Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The folks over at the Windows Mobile blog did a really nice write up on how to get Live Mesh running on your Windows Mobile device.

Live Mesh is a great way to keep files available to you by synchronizing them across different devices.  It’s essentially a file replication engine that works across firewalls over port 433 in a similar way that Foldershare does however it works on Windows PCs at home and at work, Macintoshes, Windows Mobile devices, and “the cloud”, in other words a version of your content is accessible over the web simply by surfing to a mesh web site.

LINK:  http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/10/31/live-mesh-and-windows-mobile.aspx

New Features to include Microsoft Online Services, SQL Server 2008, Forefront Client Security, and Network Access Protection

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/MAP

Many of you are in the midst of an IT migration or upgrade planning but do not know 100% with certainty what computers are in their IT environment or what applications have been deployed. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 3.2 makes it easier for customers and partners like you to quickly identify what servers, workstations, and network devices are in your IT environment. MAP also provides specific and actionable IT proposals and reports to help you get the most value out of Microsoft products and infrastructure. Over 510,000 Microsoft customers and partners have already downloaded and used MAP and its prior versions including Costco Wholesale Corporation, Continental Airlines, and Banque de Luxembourg.

Introducing Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
MAP is a scalable and agent-less assessment platform designed to make it easier for you to adopt the latest Microsoft technologies. In this version, MAP has expanded its assessment capabilities to include SQL Server 2008, Forefront/NAP, and Microsoft Online Services migration, as well as providing a Power Savings assessment to help you “go green.”

In summary, MAP 3.2 assessment areas now include:

• SQL Server Database Instance Discovery (NEW!)
• Microsoft Online Services Needs Assessment and Survey (NEW!)
• Forefront Client Security/NAP Readiness Assessment (NEW!)
• Power Savings Calculator (NEW!)
• Virtualization Infrastructure Assessment (e.g. reporting the mapping of hosts by guests) (NEW!)
• Windows Server 2008 Hardware Assessment
• Server Consolidation Reports and Proposals (Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005 R2)
• Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 Hardware Assessment
• Desktop Security Assessment to determine if desktops have anti-virus and anti-malware programs installed and up-to-date, or if the Windows Firewall is turned on

Toolkit Features
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit performs key functions that include hardware and device inventory, compatibility analysis, and readiness reporting.

MAP utilizes an enterprise-scale, agent-less architecture that enables you to inventory your servers, desktops, applications, and network devices without installing any software agents on each machine being assessed. This tool can discover all computers within Active Directory, and most importantly, non-IT managed machines such as workgroup members.

Additionally, MAP can generate localized desktop readiness reports in seven languages including North American English, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Benefits to You (Customers and Partners)

• Fast and Agent-less. MAP provides secure network-wide assessment of environments of up to 100,000 computers in a matter of hours instead of days, all without deploying any software agents on each inventoried machine.
• Saves Pre-Sales and Planning Time. For most IT consultants and Microsoft Partners, a detailed network inventory and assessment of servers and desktops often takes days of manual labor. With MAP, they can now drastically reduce the time it takes for the same inventory to a matter of hours; allowing them more time to focus their efforts on critical pre-sales engagement tasks. For IT professionals, MAP can significantly reduce the time it takes to gather the information necessary to make the business case for client and server migration, as well as for their upcoming virtualization projects.
• Actionable Recommendations and Reporting. MAP offers valuable inventory and readiness assessment reports with specific upgrade recommendations and virtualization candidate reports that make it easier for IT migration and deployment projects to get off the ground and running.
• Coverage from Desktops to Servers. MAP provides technology assessment and planning recommendations for many Microsoft desktop and server products including SQL Server 2008, Forefront Client Security/NAP, Microsoft Online Services, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005 R2, Windows Vista, 2007 Microsoft Office, Microsoft Application Virtualization (or App-V), System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, and more.

Next Steps
Try the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.2 RTM version now!

• Download Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.2 (RTM Bits)
• Learn more about MAP on TechNet or Microsoft Partner Program Portal
• Read Hyper-V/MAP Case Studies: See how Costco Wholesale Corporation, Continental Airlines, and Banque de Luxembourg benefitted from using the MAP Toolkit
• Read the MAP Team Blog
• Listen to TechNet and Academy Live webcasts on MAP
• Join the TechNet Forum Community for MAP

The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is currently being held in Los Angeles (October 27th and October 30th).  Five major announcements have now been disclosed:  (For up to date information and essential resources refer to the Microsoft PDC Website)

PDC Day 1 Announcements: Read the official press announcement

• Microsoft Windows Azure Online Services: Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.  Visit the Official Windows Azure Website  and read the article What is Azure?

