Earlier today the Exchange CXP team released Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 SP3 to the Download Center.

Note: The post title erroneously referred to Update Rollup 3. It has been updated to reflect the correct rollup number.

This update contains a number of customer-reported and internally found issues since the release of RU5. See KB 2608656: Description of Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3' for more details.

We would like to specifically call out the following fixes which are included in this release:

• DST Cadence Release for Dec 2011 - Exchange 2007
• 22656040 An Exchange Server 2007 Client Access server may respond slowly or stop responding when users try to synchronize the Exchange ActiveSync devices with their mailboxes
• 2498852 "0x80041606" error message when you perform a prefix search by using Outlook in online mode in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 22653334 The reseed process is unsuccessful on the SCR passive node when the circular logging feature is enabled in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 22617784 Journal reports are expired or lost when the Microsoft Exchange Transport service is restarted in an Exchange Server 2007 environment
• 2289607 The week numbers displayed in OWA do not match the week numbers displayed in Outlook for English users and French users in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

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If you plan your days using Google Calendar, you’ll be happy to know that the company’s Sync team has now made it possible to show appointments from multiple calendars on your Windows Phone 7.5 (thanks, fellas!).

To add them, just go to m.google.com/sync on your phone. Once you’ve logged in, select your device and the calendars you want to sync (you can choose up to 25—if you’re really that organized). Tap Save and you’re done! Note that your new calendars won’t show up until your phone’s next sync with Google’s servers—every 30 minutes by default. To make them show up sooner, you’ll need to do a manual sync. We’ve put together some detailed instructions here.

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The latest version the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager (SCM) tool—version 2.5—is now available for beta download and review!

NEW baselines include:

• Exchange Server 2007 SP3 Security Baseline
• Exchange Server 2010 SP2 Security Baseline
• Updated client product baselines include:
• Windows 7 SP1 Security Compliance Baseline
• Windows Vista SP2 Security Compliance Baseline
• Windows XP SP3 Security Compliance Baseline
• Office 2010 SP1 Security Baseline
• Internet Explorer 8 Security Compliance Baseline

SCM 2.5 enables you to quickly configure and manage your desktops and laptops, traditional data center, and private cloud using Group Policy and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.

Get the beta download from Microsoft Connect at https://connect.microsoft.com/site715/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=40885.

After you download and become familiar with updates in SCM 2.5, please provide us with your feedback.Your opinion is very important to us. We would especially appreciate your feedback in the following areas:

• Relevance.How relevant is the information for your organization?
• Usefulness.How will you use these product baselines? How does the SCM 2.5 tool provide value?
• Usability. Is the baseline configuration information easy to follow? Can you easily find key content?
• Consistency. Is the content in the security guides consistent with the setting recommendations and vulnerability information?
• General Quality. Please provide us with your opinion on the general quality of the product baseline content. Would you recommend SCM 2.5 to colleagues?

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At the beginning of each year, many of us assess how we (and our developer community) might want to invest our respective time and resources for the year ahead, and we’ve devoted some of that energy in the past few months toward thinking about the various developer conferences we host.

As part of that reflection, we have decided to merge MIX, our spring web conference for developers and designers, into our next major developer conference, which we will host sometime in the coming year. I know a number of folks were wondering about MIX, given the time of year, so we wanted to make sure there’s no ambiguity, and be very clear… there will be no MIX 2012.

For context, the idea to create MIX was conceived in the fall of 2005, literally as the PDC05 main stage was being disassembled after the final keynote. While we reflected on that PDC, there was a lot of discussion around our engagement with the web community, and how we needed a more focused effort around our upcoming plans for Internet Explorer, the roadmap for our web platform, the work we were starting on web standards (we were shipping IE6 at the time), and so on. MIX06 was held about four months later in Las Vegas, and has been there ever since. A lot of great things subsequently happened in and around MIX in the six years that followed, but there have been a couple of slow and steady trends that have brought us to this point.

Full Story At Source

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On March 7th, 2012 this online event will allow you to immerse yourself in the exciting New World of Data with SQL Server 2012. Engage not only Microsoft product teams, but with our partners and our most ground breaking customers. SQL Server 2012 is part of the broadest Data Platforms in technology today. Discover how it enables mission critical confidence, blazing fast performance, and stunning interactive data visualizations.

Join us on March 7, 2012 and be a part of the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event. You will have access to over 30+ sessions to learn about the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 at your own pace, in your own schedule. This event brings together a who’s who of industry experts and executives to tell the SQL Server 2012 story in this unique online launch event. You will also “meet” with partners, experts, and peers in a virtual “Expo Hall” to discuss SQL Server 2012 one-on-one.

Register Here

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Is Microsoft going to position the coming Windows 8 beta as a “consumer preview”? And if so, why?

Microsoft officials have repeated recently that the Windows 8 beta release is on track for late February 2012. But one public relations official with the Windows team provided a slightly different message — and one that escaped notice by most of those who read her quote — during the Consumer Electronics Show.

