Take advantage of free, online, fast-paced training courses designed specifically for experienced IT professionals with jobs that demand that they know how to best leverage the emerging features and technologies in Windows 8.

Module 1:
Tips and Tricks for IT Pros

See what's new in Windows 8 for the IT professional from the new user interface and keyboard shortcuts to the Windows App Store and Internet Explorer 10.
Download this module (2.66 GB)

Module 2:
Windows 8 Deployment

Learn how to simplify Windows 8 planning and deployment, and ease your migration from earlier versions of Windows.
Download this module (1.76 GB)

Module 3:
Access to Windows

Explore virtualization scenarios for Windows 8, specifically with regard to Windows To Go, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and Client Hyper-V.
Download this module (1.73 GB)

Module 4:
Anywhere Productivity

Explore common Windows 8 mobility scenarios including providing a consistent user experience across devices, virtual machines, and session-based desktops.
Download this module (2.02 GB)

Module 5:
Windows Apps

Learn how to deploy applications in Windows 8, sideload apps for individual users or all users, and centrally manage apps once deployed.
Download this module (1.39 GB)

Module 6:
Recovery and Security

Learn how to better control, secure, and manage Windows 8 PCs with BitLocker, UEFI, Secure Boot, and the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT).
Download this module (1.63 GB)

The top 15 Windows 8 apps to boost business productivity

Author Bio: Marcus Austin works for Firebrand Training as a Technical Author. Marcus has over 25 years’ experience in the technology and business sector. His recent work includes constructing a mobile strategy for the Guardian Media Group, together with writing and editing for magazines and websites including TechRadar, Internet Retailing, IT Perspectives, and Santander Breakthrough.

With over 35,000 apps available on Windows Store, there’s a lot to choose from.

The likes of Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja may be the most fun, but there’s a wealth of business apps to be explored. Here are 15 of them that will help increase your productivity:

1. Remote Desktop App.

This allows you to sign in to different PCs, and access files, without having to be physically near your PC. This can prove useful in case you forget an important document, or simply want to move files to and from computers while on the bus home.

2. Evernote.

If you're in the middle of a meeting with your Surface tablet or other Windows 8 device, you can use this program to take notes. You may be wondering why you shouldn't simply use the included app, Onenote. Evernote contains much more functionality allowing you to add links, videos, and photos as well as make to-do lists and sync with multiple computers.

3. Skype.

If you need to keep in touch with co-workers or host a business meeting, Skype has you covered. This has all the features you would expect including the ability to host voice calls, video calls or simply use instant messaging.

4. Microsoft Lync.

This is an elegant and clean looking app thanks to the Modern UI design. With support for audio and video with multiple people, you can keep in touch with colleagues. Plus, you can reference another app or website while using Lync. It snaps to the side of your screen, so you can multi-task and use multiple windows at the same time.

5. BBC News.

This app has a clean design, providing easy access to the latest articles. With multimedia to enhance your experience, this is an essential download.

6. News Bento.

This app is a gorgeous RSS reader following all the design cues from Microsoft's Modern UI philosophies. Like any other RSS reader, this aggregates all your subscriptions into one easy-to-read place. This goes one step further by aggregating pictures along with text.

7. Package Tracker.

Do you send or receive lots of packages? If so, this app is invaluable. It allows you to track the location of packages on a map, with support for a wide variety of shipping services.

8. Invoice 360.

This app allows you to print out a professional-looking invoice in a matter of minutes. All you have to do is input the correct information and choose from a number of invoice templates. After inputting all the information on the invoice, you can save it as a PDF, print it out or use the built-in soft-copy sharing in Windows 8.

9. TeamViewer Touch.

While the Remote Desktop app was already suggested, this app is a good choice for businesses that already use TeamViewer and don't have a company infrastructure that runs on Windows Server.

10. Skitch.

With this app, you can write notes and add annotations to existing pictures. This is incredibly useful for when you're having a brainstorming session.

11. Box.

This app is similar to other popular services like Skydrive or Dropbox, but offers a number of different features and is focused specifically at businesses. There is an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, the ability to collaboratively work on documents as well as the ability to search for text through a document. There are also numerous powerful security features and robust admin tools. This is a great choice for businesses that want a reliable cloud storage service.

