Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Convergence is the premier Microsoft Dynamics event, bringing customers, partners, team members and industry experts together in an environment created for you to discuss solutions, address business needs and establish a true community that can be leveraged throughout the year.

In 2009, Convergence will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana March 10 – 13. This is your opportunity to participate in an exceptional program including a variety of speakers, detailed product demonstrations and hands-on learning sessions. You will learn how to enhance your Microsoft investment now and in the future, and gain a stronger sense of community through interacting with industry leaders, Microsoft team members, partners and other customers.

Convergence 2009 will help you:

• Build skills across all Microsoft platforms and equip yourself with the tools and knowledge you need to optimize your business solution.
• Interact with peers, partners, Microsoft team members and top industry experts in both structured and informal settings.
• Hear the vision and strategy of key Microsoft executive leaders and gain insight on the future of the company, product direction and investments so you can align your business and take advantage of the benefits.

Why Management Should Let You Attend

In today’s difficult economic environment, there has never been more value in attending Convergence. This year is geared toward helping attendees leverage their Microsoft Dynamics solutions to increase visibility into operations and maximize efficiencies.

Convergence attendees will get exposure to new technologies, will better understand their current business management software, and will have the insights they need to unleash their solution’s full capabilities.

Here are the six reasons for you to attend:

1. Learn how to more effectively use Microsoft Dynamics solutions to easily analyze financial data and respond to changing business conditions.
2. Gain clearer understanding of reporting and process automation capabilities to more effectively forecast and manage cash flow and compliance.
3. Learn how Microsoft Dynamics solutions can give their advisors and representatives access to comprehensive client information and insight.
4. Discover new ways Microsoft Dynamics can help improve fiscal responsibility and the delivery of public services.
5. Use accurate financial tracking and reporting to boost efficiencies and improve accountability.
6. Take advantage of the Convergence Attendee Sales Offer! Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV and SL customers who attend Convergence 2009 are eligible to receive up to a 20% discount. Terms & Conditions available here.
   View the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online sales offer for Convergence attendees here.

Register now by visiting the Convergence 2009 New Orleans registration site at:
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/convergence/neworleans09

Tina from Channel 10 is publishing a video series of the History of Microsoft.

Welcome to The History of Microsoft.  A video series that gives you a rare glimpse into the story behind the software giant.  Using rare footage and never-before-seen photos we break down Microsoft’s history by year. Every Thursday we will air a brand new episode beginning with 1975 where The History of Microsoft begins when the ALTAIR 8800 appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics inspiring two young men Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop BASIC language software for it.  Tune in.

So far, years 1975 & 1976 are published with more anticipated:

• http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/History/

The Hyper-V Security Guide can help you elevate the security of virtualized Windows Server environments to meet your business-critical needs.

This accelerator provides IT professionals like you with recommendations to address your key security concerns around server virtualization. The guide provides authoritative guidance that relates to the following strategies for securing virtualized environments:

• Hardening Hyper-V. The guide provides prescriptive guidance for hardening the Hyper-V server role, including several best practices for installing and configuring Hyper-V with a focus on security. These best practices include measures for reducing the attack surface of Hyper-V as well as recommendations for properly configuring secure virtual networks and storage devices on a Hyper-V host server.
• Virtual machine management and delegation. The ability to safely and securely delegate administrative access to virtual machine resources within an organization is essential. The guide highlights several available methods to administer different aspects of a virtual machine infrastructure and ways to control administrative access to different servers and at different levels.
• Protecting virtual machines. The guide also provides prescriptive guidance for securing virtual machine resources, including best practices and detailed steps for protecting virtual machines by using a combination of file system permissions, encryption, and auditing.

Join the beta program [Live ID required].  Then bookmark this link to the program site to get the latest information about upcoming events.

