IT edge

March 3, 2010 – Microsoft release the Release Candidate for Service Manager 2010 to customer in the TAP/RDP Program. System Center Service Manager 2010 includes the following features:

• Integrated System Center CMDB
• Incident Management
• Change Management
• Knowledge Management
• Data Warehouse
• Self-Service Portal

Enhancements delivered since Beta 2 include:

• Upgrade and migration support for TAP customers
• Improved Performance, Scale and Stability
• Improved Notifications with batching email
• New Change Management Features

• Reviewer Notification
• Line Manager Approval

• New and Updated Reports
• Improved Self Service Software Provisioning
• Improved View Editing
• UX Improvements throughout the product
• Data Warehouse improvements
• Authoring Tool Improvements

• Extending and adding classes and relationships
• Support for controls in form customization
• Added workflow activities in activity library

• Localizability and Globalization bug fixes
• Supportability bug fixes
• Disaster Recovery

March 18^th, 2010 @ 9am PST www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com

Want to discover the best migration path to Windows 7? What’s the best desktop management strategy for your company? Which virtualization solutions can save you time and money?

This virtual event will teach you how Microsoft can help you discover choices, preserve & extend your existing investments. Learn how Microsoft’s virtualization vision and technologies can help you:

• Build a desktop virtualization management strategy that helps you manage your applications, data, mobile workers and multiple physical and virtual form factors
• Reduce desktop costs
• Enable flexible and agile IT through virtualization
• Increase desktop security and compliance
• Improve business continuity and end user productivity
• Increase end user productivity and streamline your IT management with Windows 7

HIGHLIGHTS:

• Microsoft offers a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization options
• 60 minutes of moderated and interactive discussions with early adopters of desktop virtualization technologies, key analysts and industry experts
• Explore your options and evaluate solutions that are right for your organization
• Learn about new licensing programs and the latest product updates

Register at www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com

If you have problems with a meeting ending after 30 minutes, 1 hour, or another specified length of time when using Office Communications Server or Microsoft LiveMeeting Service check your “Meet Now Options”

First, Start your LiveMeeting Client

Click the “Meet Now Options” from the LiveMeeting window. It located directly under the large “Meet Now” button.

This will open up your options and allow you to choose a longer duration of a meeting from the drop-down menu.

This post on the Microsoft Office Web Apps team gives a good scenario of why and how you would use both the Microsoft Office Suite and the Microsoft Office Web Apps either through SharePoint or your Windows Live SkyDrive.

It made me think of changing my own work habits in the near future. Take a look at it and perhaps it will give you some new ideas on the way you work.

http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/archive/2009/12/11/9935851.aspx

MED-V 1.0 SP1 RC for Windows 7 is now available!

• MED-V 1.0 SP1 Release Candidate is available for immediate download and evaluation at: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=665. This version adds support for Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit).

Accelerate your migration to Windows 7 with desktop virtualization
In the migration to Windows 7 you may find applications that aren’t compatible, still require Internet Explorer 6, or cannot be fixed by traditional methods. MED-V can help you remove these deployment barriers.

Whether you are working on your Windows 7 migration plans or already ramping up a deployment, you can start building a MED-V environment and evaluate its capabilities. Check out the MED-V Quick Start guide and the MED-V Evaluation Guide and training videos.

The final release of MED-V 1.0 SP1 and 13 new localized languages of App-V 4.6 will be available in April 2010.

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6, including App-V for RDS, is now publicly available as part of MDOP 2010.

• App-V 4.6 can be accessed immediately via MDOP 2010.
  Existing MDOP customers can download MDOP 2010 at the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS).  For evaluation, MDOP 2010 can be downloaded from MSDN and TechNet.

• App-V 4.6 for RDS (formerly App-V for Terminal Services) can be downloaded immediately here.

Virtualized Applications enable Access from Anywhere
By combining App-V 4.6 and Windows Server 2008 R2 access from anywhere is possible for end users, meaning:

• App-V 4.6 is now compatible with 64-bit Windows client and server platforms.
  Enabling IT to take advantage of x64 for client hardware refresh AND also deploy App-V to Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) allows:

• consolidating terminal server farms
• simplifying profile management
• providing virtual applications via session virtualization for users using App-V with RDS Desktop Web Access, and Access Gateway.

Improve application delivery & management using virtual applications with Windows 7
Through the App-V Cost Reduction Study and over 80 App-V customer case studies  Microsoft understands customers are gaining real benefits by using App-V to improve their application delivery. They have saved time, money and simplified their application management.

