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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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Everybody chuckled when Tellme, a mobile voice company snapped up by Microsoft almost two years ago, released its smartphone voice search application for BlackBerry, instead of for Windows Mobile. Thanks to a new native application that will be released on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones this coming fall, the ribbing may entirely subside.
On Wednesday, Tellme announced the application's features and its shipping plan. Like rival voice services for smartphones, you click a hardware hotkey to initiate the program's digital ears, and from there you can begin a search, call a number, or dictate a text message. This last feature will be new to Tellme's Windows Mobile app.
Tellme's application will offer more voice services than the straight voice search that Yahoo Mobile, Windows Live Mobile, and Google Mobile App are currently capable of, but after watching Tellme's demo here at CNET, it appears that it won't be as fully stocked as Vlingo when it's released. Vlingo--a free voice service for BlackBerry and iPhone, but not yet Windows Mobile--adds greater dictation powers, including launching native applications, updating your status on Facebook and Twitter, and reading back e-mail messages.
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Download Release Notes: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=51e93833-4b55-41e4-ab6a-c1ba9f8a3c2e&displayLang=en
“Listening to our partners and customers has been fundamental to the development of Windows 7,” said Bill Veghte, senior vice president for the Windows business at Microsoft. “We heard them and worked hard to deliver the highest quality Release Candidate in the history of Windows. We have more partner support than we’ve ever had for an RC and are pleased to say that the Windows 7 RC has hit the quality and compatibility bar for enterprises to start putting it through its paces and testing in earnest.”
Overall, Windows 7 has garnered strong industry support. According to an independent report from Forrester Research Inc.’s Ben Gray: “The beta of Windows 7 shows significant promise, and most IT operations professionals are looking forward to its availability and eventual enterprise deployment ... start preparing for it now, and the best way to prepare for Windows 7 is by deploying Windows Vista. Short of that, begin testing your applications and hardware for compatibility against Windows Vista; it will pay off with greater compatibility with Windows 7.” (“Get Ready for Windows 7,” Forrester Research, April 2009.)
With Windows 7, customers will have access to the broadest array of software and hardware options the industry has to offer, and Microsoft is committed to delivering tools and support that enhance software compatibility as well as ease deployment and migration concerns for businesses and consumers alike. Customers also will benefit from the strong industry and partner support of Windows 7.
My moment of "I told you so!". But before I break my NDA, let's get to Paul Thurrott's statement...
This Monday, Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte finally declared that he expects that "a holiday release (of Windows 7) is accomplishable". It is the first public statement from a Microsoft executive that contradicts long-standing company policy to promise only that it would deliver Windows 7 roughly three years after its predecessor, Windows Vista.
Paul (and others) expect that Microsoft will finalize WIndows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in late July or August and begin selling it to customers in September.
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Today we are announcing the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. SP2 represents the latest step in Microsoft’s commitment to continuous improvement. It includes all updates that have been delivered since SP1, as well as support for new types of hardware and emerging hardware standards.
As we have mentioned before, here are some of the key benefits of Windows Vista SP2:
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Microsoft Corp. is in discussions with Verizon Wireless to launch a touch-screen multimedia cellphone on the carrier's network early next year, in a bid to compete with Apple Inc.'s iPhone, people familiar with the matter said.
Microsoft's project, which is code-named "Pink," is aiming to produce a phone that extends the tech giant's Windows Mobile cellphone operating system, adding new software capabilities. It would also likely include Microsoft's new Windows Marketplace for Mobile,
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Have you ever sent a really well thought out, important email, only to find out (through an automatic response) that the recipient is on vacation for two weeks? For most of us, this means either waiting two weeks for a response or emailing an alternate contact. For the recipient, it means dealing with tons of messages when returning from vacation.
This scenario is one of the many reasons we developed MailTips in Exchange Server 2010. MailTips are there to give you information about your message and its recipients before you hit the send button.
For instance, this MailTip will show you automatic replies for recipients of your message:
When you know that someone is on vacation before you send them a message, you won't waste your time writing it, and they won't have to read as many messages when they get back.
Have you ever read an email from someone and thought to yourself, "Do they realize how many people just got that message?" All too often, the answer is "no." MailTips will tell you when you're sending a message to a large audience, and summarize it for you, like this:
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Today the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system was announced. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. One big benefit is SP2’s boost to interoperability — with this release, Office supports additional built-in file formats such as PDF and ODF.
PressPass talked with Jane Liles, group program manager, Office Sustained Engineering, to discuss what customers can expect from Service Pack 2, how the improvements will provide added value, and how Microsoft is increasing its commitment to interoperability.
PressPass: Why should someone download this service pack for Office 2007?
Liles: This release builds on customer feedback and offers enhanced stability for Outlook, calendaring reliability, and many more improvements to applications that run on both PCs and servers. Microsoft has also been working hard to build interoperability into its products across the board, and so Office now also includes additional file-format support, which makes it much easier for customers to work with different file formats in the same application.
PressPass: What are the main improvements that customers will notice with SP2?
Liles: Users should notice the improved performance and stability of Outlook, better charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics.
On the server side, IT professionals will notice several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. SharePoint Server will also feature better support for newer versions of the Firefox browser.
Microsoft is taking reservations starting April 28 for a limited beta of a new public-information service called Vine.
The service, slated to go to testers in May, uses alerts, reports and a personal dashboard to allow users to stay in touch, particularly during crisis situations.
