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Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 2:22 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Oct. 27 - Nov. 9 Hot-Fix KB articles Weekly Release - Windows 6/7

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

Hi Everyone, In the last two weeks, 29 Windows 6 and Windows 7 related hot-fix KB articles were released. Below are the details: Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 - 14 KB articles: · 975889 An October 2009 update is available for the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008 · 975803 Earlier snapshots are deleted after you restore multiple copy-on-write snapshots in consecutive order in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008 · 973414 Isochronous...(read more)

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 6:05 PM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Firefox turns five: Thanks for giving us a choice

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

Birthdays in the world of tech normally aren't that big of a deal for most folks. We tend to feel as much nostalgia toward hardware, software and services as we do toward flu shots and oil changes for the car. But even if you don't use Firefox -- and by the numbers, that's over 60% of you -- it's difficult to underestimate this once-upstart browser's impact on the way we experience the Internet, and how our software is developed in the first place.

Replacing monopoly with choice

Before Firefox came along, Internet browsing was Microsoft's game to lose. The company had successfully used its ability to bake IE into the fabric of its dominant operating system, to none-too-subtly force mainstream internauts to overlook the alternative. If IE was already sitting on the average user's desktop, the logic went, why would he or she even bother to download Netscape?

The strategy worked, as Netscape began a long, slow slide into oblivion. Users by the millions simply stuck with what their OS came with. I'm keenly aware of the fact that Betanews readers can download and install a browser in the time it takes to change the channel. Yet I'm also keenly aware that our tech savvy readers are far outnumbered by the kind of Internet users who, for a while anyway, didn't understand what a browser was, and who thought "The Internet" was the glowing IE icon on their desktop.

Microsoft got this, too. Whatever your view on the company, it's easy to see that this fundamental understanding of its audience helped it recover from almost missing the browser bandwagon altogether. Antitrust cases notwithstanding, Microsoft's recognition that most everyday end users wouldn't bother (at least in the chaotic early days of the commercialized Internet) to take the time to download something as mundane as a browser, helped it drive a large chunk of the Internet agenda for the better part of a decade. Although we scoff at the notion of default desktop real estate today, it mattered immensely when Windows 95 first hit the market.

The shift toward download-your-own

But getting and keeping a monopoly are two entirely different things. As Microsoft eventually learned, product innovation matters, and its inability to focus on that growing market need left the door slightly open for an alternative.

By failing to move the bar once it wrested control, Microsoft virtually guaranteed that increasingly sophisticated and demanding mainstream users -- who by then had figured out how to customize their desktops with their own software choices -- would eventually take the time to download and install a new browser. By 2004, there were enough of them who were ticked off with IE's dominant market position, its bloat, its disrespect for the Web standards of the day, and its sock-it-to-me reputation as a target for hackers that IE's days as the default choice were numbered.

It's easy to forget that Firefox wasn't always a flexible upstart. It was born out of the ashes of Netscape's Mozilla Project, a bloated failure that stands as an example of too many features and not enough thought devoted toward making them work with each other...or for the end user. The project's rebirth under the Mozilla Foundation as a broad-scale open source collaboration allowed it to return focus to the singular browser. It also gave it the edge needed to position itself as a viable alternative to the then-dominant IE.

Firefox introduced a number of features that we now take for granted: Tabbed browsing, add-ons and extensions, integrated search, themes, consistent support for Web standards, download management, pop-up blocking, and best of all, speed. And while age has helped more recent competitors like Google's Chrome begin the process of turning yesterday's David into today's Goliath, Firefox remains a formidable platform with enough developer and end-user support to ensure it won't soon meet Netscape's fate.

Of course, nothing is a given in the world of tech. And despite its vaunted success in hacking out a growing base of fans (over 24% of all users, according to October 2009 data from NetApplications) and taking on a company many saw at the time as unbeatable, Firefox the browser isn't immune to the creeping ailments of age. It's gotten bigger and slower with each successive generation, and its prodigious use of memory and system resources remains a widespread source of irritation. But as the first truly successful example of an open source product that went mainstream, Firefox has helped build the business model by which software that's given away for free can become the basis of an industry.

