In this rather good article, Matthew Graven, TechNet Tips Editor (I didn’t even know we had one of those) shows you how to Remove Personal and Confidential Information from Office 2010 Files. Find out how the Backstage View allows you to manage files and perform critical tasks to protect your data and private information.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered the TechNet Treasure Hunt in last fortnight’s TechNet Flash – I was so pleased to get so many entries and great comments about the blog. As you will be aware the amazing prize up for grabs was a copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2010, wonderfully showcased here by IT pro marketing team gal, Sam Taylor.

Congratulations to our winner, Iain Bowes. Your copy of Office Professional 2010 is in the post.

There’ll be another chance to win in the next TechNet Treasure Hunt competition coming next month. Keep an eye on the TechNet Flash newsletter for details.

You’ll see that TechNet On is dedicated to all things virtualisation this week, and rather than call out one of the many useful links there I wanted to briefly describe perhaps the oldest virtualisation scenario testing . Traditionally this has been done in an ad hoc way as the development team don’t understand virtualisation indeed why should they.  However the IT Professionals can’t always be on hand to provision these environments when required or have made provision for them.  There are a couple of tools around to make all this a lot easier:

The simplest is the Self Service Portal that comes with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). This is currently still in beta (release candidate) and lets users provision their own clean virtual machines through a browser interface from a list of  templates you have prepared in SCVMM. 

For integrated testing of in house applications your development team might already be using the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capabilities in Visual Studio.  The Lab Manager in the ultimate and test professional editions of Visual Studio 2010 takes this a stage further by also using SCVMM to provide an integrated testing environment of virtual machines.  This is so sophisticated that if there’s a bug in the developer’s code  a tester can snapshot all the virtual machine states and save them off to review what went wrong and pass the complete scenario back to the developer to resolve.

I can also see these tools being used to manage sandboxes for testing new releases of third party products as well as patches and service packs, so even if there’s no development team per se in your organisation you might want to look at what these tools offer even if it’s only to inform your thinking about how to streamline your testing and release processes.

Find out more about Andrew on his blog.

If you like Sysinternals, the book Windows Internals, or want to learn more about Windows OS internals, then you'll want to attend this class in London on 18-22 October.

Aimed at developers and IT Professionals, you'll peer into the internals of the Windows operating system kernel (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and related core mechanisms such as memory management, thread scheduling, interrupt processing, time accounting, and crash dump analysis. Learn how to dig into the system with advanced troubleshooting tools, such as the Kernel Debugger and key tools from Sysinternals such as Process Explorer and Process Monitor.

More details here.

Are you following the UK TechNet team on Twitter yet? A very impressive 1548 of you are following @ASKTechNetUK and talking to us about what’s on your mind as an IT pro. Join us, won’t you?

Preparing for the big move to Office 2010? Here are four tools you should download to help you assess your environment and plan your migration.

You’ll find everything you need to plan, deploy and manage Office 2010 right here on the TechNet Office 2010 Springboard page.

Are you looking to plan, pilot or deploy Windows and Office?

Our very own Microsoft Campus in Reading is one of the stops on the upcoming European Springboard Series Tour of Microsoft Windows, Office and MDOP Deployment Workshops.  The workshops will cover Office 2010, key deployment strategies for Windows 7, the Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack, as well as show you the value of getting trained and certified in these key products.

Find out why Windows 7 has received rave reviews from IT organisations and is setting records as the fastest selling operating system in history, and find out why so many IT Pros are ready to deploy Office 2010. Give us five hours, and you will have a clear understanding of the tools, tips and tricks you need now to jumpstart the successful deployment and management of your Windows desktop environment today. Come join members of the Windows and Office US Product Teams, as well as local Microsoft Technology Evangelists for technical training, professional networking, and real world guidance.

Don’t miss your chance to be there and meet the TechNet gang, register today.

For the latest updates follow us on Twitter, @MSSpringboard

Make time to tune into this Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable on 30 September at 5pm for a virtual, interactive roundtable discussion on migration strategies, standards, and support for organisations moving from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8.

Tune in live or catch the on-demand session afterwards here.

As organisations deploy Windows 7, many still depend on web applications that were designed for Internet Explorer 6. Will they still work, and what can you do when they don’t? Join a panel of IT Professionals, Microsoft specialists and technical experts to discuss best practices to simplify and accelerate the migration to Internet Explorer 8. Topics will include an explanation of the causes of and solutions for application compatibility issues (including policy, code, and virtualisation solutions), an introduction to tools, and a review of best practices.

It was another manic week on the UK TechNet blog – I feel I need a weekend to recharge my fingertips. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week.

On Monday I went poking about in TechNet again and found a New TechNet Virtual Lab helping you to install Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010. The Labs are great and they’re updated pretty frequently so I’ll keep my eyes open for new topics.

Tuesday’s action featured the new Software Update 1 for Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Service Pack 1 along with a nice TechNet library article detailing Microsoft IT’s migration of Microsoft.com to Windows Azure platform.

On Wednesday I found the Preview of Windows Small Business Server 7 and since I posted it an awful lot of you have read the post to find out more.

Thursday’s fun followed up the Internet Explorer 9 beta launch with a fabulous article from Simon May (have I mentioned how great Simon is?), IT Pros and IE9 - what should you do. We also posted the latest news from the TechEd Europe 2010 team and invited you to join us at Microsoft at IP Expo – 20-21 October.

The Ultimate Desktop Experience Day was today’s news – we’ve teamed up with Ultima to stage a day covering the desktop optimisation story. Hope to see you there.

See you on Monday, folks!

Join Microsoft and Ultima for the Ultimate Desktop Experience Day on 21 October at Microsoft Reading.

The Ultimate Desktop Experience day covers the whole story of desktop optimisation from Microsoft. There will be a commercial stream featuring such topics as case studies, business benefits and licensing; and multiple technical streams covering application compatibility, application virtualisation and Windows 7.

If you’d like to join in the fun, please register here.