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 release of Windows 7. The Windows 7 team immediately added some more info to their blog, to give a bit more detail.

The most important thing is that our customers who have a Campus Agreement, or another agreement with Software Assurance, will be the first to get access, and it looks like that’s in the middle of August.

So the race is on to be the first university to deploy the release version of Windows 7 widely this summer!

Here’s the verbatim from the Windows 7 blog:

As previously stated, we expect Windows 7 to RTM in the 2nd half of July.

Once Windows 7 is complete, how do I get it?

The answer depends on who you are:

• MSDN & TechNet Subscribers: Subscribers will be able to download the final version of Windows 7 a few weeks after we announce RTM.
• Volume License (VL) Customers: Customers with Software Assurance for Windows will be able to download the final version of Windows 7 Enterprise a few weeks after we announce RTM. As announced today by Bill Veghte during his WPC09 keynote, customers without Software Assurance will be able to purchase Windows 7 through Volume Licensing on September 1st.
• Consumers, Enthusiasts, & Beta Testers (Everyone else): The retail version of Windows 7 will be available in stores October 22nd. If you pre-ordered Windows 7, it should be delivered sometime around the October 22nd timeframe (depends on the retailer).
• On New PCs: OEMs are expected to start shipping new PCs with Windows 7 pre-installed on them around October 22nd. 

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 Licensing.

The very good news in their blog post is that customers who have bought their existing Windows licences with a Campus Agreement will be able to get the full released version on 7th August. (Whilst the rest will have to wait until at least 1st September).

This ‘thank you’ to Campus Agreement customers means that some colleges can start to roll out Windows 7 during this summer holiday, whilst the rest will proably have to wait until Christmas or beyond, when the classrooms are quiet enough.

Full details of all of the dates are on the Windows 7 team blog

It may seem adventurous to roll out a brand new operating system very early, but this time things are very different – over 2m downloads of the Windows 7 beta, and millions of people running it means that we’re releasing a pretty mature product which has already had significant amounts of real-life testing. The old adage of “Wait for Service Pack 1” doesn’t seem to apply in the new release model, where the Beta and the Release Candidate are both widely available for public use.

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 Labs, to allow ‘quick’ projects to release helpful applications (or more likely ‘applets’) specifically to support teachers and learners
• We’ve released software development kits to allow programmers to connect our Live services into other applications (like web portals)
• …and it is only Thursday

The background

Let me go back to the beginning…

• Moodle is an open-source virtual learning environment used in the majority of colleges in the UK, and in a minority of schools. (More on Moodle at moodle.org)
• Colleges typically either implement Moodle as a stand-alone web portal, or use the SharePoint webparts for Moodle as one way of integrating it with the rest of their ICT systems
• GPL is the licence scheme that most open-source software is released under. We don’t normally use it, because once something is released under this licence, control of it passes over to anybody who wants it. It’s different to the usual licences we use, where we retain the rights to the software – eg to modify it, or to introduce a fee for it.
• OfficeLabs was started a year ago, to share some of the projects we work on internally, that produces prototypes products (a bit like ‘concept cars’). Previously these projects would have been used by Microsoft staff, but only the occasional product would make it out in the big wide world. But OfficeLabs allows the release of small projects which can add to the Office experience, even without them being fully engineered products. It’s come out with things like PPTPlex for PowerPoint (which completely transforms presentations from being a start-on-the-first-slide-and-go-all-the-way-to-the-last-slide experience) and the Forgotten Attachment Detector for Outlook (which looks out for key words like ‘attached’ in your email, and reminds you when you’ve actually forgotten to attach the document in your email)
• Education Labs is the new equivalent for education projects from Microsoft. If you imagine Microsoft as a car factory, then Education Labs is the guys around the corner building a Go Kart – it’s the fun, hobby side of the team.

The Live Services plug-in for Moodle

What we’ve released on Education Labs this week is a toolkit that allows you to integrate the Live@Edu services onto your students’ Moodle homepage. Live@Edu is our hosted mail and collaboration service for students, which provides a free 10GB mailbox, 25GB of general online file storage, and additional 5GB of online document storage for collaborative projects. A large number of UK universities have started using it, and an increasing number of colleges – with budgets so tight, the idea of outsourcing student email to a free provider is looking more attractive!

What the plug-in does is allow a student to see their live, real-time inbox and calendar on their Moodle home page, via a single login. And it also allows lecturers to do things like send out student alerts – things like “Your homework assignment is due in tomorrow” with an easy step, and the system will handle the delivery of it to students (through email, mobile phone etc).