An intensifying market

As version 3.6 gets set to go gold, the core developers are already filling in the blanks on a roadmap that stretches years into the future. Google, which was an early and ongoing Firefox supporter, now wants its own piece of the action as it aggressively improves Google Chrome and uses the browser as the basis for its first full-blown desktop operating system, Google Chrome OS. The broader client market is evolving as well, as the desktops that defined the bulk of our online activities in 2004 give way to increasingly mobile form factors and uses. Firefox's mobile project, known as Fennec, is expected to deliver a working product in 2010. None of this would have happened without Firefox 1.0.

No one quite knows where any of this will end up. And whatever features and performance the various players pile in to their respective offerings in the coming months and years, they'll all owe a debt of gratitude to a product...more accurately, to an open source project that saw the potential in shifting the market away from dominant offerings from commercial players that limited choice and stifled development.

In that respect, Firefox was less a product than a revolution in how software is developed and used, and how sustainable markets are built around these products. I can't wait to see what the next five years have in store.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 6:08 PM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: OffiSync Premium Lets Microsoft Office Play Nice With Google Sites

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

OffiSync, the Microsoft Office plugin that allows users to sync their documents easily with Google Docs, has launched a new release today that will make it even more appealing to businesses: support for Google Sites. Google Sites is the search giant’s answer to Microsoft SharePoint, so this will give business users an alternative solution they can use to manage their documents in a shared workspace. Today’s release also marks the launch of OffiSync’s first premium offering.

We’ve been tracking OffiSync’s progress for a while now: last May the startup launched support for Google Docs, and released an improved version over the summer that integrated Google Image Search. But until now they haven’t had a premium option that was tailored for business.

Founder Oudi Antebi, who was a Product Manager at Microsoft for both Office and SharePoint, says that up until now using Office with Google sites has been a clumsy process that required users to manually upload their modified documents from their desktops (conversely, SharePoint syncs the documents automatically). He says that ever since OffiSync launched, the company has been working toward bringing the product to the enterprise market, in the hopes of helping turn Google Sites into a more viable alternative to SharePoint.

Antebi also says that using OffiSync with Google Sites actually has a few advantages over SharePoint. For one, he says that Microsoft requires the use of the latest version of Office if you want to use the most up to date version of SharePoint, while OffiSync lets users work with any version of Office alongside Google Docs and Google Sites. Google has endorsed the product as well, with Sites PM Scott Johnston saying “Offisync makes it significantly easier for Office users to share information with their coworkers using Google Docs and Google Sites”.

OffiSync premium costs businesses $12 per user per year, and will offer a free 30 day trial. The company has over 150,000 users of its free version (that supports Google Docs, but not Sites). OffiSync is still Windows only, but Antebi says that a Mac version will be released eventually.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 7:43 PM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Ubuntu 9.10 upgraders report frustration

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

By Katherine Noyes, LinuxInsider

Following the Karmic Koala's joyful reception last week, sentiments toward the FOSSy marsupial have become distinctly less enthusiastic in recent days -- at least for some.

"Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala" was the headline on a piece that ran in The Register last week, which chronicled multiple cases of frustration among some users upgrading to the new version.

"More than a fifth of people upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 have reported issues they can't fix, according to an Ubuntuforums.org poll," The Register reported. "Only around 10 percent of those upgrading or installing reported a completely flawless experience."

A biased snapshot

Of course, the opinions represented in said poll aren't exactly representative of the population at large, as Slashdot bloggers quickly pointed out, biased as it is toward those with problems.

In fact, at the top of the poll, the following red-ink warning is given:

*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll *** Most of users voting here are users with issues. Users with painless experience are not likely to come here."

Nevertheless, word of The Register's report quickly spread, and bloggers far and wide didn't hesitate to register their own reactions.

"I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and it is quite buggy," wrote MichaelSmith on Slashdot, for example. "Much more than previous releases. I have had to go back to the NDIS wrapper to use my WG511 PCMCIA wifi adapter. I haven't had to do that in years."

On the other hand: "The statistics derived by The Register are invalid, and probably quite wrong, being from a non-representative self-selected subset of Karmic installations or upgrades," countered AliasMarlowe.

