Starting July 1, the beta will start to reboot every 2 hours and then expire on August 1st.

If you want the RC, you'll only be able to download it until August 15th.

Download the Windows 7 RC today!

Chris

FIN

The sun is shining here in the Seattle area today, and for some reason, it got me thinking about disaster recovery. I guess I'm weird that way, but then I have dreams about command lines from time to time.

Anyway, thinking about how to recover from a major disaster and getting that documented into a plan can be a career differentiator for you. If you already have a disaster recovery plan, periodically reviewing and updating it is a best practice, and there's no day like a sunny day to re-evaluate what to do when the fecal matter impacts the rotating blades.

The online TechNet Library is a great place to find disaster recovery information for many of our products like Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows Server.

More individualized resources can be had in the TechNet Forums, where there are dedicated forums and threads to disaster recovery and high availability for things like SQL Server, clustering, and Windows Server.

Don't see the answer to your question? Just ask a question in the forums, and you'll be able to tap into the wisdom and advice of other IT professionals, including MVPs and Microsoft employees.

Don't forget that disaster recovery also includes your people and physical plant.

The United States government, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, has a web site all about being prepared, with a special section just for businesses. While it's what you might expect from the federal government, there are some handy tips around awareness and communication  that are worth a look.

Of course, for any disaster recovery plan, you need to start by assessing what your potential risks are, from environmental to political.

Get knowledgeable about your physical environment first, as you're more likely to have a natural disaster than armed insurgents attacking your data center. Here in the Seattle area, our largest risks are earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, high wind, heavy snow and drought, not necessarily in that order. You might be wondering why drought is on that list. Much of the energy generated in the Pacific Northwest is hydroelectric, and extended drought could cause a significant drop in generated power to run servers and HVAC systems.

But each area of the world has its own risks, so get familiar with yours. Running IT in Canberra is very, very different than running IT in Calcutta and is different again from Caracas to Cracow.

Vitamin D deficiency is now pulling me outside, where I'll be able to gaze at Mt. Rainier, and think about where I can source dust masks for when it finally decides to erupt again. ;-)

Chris

FIN

In honor of Earth Day, TechNet magazine has released an online-only edition, with articles around reducing energy consumption in the data center and other ways you can do more with less.

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx.

Chris

FIN

Good coverage at the Data Platform Insider and PSS SQL Server Engineers blogs, and as always, product documentation is in the TechNet Library.

Chris

FIN

With the geometric explosion of ever briefer (hello, Twitter!) electronic resource materials the past few years, you might think the need for long-form books is declining.

Think again.

From ancient history's clay tablets to today's print on demand, books still fill a vital niche in our ability to store and transmit information. Especially when the system is down and you don't quite remember (or haven't yet learned) the keyboard incantations to make things right again.

To that end, TechNet is happy to present a Featured Books page, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dd644554.aspx, organized by product and technology, that we feel will help you solve problems and gain new skills to keep your career headed in the right direction. We'll be expanding the lists in the next few weeks down into the TechCenters themselves and the product and technologies we cover, so consider this page just a start, and let us know if you think we've overlooked the best books for the category.

Happy reading!

Chris

FIN

Reading white papers, product documentation, blogs, forums or any other textual information can only go so far when you're trying to learn how to do something or get up to speed on a new technology.

That's why we've been adding more and more video content on TechNet over the past few months. In case you've missed it because you're using your bookmarks to just drop in to your favorite page, here's a handy link to TechNet's all-up video page. From here, you can see all the Videos available on TechNet grouped by product, along with links that take you to product-specific video pages.

Most videos are just a few minutes long and provide some great information on topics as diverse as the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool 4.0 to Windows Server 2008 Read Only Domain Controllers - Password Replication Policies to How Do I: Add a Perimeter Virtual Machine Host to System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008?

Take a peek and let me know if there are videos on topics you'd like to see.

Chris

FIN

Spring cleaning continues on TechNet with a refreshed Windows Server TechCenter!

Our big changes here include:

• A vertical left navigation strip that appears on every page of the site, exposing the most requested downloads and tasks
• We changed the tabs across the top of the page to reflect the product versions
• On the home page, a big, beautiful Silverlight video scroller that we'll be updating with new videos on a regular basis
• Removed or migrated to the Library hundreds of pages - this should increase discoverability and make search results much better
• Content cleanup and refreshes across the Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server landing pages

More to come here, but this are some big changes for this TechCenter, so please let me know what you think.

Chris

FIN

It's Spring, (well, here in the Seattle area, it was snowing this morning, so Winter isn't quite ready to release it's icy grip...) so it's time for Spring cleaning on TechNet!