12. EZ Opp.

This app allows you to view estimated revenue for your business as well as actual versus potential income. With a tablet-friendly interface and integration with Microsoft's Dynamics CRM service, this is the app to check out.

13. Meeting Money.

This app calculates how much money employees are earning while sitting through a meeting. This can help you keep track of how much money is being spent every minute when you host a meeting!

14. Banking.

Whoever you bank with, chances are they have an app. And they’re all pretty useful for banking on the go. As a minimum, you’ll get access to your account balance, and be able to make payments.

15. Microsoft's Map.

This app is the perfect fit for your transportation needs allowing you to learn about the traffic conditions and get directions to wherever you want to go.
Overall, all of these apps should help boost productivity within the workplace. Whether it's calculating how much money is being wasted during a meeting or collaborating with employees on a spread sheet, Windows 8 has you covered.

The sun is shining as I sit at home and write this blog entry, and it is giving me cause to think! When it comes to the licensing of Windows 8 we need to think about the flexibility of how we can deliver Windows 8 to a client device and the opportunities it gives us as users to work in different locations and on different devices. Yet whilst we may love the flexibility of working in different locations on multiple devices, we do need to be aware of the impact it will have on the licensing of Windows 8.

The first step we need to think about is how we license Windows 8 to run on a company owned device in the office, as this will then have an impact on the flexibility we have as users. Windows 8 is licensed per device; this means that any device running Windows 8 needs to be licensed to do so, irrelevant of how Windows 8 is delivered to that device. So, if I have a computer assigned to me in the office it will need to have a Windows 8 Pro license assigned to it. A basic Windows 8 Pro license licenses you to install Windows 8 Pro locally on the device. Now, that means that the device is now licensed to run Windows 8, and if I or one of my colleagues wished to take the device outside of the office and use it at home for instance, then we would absolutely be licensed to do so.

Having Windows 8 installed locally on a device is a perfect solution for many organisations, but it does reduce the level of flexibility we have with regard to a single user working with multiple devices.

What if our users need to access their corporate desktop from multiple devices in multiple locations, then we need to build the ability to do that into the licensing. And this for Windows 8 Pro is where Software Assurance comes in.

Software Assurance (SA) is an extra you can purchase with your licenses, optional in some agreements and mandatory in others. When you purchase SA with your licenses it gives you a whole range of benefits, some of which suit exactly the example I am talking about here.

The first SA benefit to mention is the Windows Virtual Desktop Access benefit. By definition this benefit allows you to:

• Extend the value of your virtual desktop environment by deploying your desktops anywhere, locally or in the datacenter
• Expand end-user productivity with increased flexibility to access virtual desktops outside of the work environment

Meaning that you can implement a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. The impact of this benefit is that rather than having to install Windows 8 locally on the licensed client device you can hold an image of the desktop on a server and virtualise that image down onto the licensed device. But not only can you virtualise the desktop onto the licensed device, but you can actually virtualise it onto any company owned device that has been licensed for Windows 8.

So at the moment, we can virtualise the Windows 8 desktop onto any corporate device licensed to run Windows 8. But we know our users may need to access their desktop on any device including non-corporate devices from any location. And here we are going to think specifically about non-corporate devices outside of the company premises. And this is where the next SA benefit comes into play, Windows Roaming Use Rights.

Windows Roaming Use Rights is available for the “Primary User” of the device licensed for Windows 8 Pro with SA. But what makes a Primary User? The Product Use Rights document or PUR contains the definition of a Primary User, and states:

• “Primary user,” means the user who uses the device more than 50% of the time in any 90 day period.

So to have the flexibility to roam, you must be the Primary User of the device licensed for Windows 8 with SA, and what exactly does the benefit allow? Again, by definition this benefit states:

• Roaming Use Rights allow the primary user of any licensed device to access a virtual instance of Windows running in the datacenter (VDI) or Windows To Go from non-corporate devices such as personally owned or hotel business center PCs while away from the office.

So we can now see that if you have covered your corporate client device with a Windows 8 Pro with SA license the primary user of that device is now licensed to access their desktop on the corporate device in any location, but also on any non-corporate devices outside of the corporate premises.