"Here's another non-representative data set: I have installed or upgraded 4 PCs from Jaunty to Karmic at home (2 upgrade 32-bit, 1 upgrade 64-bit, 1 conversion 32-bit to 64-bit)," AliasMarlowe added. "All went flawlessly, even the migration of user accounts and reinstallation of applications (including commercial paid-for apps) on the 32-bit to 64-bit reinstallation."

Over on LXer, meanwhile, HoTMetal warned, "I've said it before and here it goes again: never, ever upgrade. Clean installs are the only way to go."

Then again: "Never upgrade? Clean install only? That's Windows-think," shot back tuxchick. "I have Debian boxes that have gone for years without ever needing a reinstallation, upgrade and dist-upgrade all the way. Though with Ubuntu upgrading to a new release has always been a roll of the dice."

Bottom line? If you're upgrading, be prepared at least for the possibility of a bumpy ride early on.

Does Wine make Linux too loose?

The problems one is likely to encounter with Linux tend to pale by comparison with the security problems one is likely to have using Windows. Unless, that is, you're using Wine.

Indeed, alert blogger fsufitch recently uncovered a situation in which Wine allowed Linux to get infected by a virus targeting Windows.

"Wine emulates Windows well enough to get infected by a Windows virus," fsufitch wrote -- noting, however, that the observed virus didn't work as intended.

"So WINE can get a virus intended for Windows, if you jump through some hoops to help the virus along," wrote AliasMarlowe on Slashdot, where bloggers took quick notice of the news. "Color me unworried."

Then again: "Linux is by no means impervious to infection, but you would need to really put an effort into getting and staying infected," wrote Jeff901 over on Digg. "Things just don't run without your knowledge or control."

And an anecdote: "Using Linux, I'd gotten into the habit of ignoring warnings about all the Web sites I knew spread malware and viruses -- sometimes because I was looking for something, and sometimes just because it's fun to walk through a battlefield with godmode on," JanusTheDoorman began.

"Then, because I needed to run certain software for school, I reinstalled Windows onto my laptop, and absentmindedly continued my usual browsing habits for about a week without so much as spybot to keep me safe," JanusTheDoorman added. "The moment of realization was a bit like what I imagine it'd be like waking up in a doorway, noticing a syringe on the ground next to you, and feeling an itch in your arm..."

Just how big a security concern is Wine? Linux Girl felt it her duty to ask around.

"As long as said virus can't punch through my web browser and install itself, I'm fine with it," Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told LinuxInsider. "As long as viruses need user intervention to install, we can keep it down to a user education problem."

Indeed, "unless there is an inside job like Wine, it is very difficult to get a virus in GNU/Linux," blogger Robert Pogson agreed. "The GNU/Linux ecosystem is so diverse, hackers cannot build their stuff for all the varieties of drivers, kernels, GUIs, apps and builds to make overflows and such to work. They would rather compromise millions of willing zombies running that other OS -- it's just too easy."

The result is "1000:1 more security against malware with GNU/Linux these days," Pogson noted. "I love it."

"Reading the anguish of users of that other OS struggling for days to cleanse their systems only to reinstall after nothing works brings tears to my eyes," he added. "I just have to tell them about running malware free for eight years without a scanner."

Is the Linux user simply more educated?

A bigger question lies behind the current news, however, and that's, "Why does Linux not get viruses?" Slashdot blogger hairyfeet told LinuxInsider.

"Ultimately, I believe it comes down to the fact that the malware writers know that Linux users are generally more savvy, less likely to fall for tricks, and less likely to fall for the really dumb attacks," hairyfeet said. "Which is why I say, 'Linux users: hope and pray to Linus and RMS you never have a year of a Linux desktop.'"

With mainstream users comes "'the Velma problem,'" hairyfeet explained. "Velma is sweet and nice and always remembers your name and all about your family, but Velma has a darker side: she is what we in the repair biz call ... DUM DUM DUM ... the disaster area."

Specifically, Velma is a user who "followed step-by-step instructions to turn off her antivirus and put the password in a password-protected .zip file," hairyfeet explained. "For what? It was supposed to be a 'happy puppy' screensaver."

Then there's the user who "would run anything -- .exe, .vbs, you name it -- as long as it had the word 'lesbians' in it," hairyfeet added.

