Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2 Betas and More!
Last night, in the keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the immediate availability of the betas for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2! Needless to say, these are significant milestones – we are all very excited to share our latest operating system releases with the public. As of 10:30 p.m. EST on 1/7, TechNet and MSDN subscribers had access to download both OS betas, and tomorrow, 1/9, the full public beta will launch here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx
What are Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and why should you care? Windows 7 is the next major release of our client operating system. For consumers and business users alike, Windows 7 will provide significant performance improvements, reliability, security, compatibility, and battery life. The UI has been updated to improve the user experience, making the tasks we all do every day faster and easier. Consumers will also benefit from a new feature called ‘Home Groups’, wherein multiple PC’s in the home can be connected easily to share resources, media files, and the like. A new hardware compatibility technology named Device Stage will improve the hardware connection and management experience. Enterprise users will see immediate benefit from new features like BranchCache, DirectConnect, BitLocker to Go, AppLocker, PowerShell 2.0, VDI\RDP enhancements, and more. Windows Server 2008 R2 will unlock a number of these features when combined with Windows 7 clients, but offers its own unrestricted enhancements, as well – Hyper-V 2 (which includes Live Migration), Power savings enhancements such as Core Parking, Remote Desktop Services, VDI, improved scalability and performance, GPO enhancements and the list goes on.
For more information on Windows 7 and the IT Professional, hit our Springboard site: http://blogs.technet.com/springboard/
Windows Server 2008 R2 reading is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/r2.aspx
Additionally, we announced the release of Windows Live Essentials, a suite of client side consumer-focused applications that represent an evolution of our popular Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery and Live Writer applications. www.windowslive.com/explore
For a full breakdown of CES, videos, and more, go here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/default.mspx