In the example above I have been talking about covering a corporate owned PC with Windows 8 Pro with SA. And you may well be aware that Windows 8 Pro licenses purchased through Volume Licensing are upgrade only licenses, which means that there must be an underlying qualifying operating system on the device. So what happens if you have thin clients in the organisation that you wish to virtualise your desktop onto? Well, rather than purchasing Windows 8 Pro with SA, you would purchase a VDA subscription, which then allows your corporate desktop to be virtualised onto the VDA licensed thin client, and the Roaming Use Rights would also come into play allowing the primary user’s desktop to be virtualised onto non-corporate devices outside of the corporate premises.

If you want to know more about licensing, join us on our Spotlight Licensing calls every month here or why not test your knowledge on the MVA Licensing courses

This is one scenario and licensing situation. Each customer scenario can vary by deployment, usage, product version, and product use rights.  Always check your contract, and the current Products Use Rights document to confirm how your environment should be fully licensed.  The blogging team does not warrant that this scenario will be the right licensing solution for other similar cases.

I’m starting this blog with an intuitive quiz… (exciting I know!).

If you’re building a high density private cloud, do you know which edition of System Center 2012 provides the most efficient option?

What is the licensing minimum initial purchase for Enrolment for Core Infrastructure (ECI) and how many processers does each license cover?

Take the new Private Cloud Licensing MVA Course to discover all you need to know about licensing the Private Cloud. Learn how to license your private cloud; including server management and virtualization, as well as migrating servers to third party hosting companies. Products covered include Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. Understand how the combination of both provides enterprise class virtualisation, end-to-end service management and deep insight into applications so you can focus more attention on delivering business value to your organisation.

Learn how the four different Windows Server 2012 licensing editions, Datacenter, Standard, Essentials and Foundation, can be optimised depending on your organisation size and your virtualisation needs. The course takes you through Volume licensing, virtual instances, processor capabilities, CAL’s, and much much more. Below is a familiar scenario which illustrates the use rights for a customer running 4 instances of Datacenter in the virtual. The instance running in the physical can only be used to manage the instances of the operating system running in the virtual operating system environment.

System Center 2012 integrates 8 separate component products into one which streamlines the installation and reduces the time it takes to deploy, from days into hours! The Datacenter edition in particular allows for the provisioning of unlimited virtual machines without additional licensing costs. The Datacenter license edition also covers 2 physical processors and allows you to manage unlimited OSEs providing highly virtualised environments with significant cost savings. The System Center 2012 Standard license edition covers 2 physical processors and allows you to manage 2 Operating System Environments.

The course also trains you on how to assign certain licenses to a cloud infrastructure with License Mobility through Software Assurance. Do you know the products eligible for License Mobility? I’ll give you a clue… there’s 6! To gain more knowledge and great training and accreditation on licensing the Private Cloud, start the course here and get your certificate to become a Microsoft Licensing expert!

Be sure to also download a free Evaluation Copy of System Center 2012 sp1 and Windows Server 2012 and have a play with the software.

MVA Licensing Courses

Damian Flynn, (Cloud and Datacenter MVP), has been working in IT since 1993. He has worked as an engineer and administrator for multinational’s in manufacturing and services sectors where he has dealt with large and complex IT infrastructures. With experience spanning from digital data collection networks, Telco and VoIP based technologies, he is currently specialising in Networking and Server Virtualisation (VMware ESX, Hyper-V), focusing on Cloud, Core Infrastructure and Datacenter Management/Automation. Damian is currently "Corporate Infrastructure Architect" with Lionbridge Technologies based in Ireland, while also serving as a director for a Wireless ISP.

Damian is active in many MS Programs, and a member of the MS Windows Futures Council, a Blogger, and Co-Author of "Microsoft Private Cloud Computing", "Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration", numerous technical articles, and can be found at many events presenting on  various technologies.

With the release of System Centre Orchestrator 2012 SP1, included with the product are even more activities which extend the reach of this unique tool to enable yet more automation possibilities. Now you have the added ability to integrate with FTP services anywhere, automate your Azure subscription and integrate with REST services, while gaining enhancements in most of the already available packs ranging from Active Directory and Exchange all the way to VMWare!

