Go ‘n get it! Microsoft’s My Phone service is now ready for all Windows Mobile users to test. The beta service syncs any Windows Mobile 6+ phone to Microsoft’s 200MB per person cloud. That includes contacts, calendars, tasks, photos, text messages, music, videos, and more. In essence, anything on the My Phone website is on the phone and vice versa. Hey free is free and this is a goodie.
Go ‘n get it! Microsoft’s My Phone service is now ready for all Windows Mobile users to test. The beta service syncs any Windows Mobile 6+ phone to Microsoft’s 200MB per person cloud. That includes contacts, calendars, tasks, photos, text messages, music, videos, and more. In essence, anything on the My Phone website is on the phone and vice versa. Hey free is free and this is a goodie.
Exchange Server 2010 includes a new unified platform for both high availability and site resilience that is very different from the high availability model and solutions provided in previous versions. Exchange 2010 includes significant changes at its core that integrate high availability deep in its architecture, making it even less costly and easier to deploy and maintain than previous versions of Exchange.
In this and upcoming videos, I’ll give you a tour of the new high availability features, such as database availability groups and mailbox database copies.
Please download the attached video and watch it full-screen. It’s just over 5 minutes, and it will familiarize you with the concepts and process for configuring highly available mailbox databases. Part 2 is coming later this week.
Please click on the video thumbnail below to see the video. There is a Download link where you can download the video (Right-click, Save Target As…):
Part 1:
Full Article – http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/05/18/451353.aspx
One fairly controversial aspect to this policy was our support (actually non-support is a better word) for “guest” failover clustering. We didn’t support installing SQL Server failover clustering in a virtual machine. Well this policy is now changed effective immediately as updated in the article.
The article now contains the following new wording on this topic:
Guest Failover Clustering is when you create a SQL Server failover cluster inside a virtual machine where the nodes are running as a virtual machine. A non-SVVP configuration that meets these requirements will receive support from Microsoft CSS per the policies documented in
897615 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/ ) Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software
One fairly controversial aspect to this policy was our support (actually non-support is a better word) for “guest†failover clustering. We didn’t support installing SQL Server failover clustering in a virtual machine. Well this policy is now changed effective immediately as updated in the article.
The article now contains the following new wording on this topic:
Guest Failover Clustering is when you create a SQL Server failover cluster inside a virtual machine where the nodes are running as a virtual machine. A non-SVVP configuration that meets these requirements will receive support from Microsoft CSS per the policies documented in
897615 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/ ) Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software
As display technologies advance and the world begins to fully embrace accessibility on the web, the Zoom and High DPI experience of all browsers has become increasingly important. This is the first in a series of posts describing changes and improvements to Internet Explorer 8 to enable a more readable web on today’s displays. In this post, we’ll focus on enhancements to the Zoom user experience.
First, let’s review how to take advantage of Zoom in Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 7’s zoom was closer to optical zoom, where every element on the page was scaled relative to its size as rendered at 100% or ‘normal’ view. This led to a number of issues for users, such as the overabundance of horizontal scrollbars. The new zoom in Internet Explorer 8 scales elements that are defined in absolute units, such as pixels, while not affecting the size of elements defined in relative units, such as percentages. For a full description of the zoom layout and rendering behavior in Internet Explorer 8, please see Saloni’s blog post from Beta 1. Preferences for individual users differ greatly, so there are four ways to zoom in and out on web pages:
Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/05/18/making-the-web-bigger-part-1-improvements-to-zoom.aspx
If a company with 8 percent market share revamped its search engine would anyone notice? That’s the looming question as Microsoft prepares to unveil its search upgrade at the D: All Things Digital conference next week.
The long-awaited upgrade to Microsoft’s search engine will soon make its debut. This unveiling will be the long-awaited ‘Kumo’ search revamp.
