theMSgeek

Good news—the Windows Phone Marketplace for apps and games is opening for business today in five new spots—Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru and the Philippines.

If you live in one of these countries, tapping on the Marketplace tile will soon (it might a few hours for all the lights to come on) put loads of great apps and games at your fingertips. One important caveat: Your phone will need to have Windows Phone 7.5 installed to access the new stores. (Look here for update instructions.)

If you’re a developer and want to make sure your app lands in one of these new stores, make sure to check out Todd Brix’s post today on the Developer Blog.

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This update contains hotfixes for issues that were fixed after the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Note The build of this cumulative update package is known as build 10.50.2796.0.

Important notes about this cumulative update package\

• SQL Server 2008 hotfixes are now multilingual. Therefore, the cumulative update package is not specific to one language and applies to all supported languages.
• One cumulative update package includes all the component packages. However, the cumulative update package updates only those components that are installed on the system

Request a download: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2633146

This morning, we reached an important development milestone: the beginning of the “Office 15″ Technical Preview Program. Office 15 is the codename for the next generation of the Microsoft Office products and services, and the Technical Preview is the first time we share our work with a select group of customers under non-disclosure agreements. These customers play a key role in our development process by testing early builds and providing feedback, which we incorporate into the final release.

At this early point in our development cycle, I’m not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.

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The Cloud Services Management Pack is now available for download. It contains:

1) Model extensions for the SCSM CMDB to store additional types of data which are useful for managing a private cloud.

2) Views so that the cloud-related data can be easily viewed in the Configuration Items workspace in the SCSM console.

3) Service request templates for common scenarios related to private cloud management such as provisioning/deprovisioning VMs, allocating capacity pools, creating new projects, and so on.

4) Request offerings based on the service request templates that can be published to the Service Catalog on the self-service portal.

5) Automated workflows in SCSM to automatically fulfill some of the requests.

6) Runbooks for Orchestrator to automatically fulfill other types of requests which need to be executed on other System Center components such as Virtual Machine Manager

Go here to download:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=231143

A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that calculates WAN bandwidth requirements for a Lync Server deployment based on administrator-specified user profiles and network information.

With the Lync Server 2010 Bandwidth Calculator, you can enter information about your users and the Lync Server features that you want to deploy, and the calculator will determine bandwidth requirements for the WAN that connects sites in your deployment.