Windows Live Managed Beta Starting Up Soon

The members of the butterfly community today received a mail from the Windows Live Beta Team stating that the Windows Live team would be soon starting with the “managed beta” to collect feedback from the users.The mail also states that they would be sending invitations to the previous Windows Live beta testers in a week time,so stay tuned if you have not received any invitation till yet.

Here is what the mail reads-

It’s time to get ready for the next Windows Live beta program. We have been working very hard to bring you the next big release, and it will be a whole suite of applications. As usual, we are running a “Managed Beta” program to collect your feedback, but this time, there will be very limited seats open.
As a valued member of the Butterfly community, you are pre-approved into this beta program.
To accept this invitation and become a member of this beta, follow this link: (Link removed)
(If this link does not work for you, copy the full link and paste it into the Web browser address bar.)
Here are a few things you should know:
1. After getting approved in this beta, you won’t see much content on Connect site yet, neither will the newsgroups be available at the moment. Please stay tuned for further notice when the beta actually starts.
2. In a week time, we will send out mass invitation to previous Windows Live beta testers, which means you probably will receive a second invitation for this beta. When you receive the second e-mail, please ignore it. Do NOT take the nomination survey because by that time you should already be approved in this beta, there is no need to waste your time and ours.
We look forward to hearing from you again in the next beta release,
Yours sincerely,
Windows Live Beta Team

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SBS 2008: Released to Manufacturing!

On behalf of the SBS team, I am extremely pleased to announce that Windows Small Business Server 2008 software has been finalized! Today both SBS Standard and Premium are being released to manufacturing, which means we begin the process of finalizing international versions, creating media, building packaging, delivering the product to distribution channels and handing it off to our OEM partners, so it will be widely available by our November 12 launch. (More information about launch will come in the future.)

As you can imagine, this is an exciting day for me and the rest of the team. Development of SBS 2008 has been a big effort here at Microsoft and the software has undergone extensive testing within Microsoft, by our partners, private tech beta participants and our Technology Adoption Program members. We are proud to say we have truly heard and incorporated input from our partners and customers throughout product planning and development. As a result, we feel very confident that this new release builds on the success of SBS 2003 R2 and makes the power of enterprise IT accessible and affordable for small business, helping them increase productivity and grow. And, just as important, SBS 2008 provides solution providers with a great platform to meet the needs of their small business clients.

Source- Technet Blog

Windows sysinternals: New Tool: Desktops v1.0; Updates: Autoruns v9.33

Desktops v1.0: This new utility enables you to create up to four virtual desktops and to use a tray interface or hotkeys to preview what’s on each desktop and easily switch between them.

Autoruns v9.33: This Autoruns update adds command-line options for automatically scanning and exporting scan results, as well as a number of bug fixes.

Source- Sysinternals blog

New Product Families - Windows 7

Yesterday a new product category for Windows 7 Client was published to Windows Update and was made available to WSUS (another one for Windows 7 Server should be appearing soon as well). As with all of our other new product categories, this is for Microsoft teams who are publishing Windows 7 beta drivers/updates in the near future. In the future, we’ll try to let you know about new categories ahead of time.

Source- Technet Blog

The Ultimate Steal: A Deal on the 2007 Microsoft Office System for Students

As part of Microsoft Corp.’s commitment to education, the company is re-introducing The Ultimate Steal program this school year, inviting students who are actively enrolled at educational institutions to purchase Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 at a low student price of $59.95 (U.S.). This program begins in the United States today with additional countries to be launched throughout the year. The offer will be available to students throughout the academic school year.

Office Ultimate 2007 provides students with a comprehensive set of tools that can help them create high-quality documents, gather and consolidate lecture notes and other information, stay organized, find what they are looking for quickly, and easily collaborate with colleagues and professors across geographies. Office Ultimate 2007 includes the entire Microsoft Office toolset that students are accustomed to working with and more, including Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office Access 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007.

Additional Products Offered this School Year

This year, The Ultimate Steal program features additional products, including the following:

•Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade.1 The most comprehensive edition of Windows Vista, combining the power, security and mobility features that you need for work with all the entertainment features that you want for fun.

•Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007.1 Visio Professional makes it easy for students to visualize, explore and communicate complex information. Students can go from complicated text and tables that are hard to understand to Visio-based diagrams that communicate information at a glance.

•Microsoft Office Language Packs.1 Office Language Packs help multilingual students who routinely create or edit documents in different languages by providing the flexibility of switching the entire user experience — including menus, help and proofing tools such as spell checker, dictionary and thesaurus — to any of 37 different languages.

The additional products will be available in the U.S. on Sept. 8, 2008. Those wanting to see what upgrades are available in which countries should visit http://www.TheUltimateSteal.com.

Source- Microsoft Press Release

Microsoft Urlscan Filter v3.0

UrlScan version 3.0 is a security tool that restricts the types of HTTP requests that Internet Information Services (IIS) will process. By blocking specific HTTP requests, UrlScan helps prevent potentially harmful requests from being processed by web applications on the server.
* Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP
A supported platform running Internet Information Services 5.1, 6.0 or 7.0

Download here

64 bit here

Microsoft and Novell Expand Successful Interoperability Relationship

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. are announcing an incremental investment in their relationship to meet accelerating customer demand for their business model solution, which is designed to build a bridge between open source and proprietary software to deliver interoperability and intellectual property (IP) peace of mind for organizations operating mixed-source IT environments.

The investment focuses on enhanced programs from Novell to provide tools, support, training and resources for customers seeking an enterprise-class Linux* platform and specifically, the optimal interoperability solution between Microsoft Windows Server and SUSE^® Linux Enterprise Server from Novell^®. It also includes Microsoft’s commitment to purchase up to $100 million in certificates that those customers can redeem for expanded support from Novell that includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support and support for moving toward an enterprise-class Linux platform. The investments will take effect Nov. 1, 2008, and between now and then Microsoft and Novell will solicit customer input and identify aspects of the support programs that will be most useful to organizations running mixed-source environments.

Source- Microsoft Press Release

New Microsoft Licensing and Support for Virtualization

If you’re running Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) in a virtualized environment or if you’re planning on doing so in the future, you’ll want to be aware of this, and since this involves changes to our support policy I wanted to share it with all of you here.  My own personal one line summary would be that if you’re running one of the applications mentioned in KB957006 then you’ll get the same level of product support in a virtualized environment that you would get in non-virtual environments, plus we’ve made licensing easier to accommodate these scenarios. 

Here is a link to the announcement that went out this morning:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080819/aqtu037.html?.v=60

There are a few Knowledge Base articles mentioned but the big ones are below:

897615 - Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software

957006 - Microsoft server software and supported virtualization environments

Source- Technet Blog