Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Announcing MBSA 2.0 Beta
MBSA 2.0 is the next version of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, which utilizes the Windows Update Services infrastructure for security update scanning. Please help us improve the quality of this release. We are currently accepting nominations into the MBSA 2.0 beta program. To nominate yourself for the beta, visit http://beta.microsoft.com, sign in to the system using your Passport ID and a guest ID of "MBSA20" and complete the survey.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsahome.mspx

Congratulations to Countrywide Tax Services:  They’ve been published! 

Microsoft and Countrywide legal teams finally finished up dotting-the-I’s-and-crossing-the-T’s on the Tax Services case study around Microsoft’s Rules Engine/Business Orchestration engine "Biztalk Server 2004" and Microsoft’s development .NET development environment.  It’s a great case study with distinctly quantifiable savings.  Expect to see it referenced heavily in the financial industry as an example of thought leadership.

<excerpt>
Countrywide Financial Corporation
Financial Services Firm Saves $1.7 Million, Speeds Development 50 Percent  

The Tax Services subsidiary of  Countrywide Financial Corporation was adding more than 100,000 new mortgage-customer tax records to its database every month—and stressing its AS/400 system capacity. A new AS/400 would be a prohibitive expense and still leave the unit without the flexibility and reliability it wanted. The company chose a solution based on Microsoft Windows Server System, including the Microsoft .NET Framework. The company achieved first-year savings of U.S.$1.7 million—more than 50 percent—and expects annual savings on maintenance of $500,000. The development team got up to speed in one-third the time it would have taken on competitor systems, and continuing development is up to 50 percent faster. As the company takes increasing advantage of Microsoft technologies—for example, adopting Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)—the solution’s performance continues to climb. 

See the case study on the web here:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/casestudy.asp?CaseStudyID=16400

Download the entire case study in Word format here:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/ShowFile.asp?FileResourceID=7358

I recently received the question:  Exactly what tools do you use to track Blogs and RSS Newsfeeds?  Good question – I primarily use THREE products:

NEWSGATOR – This is an Outlook 2003 add-in that allows you view RSS Newsfeeds (like mine) within Outlook, as if each entry were a email message.  It’s exceptionally cool because it provides you with a newspaper summary of the whole blog you’re interested in and it gets rid of all the advertising and all the graphics… just the information!  In order to subscribe to a new RSS newsfeed, all you have to do is use Internet Explorer 6.0 find the little orange "RSS" bug or graphic on a news/blog web page, right mouse button click on it, and you’ll see an entry called "Subscribe in Newsgator".  Click on it, and Internet Explorer will tell Newsgator to start sucking in all the news articles from the blog in question, and have them available to you offline within Outlook.  It’s a GREAT product. 
DOWNLOAD:  http://www.newsgator.com

AVANTBROWSER – This is a Internet Explorer 6.0 add-in that provides tabbed browsing, a download manager, a graphic/video/audio/flash blocker, auto-refresh for tabs to update the screen every 30 seconds for stocks and stats, etc.  One of the capabilities is the ability to parse and present RSS feeds.  So for example, http://spaces.msn.com/members/kurtsh/feed.rss looks like a clean easy-to-read newspaper instead of a bunch of XML.  Great preview tool.
DOWNLOAD:  http://www.avantbrowser.com/

NEWSBREAK – This is a Pocket PC application that sucks in RSS newsfeeds so that you have them available to you on your mobile device.  There’s even a version for Smartphone.  It works via ActiveSync direct-connection to your desktop or laptop, over the WiFi connection on your Pocket PC if you’ve got one… or via the cellular connection on your Pocket PC Phone/Smartphone if you’ve got one.  I use it on my Pocket PC Phone and it updates throughout the day so I always have fresh content to read.  Better than AvantGo!
DOWNLOAD:  http://iliumsoft.com/site/nw/newsbreak.htm

Enter Los Angeles course code:  r2bNw67WpW