Going virtual can go way beyond doing more with less and reducing your carbon footprint; virtualization enables a more agile, responsive infrastructure and lays the foundation for cloud services. In the new edition of TechNet ON we look at all the reasons why running enterprise workloads on virtual machine can deliver the ROI trifecta, while dramatically reducing the environmental impact of your datacenter.

More to come,

Mitch

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Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, and said the SP1 will be generally available on February 22.

Customers in the Windows Volume Licensing program can get the SP1 release on February 16.

According to the post in the Windows Server Division blog, the key new features in the release, Dynamic Memory and Remote FX are updates to Windows Server 2008 R2. Dynamic Memory lets you increase the virtual machine density on your existing servers, while Remote FX allows you to virtualize the graphical processing unit on a server and deliver rich media experiences on virtual desktops.

More to come,

Mitch

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The Business Intelligence Center is now a content hub featuring six end-to-end scenarios that highlight cross-product integrations for BI solutions. This collection of BI scenarios provides guidance on how to implement these solutions in your organization. There are currently six scenarios to choose from, including:

• Analyze Sales Performance by using a Dashboard Built on SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Office
• Create Reports and Subscriptions by using SQL Server Reporting Services, and Analyze Data in Excel
• Track Project Resource Usage by using a Dashboard Built on SharePoint Server and Project Server
• Create a Self-Service Analytics Solution for Sales Data by using PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint
• Configure Excel and Excel Services by using SQL Server Analysis Services on SharePoint Server 2010

·    Monitor SharePoint Server by using Visio Services and System Center Operations Manager

Additional scenarios will be added regularly. We encourage you to submit requests for solutions to address your business needs, as well as feedback on the content we provide.

Thanks for reading,

Mitch

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The Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Best Practices Analyzer gathers configuration information from Lync Server 2010 components to determine the overall health of a Lync Server environment.

the Best Practices Analyzer can examine servers running Active Directory Domain Services, Exchange Server Unified Messaging (UM), and Lync Server. You can use Best Practices Analyzer to do the following:

• Proactively perform checks, verifying that the configuration is set according to recommended best practices
• Automatically detect required updates to Lync Server 2010
• Generate a list of issues, such as suboptimal configuration settings, unsupported options, missing updates, or practices that we do not recommend
• Troubleshoot and fix specific problems

Download the Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Best Practices Analyzer.

Thanks for reading,

Mitch

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Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 are ready with new virtualization tools, web resources, management enhancements, and Windows 7 integration. You can also evaluate the SP1 edition with the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 trial. Also find Service Pack 1 evaluation resources here.

Thanks for reading,

Mitch

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