Windows 8 has a problem – it really can boot up too quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that there is no longer time for anything to interrupt boot. When you turn on a Windows 8 PC, there’s no longer long enough to detect keystrokes like F2 or F8, much less time to read a message such as “Press F2 for Setup.” For the first time in decades, you will no longer be able to interrupt boot and tell your PC to do anything different than what it was already expecting to do.

Fast booting is something we definitely want to preserve. Certainly no one would imagine intentionally slowing down boot to allow these functions to work as they did in the past. In this blog I’ll walk through how we’re addressing this “problem” with new solutions that will keep your PC booting as quickly as possible, while still letting you do all the things you expect.

Too fast to interrupt

It’s worth taking a moment to watch (again, if you’ve already seen it) the fast boot video posted by Gabe Aul in his previous post about delivering fast boot times in Windows 8. In this video you can see a laptop with a solid state drive (SSD) fully booting in less than 7 seconds. Booting this fast doesn't require special hardware, but it is a feature of new PCs. You'll still see much improved boot times in existing hardware, but in many PCs, the BIOS itself (the BIOS logo and set of messages you see as you boot up) does take significant time. An SSD contributes to the fast boot time as well, as you can imagine.

If the entire length of boot passes in just seven seconds, the individual portions that comprise the boot sequence go by almost too quickly to notice (much less, interrupt). Most of the decisions about what will happen in boot are over in the first 2-3 seconds – after that, booting is just about getting to Windows as quickly as possible. These 2-3 seconds include the time allowed for firmware initialization and POST (< 2 seconds), and the time allowed for the Windows boot manager to detect an alternate boot path (< 200 milliseconds on some systems). These times will continue to shrink, and even now they no longer allow enough time to interrupt boot as you could in the past.

On the Windows team, we felt the impact of this change first, and perhaps most painfully, with our own F8 behavior. In previous versions of Windows (as far back as Windows 95), you could press F8 at the beginning of boot to access an advanced boot options menu. This is where you’d find useful options such as Safe Mode and “Disable driver signing.” I personally remember using them when I upgraded my first PC from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. F8 helped me quickly resolve an upgrade issue and get started using Windows 95.

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Microsoft is pleased to announce SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP. Customers with existing investments on SQL Server 2008 R2 are encouraged to explore Service Pack 2 CTP. Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 R2 includes product improvements based on requests from the SQL Server community and hotfix solutions provided in SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Updates 1 to 5. A few highlights are as follows:

• Reporting Services Charts Maybe Zoomed & Cropped
  Customers using Reporting Services on Windows 7 may sometime find charts are zoomed in and cropped.  To work around the issue some customers set ImageConsolidation to false.   

• Batch Containing Alter Table not Cached
  In certain situations with batch files containing the alter table command, the entire batch file is not cached.   

• Collapsing Cells or Rows, If Hidden Render Incorrectly
  Some customers who have hidden rows in their Reporting Services reports may have noticed rendering issues when cells or rows are collapsed.  When writing a hidden row, the Style attribute is opened to write a height attribute. If the attribute is empty and the width should not be zero.   

SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 provides software solutions for these customer reported issues and more.  For more details please visit the KB article 2630455 accompanying the SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP release. Customers running SQL Server 2008 R2 can now download and test the SP2 CTP and send feedback to Microsoft for continuous product improvement.

To download the SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 release please select from the links below:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP
• SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP Express
• SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 CTP Feature Pack

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The latest release from the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) team provides organizations with tools to assess readiness for Windows and Windows Server 2012 Beta.

Accelerate your move to the Private Cloud with MAP 7.0 Beta

Thanks for your ongoing interest and participation in the MAP beta review program. We hope you’ll take the time to preview and provide feedback on MAP 7.0.

The MAP Toolkit’s new capabilities help you to assess the readiness of your environment for deploying Windows as well as Windows Server 2012 Beta.  This update adds new scenarios specifically, the ability to plan for virtualization assessment of Linux servers and readiness assessment for desktop virtualization. Along with the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter and MAP 7.0, now you can easily migrate VMware VMs to Hyper-V for the best roadmap to the cloud. In addition to the above features, MAP 7.0 strengthens the SQL Server migration scenario with support for SQL Server 2012 discovery, and migration planning.

