Listen up! Join John Baker and Theresa Burch, Director of Product Management, as they discuss Microsoft Security Essentials - a new offering that extends Microsoft’s security platform to consumers and small businesses. Come and see why people are calling Security Essentials the easy-to-use, “install and forget” solution for worry-free protection from viruses, spyware and other malicious software.
Simon May, all-round good egg, has just written a great post which asks you what’s concerning you about moving apps to Azure. Simon’s going to have an audience with some of the Azure product folks during the next few weeks, so he’ll get the chance to put your questions direct to them. Your comments are already flooding in – add yours to Simon’s list here.
Well, I did promise we’d have a bit of fun this week, and here it is. The UK TechNet team is having a Twitter moment. Every other week we’ll choose a topic, and we’ll tweet about that topic in eight words, using hashtag #techin8. This week’s topic is IE9 and HTML5.
Here are a few examples of your work so far:
IE9 lets me control who sees my searches
IE9 - Pin your favourite web apps, with jump lists!
Much much better than previous versions of IE
So what can you come up with?
Learn how Entity Framework's Model-First feature eases design and deployment of databases in SQL Azure. Steve Yi, SQL Azure Director of Product Management, and Faisal Mohamood, Senior Program Manager, take you through the steps.
When Steve Ballmer says “We’re all in the cloud” this should be viewed in the same way as when Bill Gates talked about “a PC in every home”. I could quote statistics on the investment Microsoft is making in the cloud or show you some cool pictures of containers in one of the data centres, but I think this whitepaper on internal adoption of the cloud by Microsoft’s internal IT department is in many ways more compelling.
Why? because if you asked anyone working in IT what the major concerns are about adopting cloud services, I can guarantee that security and compliance will come up. So the fact that Microsoft is putting two of its most important systems in the cloud..
the performance and bonus HR stuff, and the volume licensing service manager is proof that this should not be seen as a barrier to moving to the cloud.
Actually Microsoft already has loads of personal data about us on its cloud servers, I say us because if you have
..those are Microsoft cloud services for consumers. It’s a similar story with Microsoft’s business facing services like BPOS and Azure. What all these services have in common is that they are all delivered form the same infrastructure. So it’s a logical next step for Microsoft to use this platform for its own internal services including those with sensitive personal data in them.
However what makes this interesting is that this decision was not based on some corporate mantra, it is based on cold hard economics as the return on investment calculations in the whitepaper show. These are based on the standard commercial charging for Azure that any business would be charged compared to the cost of running those services in house, and so the same numbers could be used to look at the value you could get from using cloud services.
So is it time to consider a cloud first rather than a virtualisation first strategy in your organisation?
No? Well here it is. This edition features SQL Azure and Windows Azure special offers and a wealth of virtualisation information to complement this fortnight’s TechNet On theme.
Sign up for your very own copy of the Flash here. I’d also like to know what you’d do to change or improve the newsletter – pop your suggestions below and I’ll see what we can do.
Here’s another great TechNet magazine tip – let me know if there are other tips you’d like to see and I’ll have one of our fine technical minds give them some thought. In the meantime, enjoy this one:
The Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) Sequencer can be run via the command line. This allows you to automate the sequencing of applications that do not require any special customisations in their guidelines (or recipes) for sequencing. You can also automate upgrading a package using the command line sequencer. Read more…
There’s still time to join us on 1st November at Microsoft UK HQ for the local leg of the Springboard Tour. This fantastic event is perfect for those of you thinking about planning, piloting or deploying Windows and Office. As if the agenda’s not exciting enough, the UK TechNet team will be milling about during the day to meet, greet and answer your questions.
Hit the image above to find out more or get straight on with registering your place here.
This week’s round-up is a little later than usual because my team and I spent Thursday and Friday getting to know one another better and talking about the exciting things we could do with you over the course of the next year. It made me feel happy and very lucky that I work with such a great bunch of people – I’ll be posting more about them all next week.
So, on to our wrap-up – here’s what I’ve been rambling about over the last few days.
We jumped into Monday with some events news from the Springboard team – first up was a Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable - Migrating from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, and second an invitation to join the Springboard Series Tour at Microsoft Campus - 1 November.
Tuesday’s post brought you four free tools for planning your Microsoft Office 2010 deployment – everyone loves a freebie.
Wednesday’s news of 15% off 5 day hands-on Windows OS Internals class with David Solomon Expert Seminars was joined by your chance to get the latest updates from the UK TechNet team on Twitter.
On Thursday (though the date stamp disagrees again) we heard all about virtualisation in Virtual Development – a guest post by Andrew Fryer and we found out who walked away with the TechNet Treasure Hunt prize in our second post of the day: Microsoft Office Professional 2010 – and the winner is…
Friday’s fun was a little brief due to geography, but it was good, nonetheless. Take a look at this fab top tip to remove personal and confidential information from Microsoft Office 2010 files.
See you tomorrow, folks.