• App-V 4.6 and SCCM 2007 R2 SP2 now deliver virtual applications faster to users at logon. Users no longer need to wait for policy refresh to gain access to their applications.
• App-V 4.6 saves on SAN storage space by using a cache of virtualized applications that is shared across all your VDI desktops, resulting in:

• savings of GB of space
• eliminating duplicate applications and files
• enabling faster launch of your virtual applications.

Accelerate your adoption of Office 2010 with Microsoft Application Virtualization

App-V’s native streaming, no installation and isolation capabilities deliver Office 2010 faster than a traditional install and with less user productivity impact. Users can run multiple versions side by side, easing the learning curve associated with advancements like the ribbon user interface. IT has more time to migrate LOB applications dependent on older Office versions.

Cross product collaboration delivers seamless integration and new advancements in virtual Office 2010 and the Office family of products not previously available, this include:

• Improved SharePoint integration to Open, Save, Edit files

• Find your email items quickly with Outlook’s Fast Search

• Send files from directly inside of Office products such as PowerPoint

Check out the new App-V Videos and App-V Online Labs.

At TED 2010 Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth) demonstrates augmented-reality in Bing Maps. The demo is amazing and combined typical 3-D maps, augmented with Flickr photos, in-door “street view” images and a video overly on the in-door street view images and integration with Worldwide Telescope.

Check out the next evolution in Mapping: http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html

The Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Dashboard lets IT stay on top of application and operating system deployments, security updates, the health status of computers, and IT compliance with key regulations. It has an easy to use, customizable dashboard.

Dashboard Benefits:

• Provides dependable, timely access to key information: the dashboard lets IT Pros easily stay on top of deployments, security updates, client health, and compliance status.
• Easy to build and configure: the dashboard allows customers to create new dashboards in just minutes. And six default datasets provide customers with valuable information “out of the box”.
• Easy to customize: the dashboard can easily be customized to meet the needs of different departments and other groups. Any dataset in the Configuration Manager database can be presented on the dashboard, in chart, gauge, and table formats.
• Flexible & interactive: users can easily filter data and create ad hoc, custom views. Filters allow users to quickly drill down from high-level to more specific data.

Dashboard

Here is an example dashboard displaying Configuration Manager metrics. All of this information comes directly from the Configuration Manager database.

Resources:

• System Center Configuration Manager Dashboard website link
• Direct link to the Connect site for the Dashboard beta program
• Link to send feedback
• System Center Configuration Manager website

Lots of Web sites store and display date information that is personal to their users. Users often want one place to manage their calendar for example Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, Google Calendar and so on. Web sites can make their experience more useful by allowing calendar clients to subscribe or import date information in standards-based formats so that information relating to their service is represented in a user’s primary calendar client. In other Web applications it may be necessary for a user to enter date information that is already in another service or calendaring client. By allowing a user to import or subscribe to a 3rd party calendaring information it makes it easier for the user and also increases the reliability of the data entry.

The goal of this Web Application Toolkit is to provide a standards-based service that can be reused in your own Web application to expose calendaring and events information for different users, using different data formats (iCalendar, XML, JSON). This service follows the REST principles and supports different query string parameters for data filtering: dates range, results count, text query, and so on. Additionally, standing from the client-side, you’ll find examples of how to consume the endpoint using the ASP.NET Ajax Library templates and the hCalendar microformat.

This Toolkit uses the standard iCalendar format as one representation for the calendar information. However, for simplicity purposes it does not support the full iCalendar specification (only Events). Also notice that the REST Service included does not provide support for all the CRUD operations that would be desired in production environment scenarios.

Get the Web App Toolkit here.

A popular way to attract first time users to a web site is to offer a free version of the software that has limited functionality. A good way to convert that non-paying customer into a paying customer is to offer more functionality and features beyond what is available in the free version and allow the transition between versions to be seamless. This business model of delivering “basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features” is known as the Freemium business model.

Often developers create custom branches of their core application to enable this type of functionality but this is not the most cost effective solution as maintaining two code-bases is expensive. The migration between different Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs) of the product might also require work on the part of the customer and this is another barrier to adoption.

This Web Application Toolkit offers a more elegant and cost-effective way to solve this problem by using a SKU/Features matrix to manage which features are available in certain SKUs. The Toolkit makes it easy for the developer to ascertain which SKU the current user has paid for and also which functionality should therefore be available to them by using standard ASP.NET Role Management features together with WCF REST Services to retrieve the SKU/Features information.

The Toolkit also provides reusable ASP.NET MVC views and controllers for developers to create admin experiences for managing the SKU/Feature matrix and page templates to explain to customers about the different SKUs or versions available.

Get the Web App Toolkit here.