Key features and benefits of MAP 7.0 Beta help you:

Download the beta materials on Connect:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219165

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The enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) is designed to help prevent hackers from gaining access to your system.
Software vulnerabilities and exploits have become an everyday part of life. Virtually every product has to deal with them and consequently, users are faced with a stream of security updates. For users who get attacked before the latest updates have been applied or who get attacked before an update is even available, the results can be devastating: malware, loss of PII, etc.
Security mitigation technologies are designed to make it more difficult for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in a given piece of software. EMET allows users to manage these technologies on their system and provides several unique benefits:

1. No source code needed: Until now, several of the available mitigations (such as Data Execution Prevention) have required for an application to be manually opted in and recompiled. EMET changes this by allowing a user to opt in applications without recompilation. This is especially handy for deploying mitigations on software that was written before the mitigations were available and when source code is not available.

2. Highly configurable: EMET provides a higher degree of granularity by allowing mitigations to be individually applied on a per process basis. There is no need to enable an entire product or suite of applications. This is helpful in situations where a process is not compatible with a particular mitigation technology. When that happens, a user can simply turn that mitigation off for that process.

3. Helps harden legacy applications: It’s not uncommon to have a hard dependency on old legacy software that cannot easily be rewritten and needs to be phased out slowly. Unfortunately, this can easily pose a security risk as legacy software is notorious for having security vulnerabilities. While the real solution to this is migrating away from the legacy software, EMET can help manage the risk while this is occurring by making it harder to hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the legacy software.

4. Ease of use: The policy for system wide mitigations can be seen and configured with EMET's graphical user interface. There is no need to locate up and decipher registry keys or run platform dependent utilities. With EMET you can adjust setting with a single consistent interface regardless of the underlying platform.

5. Ease of deploy: EMET comes with built-in support for enterprise deployment and configuration technologies. This enables administrators to use Group Policy or System Center Configuration Manager to deploy, configure and monitor EMET installations across the enterprise environment.

6. Ongoing improvement: EMET is a living tool designed to be updated as new mitigation technologies become available. This provides a chance for users to try out and benefit from cutting edge mitigations. The release cycle for EMET is also not tied to any product. EMET updates can be made dynamically as soon as new mitigations are ready
The toolkit includes several pseudo mitigation technologies aimed at disrupting current exploit techniques. These pseudo mitigations are not robust enough to stop future exploit techniques, but can help prevent users from being compromised by many of the exploits currently in use. The mitigations are also designed so that they can be easily updated as attackers start using new exploit techniques.

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Update Rollup 1 contains a number of fixes for System Center 2012 Operations Manager and adds support for Oracle Solaris 11.

A number of fixes may require manual steps to install.
A detailed list of fixes can be found on Knowledge Base Article KB2686249.

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Given the changing landscape, the cost of decoder licensing, and the importance of a straight forward edition plan, we’ve decided to make Windows Media Center available to Windows 8 customers via the Add Features to Windows 8 control panel (formerly known as Windows Anytime Upgrade). This ensures that customers who are interested in Media Center have a convenient way to get it. Windows Media Player will continue to be available in all editions, but without DVD playback support. For optical discs playback on new Windows 8 devices, we are going to rely on the many quality solutions on the market, which provide great experiences for both DVD and Blu-ray.

We will offer two ways to acquire Windows Media Center:

Windows 8 Pro is designed to help tech enthusiasts obtain a broader set of Windows 8 technologies. Acquiring either the Windows 8 Media Center Pack or the Windows 8 Pro Pack gives you Media Center, including DVD playback (in Media Center, not in Media Player), broadcast TV recording and playback (DBV-T/S, ISDB-S/T, DMBH, and ATSC), and VOB file playback. Pricing for these Packs, as well as retail versions of Windows 8, will be announced closer to the release date. To give you some indication of Media Center Pack pricing, it will be in line with marginal costs.