"So WINE running a Windows virus is nothing more than a 'stupid Linux trick'... for now," he said. "What will be ultimately more interesting is whether the volunteer nature of Linux will hold up to a tidal wave of stupidity if the year of the Linux desktop ever comes to be."

The minute they find out the "Velma problem" has come to Linux en masse, hairyfeet predicted, "your old friends in the Russian Business network and their friends in Nigeria and China will be happy to cook up 'Happy_Pup.sh' and 'lesbian_video_player.deb' and nicely provide step-by-step instructions that Velma and all her friends will follow to the letter."

Of course, whether those "Velma" users will all be using the same distro is another question entirely, as is whether hackers will be able to do significant damage amid the formidable strength that lies in Linux's diversity.

Then, too, there's the fact that any mass migration to Linux will surely have to involve at least some learning and education on the part of all those new users.

Dare we hope that the Year of the Linux Desktop -- whenever it happens -- may also bring about the Era of the Educated User? Now that would be a milestone in computing history.

Originally published on LinuxInsider

© 2009 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.

© 2009 BetaNews.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 8:17 PM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Microsoft's Top 3 advances in Exchange Server 2010

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The biggest change to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 was supposed to have been the introduction of something called Unified Communications -- the introduction of a singular console for the handling of all forms of digital communication, wrapping voice mail, instant messaging, and e-mail into a single delivery system. History may yet vindicate UC as the product's singular achievement.

But in the near term, administrators credit Exchange more for what it gives them than the world at large. In that light, the inclusion of PowerShell as not only the underlying language of the system but as its engine as well, changed everything for the admin. It may very well be why the product has surged to a two-thirds market share, by some estimates, over once formidable competition such as Lotus Notes.

So learning a lesson from history, the message from Microsoft with regard to Exchange Server 2010, which went on sale this morning, is about new levels of control. The idea that e-mail, or any kind of communication, once sent unto the vast Internet is out of the sender's hands -- like a paper sailboat launched from a river pier -- is what the Exchange team has been working to combat. During a beta program which Microsoft says involved dozens of universities, signing up some ten million participants worldwide, the company has completed development of a browser-based endpoint for ES 2010-delivered e-mail that is not only more manageable than Outlook 2007, but that has beaten Outlook 2010 -- the product it's supposed to be derived from -- to market by perhaps eight months.

What that means is, hopefully for a short time only, there will be a functionality gap between what the new Outlook Web App -- hosted by ES 2010 -- can deliver compared to what Outlook 2007 provides. If Julia White, Microsoft's marketing director for Exchange, has anything to say about it, that gap will be shorter rather than longer, but it's not unnoticed.

Microsoft Outlook Web App previews the textual contents of a voice mail. [Courtesy Microsoft Corp.]

White spoke with Betanews this afternoon from Berlin, where she had just completed a TechEd Europe demonstration along with Corporate Vice President Stephen Elop. "Obviously Outlook Web Apps comes with Exchange, so they can use that today; when Outlook 2010 comes out, they can use that," said White, "and we are absolutely planning support for Outlook 2007 in the roadmap here. So it's on the agenda, and we will actually be getting to it."

Much of what Exchange 2010 will deliver absolutely depends on this upgrade to Outlook 2007, as you'll see. We asked White for her take on what she would consider the top three enhancements to administrator functionality in ES 2010.

#3: Transport Protection Rules

Number three on this list is the Transport Protection Rules system, which we described earlier today. It enables the administrator to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents, based upon rules that enable Exchange to analyze the content itself. "In the demo this morning, I set a Transport Protection Rule based on a keyword. But actually another aspect of that is, those rules can be set based on the sender, the recipient, or even contents of an attachment," White told Betanews.

"Any of those things can be triggered; and having the ability to centrally decide what gets encrypted and what doesn't, is a really powerful tool. With end users, it's hard for them to keep up with corporate policy, pay attention to it, or know about it. So oftentimes it's unintended, versus intended, when information isn't protected. Having that essentially managed brings peace of mind, for the users as well as the IT pros."

The ability to analyze an attachment takes place on a granular level, White told us. If a PowerPoint presentation, for example, were to contain the words "Microsoft Confidential," that fact alone would trigger a rule that automatically encrypts the message outgoing, and that restricts the recipient from being able to pass it on.