But, what if this is not enough? What if you need to create an activity to interact with a different product which has yet to be provided? Then you join to active and growing community on codeplex and start to create your own, sharing and learning with others as you progress. Currently home to over a dozen free packs, extending the reach even further to solutions such as Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, and even activities to automate Orchestrator itself!

I’m delighted to announce today that yet another pack has made its way to codeplex, this time providing a set of activities to automate Forefront Identity Manager, Synchronisation services. Activities include the ability to enable the enumeration of published Management Agents and Run Profiles, Checking the status of the last active profile, and launching any new Run Profiles, waiting for its completion before returning the job stats so you can process accordingly.

If you feel the urge to join this growing community, or just want to try out these interesting packs, you will be greeted with welcome from an active community, delighted to help and enhance your experience.

Those of you up for a challenge, can of course download the free open-source code for any Pack on codeplex, and armed with the Orchestrator development kit you can be compiling and creating packs of your own ready to share.

Deduplication is the business of compressing data without loss and this is now built into Windows Server 2012 as a role service.  The official marketing from us states that you will save somewhere between 20-70% of the space on your file servers if you implement this. If that’s sounds interesting my screencast shows how to configure and monitor it..

The clever thing about deduplication is that it’s built into NTFS, so you can apply it to any non system volume without the need for specialist storage.  There are some caveats:

• You can’t use it on the system volume
• It works on closed files so it won’t do any good against virtual hard disks or SQL Server database files for example. However you could and in some cases should turn it on inside a virtual machine and get the benefits of deduplication that way.
• The deduplication process does not happen when you write a file to disk, it runs in the background and is typically scheduled.  The default setting is to only deduplicate files older than 5 days the odds are that a file that hasn’t changed for 5 days won’t change that much again and is worth deduplicating.
• It will slow down your initial reads a bit (approx. 3%), but once a file is cached performance will improve a bit (approx. 8%)
• You’ll want to have a backup solution that is compatible with this new feature e.g. System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1 as well as VEEAM and Symantec Backup Exec (with more vendors updating their software all the time)

To try this yourself all you’ll need is an Evaluation Copy of Windows Server 2012. Having got the idea you may also want to see how well it will work on your data. To do that install it turn on the deduplication e.g. in Powershell..

Add-WindowsFeature –Name “FS-Data-Deduplication”

and then copy windows\system32\ddpeval.exe and run this against a file share, volume etc.  Note that this might put some load on your network but otherwise shouldn’t be too invasive as it will run in the background (possibly for hours on a big volume) before telling you what you would save if you enabled this feature.

Finally thanks to my good friend Simon;  he has done most of the legwork in setting up deduplication for our IT camps and I have shamelessly used that for the screencast.

TechEd is Microsoft’s premiere conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers, offering the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft's products, solutions, tools, and services.

We are pleased to announce that registration for TechEd North America and TechEd Europe will go live next week on Tuesday, February 12^th.

            TechEd North America                          TechEd Europe

            June 3-6                                                 25-28 June

            Morial Convention Center                    IFEMA – Feria de Madrid Convention Centre

            New Orleans, LA                                   Madrid, Spain

Attendees will get hands-on learning, deep product exploration and countless opportunities to build relationships with a community of Microsoft experts and industry peers. Visit www.msteched.com to learn more. 

Register by 22 March to take advantage of the Early Bird price of €1,695, a €300 savings off regular pricing.

At TechEd you will get 4 days of hands-on learning, deep product exploration and countless opportunities to build relationships with a community of Microsoft experts and peers. Need to deliver maximum business value while managing your company's technology investments? We’ve got you covered with multiple tracks featuring a breadth of Microsoft products and solutions.

So far in this series I have used the new storage features of Windows Server 2012 as a  place to run VMs from, but there’s more to it than that.  Shared storage used to mean presenting SAN storage inside a cluster, and you relied on your SAN experts to provision the storage you needed.  However with SAS / JBOD technologies coming along it’s possible to create storage that’s still highly available.  However you might still want access to some of the clever things a SAN can do like thin provisioning, where you define storage you plan to use but actually haven’t got yet.  So in this short screencast I show how storage spaces in Windows Server meets this need..

