Daily Archives: August 3, 2010

MCITP, mcitp certification, MCITP Training, MCSE, MCSE Certification, MCSE Training, Microsoft, Uncategorized, Windows 7

Microsoft releases Azure cloud platform appliance

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Microsoft releases Azure cloud platform appliance
With the help of hardware partners, Microsoft MCTS Training has released a version of its Windows Azure cloud platform as an appliance, the company said on Monday during the kickoff of its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) being held this week in Washington D.C.

Microsoft has run a version of its Windows Azure as a service since February, and the company has claimed the service has been used by 10,000 customers. The company is now offering the platform software, packaged with a set of servers.
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In a blog posting, Microsoft server and tools corporate vice president Robert Wahbe, explained that the appliance would provide a means for organizations to run a cloud service, either internally or for their own customers.

“Using it, service providers, governments and large enterprises who would consider buying, say, 1000 servers at a time, will be able to get the control they need,” Wahbe said.

“What we are talking about is a specific locked-down piece of hardware that can represent hundreds of thousands of servers,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management, in an interview with the IDG News Service. “Like an appliance, it is standardized and turn-key, so customers can deploy the Windows Azure in their data centers.”

Barzdukas said an appliance can be useful for organizations that wish to run their software both internally and on external Azure services, adding that the workload can be easily moved between multiple Azure locations. “It provides scale of the platform, but with the added benefit of control of the location,” she said.

According to Barzdukas, Dell, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard will each sell a “limited production release” of the appliance, as well as offer an Azure service for their customers. eBay intends to use the appliance for internal operations. A broader release is expected by later this year.

The Azure appliance will have all the functionality with Microsoft’s own Azure service, Barzdukas said.

Microsoft plans to post a new promotional Web page devoted to the offering on Monday. Bob Muglia, Microsoft senior vice president of the server and tools business, is also expected to talk about the appliance at WPC.

In addition to the release of the Azure appliance, Microsoft MCITP Certification also announced that it has shipped the release candidate of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal, which is a Windows Server virtualization tool pack, and has released both the beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

MCITP, mcitp certification, MCITP Training, MCSE, MCSE Certification, MCSE Training, Microsoft, Uncategorized, Windows 7

Video previews Microsoft Office 2011 plans

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Video previews Microsoft Office 2011 plans

Microsoft has started rolling out more details about Office 2011, the upcoming upgrade of its productivity suite. On Wednesday, the company posted a brief video on its Mac Mojo blog showing off a few of the suite’s new features.

The video–which combines images of the software and interviews with Microsoft MCTS Training developers–highlights three main features: The revamped database and threaded Conversation view in Outlook (which will replace Entourage as Office’s e-mail client); and a new template gallery.
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Changes in Outlook

Microsoft reps say that the database underlying Entourage 2008–which stored your e-mail messages, calendar entries, and contacts in one huge file–was a “pain point” for customers. Among the reasons for the pain: If you made the tiniest change to that database file–by receiving an e-mail message, say, or adding a new phone number–then Time Machine would think it had to back up the whole thing.

In the video, the company sings the virtues of Outlook 2011’s new database structure, in which messages, appointments, and contacts will be contained in discrete files. That should make for smaller and faster backups; it should also make it easier to find Outlook items with Spotlight.

The video also previews that Conversation view, which will enable you to see all the messages in a single thread at the same time, no matter which folder they’re in. You could get something similar in Entourage, but only with much fiddling; it’s now the default view. (You can, of course, opt for the old unthreaded view if you wish.)

Template Gallery

The video also highlights Office 2011’s new template gallery, which is much more elaborate than the Project Gallery in Office 2008.

Instead of showing you low-res thumbnails of templates and themes, the new gallery gives you rich, high-def previews. If a template has multiple pages (the first page might be formatted one way, subsequent pages another), you can preview all of them before you start work. You can also customize the template’s color scheme and font; in PowerPoint, you can set the orientation (Landscape or Portrait).

The template gallery also includes a link to Microsoft’s online template library (which the company says contains thousands of templates, from professional designers as well as regular Office users). The searchable gallery is organized by categories and sports a recent documents list, with links to documents you’ve worked on today, yesterday, or in the past week or month.

Finally, the video offers a glimpse of the previously announced Ribbon, which replaces Office 2008’s Elements Gallery. Like that gallery, the ribbon provides quick access to commonly used tools. Unlike that gallery, you can completely collapse the Ribbon, to reclaim screen space.

Microsoft MCITP Certification hasn’t announced a firm release date for Office 2011 yet, only that it plans to ship some time in the last quarter of 2010. The company hasn’t publicly announced prices, either. But it does plan to release more of these teaser videos in the weeks and months ahead.