#2: Role-Based Access Control

One of the least loved features of Exchange, or anything Microsoft has ever done, disappears in ES 2010: The Access Control List is a Registry-based system for designating which identified and authenticated user had permissions to control specific objects. It has often been a ridiculous concept that starts one off with the assumption that everyone has rights to everything, and that ACLs provide the exceptions.

Exchange Server 2010 replaces this entirely with a concept that is much more rooted in Active Directory. Now, the administrator starts off in a universe where nothing is allowed until groups of users are added into the pool of permissions. Those groups that are added in are called management role groups, with the concept being that a predefined set of roles exist (a concept made popular by Windows Server 2008), and that groups of users or individual users are delegated those roles.

This morning, Julia White demonstrated how Role-Based Access Control enabled an otherwise unprivileged user to search for e-mails through multiple mailboxes on the company's behalf (in this case, Microsoft's usual fictitious firm, Contoso). Her system was delegated a role that let her perform the search, without having to delegate other responsibilities and privileges of a much higher administrative order. "A compliance officer might get that level of capability," White explained to us, "but a help desk might have the rights to increase mail box quota size. Maybe HR would be given the ability to update contact information on behalf of employees. Extending all the way down to end users, even that same roles-based administration capability -- end users can now create and manage their own distribution groups within Exchange. That no longer requires a call to the IT pro...usually that's a lot of overhead."

Next: The best thing ever to happen to old e-mail...

#1: Integrated archiving

During the late 1980s and into the '90s, Microsoft liked to centralize things, thinking that if everything were in one big pile -- as Arlo Guthrie put it -- that would beat two or more little ones. The System Registry is, and remains, one big pile. Another -- which can stink just as bad -- is the .PST file, the single personal folder file that is created on the client side by Outlook.

It is every Outlook user's nightmare, especially since Office buries this file typically in a black hole within a hidden directory inside each user's Documents folder. For individuals who receive hundreds of thousands of e-mails per year (I'm on that list, believe me), the archiving process has cost users many a weekend.

With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft marketing director Julia White told Betanews today, is the ability to perform this process completely in the background. But in addition, the archived items remain indexed and available, still listed as part of "Personal Folder" but stored separately.

"Today, the vast majority of e-mail actually sits on the local hard drive on those .PST files," White remarked.. The end users love it because they can file as much as they want in there, and they have access to it when they're on their PC. But from an administrator's perspective, they don't like them because they're very expensive to discover, they get lost, they get corrupted, it's a liability and a lot of overhead for the IT organization.

"So with integrated archiving...it doesn't have any change to the end user experience," she continued. "That Personal Folder appears, but the archive shows up and it looks just the same, it's another folder in your file directory, it looks like a secondary Inbox...The benefit is, it's all sitting on Exchange, so it's not going to get corrupted or lost. It's very easy to discover -- that time comes down dramatically. And as a user, you get access to it through Outlook Web App, [as opposed to] on the local hard drive."

Here, White took the bold step of proclaiming OWA as superior to Outlook, in that users still get full access to their mail (albeit with transport restrictions), but without having to keep those multi-gigabyte .PST files locally:

"What got us into this in the beginning was when we talked to our Exchange customers as we were planning [ES] 2010, and we found out that 20% of Exchange mailboxes have an archive on them today, but over 60% said it was important to them. It's scary, because there's not a mailbox out there that shouldn't be archived for one reason or another. What we heard from them was, 1) the cost and overhead of maintaining and managing another system -- new tools to learn -- was too expensive; and 2) the end-user experience. Oftentimes you have an archive today, you have to go to a different UI to retrieve the mail, or the performance is really poor on the archived mail. Because what they do is called 'stubbing,' which means they literally just leave a little bit of the e-mail in the Inbox, and the rest of it sits out on a third-party system. So the performance has to go bounce between multiple systems, so it's very slow.

"If end users don't adopt it, it doesn't work," White remarked. "So this clears the hurdle of both the end user experience as the IT pro cost and management perspective."

