theMSgeek

Today, we’re excited that the Office team is making OneNote for Android available in 57 markets worldwide with easy access to your notes on SkyDrive. The app also offers key OneNote features like checklists, image capture, table editing and support for hyperlinks. Please note that not all Android devices are created equal. You currently need to have a device running Android 2.3 or higher and with access to Android Market to use OneNote for Android.

If you have an Android device, we also encourage you to try other apps from partners built using SkyDrive APIs. For example with Browser for SkyDrive or Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive, you can view, access and upload documents or photos on your Android phone. Portfolio for SkyDrive lets you organize and upload photos from your Android phone in batches to SkyDrive. If you want to add SkyDrive support to your app, site or device, please visit our developer center.

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On February 29, Microsoft will finally release the Consumer Preview, a partly-finished beta, to the entire world. It’s announcing the preview at an event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The venue is interesting, since MWC is all about (duh) mobile devices. Earlier this month, a video leaked explaining how the next version of Windows Phone will interact with Windows 8, and share a lot of common technology as well. Expect to see some of that interaction at the show.

Here’s the invite:

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Following the release of System Center 2012 Release Candidate, Microsoft is pleased to announce the availability of the Release Candidate of the Orchestrator Integration Packs for the following System Center 2012 components:

• System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center 2012 Operations Manager
• System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager
• System Center 2012 Service Manager

In addition, Release Candidate Orchestrator Integration Packs are also available for the following legacy System Center products:

• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Service Manager 2010
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007

All of the above listed Integration Packs allow customers and partners to gain better automation and integration across their datacenter and private cloud environments by standardizing IT process and systems activities to drive greater consistency and improve operational ROI.

The Release Candidate Integration Pack download is available here.

System Requirements:

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 R2

System Center 2012 Component Support: System Center 2012 RC Orchestrator must be installed prior to installing the System Center 2012 RC Integration Packs.

Recommended Configuration for System Center 2012 RC Orchestrator:

• RAM – minimum 1GB recommended 2GB
• Disk space minimum 200MB
• CPU Dual Core or better
• SQL Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• NET 4.0 if you are installing Web features

Installation Instructions:

System Center 2012 RC Orchestrator Integration Packs

• Double click on System_Center_2012_Orchestrator_Integration_Packs_RC.EXE
• Follow the on screen prompts to extract the Integration Packs

After you extract the Integration Pack files, you must register them with the System Center 2012 RC Orchestrator management server and then deploy it to Runbook Servers and Runbook Designers. Get instructions on how to install Integration Packs here.

Related Resources:

• Integration Pack Installation Instructions
• System Center 2012
• Integration Pack Guide

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.

A great BUILD session hosted by Mark Russinovich which gives you the internals of Windows Azure OS.

I suggest to view the HQ WMV edition of the video so you can see the screen captures and command consoles clearly

• MP4 (iPod, Zune HD)
• Mid Quality WMV (Lo-band, Mobile)
• High Quality WMV (PC, XBox, MCE)

Mark Russinovich goes under the hood of Microsoft’s new cloud OS . Intended for developers that have already gotten their hands dirty with Windows Azure and understand its basic concepts, this session gives an inside look at the architectural design of Windows Azure’s compute platform. You’ll learn about Microsoft’s data center architecture, what goes on behind the scenes when you deploy and update a Windows Azure app and how it monitors and responds to the health of machines, its own components and the apps it hosts.

View in browser

Nice visual timeline of the Windows 8 development process. So with Sinofsky’s reputation I expect that May 2012 can be a realistic RTM date.

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Traditional antimalware software plays a critical role in defending and remediating attacks. However, reputation-based technologies can help provide effective protection against social engineering attacks before traditional antimalware signatures are available, especially against malware that pretends to be legitimate software programs.

Windows 8 will help protect users with reputation-based technologies when launching applications as well as browsing with Internet Explorer.

Since its release, the SmartScreen filter has used URL reputation to help protect Internet Explorer customers from more than 1.5 billion attempted malware attacks and over 150 million attempted phishing attacks. Application reputation, a new feature added to SmartScreen in Internet Explorer 9, provides an additional layer of defense to help you make a safer decision when URL reputation and traditional antimalware aren’t enough to catch the attack. Telemetry data shows 95% of Internet Explorer 9 users are choosing to delete or not run malware when they receive a SmartScreen application reputation warning.

Microsoft understands that Internet Explorer isn’t the only way users download applications from the Internet, so Windows now uses SmartScreen to perform an application reputation check the first time you launch applications that come from the Internet.

In Windows 7 when launching these downloaded applications, users get the following notification:

In Windows 8, SmartScreen will only notify users when you run an application that has not yet established a reputation and therefore is a higher risk:

The user experience for applications with an established reputation is simple and clean: users just click and run, removing the prompt users would have seen in Windows 7.

