Today we’re pleased to announce the addition of significant new features to the Power BI for Office 365 preview, including natural language search with Q&A and improved experiences in two preview add-ins for Excel with 3D mapping visualizations through Power Map and improved data search in Power Query. MORE
Today we kicked off the //build/ Conference in Seattle on the Microsoft campus. If you weren’t aware, you can watch a lot of the action live at Channel9.MSDN.com. Head on over and check out the Keynote sessions from Monday or tune into the Tuesday morning Keynote from Microsoft Server and Tools President, Satya Nadella. Satya will be live at 9am PST. Join us!
It’s an amazing time for developers. The number of platform choices they have is outstanding. From smartphones to slates, to big iron in the data center, Visual Studio has your creative needs covered.
Today we officially launch the development environment, Visual Studio 2012. You can head over to the launch site and listen to some of our key executives talk about the product and support for the terrific applications we know you’ll develop.
Here are some other key blog posts and resources to review. This list of resources will be updated throughout the morning as the various teams publish information on the product and blog sites.
Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President for the Windows Server & System Center division, launched a new blog yesterday called In the Cloud. With regular posts, podcasts, and videos, Anderson plans to use this space as a venue for discussing how IT decision makers can assemble best-of-breed cloud and datacenter solutions. In his first post, Anderson highlights the relevance of consumerization of IT and how companies can enable their users to work how, when, and where they want while still ensuring corporate data is secure. MORE
Last summer, Microsoft released a preview of Outlook.com. It was a bold step for Microsoft, as the company built a brand new, modern e-mail service from the ground up. Since then, the adoption rate has been incredible with over 60 million people already actively using Outlook.com. This week, Microsoft took the next major step: Outlook.com has come out of preview and people everywhere can start giving it a try. And soon Microsoft will start upgrading hundreds of millions of Hotmail users to the new Outlook.com experience. MORE
VMWorld is in full swing and Microsoft is there. The most obvious question that VMworld attendees (and IT professionals that are familiar with VMware) are probably asking right now – “why would I want to learn about Hyper-V while attending VMworld?” The answer is simple – to help their careers as technology professionals. Research shows that over 70% of businesses now have more than one virtualization platform in their IT environment. As you can imagine, this trend is opening up opportunities for IT professionals that are familiar with more than one virtualization platform. And if you look at the market data, it is clear that Hyper-V is the one to watch (and try!) .
Sound interesting? Get more information from our activities at VMworld 2013 from Microsoft Senior PMM Varun Chhabra in his post, “Get the “Scoop” on Hyper-V During VMworld”.
For those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you:
As always, follow us on Twitter via @MSCloud! And if you would like to follow Microsoft VP Brad Anderson, do that via @InTheCloudMSFT !
The Microsoft Cloud OS provides enterprises with a highly elastic and scalable infrastructure with always-on, always-up services. Automated management, robust multitenant support, and self-service provisioning help enterprises transform their datacenters to support the coordination and management of pooled sets of shared resources at the datacenter level, replacing fragmented management of individual server nodes.
At the core of the Microsoft Cloud OS is Windows Server 2012. The new operating system provides a comprehensive set of capabilities across the enterprise private cloud datacenter, and public cloud datacenters.
Ready to find out more? Be sure to visit the Windows Server 2012 Launch site at http://www.windows-server-launch.com/Home. You’ll see a wide variety of information on our cloud OS from a business and technical perspective. Also see Satya Nadella's blog post on some of the key development aspects of the cloud OS. We do of course have a press release on Microsoft.com if interested.
For those of you that are TechNet or MSDN subscribers, Windows Server 2012 is now available for download. If you don’t have a subscription, no problem. Download the Windows Server 2012 Evaluation. This link is currently describing the release candidate but will be updated soon.
Microsoft.com/WindowsServer2012 is always a good starting point for overview information, the data sheet, downloads and case studies.
For those of you that are looking for technical information, be sure to go to the technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver tech center. There’s a wealth of deployment, security and management information there and you’ll see the release documentation light up through the course of the day.
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
Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios.
Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. MORE
Customers asked us if they can have a monitoring mechanism for Hyper-v Replica in a rainy day scenario. With System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1, customers can now monitor Hyper-V Replica using a Management Pack available for free from the catalogue of SCOM. This blog post will deal with adding the management packs to SCOM setup to monitor Hyper-V Replica. MORE
Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, in collaboration with Symantec, has taken down the harmful Bamital botnet. In the last two years, more than eight million computers have been attacked by Bamital, and its search hijacking and click fraud schemes have affected major search engines and browsers, including those offered by Microsoft and Google. Because this threat exploited the search and online advertising platform to harm innocent people, Microsoft and Symantec chose to take action against the Bamital botnet to help protect people and advance cloud security for everyone. MORE...
