The SharePoint 2007 Designer is now available as a free download.

For those who don’t know what SharePoint Designer is, visit she SharePoint Designer web page and have a look at the videos on offer. You can download the product from the same site.

Quite often, customers and partners ask about iFilters. For those who don’t know what an iFilter is, well, when a Indexing Service needs to index the contents of a file, it needs to know what the format of the file is. A PDF file has a different format to a DOC or DOCX file. An iFilter file contains the meta-data so that the Indexing Service understand the file. More information on iFilters is available on the MSDN site.

For some good lists of iFilters, visit one of the 2 sites:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2008/02/07/ifilter-pack-for-indexing-for-sharepoint-server-2007-search-and-sqlfts.aspx
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http://www.ifilter.org/ (This site has some advertising content on it, but the site does have some interesting links to iFilters)

Have a look at this 11 minute Video on Busting the top ten myths about VMware virtualization from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/f8c3314f-c82d-4f8d-8b19-6a59733670f8?vp_evt=eref&vp_video=Microsoft+Mythbusters%3a+Top+10+VMware+Myths

Have you tried Hyper-V yet?

A new Solution Accelerator just released by Microsoft - Hyper-V Security Guide.

The guide provides authoritative guidance that relates to the following strategies for securing virtualized environments:

• Hardening Hyper-V. Providing prescriptive guidance for hardening the Hyper-V role. Measures include reducing the attack surface of a server running Hyper-V, properly configuring secure network and storage devices.
• Delegating Virtual Machine Management. Common delegation scenarios and detailed steps guide you through using Authorization Manager (AzMan) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008) to separate virtual machine administrators from virtualization host administrators.
• Protecting Virtual Machines. Providing prescriptive guidance for securing virtual machine resources. Covering best practices and also detailed steps for protecting virtual machines by using a combination of file system permissions, encryption, and auditing. Included are resources for hardening and updating the operating system instances running within your virtual machines

You can download the guide from the Microsoft Download Center

XING, the social network platform focusing on Professional-Professional contact has made a Vista (and Windows 7) Sidebar gadget available on gallery.live.com

http://gallery.live.com/liveitemdetail.aspx?li=b329b15b-8ab3-4c9e-8aa6-8247b3f701a7&pl=1&bt=1&dpt=ma&ttp=sysnews&plf=own&pid=20090305&xtr=vstgdgt

My Profile on XING. Contact me if you want.