That 70% cost savings claim

During this morning's presentation at TechEd in Berlin, Microsoft CVP Stephen Elop made the staggering claim that within a group of 100 companies testing Exchange Server 2010 over the last year, some were able to cut their administrative costs over earlier versions of Exchange by as much as 70%. As is Betanews' custom (and as is the custom of Betanews readers who see anything in double-digits beside a percentile mark), we asked how that figure was obtained. For instance, we've seen companies in the past that said the expenditure to do something this year was X% lower than the expense to do something in the past, and that typically refers to the fact that memory or storage or processor power is just that much cheaper. That's not really savings; that's a factor of the economy.

So what is this 70% savings a factor of? "A big cost driver is storage," responded White. "We know the storage aspect of e-mail, it's a lot of information and it can get expensive. Traditionally, Exchange was deployed always on a storage-area network, which was fine back in the day when you had a 200 MB mailbox. Obviously, that's not sufficing anymore, and 10 GB is becoming more of a standard. Supporting that kind of mailbox storage size on a SAN becomes cost-prohibitive.

"So what we've done in Exchange 2010 is two things: First, we dramatically improved performance, tenfold over Exchange 2003. When I say that, I mean the time it takes to read and write information to the disk. What that enables is world-class support of low-cost storage options -- direct-attached storage, SATA, even in a JBoss configuration. So big, slow disks, you can run Exchange without any performance or reliability impact." NEC Philips, for example, was able to increase its storage capacity by a factor of eight, while simultaneously reducing costs by a factor of four, White said; and Germany-based hosted service provider Elabs was able to reduce its storage costs by 70%.

Isn't that saying that the expenditure this year is 70% or so less than the expenditure for a similar service in 2003? Yes, according to White, but that's in terms of operating cost run-rate, which is figured according to time and not total investment, especially since companies don't always purchase storage capacity all up-front.

Betanews also learned today that Microsoft's SMB Windows Server bundles, Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008, will not be updated immediately with Exchange Server 2010. Those bundles may continue to be sold with Exchange Server 2007 for at least several more months down the road.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 11:22 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Windows 7 Planning Tools Ease the Upgrade Process

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

Businesses planning a move to Windows 7 need a more rigorous planning and assessment tool than the consumer-grade Upgrade Advisor. The early success of the operating system notwithstanding, you need to do some due diligence up front to determine if the existing hardware and software you rely on will work with the new operating system. If you only have a handful of systems to assess the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor should do the trick. For larger deployments, the more appropriate tool is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 4.0--or MAP.

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 9:28 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Events This Week – November 9th, 2009

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

·  The U.S. Public Sector Virtual Launch: The New Efficiency - Windows® 7, Windows Server® 2008 R2, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 12:00 PM, Online
On November 10th at 9 am (PST)/12 pm (EST) you are invited to join Microsoft U.S. Public Sector Vice President Curt Kolcun and top technology leaders at “The New Efficiency” virtual launch event for government, education, and health.
The new efficiency virtual launch experience is happening now. Learn how cost savings and productivity come together with a new wave of Microsoft® products. Be one of the first to evaluate exciting innovations in Windows® 7, Windows Server® 2008 R2, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.
[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

·  Hampton Roads .NET Users Group - November Meeting
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 6:30 PM, Chesapeake, VA
You write data validation code in your user interfaces to provide a good user experience. Then you write similar validation code in your services because other clients may not implement those validations in the future. Then you write the same data validations again in the database, well, let's face it, because DBAs are justifiably paranoid about the quality of their data. During this talk, Kevin Hazzard will show you how implement your data validations in a way that they can be shared across all the tiers of your enterprise applications.
Kevin Hazzard, C# MVP, is an accomplished software architect and a dynamic public speaker. Kevin has developed successful software products for Intel, Sony, HBO, Disney, The Discovery Channel and many other companies. His healthcare and telecommunications software is used by millions of people each day. Kevin has won patents for his work and has served multiple terms as an advisor to the legislatures and the Governors of the Commonwealth of Virginia. While serving in the Intel Architecture Labs, Kevin represented the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In his spare time, Kevin enjoys welding, motorcycling, swimming and serving as a missionary doing construction work in Central America and South America.
[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

·  Sahil's favorite things about SharePoint 2010
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 7:00 AM, Vienna, VA
In this talk Sahil will discuss his top favorite features in SharePoint 2010. He will compare them with SharePoint 2007, discuss why certain things were problematic in SharePoint 2007, and what exactly the newly available features in SharePoint 2010 will solve many of those challenges.
[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