Active Directory (AD) still continues to be a topic of interest for new and seasoned IT Professionals. Directory services provide the core for organization, security and management of many type of principles. With that in mind we wanted to highlight a couple of the top rated sessions from TechEd 2013. 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.
See the full post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/grouppolicy/archive/2013/05/23/group-policy-and-logon-impact.aspx.
Business Intelligence, the process of analyzing business data to support better decision-making, has become a necessity for most businesses in today’s competitive environment. In order to bring BI to small and mid-sized companies, there needs to be a set of affordable and easy-to-use tools at each company’s disposal. Microsoft has long had a vision and commitment to bringing the power of BI to the masses, and creating a set of tools and technologies to allow for self-service BI.
In order to realize this vision, Microsoft introduced the Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM), which supports two models, the traditional multidimensional model and a new tabular model.
See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_business_intelligence1/archive/2012/10/11/blog-series-creating-bi-solutions-with-bism-tabular-part-1-of-4.aspx for the full blog post.
There are also two fantastic tutorials available in the mobile dev center. The first provides a walkthrough of the basics of configuring your iOS app for push and sending push notifications. The second details how to use a table to store APNS tokens that can then be used to send push notifications to an app’s users.
Just as important as understanding how to use these push notifications, is understanding when to use a push notification versus an SMS versus an email. The easy answer is that it depends on the app.
See this informative blog post in it’s entirety at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/12/10/best-practices-for-using-push-notifications-sms-and-email-in-your-mobile-app.aspx.
It is becoming more and more common for software shops to build applications and apps for multiple platforms and devices. In addition to other applications and platforms that you need to build, you may also need to build iOS or Mac OS X applications.
It’s desirable to keep all of your source code assets in the same repository regardless of the target platforms you are building for. Developers should also work how they want to work with source control integration in their IDEs. For iOS and Mac OS X, that would most likely be Xcode with integrated git for source control.
See the entire post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/10/19/building-ios-apps-in-tfs.aspx.
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
Providing information to our community is important to us. There are a number of channels we use to get the word out on promotions, great technical content, and fun contests. The Microsoft Server and Cloud business is growing, as is the community of developers and IT professionals.
We recently launched a number of new areas on Microsoft.com to give you better perspective on the Cloud OS vision we have, the investments we are making, and how to get information for evaluation and implementation purposes. In addition to the stories and articles, we also launched a new Community area. MORE
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 fundamentally different from VMware’s approach. This difference stems from Microsoft's belief in offering choices to customers. Unlike VMware, Microsoft can deliver VDI functionality in 3 different ways. MORE
SQL Server 2014 CTP2 includes three SQL Server Backup and Restore enhancements. These enhancements enables using Windows Azure for backups, providing options to ease and automate backup management, and improved security for backups through encryption.
In addition, to enable backup to Windows Azure from previous versions of SQL Server, a stand-alone tool is now available. MORE
A few moments ago we announced availability of the Windows Server 2012 R2 download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. See all of the resource links on the Windows Server blog post! MORE
Hilton Lange, a Software Development Engineer on the Virtual Machine Manager team, has been working on a three-part series covering Intelligent Placement in Virtual Machine Manager 2012. He has just published the final installment, in which he delves into custom rules that help you control where your VMs are deployed. Earlier posts look at managing power consumption and using Dynamic Optimization to improve the health of clusters. You can check out all three insightful posts at:
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.
On Wednesday we announced another price reduction for Windows Azure Storage by as much as 28%, effective on December 12th. This follows our March 8th 2012 reduction of 12% furthering our commitment to best overall value in the industry.
Reducing prices is only part of the story; we’ve also added more value to our storage offerings in a number of ways. Our Geo Redundant Storage continues to lead the market in durability with more than 400 miles of separation between replicas. We recently announced deployment of a flat network for Windows Azure across all of our datacenters to provide very high bandwidth network connectivity for storage clients which significantly enhances scenarios like MapReduce, HPC, and others. We also announced increased scalability targets for Windows Azure Storage and continue to invest in improving bandwidth between compute and storage.
See the remainder of this blog post on the Windows Azure team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/12/05/announcing-reduced-pricing-for-windows-azure-storage.aspx.
Microsoft has launched a new online tool—called Microsoft BI Solution Builder—that can help you build a better platform and strategy for Business Intelligence. It helps you uncover the BI capabilities available in the products you already own as well as indicates what additional products you would need to get the BI capabilities you desire. Microsoft BI Solution Builder even offers potential upgrade paths and additional resources, such as case studies and white papers. MORE...