PDC Day 2 Announcements: Read the official press announcement

• The company also delivered a pre-beta build of Windows 7 to PDC attendees and announced plans to release the full Windows 7 beta early next year.    In terms of the final release of Windows 7 the official guidance is three years after the release of Vista.  For further information visit the Windows 7 Website, Windows Team Blog, and Engineering Windows 7 Team Blog
• Microsoft demonstrated, for the first time, its new Web applications for Office, which are lightweight versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are used from within standard Web browsers. The company showed how anyone can use all of the Web, phone, and PC versions of Office to edit the same rich document, switching among them seamlessly with lossless file compatibility.  This new offering will be compatible with familiar Web browsers from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Microsoft will release a private Technical Preview of Office Web applications later this year.   In the meantime, customers interested in learning more about the upcoming beta availability are encouraged to sign up for Microsoft Office Live Workspace at http://www.workspace.officelive.com.
• Live Services for Seamless Client-Cloud Experiences: Microsoft demonstrated many capabilities of the Live Services platform, including how developers can build rich applications and experiences that can be extended to over 400 million users of the company’s Windows Live services such as Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.  The company demonstrated many aspects of Live Services including Live Mesh. Live Mesh is a service for synchronizing any user’s documents, media, files and application data across multiple PCs and devices, and is available as an open beta at http://www.mesh.com for Windows and Windows Mobile.
• The Best of Web and Windows Development With Visual Studio and .NET:   In terms of software development, Microsoft highlighted how it continues to help make it easy for developers to use their existing skills to build applications from the Web to the desktop, through both the recent Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 service packs, and the forthcoming Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 releases. Building on Monday’s announcements that Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will make it easy for developers to create applications for the new Azure Services Platform, the company revealed that Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 innovations will help developers build next-generation applications for Windows 7 and take advantage of new features in Windows 7, such as the Ribbon and support for multitouch enabled interfaces. Several other areas of improvements in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 were shown, with a focus on Win32, C++, ASP.NET, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.

<taken from the Windows Server Division Blog>

Building off the great work done on Windows Server 2008, I’m happy to share that next week, a small group of Technology Adoption Program customers will be getting their hands on Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) Beta. As we have done in the past, we routinely start testing a service pack release for Windows Server with a small group of testers first before making the beta more broadly available to the public. Windows Server 2008 helped make major strides in the areas of Web, Virtualization, and Security. SP2 builds upon this by enhancing the operating system for IT Professionals.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 addresses feedback from our customers. It contains all previously released fixes integrated into a single service pack covering both server (Windows Server 2008) and client (Windows Vista) versions. We adopted a single serviceability model for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista when we launched Windows Server 2008. Because of this, Microsoft can provide customers with a single, high-quality update that minimizes deployment and testing complexity.

In addition to the above, Windows Server 2008 SP2 contains two changes that will ease deployment and help reduce cost.

• Hyper-V RTM is included
• Additional changes to the power profile have yielded a 10% improvement over the power profile of Windows Server 2008 RTM

In case you’re wondering, no you didn’t miss Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1.  We actually released the first version of Windows Server 2008 as “Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1” because it depended highly on the Windows Vista codebase.  They now share (as they did back in the NT 4.0 era) common core services and so when Windows Server 2008 was released, it was based on the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 source.

Hence the next Service Pack being called “Service Pack 2”.

Address your GRC needs by leveraging
your existing Microsoft investment!

This Solution Accelerator can save you time and money by shifting your governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) efforts from people to technology. Use its configuration guidance to help efficiently address your organization’s GRC objectives with Microsoft technology you may already own.

This Accelerator helps you better understand how an IT process framework can help you implement GRC controls in your Microsoft infrastructure.

The IT Compliance Management Guide includes a Microsoft® Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 companion guide that is based on the Regulatory Compliance Planning Guide.

The IT Compliance Management Resources workbook saves you time by bringing together the information you need. It provides an extensive inventory of GRC-related configuration tasks and guidance organized by Microsoft product name.

DOWNLOAD HERE:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=56419

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Manage IT compliance with Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0

The IT Compliance Management Guide helps you address GRC requirements and organization-wide governance initiatives by using an approach based on MOF 4.0. MOF is a free IT service life cycle process model that addresses the control objectives of GRC authority documents and frameworks such as COBIT and ISO 27002.

