IT edge

With the recent Beta release of Windows 7, you may be wondering where to find resource, how to download / get access to the bits, how to get a key and if support is available. Here is the most up to date information (as of January 16, 2009) and set of resource available as you [...]

Microsoft, which acquired Caligari, has recently made the new version of trueSpace (v7.6) available for FREE. you can now build high-resolution 3-D models for use in games, on your web site, in Virtual Earth and in other projects using this free high-powered software. the software, documentation, and video tutorials are all free as well., along [...]

A lot of IT departments are concerned with managing the grwoth of SharePoint resources on their network. To answer this concern, Microsoft has released a SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool, which will allow administrators to scan their network and discover SharePoint resources and data assests. The main purpose of the SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool is to [...]

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 was made available for download today (February 25, 2008). The RTM build of SP1 can upgrade Operations Manager from the release code and from the SP1 RC code. A list on what’s included with Service Pack 1 can be found on these pages: What’s new in OpsMgr SP [...]

Microsoft has announced a program it calling ‘DreamSpark’ which will provide free professional development software to students. The software includes Vistual Studio Professional, Expression Studio, XNA Gae Studio, SQL Server Developer Edition, and Windows Server Standard. That’s a lot of free software! You can get the software from DreamSpark on MSDN’s Channel 8 if you qualify. [...]

Virtualization.info posted an article, ‘Patch Tuesday for VMWare’ on the analysis they did on VMWare patch release data. Obviously the hosted OS’s aren’t the only things which need to be patched. Here part of the analysis the authers released: “ESX 3.0.1: 68! Sixty-Eight patches in the course of about a year. Of course they were released in [...]

SQL Server 2008 Release to Manufacturing (RTM) date moved from Q2 to Q3 2008. On January 25th, the Data Platform Insider Blog on TechNet Blogs posted the updated roadmap information. The reason cited for the new release timeframe is because the “goal is to deliver the highest quality product possible and we simply want to [...]

Software management has become a big topic. Companies and government agencies have seen the need to keep control of software assests and determine if they have too little or too many licenses. There many tools that can be licensed and installed locally or hosted in an attempt to get a handle on the organizations software. One of the Online Services [...]

Microsoft continues to update it’s tools and guidance around deploying it new products. Currently available in beta is the ‘Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator’ which is built to assess a client and server environments for possible upgrade to the lastest respective OS’s. There are other great resources consistently released for planning and evaluating ’upgradability’ to Vista and Office 2007. After using [...]

It’s been a long time since the last Service Pack was released for Windows XP. But now you can now download Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Canidate. Befire you install SP3 RC review the Release Notes here. When you are ready to test the software (it’s recommended to test it only on non-production systems in your environment), download the Release [...]