·  Microsoft Developer Dinner for Partners
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 5:30 PM, Reston, VA
An Overview of SharePoint 2010 from a Developer’s Perspective: Join Marc Schweigert for a developer focused walkthrough over dinner, jam packed with demos showcasing how SharePoint 2010 combined with Visual Studio 2010 is a very familiar and approachable platform for ASP.NET developers to build custom solutions faster by leveraging all that SharePoint 2010 has “in-the-box.” SharePoint 2010 is a major step forward for SharePoint as a development platform not only because of the richer set of overall features that the platform supports but also because significant investments have been made in the suite of tools to make developers more productive. SharePoint is now more accessible to developers of all skill levels.
[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

·  RockNUG Release 3.5
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 6:30 PM, Rockville, MD
N-Tiered LINQ to SQL
presented by Steve Michelotti
Creating an N-Tiered design with clear "separation of concerns" in crucial to successful solutions. However, there have been considerable misconceptions that using LINQ essentially means putting SQL statements directly in the code behinds of web pages. This presentation will create a tiered application from the ground up in order to debunk this misconception. The presentation tier for the application which will be built "on the fly" will not have any knowledge that LINQ is even being used behind the scenes in the data layer. Rather than simple CRUD operations on a single row, the presentation will highlight real-world scenarios with complex objects (e.g., parent/child relationships). The presentation will first show out of the box LINQ auto-generated SQL and then, in minutes, switch to all stored procedures in order to examine the differences. Throughout the talk, the "gotchas" for building N-Tiered LINQ applications will be presented with their appropriate solutions.
Steve Michelotti is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and an Architect/Developer for Applied Information Sciences (AIS). He has consulted at Advertising.com/AOL where he was the Tech Lead for one of the highest volume .NET applications in the world. He previously was the Chief Technologist at e.magination. Steve is a frequent presenter at developer user groups and Code Camps along the East Coast and holds the MCSD, MCPD, and MCT certifications. Steve has been on Microsoft Channel9 and his published articles include Visual Studio Magazine and his blog: www.geekswithblogs.net/michelotti.
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·  MSDN Events Presents: The MSDN Mid Atlantic Roadshow
Thursday, November 12, 2009 1:00 PM, Pittsburgh, PA
Join Microsoft Evangelists Dani Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, and David Isbitski as they tour the Mid Atlantic this Fall presenting an afternoon packed full of cutting edge tips and techniques for developers and architects. Dig deeper into data access and network options in Silverlight, and check out the most important features in Windows 7 for Developers like Trigger Start services and the new Windows Troubleshooter. Finally, we’ll show you how to add several of the new interface options you won’t want to miss including Multi-Touch and the Ribbon Menu.
Free admission and a chance to score some great giveaways!
Reservations are required, and seating is limited. Register today to reserve your seat.
This event will be held at the Doubletree Hotel and Suites, Pittsburgh City Center.
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·  Mature Your Process with Continuous Integration
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 7:00 PM, Vienna, VA
Continuous Integration is a development practice that keeps your code
"ready to ship" at a moments notice. We will examine the tools and
practice of Continuous Integration, and then look at several extensions
to make your development team (from 1 - 100 developers) shine.
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·  15 Minutes of Fame
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:30 PM, Dresher, PA
This is a yearly tradition. We select 10 of the favorite speakers from monthly meetings, code camps, and hands on labs. Each one does a 15 minute talk on their favorite .NET technology. This is our 10th anniversary so we plan a gala event with special prizes and refreshments.
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·  Frederick .NET User Group Monthly Meeting
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 6:30 PM, Frederick, MD
FredNUG is pleased to announce that we have another great speaker lined up for November. On November 18th, we’ll start with pizza and social networking at 6:30 PM. Then, starting at 7 PM, John Baird will present “Building Silverlight LOB Apps.” With so many software development teams trying to make the switch from Winforms to WPF/Silverlight, I’m sure this talk will be very useful and informative.
The scheduled agenda is:
•6:30 PM - 7:00 PM - Pizza/Social Networking/Announcements
•7:00 PM - 8:30 PM - Main Topic: Building Silverlight LOB Apps with John Baird
Main Topic Description: Take a look at the newest incarnation of UI building tools from MS. This presentation will look at the basics of WPF/Silverlight. We will look at switching a program from Winforms to Silverlight and topics including Data Binding, Entity Framework, ADO .Net Data Services, Styles and Themes."
Speaker Bio: John Baird began his computer programming career while in the US Navy. In 1982, he helped form and direct the first PC-based computer processing department for training and manpower in the Department of Defense. After leaving the military in 1988, John began a varied career as a consultant developing business applications ranging from computer-based training to vertical market software for resellers.
Today, John is working for the industry leader in financial software for fund administration. John was recently awarded MVP status for device application development.
• 8:30 PM - 8:45 PM – RAFFLE!
Please join us and get involved in our .NET developers community!
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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 2:37 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Oct. 26 - Nov. 8 Hot-Fix KB articles Weekly Release - Windows Legacy Products