As reported by Pocket Lint, Windows Director of Consumer PR, Janelle Poole, stayed on message regarding Microsoft’s continued reluctance to talk about its release-to-manufacturing/ship targets for Windows 8. But, as Windows SuperSite’s Paul Thurrott noted last week, part of Poole’s message deviated from the usual script. Poole called the coming Windows 8 beta “the consumer preview.” Here’s her quote:

“We haven’t talked about the release date and we generally don’t. We are talking milestone to milestone, so for us right now we’re talking about the next milestone being the consumer preview happening in late February.”

If you know anything about the Windows org, you know words matter. This wasn’t a random throw-away.

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The Integration Pack for HP Service Manager is an add-on for System Center 2012 Orchestrator that enables you to retrieve, create, update and monitor tickets in HP Service Manager.

The Integration Pack for HP Service Manager is an add-on for System Center 2012 Orchestrator that enables you to retrieve, create, update and monitor tickets in HP Service Manager.

This integration pack adds the HP Service Manager category to the Activity pane in the Runbook Designer. This category contains the following activities:

• Close Entry
• Create Entry
• Get Entry
• Monitor Entry
• Update Entry

After you download the integration pack file, you must register it with the Orchestrator management server and then deploy it to runbook servers and Runbook Designers. For how to install integration packs, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh420346.aspx

System_Center_2012_Orchestrator_Integration_pack_for_HP_Service_Manager.exe

Download 699 KB

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Connect your Facebook account to the Outlook Social Connector and stay up to the minute with the people in your network by accessing everything from e-mail threads to status updates in one single, centralized view.

The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook allows you to connect your Facebook account to the Outlook Social Connector and obtain information about your friends and colleagues. You can see status updates and recently posted items from your Facebook contacts.
You can also use Outlook Social Connector to display a quick view of related Outlook content when you click on an email from a contact, such as recent e-mail conversations, meetings, and shared attachments to help you easily track your communications

NOTE: The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider requires Microsoft Outlook Social Connector and the related update (KB983403) to be installed. If these components are not already installed on your machine, the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook will download and install the necessary updates from the Microsoft Download Center before completing the provider installation.

Download Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook - Microsoft Download Center

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Download: System Center 2012 Licensing Datasheet

Video: Thought Leadership Series – Enabling Private Cloud
Garth Fort talks about why you should consider converting your current datacenter infrastructure into a private cloud fabric.

Video: Thought Leadership Series – All about the App
Garth Fort talks about Microsoft’s unique philosophy around managing apps and highlights some of the compelling app management capabilities in System Center 2012.

Video: System Center 2012 Application Management Overview
Anant Sundaram, a Senior Product Manager, talks about the importance of application management in the private cloud and virtualized datacenter.

Video: System Center 2012 Infrastructure Management Overview
David Mills, a Senior Product Manager, talks about the importance of infrastructure management in the private cloud and virtualized datacenter.

Video: Deploying the Fabric with Virtual Machine Manager 2012
Kenon Owens, a Product Manager, talks about some of the new deployment and configuration features in VMM 2012.

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform website

Official Press Release: Microsoft Brings the Cloud Down to Earth for Enterprises

System Center 2012 – Orchestrator 2012 Component Add-ons and Extensions

System Center 2012 – Service Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions

The move to private cloud is on, and Microsoft is taking customers there with System Center 2012:

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A Microsoft private cloud dramatically changes the way your business produces and consumes IT services by creating a layer of abstraction over your pooled IT resources. This allows your datacenter to offer true infrastructure service capability as well as optimally managed application services.

Microsoft private cloud solutions are built on System Center and Windows Server.

System Center 2012 Release Candidate empowers you with a common management toolset for your private and public cloud applications and services. System Center helps you confidently deliver IT as a Service for your business.

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (optional download) will give you improved powerful virtualization capabilities that can transform how you deliver IT services to your end users and enable you to lay the foundation of a private cloud infrastructure.

Please Note: Many Microsoft private cloud scenarios require Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. If you are using an older version, we highly recommend upgrading to experience the full Microsoft private cloud evaluation.
Need more information? See the product details page. Register to access technical product resources at the Microsoft Private Cloud Evaluation Resource Page.

The Microsoft private cloud evaluation includes:

System Center 2012 Release Candidate
Available in these languages: English

• System Center 2012 Unified Installer is a utility designed to perform new, clean installations of System Center 2012 for testing and evaluation purposes only. If you want to upgrade from an existing System Center installation or choose set up options such as high availability or multi-server component installs, please refer instead to the System Center 2012 component installation guides located on the Microsoft Private Cloud Evaluation Resource Page.
  User's Guide >>
• System Center 2012 App Controller provides a common self-service experience across private and public clouds that can help you empower application owners to easily build, configure, deploy, and manage new services.
  
• System Center 2012 Configuration Manager provides comprehensive configuration management for the Microsoft platform that can help you empower users with the devices and applications they need to be productive while maintaining corporate compliance and control.
  
• System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager provides unified data protection for Windows servers and clients that can help you deliver scalable, manageable, and cost-effective protection and restore scenarios from disk, tape, and off premise.
  