LINK:
https://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=2699&InvitationID=TET-THVC-6CWK&SiteID=715

[as taken from The Deployment Guys]

The Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) is a set of tools and documentation that support the configuration and deployment of Microsoft® Windows® operating systems.. By using Windows AIK, you can automate Windows installations, capture Windows images with ImageX, configure and modify images using Deployment Imaging Servicing and Management (DISM), create Windows PE images, and migrate user profiles and data with the User State Migration Tool (USMT).

GImageX is a third-party graphical version of the ImageX command-line tool from the Windows AIK.

With the release of the Windows 7 beta and also the beta of the Windows Automated Installation Kit I’ve updated GImageX to work with these new beta versions. I’ve also tidied up parts of the documentation around installation and tweaked the “mount” functionality to provide better feedback during the operation.

Please note that GImageX is a third-party tool so please remember that you won’t be able to ring up Microsoft PSS to get support with it! However, it uses the official Microsoft published WIMGAPI SDK which is a supported way of working with WIM files.

If you like the movies, it’s time to celebrate!

Windows Mobile now offers a mobile application for Netflix. The new Netflix application for Windows Mobile phones makes it simple to manage your Netflix experience from a mobile device. You can search the entire Netflix library for your next film, get complete movie details, and even manage your DVD queue. Easily update your queue by moving films up, moving films down, or removing films from your queue.

A feature exclusive to Windows Mobile is the ability to play previews right on your Windows Mobile device. After watching a preview, you can then add the movie to your Instant Queue so you can instantly watch the movie on your Xbox 360.

Managing a Netflix account while mobile has never been easier, thanks to Mobile Manager for Netflix and a Windows Mobile phone.

DOWNLOAD:
(from desktop) http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/totalaccess/software/software/netflix.mspx
(from mobile) http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/mobile/en-us/totalaccess/software/software/default.mspx

MSDN WINDOWS MOBILE ARTICLE:
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/02/04/mobile-manager-for-netflix.aspx

Richard and Greg talk to Richard Hicks about ISA Server, including 2000, 2004, 2006 and the upcoming Threat Management Gateway product. The discussion also explores dedicated ISA hardware.

Richard Hicks is a Senior Sales Engineer and Product Specialist for edge security solutions at Celestix Networks, Inc. Richard has been working with Microsoft ISA Server 2006 and its predecessors for over 12 years. Richard has designed and deployed network security solutions using ISA for SMB’s, military and defense organizations, and Fortune 100 companies around the world. Richard is an MCSE and MCITP, and is Microsoft Certified in Proxy 2.0, ISA Server 2000, ISA Server 2004, and ISA Server 2006. Richard currently lives and works in beautiful, sunny Southern California.

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=96

Have you ever wished you could edit the LiveMeeting recordings using Windows Movie Maker?

Or maybe you wanted to distribute a LiveMeeting recording to portable media devices like Zunes as a podcast?

Recording Converter for Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 (LM2MOVIE) is a tool for Office Live Meeting 2007 customers to convert recorded meetings in High Fidelity Presentation (HFP) format into single movie files. The converted movie files can be integrated with a customer’s existing learning management system, and edited by using a video editing tool such as Windows Movie Maker, and then viewed on portable devices.

A few comments about LM2MOVIE.EXE:

• Getting a conversion to look the way you want it to may take several attempts with different settings.  This is not a perfect science.
• Video editing in general takes some effort; you may have to use command line arguments against LM2MOVIE.EXE to get the results looking to your liking.
• The resulting file is streamable but it is not recommended for efficiency purposes.  If streaming is necessary, you should re-encode using Windows Media Encoder however be aware that this will possibly degrade the picture quality.
• LM2MOVIE defaults to 5 frames per second which allows for a very quick conversion and should work well for most meetings. But that is going to look very choppy if there is animation on the screen (mouse movement, talking head, etc…).  This is editable using the command line.
• Flash, Shared Notes & Q&A are not supported in this version.

And finally, this tool is a unsupported.  Don’t go calling Premier.  They’ll go, “What?”