MOF provides a process model to help you manage change and configuration throughout the IT service life cycle.

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Configure Microsoft products to address GRC requirements

Numerous resources are available to help address GRC requirements for Microsoft products and solutions.

The IT Compliance Management Guide ships with the IT Compliance Management Resources workbook, which provides job aids to locate these resources and conduct changes to your IT infrastructure.

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Benefits:

• Views compliance obligations through a ‘lens’ of 8 authority documents. The example authority documents include SOX, GLBA, HIPAA, EUDPD, PCI DSS, ISO 27002, COBIT 4.1, and AICPA GAPP.
• Takes advantage of your current Microsoft investment. Configure Microsoft products in your environment to address GRC objectives.
• Reviewed by auditing firm Grant Thornton LLP. "The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) referenced in the guide is both a reasonable and extensible framework by which an organization may manage GRC requirements and solutions."
• Reduces complexity. Provides guidance to consolidate and address GRC requirements from multiple authority documents such as regulations, publications, and agreements.
• Clarifies configuration requirements. Includes a Microsoft Excel® workbook with a detailed inventory list and job aids.
• Free. The IT Compliance Management Guide is a free download.

Additional Information

• IT Governance & Compliance TechCenter
• MOF 4.0 home page
• Solution Accelerators home page
• Security & Compliance Solution Accelerators home page
• Subscribe to the Compliance Management Community forum

Is your organization concerned with Regulatory Compliance?

The Solution Accelerators – Security and Compliance team provides guidance and tools to manage compliance infrastructure and to institute sound principles of IT service governance.

• Get the latest news on IT Governance and Compliance
• Ask a question using the Compliance Management forum
• Learn more about Microsoft Solution Accelerators

There are a variety of Compliance related assets that are available for download on our IT Governance & Compliance site:

• IT Compliance Management Guide
  This Solution Accelerator can help you shift your governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) efforts from people to technology. Use its configuration guidance to help efficiently address your organization’s GRC objectives.
• Microsoft® Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0
  MOF 4.0 delivers practical guidance for everyday IT practices and activities, helping users establish and implement reliable, cost-effective IT services for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) activities.
• Security Compliance Management Toolkit
  This toolkit provides proven methods that your organization can use to effectively monitor the compliance state of recommended security baselines for Windows Vista®, Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), and Windows Server® 2003 SP2.
• Security Risk Management Guide
  The Security Risk Management Guide helps customers plan, build, and maintain a successful security risk management program.

Microsoft’s IT Governance & Compliance site:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/regulatorycompliance/default.aspx

I just caught wind of the awards that Microsoft Research (the second largest research lab of any private sector company) have received.  Check some of the awards given to our researchers.  I’d only heard of many of these back when I was in college.

For example… Gary Starkweather’s National Academy of Engineering award.
(For those who didn’t know, Gary invented the laser printer.  He’s since retired.)

AWARDS:
http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/pastpresentfuture/awards.aspx

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So what exactly does all this research do?  Where does it turn up?  How does Microsoft & the world take advantage of all this “thinking”?  Here’s a few of my favorites:

• Outlook 2007/Exchange Server 2007
  Computational puzzles for fighting spam. Outlook E-Mail Postmark applies a computational puzzle that acts as a spam deterrent to e-mail messages it sends. The puzzle is read by a receiving Exchange Server 2007 server as a check for the reliability of the incoming message, improving mail legitimacy and security.
• Office OneNote 2007
  Phonetic audio search enables users to search for spoken keywords in audio recordings. By means of phonetic speech recognition, the audio search technology allows OneNote 2007 users to locate meeting recordings in which a certain topic is talked about, and to narrow down where exactly in the recording the words were said.
• “Halo 3”
  TrueSkill is a skill-based ranking system for Xbox LIVE developed at Microsoft Research. The system identifies and tracks the skills of gamers to be able to assign them into competitive matches.
• Microsoft Surface
  Multitouch and object recognition. A hardware- and software-based method for separately recognizing multiple objects that are placed on a display surface.
• Audio watermarking and identification. Audio watermarking and identification technology licensed to Harper Security Consulting AS of Norway helps its forensic tracking of digitally distributed content. The licensed technology consists of digital audio watermarking and fingerprinting software tools that provide for the marking and decoding of audio files.