The Vine service initially was developed by the Windows Live team, post Hurricane Katrina. I heard a bit about the service back in June 2008, after which the service — like a number of Windows Live properties — seemed to just disappear. It turns out the concept was passed over to Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s division and incubated like other technologies in Microsoft’s Start Up Business Accelerator group. “Eventually, products and services started in the accelerator will transition into one of Microsoft’s existing business divisions,” a spokesperson said.
We just launch a new IT Pro campaign called “Talking About Windows”. This has been a project I have been involved with for months and something I am quite proud of. We have interviews with our top Windows 7 Engineers including Jon DeVaan, Mark Russinovich, Gabe Aul and others as well as some great Windows 7 early adoption companies.
TalkingaboutWindows.com offers IT professionals genuine insight on Windows 7 from the Microsoft engineers who helped build the product.
Listen as they talk about why product decisions and feature trade-offs were made. Also, get real-world commentary from IT professionals as they share their Windows deployment and adoption experiences. Participate in this forum to express your opinions, discuss Windows and share adoption stories.
Join the conversation with Microsoft and other IT professionals just like you as the next generation of Windows arrives. Visit www.TalkingAboutWindows.com today.”
“In today’s economy, it is more important than ever for Microsoft to deliver innovation that drives immediate customer value,” said Dan Neault, general manager of Microsoft SQL Server and BizTalk Server at Microsoft. “With BizTalk Server 2009, Microsoft has delivered an enterprise-ready scalable platform that enables our customers across the globe to more efficiently connect processes, systems and data, which is critical to reducing costs and enabling informed business decisions across their organizations.”
Expanded Platform Support Enables More Flexible and Cost-Effective Systems
BizTalk Server 2009 expands support for the latest Microsoft application platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. With BizTalk Server 2009, customers can now utilize the improvements available within these Microsoft products to boost their integration initiatives through enhanced developer productivity, improved system performance and better manageability. With Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise Edition, customers can further reduce the cost of infrastructure using Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology to run unlimited virtualized instances on virtual machines.
With upfront costs that are often less than offers from other vendors, BizTalk Server 2009 empowers customers to use industry standards and line-of-business adapters to more efficiently link partner as well as internal information systems across various domains. The adapters available for BizTalk Server 2009 enable organizations to quickly and easily access and use data from mainframes, databases, third-party applications and radio frequency identification (RFID) devices using familiar, simple-to-use management and development tools with less complexity and lower costs.
Industry-leading companies around the globe are relying on BizTalk Server as their mission-critical business process management solution. Customers including American Apparel Inc., Continental Automotive, Florida Community College, Gulf Coast Seal Ltd. and Sempra Energy Solutions have been using BizTalk Server, and many have plans to upgrade to BizTalk Server 2009 to take advantage of the benefits provided with this latest release.
“We’ve been using Microsoft BizTalk Server products for years as the backbone for our electronic data interchange and order processing mechanism and more recently for our extranet account management process, and we continue to believe BizTalk Server is the best solution for our needs,” said Chris Lavoie, application development manager, Enterasys Networks Inc. “We’re looking forward to upgrading our systems to BizTalk Server 2009 to take advantage of the improvements in this latest release such as enhanced business activity monitoring and tighter integration with the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework, which will help to reduce our implementation and maintenance costs.”
A "Windows Vista SP2 Prerequisites" update is coming via Windows Update on April 28, 2009. Showing that Service Pack 2 is expected early next month.
Update for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista (KB955430)
Description: Install this update to enable future updates to install successfully on all editions of Windows Server 2008. This update may be required before selected future updates can be installed. After you install this item, it cannot be removed. This update is provided to you and licensed under the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 License Terms.
At the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) 2009 conference early this month in April, an interesting video series titled “Home, Work and Play” was produced for and showcased on behalf of a mysterious and never-seen-before group at Microsoft called Volume Studios. It’s purpose, inspiration in nature, was aimed to “explore in a poetic narrative way how certain developing technologies could begin to blend and augment our daily lives”.
The first two of the series, “home” and “work” were recently published and words fail to describe it.
XUI, which stands for experience-user-interface in theory is the next evolution of computer-human interaction from natural user interfaces (NUI) like Microsoft Surface which itself is an evolution from graphics user interfaces (GUI) like Windows.
Its creators, a collaboration between interactive design firm INVIVIA and MIT Media Lab researcher Amanda Parkers explains, “the hyper-real phenomenon portrayed focuses on an ability to instantly personalize space as well as inject/reveal hidden properties of daily objects. The emphasis both in concept and execution was to remove the digital influence inherent to computing and focus on its repercussions.
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“I’m honored to have this opportunity to advise President Obama and Vice President Biden on science and technology policy,” Mundie said. “I look forward to working with other members of the council to determine how science and technology can help address some of the nation’s biggest challenges.”
Mundie is responsible for directing Microsoft’s long-term technology strategy. He oversees Microsoft Research and the company’s health and education businesses, as well as emerging business areas such as robotics and energy. He joined Microsoft in 1992, and holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in information theory and computer science from Georgia Tech.
Mundie has worked with government and policy leaders around the world on technology policy, regulation and standards. In 2000, President Clinton named Mundie to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and in 2002, he joined the Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. Since February 2002, Mundie has also been a member of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.
Mundie is one of 20 PCAST appointees announced today. The complete council membership can be found in the White House announcement of PCAST appointments.