SmartScreen uses a marker placed on files at download time to trigger a reputation check. All major web browsers and many mail clients, and IM services already add this marker, known as the “mark of the web,” to downloaded files.

Microsoft expects average users to see a SmartScreen prompt less than twice per year and when they do see it, it will signify a higher risk scenario. Telemetry data shows 92% of applications downloaded via Internet Explorer 9 already have an established reputation and show no warnings. The same data shows that when an application reputation warning is shown, the risk of getting a malware infection by running it is 25-70%. And SmartScreen has administrative controls to prevent the non-techie friends or children from ignoring these warnings.

Here’s a video that shows you Windows Defender and SmartScreen URL and application reputation in action:

High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

According to Microsoft Windows 8 blog, Windows Defender in Windows 8 will include real-time anti-virus protection. Currently Windows Defender protects the system from adware and spyware.

For anti-virus Microsoft now has Security Essentials, with Windows 8 it seems the products will finally be merged in to one product. If this impacts anti-trust issues remains to be seen. In my opinion Microsoft is entitled to protect their own product and customers.

Microsoft announced more ant-malware enhancements in protection and performance:

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). ASLR was first introduced in Windows Vista and works by randomly shuffling the location of most code and data in memory to block assumptions that the code and data are at same address on all PCs. In Windows 8, we extended ASLR’s protection to more parts of Windows and introduced enhancements such as increased randomization that will break many known techniques for circumventing ASLR.

Windows kernel. In Windows 8, we bring many of the mitigations to the Windows kernel that previously only applied to user-mode applications. These will help improve protection against some of the most common type of threats. For example, we now prevent user-mode processes from allocating the low 64K of process memory, which prevents a whole class of kernel-mode NULL dereference vulnerabilities from being exploited. We also added integrity checks to the kernel pool memory allocator to mitigate kernel pool corruption attacks.

Windows heap. Applications get dynamically allocated memory from the Windows user-mode heap. Major redesign of the Windows 8 heap adds significant protection in the form of new integrity checks to help defend against many exploit techniques. In addition, the Windows heap now randomizes the order of allocations so that exploits cannot depend on the predictable placement of objects—the same principle that makes ASLR successful. We also added guard pages to certain types of heap allocations, which helps prevent exploits that rely on overrunning the heap.

Internet Explorer. “Use-after-free” vulnerabilities represented nearly 75% of the vulnerabilities reported in Internet Explorer over the last two years. For Windows 8, we implemented guards in Internet Explorer to prevent an attacker from crafting an invalid virtual function table, making these attacks more difficult. Internet Explorer will also take full advantage of the ASLR improvements provided by Windows 8.

Windows Defender.:

The improvements to Windows Defender will help protect you from all types of malware, including viruses, worms, bots and rootkits by using the complete set of malware signatures from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, which Windows Update will deliver regularly along with the latest Microsoft antimalware engine. This expanded set of signatures is a significant improvement over previous versions, which only included signatures for spyware, adware, and potentially unwanted software.

In addition, Windows Defender will now provide you with real-time detection and protection from malware threats using a file system filter, and will interface with Windows secured boot, another new Window 8 protection feature.

When you use a PC that supports UEFI-based Secure Boot (defined in the UEFI 2.3.1 specification), Windows secured boot will help ensure that all firmware and firmware updates are secure, and that the entire Windows boot path up to the antimalware driver has not been tampered with. It does this by loading only properly signed and validated code in the boot path. This helps ensure that malicious code can’t load during boot or resume, and helps to protect you against boot sector and boot loader viruses, as well as bootkit and rootkit malware that try to load as drivers.

The same interfaces for secured boot used by Windows Defender, as well as all APIs used by Windows Defender, are available for use by our antimalware partners to deliver additional protection to Windows customers.

• Improved user experience. We have designed Windows Defender to be unobtrusive for most daily usage, and will notify you only when you need to perform an action, or critical information demands your attention. Windows Defender will also use the new Windows 8 maintenance scheduler to limit interruptions.
• Improved performance. Traditional antimalware technologies are well known for impacting system performance. It’s not uncommon that running antimalware software doubles the amount of time required for core scenarios like file copy and boot. As you read in last week’s blog entry, we have a lot of people working on system performance and Windows Defender dramatically improves performance on all key scenarios compared to common antimalware solutions on Windows 7, while maintaining strong protection. For example, Windows Defender with its full protection functionality enabled adds only 4% to boot time, while dramatically reducing CPU time during boot by 75%, disk I/O by around 50MB, and peak working set by around 100MB.

These same improvements benefit energy efficiency, meaning Windows Defender consumes less power, and gives you longer battery life.

