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If you have registered for tomorrow's Further Education Briefing, you'll be notified by email, but as an added precaution, here's the news: With the poor weather conditions, and the likelihood of further severe train and traffic disruption, we have decided to postpone tomorrow’s Microsoft Further Education...

I was away at the end of last week, so I didn't see that details on RM's upcoming slate PC had made their way onto their website . Called the RM Slate, it does exactly what you'd expect - a fully functioning PC running Windows, in the style of a pad/tablet/slate device. You can read more details on Merlin...

I’ve indexed all of the different product guides for the new Office 2010 applications. There are two separate documents for most of the products – the Overview version is a short two-page summary, and then there’s a detailed Product Guide which goes into much more detail. The Overview document is...

There’s recently been a lot of discussion within education about different models of ICT services. Individual colleges have tended to use a mix of services provided on-premise and cloud-based services . And newer models of teaching and learning have accelerated the trend towards cloud-based services...

We have been developing Office 2010 for quite a while now – and many of you have been taking part in that by running the beta versions (at the last count, 7.5 million people have downloaded the beta version ). Late on Friday, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 reached their last stage in the development...

I’ve got two daughters who think that the best things on TV are reality makeover programmes (our TV at home seems to alternate between Grand Designs and Gok’s Fashion Fix), but they didn’t get as excited as I did about our makeover project – taking the Microsoft UK Education site and adding a pile of...

Although it’s a little bit last minute, I’ve grabbed at the chance to get some of our Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 brains together on Friday 21st August, in our Thames Valley Campus in Reading. It’s August, and I know that it is one of the busiest times for IT teams, however you probably have...

Who’d have thought it, not only would I be looking for the Moodle logo for the blog, but other strange things have been happening this week: We’ve released two projects under the open source GPL v2 licence for the first time ever Following on from the experimental OfficeLabs project, we’ve launched Education...

The Windows Team have announced, via The Windows Blog , more information on the various availability dates for Windows 7. Whilst the consumer product launches on 22nd October, it will actually be available earlier for customers using our ‘volume licensing’ schemes – like the Campus Agreement and Select...

Our Worldwide Partner Conference was on this week, and there has been a flurry of announcements. I’ll summarise those that may be important to you over the next few days, but if you can’t wait then go over to our PressPass site . One of the most important things mentioned at the conference was the imminent...

The Windows 7 team announced it will be available on October 22nd – that’s the date in the stores, so I don’t know if we’ll get the version for education (ie the Volume Licence version) any earlier. Even if it was earlier, I guess it’s unlikely it’ll be in time to roll it out before the end of the summer...

During half-term week, we joined the Welsh Assembly Government at the Urdd Eisteddfod in Cardiff Bay, to launch Welsh language support for SharePoint. Steve Beswick, of Microsoft, and Meri Huws, of the Welsh Language Board, officially launched the pack with Jane Hutt, the Welsh Assembly Minister for...

This could be part of a “things you wish you’d heard about earlier…” series. If you’re working within a UK college, then there’s a fair chance that your university has signed a Microsoft Campus Agreement , and that this applies to YOU! The deal, in a nutshell, is that you can place a bulk order...

I go away on holiday, and suddenly tons of things get announced. Hurrah. I should holiday more! Alongside all of the Windows announcements (the first public view of Windows 7 and the new cloud-computing platform, Windows Azure), we also previewed the Office Web Applications which will be included within...

Whoops – when I wrote about the Ultimate Steal ( Office 2007 Ultimate Edition for £38.95, only for students ) I said it was open to all UK students who have a .ac.uk email address ( and staff too). Of course, I’d forgotten something – we have also added Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man students and...

The moment you’ve been waiting for? Last year we ran a promotion called “The Ultimate Steal”, which offered a full copy of Office 2007 Ultimate Edition to students for £38.95. And, finally, it’s back! In a nutshell, The Ultimate Steal is: A time-limited offer available to your college students...

How do you keep one step ahead of your students? When they are used to living in a multimedia rich world, are you finding it increasingly difficult to grab them and engage them? I know that I find my own children don’t want to sit through a 300 photograph slide show any more...but I’ve found a way to...

You may recall me blogging the ‘Next-Gen PC’ competition last year , aimed at getting people to think outside of the (beige/black/silver) box for computer design. Well, the winners have been announced, and the amazing Napkin PC is the winner. It uses the metaphor of a paper napkin (“great ideas often...

We’ve just announced that Office 2007 will get native support for ODF with the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, early next year. You can already save files from Office 2007 in 20 different formats – of which, my favourite three are: Office Open XML – which is the new standard format for Office...

If you join the MSDN blog community, using the "Join" link at the top right of the page, you get a couple of nice extra features. One is that you get the chance to comment on any of the blog articles. It's not because I want to know who you are - unless you tell me in your public profile, I can't see...

The TechNet roadshows are coming soon - in April and May the team will be on their way around the country, talking about (and showing) lots more of Windows Server 2008 and the other products launched this week. I know that the launch event in Birmingham in March was filled up very quickly, and there...

I like SkyDrive. Before it was invented, I used to have to load any files I wanted to share onto an FTP site somewhere, and then write clunky links to them. Now, I just drag my files onto my SkyDrive , and then provide a nice graphical link to them, like this: But up until now, it's been called Windows...

I guess this will be pretty big news on the Internet. And if I've timed this right - and you're reading this just after I've blogged it - then you're one of the first to find out. We have launched a programme called " Microsoft DreamSpark ", which allows university and college students to download...

For the last 5 years we have been running a programme, called Partners in Learning, to extend and expand the development of learning, and especially the ways that ICT can support learning in schools. Globally this programme has invested £125 million into projects run in partnership with governments,...