Scenarios:

• Internal conference room scheduling – Ever have a person visit your office and you need a place to meet? You make a quick pass around the usual suspects looking for an open room. You find one but you’re not sure how long it’s open… Then you want to book it… but what’s the alias? Thor makes it easy.
• External Schedule of Events for a Conference – Provides people a live calendar of events direct to their mobile phone without the need to create a new web site or management application.
• Public Conference room Schedules – Allow Anonymous users to access room schedules securely without needing direct access to exchange.

Benefits of Thor:

• No need for expensive LCD monitors for your conference rooms…
• No need to remember conference room alias to lookup a schedule…
• No need to open outlook to book a room or resource…

Thor’s Technology:

• Microsoft Tag – Thor’s addressing layer. You can get at calendars via URL but tag makes it easy
• Windows Azure Web – Presentation layer that takes advantage of ASP.NET MVC and RIA services for the client presentation layer and Silverlight as the configuration and administration presentation layer
• Windows Azure Compute – The compute layer supports a calendar provider model. Thor ships with providers for Exchange 2007 Interop, Exchange 2010 Interop and Exchange Web Services for cloud hosted exchange instances! The compute layer caches the calendars so exchange is not accessed in public calendar modes! The compute layer also addresses scenarios where a proxy is required to book appointments
• Azure Storage – Azure storage is the calendar caching layer for Thor as well as logging repository
• Exchange 2010 – Exchange is used as an on and off premise calendaring service for Thor!
• PowerShell – Thor also includes PowerShell scripts required to manage and maintain the service

Architecture Notes:

• Thor Presentation The Web role is responsible for UX rendering for both the calendar services as well as Thor’s administrative interface. When a user requests a calendar or administrative services, authentication, if required, is performed against Exchange services. The calendar services UX leverages ASP.NET MVC for display segmentation and RIA services for advanced data binding. The information rendered on the calendars is not pulled directly from Exchange but from an Azure Storage table cache. This helps firewall the Exchange server in public use scenarios as well as address potential performance issues with potentially thousands of users requesting the same calendar.

  The administrative pages for Thor are implemented in Silverlight. The administrative UX binds to a set of tables in Azure storage that maintain configuration settings for each Thor instance deployed. These tables can be accessed using a storage utility but some of the fields are encrypted. The Azure tables are also used by Thor to store application logging data.

• Thor Worker The Worker role  does most of the Exchange Server interaction. Thor was designed around a provider model so that it could be extended to support multiple calendaring providers. Thor ships with providers for Exchange 2007, 2010 and native Web Services. The worker role uses these providers to access Exchange calendars using a service account configured by the administrator. Once authentication has been successful, the worker role generates the calendar cache in Azure storage and maintains synchronization with the Exchange Server as calendar updates are made.

Download Thor free at CodePlex here: http://thor.codeplex.com/releases/view/40406

Stephen Elop is announcing the launch via webcast on May 12th at 11am EST. If you want to join the webcast, you can register at: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx.

• 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

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

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.

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 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.

• 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.

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

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