For the month of December, Microsoft is offering a free four-day online training program to help you make the transition to the cloud. The program is four hours per day for each of the four days. Find the dates and times for your region and register here.

The sessions are geared for technical decision makers who have at least an intermediate knowledge of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or later and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 or later, along with a basic technical understanding of cloud services. See the Practice Accelerator prerequisites.

For more on the Practice Accelerator for Cloud Services, see the US SMB&D TS2 Team Blog post.

More to come,

Mitch

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Microsoft yesterday announced Silverlight 5. With beta availability scheduled for the first half of 2011, the next release of Silverlight sports more than 40 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications with desktop features in the browser and dramatic video quality and performance improvements.

Key media and UI improvements include:

• Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 improve performance for lower-power devices to render high-definition video using GPU support.
• TrickPlay allows video to be played at different speeds and supports fast-forward and rewind. At up to twice the speed, audio pitch correction allows users to watch videos while preserving a normal audio pitch.
• Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.
• Remote-control support allows users to control media playback.
• Digital rights management advancements allow seamless switching between DRM media sources.

Silverlight 5 was announced during a day-long Firestarter event. You can view the Silverlight Firestarter webcast on demand.

For more detail on the upcoming release, see Scott Guthrie’s blog.

More to come,

Mitch

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Two limited Community Technology Previews will be available before the end of 2010: The SQL Azure Reporting CTP and the SQL Azure Data Sync CTP 2.

SQL Azure Reporting enables developers to enhance their applications by embedding cloud based reports on information stored in a SQL Azure database, and author reports using familiar SQL Server Reporting Services tools and then use these reports in their applications which may be on-premises or in the cloud.

The update to SQL Azure Data Sync enables synchronization between on-premises SQL Server and SQL Azure, giving customers greater flexibility in building solutions that span on-premises and the cloud.  

Sign up for the CTPs via Microsoft Connect.

More to come,

Mitch

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You can now register to download the 120-day trial or the virtual hard drive 180-day trial of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1.

You can also review the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 system requirements or Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1 VHD system requirements.

More to come,

Mitch

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Microsoft has released the latest Security Bulletin for December 2010.

For more information about the bulletin advance notification service, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification.

For information about how to receive automatic notifications whenever Microsoft security bulletins are issued, visit Microsoft Technical Security Notifications.

Microsoft is hosting a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins on December 15, 2010, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada). Register now for the December Security Bulletin Webcast. After this date, this webcast is available on-demand. For more information, see Microsoft Security Bulletin Summaries and Webcasts.

More to come,

Mitch

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