Sources with knowledge of the situation said the company is expected to demonstrate it at our D: All Things Digital conference next week.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to appear onstage at the event, a three-day event that hosts top players from the tech and media industries in interviews by AllThingsD.com Co-Executive Editors Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
Full Artilce – http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18458l
This blog entry describes the support in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 for creating and managing Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files as a native format, and booting a physical machine from a VHD file. Native VHD support helps our enterprise customers and developer community use a common image format and common tools to manage and deploy Windows images that run either in Hyper-V virtual machines or on physical machines.
The Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk file format (VHD) is a publicly available format specification that specifies a virtual hard disk encapsulated in a single file, capable of hosting native file systems and supporting standard disk operations. VHD files are used by Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Virtual PC for virtual disks connected to a virtual machine. VHDs are useful containers and the VHD file format is also used by Microsoft Data Protection Manager, Windows Server Backup as well as many other Microsoft and Non-Microsoft solutions. To create a VHD on Windows Server 2008, you install the Hyper-V Server role and use the Hyper-V Manager to create a VHD file, and then install a version of Windows onto a partition in the VHD.
Full Article – http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx
We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packs for Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2003 SP2. The MUI packs can be downloaded from here :
As detailed in our previous blog post, the following Internet Explorer MUI packs shipped today –
Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/05/14/now-available-internet-explorer-8-mui-packs-for-windows-xp-windows-server-03.aspx
Earlier this week we learned that Microsoft would be giving out the Office 2010 Technical Preview to select testers on an invite-only basis. In January, screenshots of the alpha (then still codenamed Office 14) were leaked a week after select testers got them. This time, testers don’t even have the Technical Preview yet, but new screenshots have already arrived (see below). Office 2010 will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit, and both flavors have been leaked.
The most important part to remember here is that this version is build 14.0.4006.1010. The build number of the official Technical Preview, which is scheduled for two months from now, is not known, so it is perfectly possible that this is not the build that testers will be getting.
Full Article – http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/05/leaked-office-2010-technical-preview-screenshots.ars
The June edition of TechNet Magazine is now available online or, if you prefer, you can download as an HTML Help .chm file for offline reading.
The capital letters of the cover, “IT’S ALL GOTTA WORKâ€, take us to the main subject of this issue: application compatibility and how to deal with those critical applications that can prevent the upgrade to the latest and greatest operating system provided by Microsoft.
The June edition of TechNet Magazine is now available online or, if you prefer, you can download as an HTML Help .chm file for offline reading.
The capital letters of the cover, “IT’S ALL GOTTA WORK”, take us to the main subject of this issue: application compatibility and how to deal with those critical applications that can prevent the upgrade to the latest and greatest operating system provided by Microsoft.
Today, at our annual TechEd event held in the US we are announcing that attendees will make up the first segment of our limited Technical Preview program that will kick off in July. We have some additional content we will be releasing going into this milestone so keep checking back (check out www.office2010themovie.com as well).
So while we aren’t ready to start demoing and sharing all of the features quite yet, we have heard the feedback loud and clear that requirements for running our software needs to be available ASAP (you will see if you look here that our server products have released similar information). To that end, this post will cover the preliminary system requirements for Office 2010.
1. Office 2010 will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
2. Office 2010 will run on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.
3. You don’t need to replace hardware that is capable of running 2007, it will support Office 2010. Like Windows 7 has demonstrated, we realize that taking advantage of the hardware you already own is just as important as supporting all the new technology coming out.
Full Article – http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/default.aspx
Historically, I’ve cautioned Windows users against upgrading from one version of the OS to another, because the result is often a crufty, Frankenstein-esque install that doesn’t run as fast or reliably as a clean install. With Windows 7, however, I’ve been forced to reevaluate this advice.
In the process of documenting the various ways in which one can install and upgrade to Windows 7 for the forthcoming book, Windows 7 Secrets, I’ve discovered that the upgrade process appears to work a lot more smoothly than it did in previous versions. Now, I’m not ready for a blanket reversal of my previous advice. But I’ve now upgraded three heavily-used and constantly updated Windows Vista-based PCs, and one XP-based PC, to Windows 7 (in additional to numerous, less relevant virtual machine installs).
Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_upgrade.asp
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