To try this out all you’ll need is one virtual machine running on one laptop and an Evaluation Copy of Windows Server 2012

Notes

I used a bunch of SCSI disks in my demo VM to build a storage space and they were all the same size. They don’t have to all be SCSI,  they could be attached via USB, SATA etc. and can be of varying size and performance.  However if you want to  create a storage pool in a cluster then the disks must be SAS (Serial attached SCSI) for that.  Also bear in mind that the pool will work down to the slowest disk and not up to the fastest.

I do have a script to build my fileserver, which in turn relies on a configuration file to add in the roles and features I need, and it builds form a sysprep copy of Windows Server 2012 with an answer file to join it to my Contoso domain.  It does have a really useful function from Simon to rename the VM in active directory (so it is called FileServer1 in AD as well being the name of the VM in Hyper-V).

Rather than running a virtual machine or using the storage space for ordinary files, in this screencast I used it to host a SQL Server database. SQL Server 2012 has support for storing databases on SMB shares and  I have seen 200,000 iops in SQL Server where the database is on a remote share like this.  However the UI in Server manager doesn’t seem to allow you to navigate across shares (have I been away form SQL Server too long?) so I did the attach from a simple  SQL Server T-SQL script.

Storage spaces often raises a lot of questions at our camps so here’s a good FAQ on TechNet.  If you are curious about performance my advice is to test your big idea thoroughly and check this script and whitepaper to ensure you have the optimal setup.

As I type this I am working hard with Simon to prepare for our next wave of IT Camps specifically the new camps on System Center 2012 sp1.  Having just completed the five exams of MCSE Private Cloud I am now having to readjust to how much is different as a result of this service pack coming out.  The key change is that System Center has had to change to run on and support Windows Server 2012 for example:

• Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) has to support all of the new stuff in Hyper –V so Shared Nothing and Storage Migration plus all the changes to all the performance limits such as the number of cores.  Virtual Networks aren’t obvious in Windows Server 2012 (they  can only be referenced from Powershell), but they show up really will in the network diagrams in VMM.  VMM also has to understand the other parts of Server 2012 e.g.  virtual machines can now be run form SMB shares , NIC teaming, and the new standards based storage management (SMI-S)
• Operations manager has to be able to monitor the new version of server, and track the health of these new features, for example 360 health of .Net applications, storage health, IIS 8 health and so on.
• Data Protection needs to be able to understand and work with deduplication as well as the new REFS file system as does any backup provider.

System Center 2012 can now run on SQL Server 2012, which in its Enterprise edition provides availability groups to protect your key System Center data.  There’s also the capability to do some really clever business intelligence in this release with Office 2013 to help you understand and predict demand in a large datacentre and better respond to the rhythms of your business.

Then there are individual enhancements to each component of the suite..

• Orchestrator gets a new integration pack for Exchange so you can easily setup Runbooks to automate that part of your fabric.
• Operations Manager has better support for more flavours of Linux e.g. Oracle, Debian & Ubuntu.
• Configuration Manager has also undergone a lot of changes to fully manage Windows 8 in the enterprise, for example side-loading modern applications, windows to go support and BitLocker configuration.  It’s also important to remember that config manager can also manage Server 2012 and set such things as desired configuration baselines.
• Service Manager introduces chargeback, one of the key pillars of a private cloud, and essential if you want to benchmark your IT department against third party service providers.
• Virtual Machine Manager will now manage up to Vmware VSphere5.1 and Citrix XenServer 6.0.

Finally each component has better integration with the others and so there is a general sharpening of the whole suite.  So that is quite a lot of stuff for a service pack and would easily take a day to go through assuming like me you are already au fait with System Center 2012. 

I also know that a lot of you have been holding off evaluating or deploying Windows Server 2012 until this service pack was released as you quite rightly want to manage this new version of Windows Server. 

Finally we are on tour with the System Center camps Manchester, Birmingham and York and we have a few places left on each of them so please don’t beat me up in a few months time that we didn’t run these, and please please cancel if you can’t make it as it does allow us to plan and to let others off the shortlist if it does fill up.

If you can’t make it and you want to try System Center sp1 you can get it here.. but note this is just for evaluation you can’t upgrade to the full version or migrate data from this.