• System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection, built on System Center Configuration Manager, provides industry-leading threat detection of malware and exploits as part of a unified infrastructure for managing client security and compliance that can help you simplify and improve endpoint protection.
  
• System Center 2012 Operations Manager provides deep application diagnostics and infrastructure monitoring that can help you ensure the predictable performance and availability of vital applications and offers a comprehensive view of your datacenter, private, and public clouds.
  
• System Center 2012 Orchestrator provides orchestration, integration, and automation of IT processes through the creation of runbooks that can help you to define and standardize best practices and improve operational efficiency.
  
• System Center 2012 Service Manager provides flexible self-service experiences and standardized datacenter processes that can help you integrate people, workflows, and knowledge across enterprise infrastructure and applications.
  
• System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager provides virtual machine management and services deployment with support for multi-hypervisor environments that can help you deliver a flexible and cost effective private cloud environment.
  

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (optional download)
Available in these languages: Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 is designed to help you increase control, availability, and flexibility of your datacenter and desktop infrastructure while helping reduce costs.
  

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The soon to be released System Center 2012 product suite will get a huge licensing overhaul.

Where the current System Center 2010 suite contains 110(!) licensing items, SC 2012 will only have 2, yep that’s right only 2 choices of SKU’s and that is for the whole suite of SC products!

That’s not all, these licenses also include SQL licenses if a SC 2012 component requires it.

That is still not all, besides Opalis and AVICode now being fully integrated in 2012 a new SC product is included in 2012: App Controller and…..

Forefront endpoint protection (anti-malware)!

So that is 8 System Center products included in 2 license forms:

An OSE is Operating System Environment.

Each license is for a dual processor machine, that is 2 physical processors, not cores. So maybe use the term socket to avoid the proc/core confusion .

Standard SKU 1,300 USD per 2 proc

Datacenter SKU 3,600 USD per 2 proc (socket), includes SQL runtime

And there is still more, the licensing transition plan is also very generous!

Also available in combination of the ECI licensing, with minimum of 25 initial purchase.

Now compare the new licensing with Vmware:

Some examples which license is most economical

More system center 2012 news later this week.

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Another extensive blogpoost on the Building Windows 8 blog:

ReFS, has been designed from the ground up to meet a broad set of customer requirements, both today’s and tomorrow’s, for all the different ways that Windows is deployed.

The key goals of ReFS are:

• Maintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint.
• Verify and auto-correct data. Data can get corrupted due to a number of reasons and therefore must be verified and, when possible, corrected automatically. Metadata must not be written in place to avoid the possibility of “torn writes,” which we will talk about in more detail below.
• Optimize for extreme scale. Use scalable structures for everything. Don’t assume that disk-checking algorithms, in particular, can scale to the size of the entire file system.
• Never take the file system offline. Assume that in the event of corruptions, it is advantageous to isolate the fault while allowing access to the rest of the volume. This is done while salvaging the maximum amount of data possible, all done live.
• Provide a full end-to-end resiliency architecture when used in conjunction with the Storage Spaces feature, which was co-designed and built in conjunction with ReFS.

The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces).

• Metadata integrity with checksums
• Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
• Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write)
• Large volume, file and directory sizes
• Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
• Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
• Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
• Resiliency to corruptions with "salvage" for maximum volume availability in all cases
• Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing

In addition, ReFS inherits the features and semantics from NTFS including BitLocker encryption, access-control lists for security, USN journal, change notifications, symbolic links, junction points, mount points, reparse points, volume snapshots, file IDs, and oplocks.

And of course, data stored on ReFS is accessible through the same file access APIs on clients that are used on any operating system that can access today’s NTFS volumes.

Continue at source!!

MSDN Blogs

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This Rollup fixes a “Bad Request” issue when accessing OWA through Forefront TMG. For a full list of changes, consult knowledgebase article kb2649961.

Note that along the lines of products like Exchange, cumulative updates for ForeFront TMG are now also called Rollup instead of Software Update or Update.

You can request ForeFront TMG SP2 RU1 directly from support here.

Source: EighTwOne (821)

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I recommend you to attend this webcast tomorrow. Also keep checking bink.nu tomorrow for some nice announcements.

The definition, business value, and technology benefits of the “the cloud” have been hotly debated in recent months. Most agree that cloud computing can accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and increase business agility in the market. In 2012, cloud computing will transition from hype and discussion, to part of every enterprise’s reality, and IT is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation and help business reap the benefits of cloud computing.

Join us for a virtual event designed to help you explore your cloud options. It’s your chance to interact with Microsoft experts and with IT leaders like yourself, who have been putting cloud technology to work in their own organizations. You’ll be among the first to hear the latest private cloud news from Microsoft.

Register Now for the virtual event Tuesday, January 17th
8:30 AM PST | 16:30 UTC

• Hear from other senior IT professionals about how cloud computing can help you gain maximum competitive advantage with minimal risk.
• Learn about Microsoft cloud offerings, including private, public, and hybrid cloud models.
• Experience Microsoft private cloud solutions through the Microsoft Technology Center.

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