We've started with the Windows Client TechCenter.

Notable changes:

• More featured videos
• Removal of sub-navigation elements (underneath the tabs) to pull the content up on the page and de-clutter your choices
• For the Springboard pages, we introduced a new navigation element with buttons that takes up less space and just looks nicer than the text links we had before
• We removed useless, bandwidth hogging-graphics :-)
• Standardized icon application to allow for content type identification at a glance
• Implemented OMPL feeds in some places for fresher content
• Standardized the look and feel of the pages across the different product version pages for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7

Let me know what you think.

Chris

FIN

Regular visitors to the TechNet home page might have noticed that we've been making more changes around the content we feature.

Previously, we were featuring a variety of blogs at the top of the page, but we realized that the chance of a blog post intersecting with your needs today wasn't as large as we would have liked. So, we've changed that area to be more topical and up-to-date with today's concerns.

Top-of-mind right now is Security and Windows 7 - keep an eye on the space and let us know if the links we put there are useful for you.

Chris

FIN

ars technica has a short article about installing the Windows 7 beta on a Mac.

It's worth a look if you support multiple platforms.

Chris

FIN

Bits. You want 'em, we got 'em.

And we serve 'em up from the Microsoft Download Center, which has just been refreshed with a great, new Silverlight home page.

Take a peek.

Chris

FIN

In a few months, it will have been fifteen years since I set up my first web server on a spare Mac II at www.hsas.washington.edu using Mac httpd.  (You can check Netcraft to see what it's running today.)

The genesis of that box was frustration. Frustration that the job I was doing at the time had no budget to solve a data sharing problem I was hired to fix. Frustration that the solutions I was looking at to solve the problem were tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and would take years to hit final install.

In two days, I had the server set up with software downloaded from the Internet and it was successfully posting data to a back-end database. Ahh, satisfaction!

I'll never forget the demo I did for my managers, "This is called a web browser..."

They didn't get it, so by the end of the year I struck out on my own and spent the next decade building and maintaining data centers.

I took a brief career break earlier this decade to work for a coffee shop doing corporate communications then plunged back into the web here at Microsoft and have had the opportunity to do some really interesting things along the way.

So why the trip down memory lane? Once a year here at Microsoft we do an annual check-in around careers and career planning, and it's done in conjunction with our managers. I had my check-in on Monday and I met with my team members through last week. It's a great way to sanity-check skills, career headings and talk about areas for growth. In my case, I've had a varied, non-linear career, to say the least.

What has been my touchstone over the past fifteen years has been port 80: the web.

As I think about the next fifteen years, I'm energized by the projects before me at the moment and those that are but faint glimmers in my mind about things we may be able to do in the future.

The cables are calling to me and I can almost hear the electrons and photons singing their ultra high frequency songs as they spin along.

Or that could be all the caffeine I've ingested over the years talking. ;-)

Chris

FIN

The Sysinternals TechCenter is one of the most popular TechCenters we have on TechNet, so I'm sure that many of you have seen this already, but this week we refreshed its look and feel.

If you've never visited, take a look. There are some great, free tools available there like Process Explorer, Autoruns, and Process Monitor, all great tools for troubleshooting complex or almost invisible problems.

Chris

FIN

The Seattle area is notorious for its darkness during the winter due to the combination of latitude and weather. (A little-known fact is that Seattle is farther north than the majority of the Canadian population - check the map!)

Contrary to popular opinion, it doesn't rain every day, but It has been a dark, cloudy, grey, damp winter here in the Pacific Northwest and when we're not skiing (at night), reading, working, playing music in our garages or planning trips to sunny climes, we think about the sun and blue skies.

This morning the fog burned off, and a gorgeous day is blossoming. With it comes an additional spring to step and thought, and dreams hatched in dark caves of clouds come into the light and fledge.

If you're a frequent visitor to TechNet over the past year or so, you may havee noticed that we've been doing some repainting and moving the furniture around, and hopefully these changes have made your TechNet web experience better.

Last week, we kicked off planning for TechNet 2.0, and instead of approaching it from taking what we have today and adding a new paint and furniture, we're going to build a new house.

We have a blue sky, where everything will be considered and nothing yet seems impossible or crazy.

What would you like to have TechNet 2.0 be for you?

Chris

FIN

Just in case you had not heard, Microsoft is offering a $250,000 USD reward for information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for illegally launching the Conficker malicious code on the Internet.

We have a resource-packed page on the Security TechCenter about the Conficker Worm to help you stay safe or get your machines clean.

Chris

FIN