Antimalware partners can participate during the Windows 8 development process so you have the best possible Windows PC experience no matter what antimalware solution you choose. We provide them with resources, such as the technical details of how we architected the performance improvements for Windows Defender, so they have the opportunity to make similar improvements to their products.

Protecting you from malware - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

the Windows 8 developer preview is out, now you can install this in a virtual machine to try it out, but it is more fun to run it direct on your hardware. However this build is pre-beta, so not ready to do all your daily “ production” work on. You can solve this by dual booting, but it is cooler to boot of a VHD! Booting from VHD was introduced in Windows 7.Now there are several methods on the Internet to make this work, I have found this procedure so the procedure is the simplest and quickest.

No need to use WAIK, DISM, x-image, sysprep, WIM2VHD. Even no need for BCEDIT!

In short:

• Boot from the Win8dev DVD or USB
• When in setup the disk selection appears where to install to you press SHIFT-F10
• A cmd window appears.
• Now your drive letters may have shifted so do some DIR commands where you want the put the VHD file also choose a volume that has enough free space.
• Then run diskpart:
  • create vdisk file=d:\win8dev.vhd type=expandable maximum=50000 (for better performance do not use expandable, but creating the VHD may take some time.
    I choose about 50 GB in size
  • select vdisk file=d:\win8dev.vhd
  • attach vdisk
• Now alt-tab back to the disk selection window and click refresh, the VHD volume should appear, select it to install Windows in it.
• Click next, Windows will install and reboot into next phase of Windows 8 setup
• After another reboot the new Metro style boot menu appears where you can choose to boot from Windows 8 or Windows 7. Advanced options lets you set the default and change timeout. Also troubleshooting options are here.
• The default is Windows 8 and it will run direct on your hardware

A bit longer guide but with screenshots is here:

www.hanselman.com

Today at its developer-focused BUILD conference, Microsoft Corp. showcased a detailed preview of the next major release of Windows, code-named “Windows 8.” The company also detailed new tools for developers to help write applications for more than 1 billion people around the world who use Windows every day.

“We reimagined Windows,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, in his keynote address to the thousands of developers in attendance. “From the chipset to the user experience, Windows 8 brings a new range of capabilities without compromise.”

The company also highlighted a variety of new features in Windows 8, including the following:

Touch-First User Interface

• Metro style. Windows 8 introduces a new Metro style interface built for touch, which shows information important to you, embodies simplicity and gives you control. The Metro style UI is equally at home with a mouse and keyboard as well.

• Touch-first browsing, not just browsing on a touch device. Providing a fast and fluid touch-browsing experience, Internet Explorer 10 puts sites at the center on new Windows 8 devices.

More Ways to Engage With Powerful, Connected Apps

• Powered by apps. Metro style apps built for Windows 8 are the focal point of your experience, filling your entire screen so there are no distractions.

• Apps can work together. Apps communicate with each other in Windows 8. For example, you can easily select and email photos from different places, such as Facebook, Flickr or on your hard drive.

• Your experience syncs across your devices. Live roams all the content from the cloud services you use most — photos, email, calendar and contacts — keeping them up-to-date on your devices. With SkyDrive, you can access your files, photos and documents from virtually anywhere with any browser or with Metro style apps in Windows 8.

Enhanced Fundamentals

• The best of Windows 7, only better. Windows 8 is built on the rock-solid foundation of Windows 7, delivering improvements in performance, security, privacy and system reliability. Windows 8 reduces the memory footprint needed — even on the lowest-end hardware — leaving more room for your apps.

• Preserving power-user favorites and making them better. For those who push the limits of their PC, Windows 8 features an enhanced Task Manager and Windows Explorer and new, flexible options for multimonitor setups.

New Developer Opportunities

• Windows Store. The Windows Store will allow developers to sell their apps anywhere Windows is sold worldwide, whether they’re creating new games or familiar productivity tools.

• Build using more languages. Windows 8 lets you leverage your existing skills and code assets to create great experiences using the programming language you prefer.

• Rich hardware integration leads to richer experiences — particularly for games. DirectX 11 gaming power underlies Windows 8, allowing the easy creation of full-screen games with smooth, flicker-free action.

New Generation of Hardware

• One Windows — many shapes and sizes. Support for ARM-based chipsets, x86 (as well as x32 and x64) devices, touch and sensors means Windows 8 works beautifully across a spectrum of devices, from 10-inch tablets and laptops to all-in-ones with 27-inch high-definition screens.

• Always connected. With Windows 8, new ultrathin PCs and tablets turn on instantly, run all day on a single charge and stay connected to the Internet so your PC is ready when you are. Next-generation system on a chip (SoC) support will also enable greatly extended standby and low-power states.

• Tap the full power of your PC. Windows 8 runs on PCs and is compatible with the devices and programs you use today on Windows 7, without compromise, to deliver the performance you expect of a PC.

