Download the new Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 to help you save valuable IT infrastructure planning time and expense. New features include Office 2010 readiness assessment, Windows 2000 Server migration assessment, and inventory of Linux-powered LAMP stacks.
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Mitch
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Microsoft has begun offering new Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certification for Office 2010 products. The certification exams validate proficiency in using Office 2010. Candidates who pass a certification exam show that they can meet globally recognized performance standards. More to come, Mitch Subscribe to the TechNet Flash newsletter
Partnerships are a critical part of doing business. You partner with your suppliers, your customers, and maybe even other companies within your own industry to foster cooperation, innovation, and efficiency. But how do you provide access to shared resources in a highly secure, trusted way? See this edition of the Microsoft IT Pro Guide to learn how Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) can help you establish trusted relationships across organizational boundaries, facilitating partnership and collaboration while keeping your resources protected.
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Mitch
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Workflows are core to business functions, and a key component of an enterprise-class collaboration platform is the ability to automate workflows. In the new edition of TechNet ON, we examine to various tools and procedures for building workflows in SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 offers several ways to create workflows, including ways for your users to build workflows without writing code. And TechNet has launched a new Resource Center, Workflows in SharePoint Server 2010, which does a great job of explaining the various workflow authoring tools, including the use of InfoPath forms services, SharePoint Designer 2010, and Visual Studio 2010 to create code-based custom workflows.
You also can use Visio Premium 2010 as a starting point to create SharePoint workflows since flowcharts are great way to model workflows. As Brien Posey points out in his TechNet Magazine article SharePoint 2010: Going with the Flow, Visio 2010 can be used to create a workflow template that you can then import into SharePoint Designer to complete the build, without having to write any code. Posey takes you through the steps in this process, including the use of SharePoint Designer.
While SharePoint workflows are designed to improve the performance of business processes, you’ll also be monitoring the performance of your SharePoint site and there is one key element that can contribute to sluggish performance: the database.
As more users and more documents get added to a SharePoint site and need to go back and forth between the SharePoint Web farm and the SQL Server database, the database can quickly overload and slow down SharePoint 2010. In this edition of TechNet ON, Iqbal Khan provides a solution to this problem in his TechNet Magazine article Improve SharePoint 2010 Performance with RBS.
Khan’s article is a must-read for SharePoint administrators looking to elevate the performance of SharePoint 2010. While SharePoint 2010 supports binary large objects (BLOBs), it’s not the best place to store BLOB data, so with SQL Server 2008, Microsoft added the Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) feature which lets SQL Server store all the BLOB data outside the database.
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Mitch
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MDT 2010 has been updated to include Office 2010 support, the ability for users to initiate and customize their own deployments using System Center Configuration Manager, key enhancements in Windows 7 driver support, and more.
Launch the download of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1:
Visit the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1 download page for quick details, system requirements, download instructions, and release notes.
More to come,
Mitch
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