All in on IT
Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server 2005 - Implementing, Managing, and Troubleshooting Beta MCP exam is looking for a few more testers. Available at Vue and Prometric from today until may 10th. There are limited seats left. Use promotional code TS262. See
James’ blog for more information.
Here’s a great little ditty on how Microsoft manages the large quantities of unwanted e-mail (spam) and mailware-infected messages in its inbound internet e-mail traffic.

Although I am sure the name comes as a shock to no one …
Yes!! The Microsoft Security and Feature Pack firmware update is now available from the Palm web site for the Treo 700w. You need to enter you serial number to obtain it and there are extensive instructions for applying it. Be warned: your device will be formatted, so back up all your data! On the back end your provider will need Exchange Server 2003 running SP2. They will also need to enable your device for direct push server side. Awesome!! There are great directions from Palm here and a review ......
From Microsoft Research comes PHLAT … a new interface for Windows Desktop Search. From the site:PHLAT is a new interface for Windows Desktop Search (enabling search through a user's own email, files, and viewed web pages). PHLAT lets you easily specify queries and filters, attempting to integrate search and browse in one intuitive interface. In addition, Phlat supports a unified tagging (labeling) scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems (files, email, etc.) ......
Sourced here: Microsoft is working on a Virtual Server management console, code named Carmine. The console will alllow for easy management, movement (drag and drop) and patching with “little” downtime. It cannot get here soon enough! I know VMWare has a long lead on Microsoft, but I hope they throw a ton of resources at virtualization and catch up with VMWare in a speedy (and high quality) fashion. ......
SQL Server 2005 SP1 is
officially live. Database mirroring is now natively supported without having to hack at the registry to enable it. In an unrelated note, some are starting to speculate that Oracle is looking to snap up Novell. Larry was apparently quoted as saying that all they are lacking is an OS. Is Novell the perfect target?
Microsoft Certificate Lifecycle Manager Beta 1 Is Here Microsoft Certificate Lifecycle Manager (CLM) is a policy- and workflow-driven solution that helps organizations manage the lifecycle of digital certificates and smart cards. Join the Microsoft CLM Beta Program to participate in testing and read this technical white paper to learn how CLM can lower the costs associated with digital certificates and smart cards ......
Thanks to everyone out there that voted for the ISA Server 2004 Tips and Tricks BOF. It has been accepted as a BOF session tentatively scheduled for the evening of 6/13 (my birthday no less). I am looking forward to a great night of discussions and debates around ISA Server 2004. Last year’s BOF was wonderful with varied experiences and configured uses for ISA Server. With the CTP for ISA Server 2006 in full swing we should have even more great topics to discuss. Perhaps we can rope Tom Shinder ......
I have never had a soft spot in my heart for print journalists, or most conventional news outlets (When did you stop beating your wife Mr. Smith?). And even though I blog I would hardly consider myself such – even in the most liberal sense. So I had to just laugh when I saw this post from Mary Jo Foley. While she and every other professional tech watcher\writer crucify Microsoft for its latest announcement delaying the release of Vista to consumers, she asks “But what about a delivery ......
Microsoft has launched
Port 25 – the blog\website for its open source software development team.
From MSN MoneyCentral:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Computer Inc. on Wednesday rolled out a software patch that enables its Intel-based Macintosh computers to install and run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system.
Apple said that the new software, called "Boot Camp" is available as a download beginning today.
I have read articles (and have done this myself) describing how to boot off of a USB drive to the default XP install on your HDD if your computer’s BIOS supports boot from USB.
This chap, however, has figured out how to put the entire install on the USB drive and boot and run from there as well. I haven't tested this yet so the normal disclaimers apply …
Microsoft has released some information on its enterprise-level protection suite
Microsoft Client Protection as well as started up the beta program. More will be released as NDA permits. You can get plenty of information from
the website as it stands right now.
NewsGator has released a new version of their product that allows you to read RSS from within Outlook. Called NewsGator InBox, Nick made an announcement in his blog. I am curious to see how this product fares and evolves now that Outlook 2007 will natively support RSS feeds. Given that so far the implementation has been pretty bare bones, I have a feeling there will still be plenty of room for products like this. It is interesting to see that these types of services and applications live for a short ......
Microsoft announced today at LinuxWorld that it will not be charging for Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition and will also be supporting Linux virtual operating systems.