We are confirming that we will be bringing Xbox LIVE to the PC with Xbox LIVE on Windows. We are very excited about Xbox LIVE coming to Windows 8. Xbox LIVE brings your games, music, movies, and TV shows to your favorite Microsoft and Windows devices. Bringing Xbox LIVE to Windows 8 is part of our vision to bring you all the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, made easy. At BUILD we are showing that it is easy for developers to create games for Windows 8 that take advantage of the power of Xbox LIVE. We have much more detail to share about the capabilities of Xbox LIVE on Windows and look forward to the opportunity to do so in the near future.

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In a nutshell, it allows you to reach across your PC’s as if they were part of one single desktop. I have two PCs on my desk at work connected to 3 LCD screens and using Mouse Without Borders I can move my mouse between the 3 screens, even though one of them is attached to a different PC from the other two. What’s more, I can move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another. In fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local collection of pictures I regularly use it to have one PC dedicated to social media streams while I work away on my other PC connected to two screens. The video above both explains and shows Mouse Without Borders far better than I can using words. The project is testament to the power of The Garage which helped Truong develop the user interface and setup the usability tests that have helped the tool become very accessible and easy to use. As well as that, The Garage and its regular Science Fairs inside Microsoft helped expose the project to 9,000 people before it was ready for external release. Now that day has arrived and I’m delighted to announce here on Next at Microsoft that Mouse Without Borders is ready for download.

Download Now [1.1mb]

More info: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2011/09/09/microsoft-garage-download-mouse-without-borders.aspx

News via: www.activewin.com

File server capacity planning and performance troubleshooting are critical aspects of high-level network administration. File server capacity planning tools can be valuable in choosing new hardware for purchase, identifying the capacity of existing hardware, locating existing bottlenecks, and planning for resource expansion in advance of resource exhaustion.

The throughput capacity of a file server can be expressed either as the maximum number of operations per second or a maximum number of users supported by the configuration. These values are influenced by several factors, some of which include processor speed, available memory, disk speed, network throughput and latency, and the speed with which SMB requests are processed.

This release is an updated release to v1.0. It includes support of File Server in the Windows Clustering configuration. Windows Clustering allows system to be built with redundancy, which provides high availability to tolerate hardware failures. With a two node clustering, you could setup more than one virtual file server instance, and have FSCT clients run load against all the instances. In this release, a new section “Running FSCT against a singleton Windows Cluster” will describe the setup and steps for running against a Windows Cluster.

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Windows 8 boots under 10 seconds on most PC’s trick is to resume from a hibernated kernel session:

….in a traditional shutdown, we close all of the user sessions, and in the kernel session we close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

See video: High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

See full atrticle:

Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8 - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

In this post we talk about how we will support virtualization on the Windows “client” OS. Originally released for Windows Server where the technology has proven very popular and successful, we wanted to bring virtualization to a core set of scenarios for professionals using Windows. The two most common scenarios we focused on are for software developers working across multiple platforms and clients and servers, and IT professionals looking to manage virtualized clients and servers in a seamless manner. Mathew John is a program manager on our Hyper-V team and authored this post. One note is that, as with all features, we’re discussing the engineering of the work and not the ultimate packaging, as those choices are made much later in the project. –Steven PS: We didn’t plan on doing so many posts in a row so we’ll return to more sustainable pace — sorry if we inadvertantly set expectations a bit too high. We’re getting ready for BUILD full time right now!!

Full Story at Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx

Welcome to the public Beta for new Data Protection Manager 2012. Please download the beta and try it for yourself.

The key DPM 2012 features that will be available for BETA validations are -

• Centralized Management (Built on the Ops Manager platform)
  • Centralized Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  • Remote Administration
  • Remote Recovery
  • Push To Resume Backups
  • Role Based Access
• Continued Best of Breed Application Support
  • SharePoint Item Level recovery without restoring Content DB
  • SQL FILESTREAM support
  • SharePoint RBS support
  • Hyper-V Item Level Restore from a DPM running in a VM
  • Faster protection of VMs on stand-alone Hyper-V servers.
• Fresh DPM 2012 Console User Interface
• Data Source Extensibility Framework
• Certificate Based Protection of non-AD machines
  • File Server
  • SQL Servers
  • Hyper-V servers
  • Clustered Data sources
  • Secondary DPM servers.
• Tape Enhancements:
  • Enhanced Granular Media Co-Location
  • Tape Reliability Enhancements
• Multiple DPM DB databases share a single remote SQL Instance
• Upgrade support from DPM 2010

We do not recommend to deploy this Beta into Production. This Beta is not supported by Customer Services and Support (CSS). If you have questions, please visit the DPM 2012 Beta Forum on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dataprotectionmanager
Help improve SCDPM 2012 Beta by submitting bugs to the Connect Feedback Center.

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