When I saw a brief demonstration of it yesterday, the bit that impressed me was seeing the email inbox on the home page of Moodle – not just a link to it, but the actual emails themselves. It is another step towards making your school Learning Platform the core of everything that your students and staff do.

You can download the Moodle plug-in from Education Labs, or watch the video of it on this page.

This project will only appeal to a minority of colleges – you’ll need the technical skills to get it working (but then you’ll have needed those to get Moodle working in your college too). But if you are using Moodle already, this project is a step in the right direction to help integrate a range of your ICT services together, and builds on the work we did a couple of years ago to help the integration between SharePoint and Moodle.

I’ve just finished scanning an excellent series of articles on TechNet, about what’s new in Windows 7. Whilst not every feature is critical for education, there are some areas which are answers to current challenges in education ICT.

• If you’re managing Information Security, then read What’s New in Smart Cards (for two-factor authentication) as well as What’s New in Windows Security Auditing (because you’re going to have to implement auditing at some point).
• If you want to improve network protection then all of them will probably be a good read, but definitely read What's New in Networking, What's New in Group Policy and What's New in IIS
• If you’re going to be the person deploying Windows 7, then take a look at What's New in Deployment Tools, as well as scanning What's New in Group Policy

And there’s plenty more on AppLocker, Biometrics, Print Management, Search, etc etc.

Read the full set of articles on TechNet

After a little bit of prompting, and a few requests, I’ve pulled the chapters of the “Good Blogging Guide” into a complete PDF booklet.

You can now download the whole thing as a PDF and read it at your leisure, and share with colleagues.

Chapter One – Writing for your audience

Chapter Two – Have an objective

Chapter Three – Getting onto page one of Google

Chapter Four – A blogging Code of Practice

Chapter Five – No lawyers please

Chapter Six – When (if) things go wrong

If you prefer to still read it online (which does make it easy to disagree or add your own thoughts via comments) you can get to all via this Good Blogging Guide page.

I was in a training session on Friday, when we were joined by the Microsoft IT team – the clever chaps that keep our IT network running right across the business, seemingly in the face of all of the odds.

I believe that the odds really are stacked heavily against keeping the IT system stable, because each user has complete control over their own computer – for example, I can hit F12 and rebuild any machine at any point, self-install software and am encouraged to use everything from Instant Messenger to development tools.

Asif Jinnah who manages the UK IT systems, talked about what they have been doing to reduce our internal IT running costs, and although our challenge is different to yours, I thought you might enjoy hearing some of our story of balancing the need to grow our business whilst managing our IT costs. Asif recorded a presentation for the virtual TechNet conference in June in the IT Management Auditorium section, and you can watch his full presentation, as well as download his slides, which are full of facts and figures:

• We manage 250,000 computers via SMS, including 124,000 Vista clients, and 20,000 Windows 7 clients
• There are over 350,000 internal SharePoint sites
• Over the last 4 years, the IT team have delivered a 44% decrease in IT cost per head
• We have over 500 virtual servers, running on a 16:1 host ratio
• OCS is saving us £160,000 a month on telecoms

There’s also an interesting part about the reductions we made when we changed the way we ran our internal IT help desk – which resulted in reduced costs and reduced user satisfaction!

You can find the whole presentation by going to the Virtual TechNet site, and looking for the "Growing the Business and Managing Costs – An Insider’s view” presentation in the IT Management Auditorium

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 a bit more control over your diary than a normal month. So here’s your invitation to:

I’d like to invite you to come along to our Windows workshop, where you’ll have the chance to hear about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and to explore what they mean for education. The agenda includes James O’Neill from our Developer and Platform Evangelist team, and Richard Lane, one of our Account Technology Specialists, exploring how the new products launched this year can help you to streamline your ICT infrastructure and improve the ICT management and user experience. With Windows 7 available to existing Campus Agreement customers from the end of this week, and Windows Server 2008 R2 available from the 19th August, it seems like the perfect time to take a day out of school to understand how it fits into your future plans (available from 1st September if you’re one of the unlucky ones and you don’t have a Campus Agreement yet).

There are already a number of education institutions planning to implement Windows 7 this summer, and so we hope to make the day as interactive as possible, with plenty of time for discussion with your peers from other schools, to compare notes and experiences (there will be people attending who’ll have implemented Windows 7 by the 21st, so hopefully they’ll have practical advice for us all!)

To allow for those making longer journeys, we’ll start at 10am and finish by 3pm.

If you’d like to attend the free Windows in Education day, then simply drop an email to Sam Mills, who’ll reserve you a place, and send you confirmation details for how to get to our Reading campus.

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 new features to it.

