Eileen Brown's WebLog

My role is impacted by the layoffs at Microsoft

…and I’m currently At Risk of Redundancy.  Therefore I won’t be continuing to blog here any more, but I’ll still be blogging at my other blog at:

http://eileenbrown.wordpress.com/

Please point your feeds to go to:

 http://eileenbrown.wordpress.com/feed/ 

If I do manage to find another role at Microsoft before my formal notice period ends, then I’ll continue blogging here of course, but you can always find me over on my other blog or you can get in touch via Twitter @eileenb

And meanwhile – if you hear of any roles that would suit a great technical manager who understands IT Pros, Audiences, Influencers, Community, Web 2.0, social media and knows Unified Communications and messaging rather well then let me know.

Meanwhile – it’s been great fun doing this fantastic job with some amazing people.  Thank you all…

Download Windows 7 Release Candidate now

The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) is now available to download for everyone, and is available until June 2009 to download.

Download the RC

So what’s new in the RC?  Check out this video explaining some of the enhancements introduced since the Beta release.

If you are considering deploying Windows 7 in an enterprise, try downloading Windows Server 2008 R2 to test out the ‘better together’ features such as Branch Cache.

Support for the RC is via the Windows 7 TechNet forums: Have questions? Need answers? Visit our Windows 7 Forums.

Important note to Windows 7 Beta users: The Windows 7 Beta will expire on August 1, 2009 so you must rebuild your PC with either Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) or another valid version of Windows before July 1, 2009. You will receive a warning two weeks prior to July 1; after this date, your PC will reboot every two hours.

New resources for IT pros:

With the release of the Windows 7 there are also some new resources on the Windows 7 TechCentre. As well as the resources to guide you through your exploration of Windows 7, there is also now support on Piloting and Deploying Windows 7 and Managing Windows 7.

The new site  contains helpful information including:

Demonstration: Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7

How to Start a Windows 7 Pilot Deployment

Windows 7 Manageability Overview

TalkingAboutWindows.com—where IT pros can hear the “back stories” from the leading engineers for Windows 7, discussing how and why they made the critical decisions and tradeoffs they did; along with videos of IT pros discussing Windows 7 in their environment

Gesture your way arond Photosynth

Now this is neat.  YDreams have incorporated a device that lets you navigate your way around Photosynth using your hands.  You may not need to have the sound on the video though :-)

Hat tip to David for finding this.  A very impressive demo…

90% discount on Microsoft Office 2007

I blogged about the Ultimate Steal last year – a really great opportunity to get your hands on Office 2007 for an incredibly low price.  all you need is an .ac.uk email address – so that includes all of the more “mature” students who have gone into academia later on in life.  Do you know anyone studying a the Open University?  Well they’re included too :-D

Microsoft can now offer students the new software they need for a rock-bottom price.  The ‘Ultimate Steal' is an offer being run by Microsoft for university students where they are able to obtain Office Ultimate for only £38.95 which is a whopping 90% off the current price amongst the retail outlets 

Microsoft Office Ultimate Edition 2007 includes:

• Microsoft Access
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Groove
• Microsoft InfoPath
• Microsoft OneNote
• Microsoft Outlook with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Publisher
• Microsoft Word

All you have to do to get your hands on this fantastic deal is visit The Ultimate Steal website.

Thanks to the Small business blog for the links

Can you spot the spammer?

This is a quiz. Here’s a word doc in an attachment that someone sent to me asking whether this letter was genuine or not.

I spotted 10 different reasons why this letter is a fake.  how many can you see?  By the way – I’m not just criticising the use of English (although there are many examples here).  Leave a comment and see how many you can find…

How to use IE8 Accelerators for a better retail experience

At our last team meeting, Simon, who runs the business value blog did a great demo about IE8 accelerators which I asked him to capture as a video so I could share it with you.

ASOS have an accelerator which you can add to your copy of IE8 and have a play with yourself.  just go to: http://www.ieaddons.com/gb/accelerators to add the ASOS.com accelerator

Go to the web page, then highlight the word Jeans as Simon explains

and the demo should work as per the video…

A great explanation about Accelerators – so thank you Simon for capturing this so well… 

Talking about Windows 7

Following on from my community focused post today here’s an interesting site showcasing stories from the engineering team working on Windows 7 and also there are also soundbites from IT Pro customers. 

Talking about Windows Windows.  Worth a look …

A community look at Windows 7

Hot on the heels about my musings about what Windows 8 could look like, there’s a community view of Windows 7 courtesy of Rodney and the Canadian IT Pro blog…

Some great stuff here from the community.  Now come on UK guys – I’m sure we can come up with something windows 7 stuff that we haven’t seen yet :-)

Reasons to get a Roomba

So @Alex_ball was right :-)

Courtesy Graph Jam

My post has more daft cat stuff and the link to a YouTube video…

Using cool Technology at a Wedding

Narenda Wicaksono sent a mail about his Wedding and using some geeky technology to invite remote guests…

Narenda and his bride Kintan were able to share their traditional Indonesian wedding with ALL of their friends.  The tradition includes inviting ALL of your friends; even if they number some 2000, from all over the world.  Using the Internet, and products such as Office Communications Server 2007 LiveMeeting, Silverlight Streaming (Live), Windows Media Services 2008 and IIS7, and several cameras (some static, but many robotic controlled using by Robotics Studio), they were able to keep the tradition, while taking advantage of technology to help cut costs. (from Kevin’s blog)

What a great use of technology… and congratulations to both..

All Woman team in the Imagine Cup final

Mary Jo Foley noticed that there’s an all woman team in the  final of this year’s Imagine cup which will be held in Egypt in July this year. 

So who to root for?  The UK team or the All Women team?  difficult choice.  Whichever i choose, I think that this is an amazing contest with some true inspiration from every entrant – so all should be commended for their efforts and innovation so far.  Well done all…

Potential Windows 8 design?

I like this :-)  What could Windows 8 look like?  Have a look at this video…

Copenhagen User Experience from Copenhagen Concept on Vimeo.

Some amazing UI and design features here – and some good stuff about past present and future concepts…

Copenhagen User Experience, The Past and Future from Copenhagen Concept on Vimeo.

Some great stuff here.  Nice one Cullen…

Ian Hameroff talks to me about Exchange 2010 features

Last week at Interact2009, I grabbed some time with Ian Hameroff (@hameroff) to talk about the features of Exchange 2010 that we’ve announced.

We snuck into the  filming room where they were filming the Windows 7 videos during a coffee break and captured some of the key features of Exchange – straight from the product team…

Thanks Ian for missing lunch to do this – and well done for getting it all filmed in one take too :-)

and the URL for you to click is: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010

Outlook Thread Compressor – now available externally

Ewan has finally gone ahead and posted this amazing tool externally.  Thousands of us have been using this internally at Microsoft for years.  I make no apologies for reproducing his post (for those of you who don’t click links to other blogs)

Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.

Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…

Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.

I can honestly say that the Thread Compressor has been great for my productivity and is the first thing i install on my PC after a rebuild… It’s small, neat, efficient – and cuts the mail down in your Inbox dramatically – allowing you to have lots more coffee!

Do read the warnings though that Ewan blogs about.  This DELETES your mail  So of course there are disclaimers over on the site .  But it will save you a heck of a lot of time too…

Great stuff mate – Forgiveness, not permission :-)

For those who don’t “get” Twitter

I thought that this was a really clearly laid out diagram of the Visual guide to Twitter on Applicant which will stop me trying to explain what Twitter is all about to those who don’t “get” the value of Twitter.

And it’s given me a couple of new ideas on how I use it myself.  happy Tweeting…