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.
See the full press release at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/May13/05-21XboxPR.aspx.
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.
For more information and the registration links, head on over to the Microsoft Virtual Academy at https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/Live-QA-System-Center?CR_CC=200211913.
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.
See Brian’s blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/05/16/new-windows-dev-center-release.aspx for more information. See the dev center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/.
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.
For more information, see the Windows team blog post at http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/05/14/windows-keeps-getting-better.aspx. See the Microsoft blog post at http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/05/14/windows-keeps-getting-better.aspx.
Listen to Tami’s presentation at JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston.
And in case you were wondering, “Windows 8.1 and will be a free update to Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store.” If you have questions, be sure and ask Brandon at the Blogging Windows blog.
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.
Sound interesting? See the full blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_business_intelligence1/archive/2013/05/14/from-data-to-insight-amp-impact-getting-public-data-with-data-explorer-and-building-an-excel-power-view-amp-geoflow.aspx.
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.
See the rest of Brad’s post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/in_the_cloud/archive/2013/05/09/teched-2013-big-news-and-a-big-event.aspx.
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.
For more information and the remainder of the post, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdev/archive/2013/05/07/optimizing-sharepoint-2013-websites-for-mobile-devices.aspx.
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.
For more information and to register for this free training event, head on over to https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/Windows-Azure-for-IT-Professionals?CR_CC=200206717.
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.
See the full report and details at http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2013/05/02/outlook-com-400-million-active-accounts-hotmail-upgrade-complete-and-more-features-on-the-way.aspx.
This morning we released the v2.0 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK with some really great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include:
Get more detail on this release at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/30/announcing-the-release-of-windows-azure-sdk-2-0-for-net.aspx.
Today is a step forward in the collaboration we started more than six years ago with SUSE. As part of Microsoft’s sponsorship of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, we are thrilled to announce that SUSE and Microsoft will extend their existing work in connecting Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V with SUSE Cloud.
See the details of the announcement at http://blogs.technet.com/b/openness/archive/2013/04/30/suse-cloud-openstack-windows-server-hyper-v.aspx
Everything on SharePoint 2013 is an app. All the things you might be familiar with (list, libraries, code) are packaged into an app for SharePoint. This way, whenever the user wants something for the site, there’s an app for that. Where do you get apps? From the store. For Office365 there is a public store that contains public apps. Some are free, some have other licensing models. You can also get apps from a private app catalog for your SharePoint site.
For more detailed technical information on this topic, see Brian Moore’s blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/archive/2013/04/29/publishing-lightswitch-apps-for-sharepoint-to-the-catalog.aspx
In this first part of our three part series on using PowerShell to help secure your cloud infrastructure, Yuri Diogenes and I (Tom Shinder) will talk about how you can secure data in flight within your cloud infrastructure using SMB 3.0 encryption. The ability to secure the data moving over the cloud infrastructure network is especially important when you consider the option of using file based storage for your virtual machine disk and configuration files.
See the remainder of the post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/04/26/security-series-using-powershell-to-protect-your-private-cloud-infrastructure-part-1.aspx.
We are very happy to announce that the updated technical documentation for deploying and running SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructures Services is now available online. When deploying SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines, we recommend that you follow the detailed guidance given in the new SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines documentation in the library.
See the entire blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/24/sql-server-in-windows-azure-infrastructure-services-updated-documentation-and-best-practices-for-ga-upcoming-blogs.aspx.