This is what the site looked like before Friday:

And since Friday morning, it has looked like this:

Whilst the new look and feel is nice (and has had some good feedback in its first four days) there are some much more important changes to the navigation and design that are important to me.

• We’ve added specific sections for Schools, Further Education, Higher Education, Teachers and Students
  The previous design did indeed have a colourful tab bar for sections, they only got you to a single page. None of the rest of the content (for example the products section) was separated. Which means that Schools were seeing products only suitable for Further Education, or vice versa. We’ve got further improvements planned for each of these sections – but obviously content changes had to wait until they existed!
  
• There is better linking between this blog and the website
  For example, you can now click on a blog story in the website, and read it right there, without having to jump across to the blog (on a different website)
  
• We have tags to help find relevant information
  The whole www.microsoft.com website is enormous, and sometimes impenetrable to navigate. And even the little bit sitting under the UK Education site was becoming unwieldy – with over 140 pages of content to navigate. So now we have added tags to the home page, allowing you to jump straight to key content, without having to search through the menu structure. “Licensing” is a good example – it is one of the most often-read sections, but was previously buried in the menus.
  
• We have updated some of the content
  But, to be honest, we have plenty of content updates to do still. Most of our focus has been moving to the new site structure, and now we hope to get lots of content updates between now and the start of term.
  (A note on the “we” in the last sentence – the team’s not as big as you might think – it’s me and Gordon who’re responsible for keeping this all going and up-to-date, with others dropping by to help! Keeping the content up-to-date is like painting the Forth Bridge – we’d never have managed to get it all updated before we moved, and so we’d never have moved. It is easier on the new site for us to make small changes quickly, without having to get a big project kicked off)
  

Go and visit the site – and then let me know what you think – either by adding comments here, or drop me an email, including any thoughts about what you’d like to see, based on how you use the site.

I’ve just heard about our Code⁷ competition, for students. The European finalist prize is a paid trip to the PDC09 event in Los Angeles in November - plus a snazzy award – and there are a bunch of other prizes. And there’s 6 weeks until the closing date on 10th October.

If you’ve got students in your college that are into software and development, it’s a great way to engage them into thinking about application development, and to get them to turn an idea into a succinct summary – because the entry method is a 3-minute video!

Full details are on the Code7 Contest website, but here’s some of the headline information.

“Take three minutes to video yourself describing and demonstrating your application idea for Windows 7 and you could win big.

Your application should support one or more of the following Windows 7 scenarios:

• Simplify My Life - Develop an application that makes the things customers do every day faster and easier, with fewer clicks, simpler navigation and easier ways to connect.

• More Media, More Places - Design a great application to help customers create, edit, organize and share media.

• Gaming - Make it fun and exciting for customers to get their game on.

• Work from Anywhere - Help make customers more productive at home, at work, or on-the-go.

• Safeguard Your Work - Help customers protect their data, whether it resides on their PC, USB devices or on a network infrastructure.

• Applications for a Better Tomorrow - Use the power of your code to help communities prepare and plan for a better future.”

This is a worldwide competition run from the States, and I noticed there’s some important small print in the rules – or at least, it’s important if you live in any of the countries named – which is: “Void in Cuba; Iran; North Korea; Sudan and the Province of Quebec, Canada.”. I wonder what Canada have done to be lumped into the same list as Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Sudan?

I’ve just heard that the first ever Microsoft SQL Server Data Management Conference is being held in London on Tuesday September 29^th.  Although it is not an education-specific event, there is a good agenda with excellent presenters that could be of use to you if you are running complex databases. It’s obviously useful for IT managers, and information managers, database administrators and architects will find real value to add to their knowledge of how to get the most out of SQL Server.

The agenda focuses on some of the major data management challenges that we know SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition is more than ready to handle: high-performance and scalability, robust security, virtualisation, data warehousing and business intelligence.

The cast of presenters includes:

• Donald Farmer & Mark Linton from the SQL Server Development team
• Mark Whitehorn, independent consultant and author on databases and data management
• An array of Microsoft technical expertise on SQL Server, data management and Business Intelligence

The agenda includes specific topics on using SQL Server in heterogeneous data environments (i.e. Oracle) and SQL Server as the data platform of choice for business critical applications such as SAP. It also includes a closer-look at the SQL Server 2008 R2 functionality in a presentation by Donald Farmer from the SQL Server development team.

The full agenda, which includes a choice of tracks for the afternoon, is available on the website

The event is free, and given that effective database management is top of the list for many organisations, you may want to book your place as soon as you can.

You can book directly on the Microsoft events website, or register by phone on 0870 166 6670 (quoting event reference 4125)