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

Hi Everyone, In the last 2 weeks, 8 Windows legacy products related hot-fix KB articles were released, including 6 for Windows Server 2003, and 2 for Internet Explorer. Below are the details: Windows Server 2003 - 4 KB articles: · 973871 An application may encounter an access violation exception when it uses the Hbaapi.dll module to query information from a DVD drive or a CD drive that is attached to an HBA adapter on a computer that is running Windows Server 2003 SP2 · 975470 The CPU usage increases...(read more)

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 5:11 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Google making Waves across all its Apps?

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

We just received a set of screengrabs from an anonymous source giving us a glimpse at what appears to be Google's (and thus, the world's) future interface to its web applications, Gmail in particular. While we were originally tempted to ignore them, communications with the tipster would indicate genuine insider knowledge. Regardless, we can not independently confirm the authenticity of these images. Having said that, the pics demonstrate a more unified apps interface based on Google's Wave and accessible from any browser (as they are now). Specifically, we're told that "the goal is to provide a consistent experience throughout all Google Apps and blur the line between the browser and the website (e.g. drag and drop, right-click, etc.)." Something that certainly makes sense to us based on what we know about Google's tender approach to its Chrome browser and its future "lightweight" Chrome OS. If true then this "work in progress" also hints at the importance of Wave to the future of Google. Then again, it could be just one of many possible interface concepts from Google's burgeoning developer's sandbox.

Filed under: Software

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Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 9:11 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: Gigabyte fixes iPhone sync issue with BIOS update

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

The Intel P55 Express chipset snafu that caused iPhones to lose their syncing minds has now been remedied -- at least by one motherboard maker. Gigabyte has issued a BIOS update making things all hunky-dory between the phone and the mobo, putting your troubles to an end. The P55 is Intel's latest midrange chipset and orchestrates things for newer Core i5 / i7 machines. The other two P55 purveyors, ASUS and MSI, were also caught by the bug, and there are anecdotal reports of success with an ASUS BIOS update, but not official fixes as of yet. Given the competitive nature of this market, though, we'd be surprised if those two companies didn't quickly follow suit. All's well that ends well, right?

Read - Gigabyte Beta BIOS download page
Read - Update fixes iPhone sync problem

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops

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Sent: Sunday, November 08, 2009 5:09 AM
To: Christopher McMillan
Subject: 7 posts on Windows 7

Sent to you by Chris McMillan, Federal Marketing Manager via Google Reader:

Windows 7 is here, there, and everywhere. And so for the weekend, we pick seven fine posts from MVP blogs where they share tips, tricks, and how-tos for Windows 7.

• Moving To Windows 7?
• Why should I move to Windows 7?
• Master Tutorial to Make Your Windows 7 Super Fast
• How to Diagnose Memory Problems on Windows 7
• 9 Touch Gestures in Windows 7 for Multi-touch Magic
• Installing Windows 7 on Asus Eee PC Netbook 900 using Pendrive
• Complete Guide To Using VHDs, Windows Virtual PC, Windows XP Mode & ISOs On Windows 7

Big props to Windows Desktop Experience MVPs Manan Kakkar, Vishal Gupta, and Nirmal TV, Windows Live MVP Vasudev G, and Setup & Deployment MVP – Vijay Raj.

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