DOWNLOAD: (1.17MB)
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101215971033.aspx

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA103525021033.aspx

LAS VEGAS — Feb. 10, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today disclosed a detailed road map for its enterprise search products, including the introduction of FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST Search for Internet Business.

FAST Search for SharePoint, a new search server that will add the high-end search capabilities of FAST ESP into Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server, will be available as a part of the next release of the Microsoft Office system. For customers who are interested in the product, Microsoft also announced ESP for SharePoint, a special offering that allows customers to purchase high-end search capabilities today, with a defined licensing path to FAST Search for SharePoint when it becomes available.

“These two new products offer compelling, new choices for our customers,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, general manager for the Office Business Platform Group at Microsoft. “FAST Search for SharePoint will combine high-end search with the broad portal, collaboration, content management and business intelligence capabilities of SharePoint. And FAST Search for Internet Business will deliver search capabilities tuned to drive more revenue through Web sites.”

“We now have the largest team of engineers and researchers in the world dedicated to enterprise search,” said Bjørn Olstad, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. “They’re passionate about search and committed to pushing the limits of what’s possible. Today’s road map announcement is significant because it not only discloses what’s next from Microsoft, but it also provides a framework for delivering continuous innovation in the future.”

A New Choice in Business Productivity Search
Businesses of all sizes have historically been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search platforms or more mainstream, out-of the-box infrastructure solutions. FAST Search for SharePoint gives customers a new choice: a search server that integrates the high-end search capabilities of FAST ESP into SharePoint Portal Server. By enhancing SharePoint’s portal, collaboration and content management capabilities with sophisticated search, FAST Search for SharePoint will enable a whole new range of business productivity applications.

A Powerful Platform for Building Search-Driven Web Sites
FAST Search for Internet Business will extend FAST ESP and will provide a flexible platform for building engaging, search-driven Web site experiences. The product will be available in beta in the second half of this year and will feature new capabilities for content integration and interaction management, helping enable more complete and interactive search experiences.

“With companies generating terabytes of data in the course of their daily operations, information has become the lifeblood of business,” said Rita Knox, Gartner Inc. “The ability to find and retrieve information that’s buried in back-office file servers or scattered across unstructured caches of content to identify a business trend, qualify a sales lead, answer an urgent customer query or identify an internal expert is an indispensable business capability.”

Microsoft partners are also looking forward to being able to provide customers with a great range of enterprise search solutions.

“Microsoft’s new road map means businesses will have the ability to deploy a companywide enterprise search platform that is fully integrated with their existing collaboration, productivity and business management solutions,” said Jørn Ellefsen, chief executive officer at Comperio AS. “That’s a compelling package and one that will spur greater adoption of high-end search capabilities with all the opportunities this generates for partners like us.”

Members of the press can find more information about news and activities at the FASTforward’09 event, and view online demos and keynote addresses, at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/fastforward.

WMSnoop is a tool for analyzing Microsoft® Windows Media 9 Series Video files on a frame by frame basis. This tool is used by advanced streaming professionals to optimize encoding and production techniques. WMSnoop provides analysis graphs of frame size and averaged file bitrates enabling power users to tweak their encoding pipeline to deliver optimal results.

WMSnoop can be used to detect where the Microsoft® Windows Media Encoder is inserting key frames into a streaming file and where the bitrate of a file may be spiking due to high motion.  By pre-filtering, tweaking encoding settings or changing production techniques, a production professional can optimize the quality of the encoded output. WMSnoop provides a very low level method of verifying the effectiveness of different processes.

WMSNoop is being offered as a free download for a limited time.

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.sliq.com/default.asp?view=wmsnoop

REQUIREMENTS:

• Operating System
  Windows XP  English (any)
  Windows 2003 Server (any)
  Windows 2008 Server (Validation Pending)
• System Configuration
  2.0Ghz or higher processor
  1GB RAM
  DVD or CD drive
  50MB of available hard disk space
• Other Software Required
  Microsoft Windows Media Player 11
  .Net Framework Version 2.0
  Windows Media Format Runtime Version 9.5