Full story at source

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All supported Windows versions and Office versions (including Mac) are affected

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This package includes a number of helper scripts created during Office 365 deployments. The following pages describe the script, the intended action and associated arguments to successfully run the script. The assumption is that the user executing these scripts has administrator-level Office 365 credentials.

The scripts require PowerShell 2.0 and the Microsoft Online PowerShell modules. Windows PowerShell 2.0 can be downloaded from the Script Center Downloads page. The Office 365 modules can be downloaded from Office 365 Cmdlets

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DirPrep is a PowerShell based script that prepares the customer’s Lotus Notes and Active Directory environment for migration. The DirPrep process will populate all of the email related attributes on user accounts, create accounts to represent shared/group mailboxes, create accounts for rooms & resources, and will create groups in AD for each group being migrated from Notes.

DirPrep prepares the following AD objects

• Users
• Group Mailboxes
• Rooms and Resources
• Groups

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Finally SkyDrive that way we all wanted it years ago!

Full integration in Windows and Mac

Buy extra storage, cheap!

Access local PC storage from the web!

https://apps.live.com/skydrive

SkyDrive for Windows

SkyDrive for Mac

 Add files to your SkyDrive and organize them right from the Finder.

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Describes the results of a study to evaluate the scalability of the Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 and Provisioning Services 6.1 environment on Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 with the Microsoft Hyper-V role connected to a NetApp storage array.

This Microsoft-Citrix virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technical whitepaper describes the results of a study conducted at the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) to evaluate the scalability of the Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 and Provisioning Services 6.1 (PVS) environment on Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) with the Microsoft Hyper-V role connected to a NetApp storage array.

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Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division at Microsoft, took the stage this morning to kick-off the first day of the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas.

Anderson delivered the opening keynote to nearly 5,000 IT professionals, highlighting how customers around the world are already using System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to move faster, save money and better compete with Microsoft private cloud. Anderson also spoke to how IT professionals can evolve their role as cloud innovators, which he further detailed in a blog post today. A replay of his keynote is available here.

News highlights include:

• System Center 2012 is generally available now for evaluation and purchase.
• The Walsh Group, EmpireCLS and Apartments.com are betting on the Microsoft private cloud and System Center 2012 today to more nimbly and cost effectively deliver applications to employees and customers.
• Windows Server “8” has been officially named Windows Server 2012. The new “cloud optimized OS,” due out later this year, will make the Microsoft private cloud even more powerful.

Additional news from MMS 2012:

• New Microsoft Certification Program for the Cloud: Following the announcement from Microsoft Learning on April 11th, changes were made to the Microsoft Certification Program to help address the growing skills gap in the IT industry and new job roles in the cloud. Program changes will help technology professionals and developers gain the skills they need to plan, design, implement, and operate cloud and hybrid solutions today and into the future. At MMS, Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) private cloud exams will be offered free to all attendees. Go here to learn more.
• System Center Advisor, Microsoft’s cloud service that enables IT professionals to assess server configuration and proactively avoid problems, has been updated to support SharePoint and Exchange. Additional details are available here.
• Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Partners deliver solutions with System Center 2012:
  • Dell: Dell announced enhanced systems and systems management solutions for System Center 2012. Check out the Direct2Dell blog for more information.
  • HP VirtualSystem: HP announced HP Virtual System VS3 for Microsoft with support for System Center 2012. Visit HP’s blog for more information.
  • Cisco, Fujitsu, EMC and Hitachi are also delivering Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track solutions with System Center 2012.

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What a surprise

At MMS 2012 today Microsoft announced the official name of Windows Server 8 to be Windows Server 2012

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NASA’s Discovery, Orbiter Vehicle 103, has departed the Space Coast of Florida for the final time.  However, on this flight there will not be any countdowns or rockets blasting.  She is mated to the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) and flown to Washington, DC to become a museum piece at the Smithsonian. 

As a tribute to Discovery Richard Hay of WindowsObserver.com perused the NASA photo archives and put together a final theme of Discovery in various phases of her service. 

This theme is available for download in three variations – one for Windows 7, one for Windows 8 and one collection of all the wallpapers in a zipped package.  That zipped package can be installed on any computer to use the photos as wallpapers.

Download at WindowsObserver.com

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