March, 2010

Gemma Yussuf has asked me to let you know about an event from one of our education partners, Perspicuity. We’re hosting it here in Reading on 23rd April.

If you’re wondering how cloud-based services will influence your IT strategy going forward, then it’s a good opportunity to spend half a day getting a perspective on the scope and scale of the online services we’re offering.

Here’s the detail from Gemma:

	Please join us, on Friday 23rd April, to find out how the Online Services model could transform the way you deliver IT to your campus Learn how you can streamline communication and simplify IT management, without compromising data security, compliance or process control. Understand the cost and productivity benefits of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other online collaboration tools Learn how you can combine hosted services with on-premise applications: we will look at integration; data security and integrity; identity management; compliance; information governance and process management Find out why a subscription approach to system development costs less and delivers better results Hear about Middlesex University’s experiences: the operational and cost benefits of an on-demand approach to infrastructure and development The event runs on Friday 23rd April 2010, at the Microsoft Campus in Reading (directions here), either in the morning (10:30-12:30) or afternoon (14:30-16:30)

If you’d like to come along, then drop an email to Gemma with your full name, organisation and contact details. Or give her a call on 0118 909 7805.

I have to admit, much of the content in the MSDN Magazine goes whooshing over my head. But I know that some of you love nothing more than digging into coding, and would love nothing more than an evening of thread diagnostics (whatever that is?).

But did you know that you can download all of the MSDN magazines, free, as PDFs?

So you could, at this very moment, be enjoying the March edition, with news on Thread Diagnostics, Extreme ASP.NET, IIS Smooth Streaming and UI Frontiers (this month, all about MIDI Music in WPF Applications).

If you know what ‘contravariance’ means, then enjoy.

Archive of the MSDN Magazine

The beauty of saving power, is that you’re also saving money. And in the case of laptops, that applies to home use as well as use on campus. So there’s an incentive for staff to want to manage their power use more effectively. So maybe this article will be of use for your internal IT newsletters too?

The Windows team, over at windows.microsoft.com, have released a new video on “saving power on the go”, which is all about using the power settings on your laptop to stretch out your battery life, and reduce the power use. The video is a very simple walkthrough of what you can do (designed for normal people, not geeks!) and then there are also a series of short articles on:

• Conserving battery power

• Change what happens when you close your laptop

• Power plans: frequently asked questions

• Sleep and hibernation: frequently asked questions

A short list of hints on conserving battery power are:

• Reduce display brightness
  
  
• Shorten the length of time before Windows dims and turns off the display
  • The Windows Engineering blog has a longer, more geeky, post on Windows 7 energy efficiency too, which goes into a lot of detail. There’s a nice chart (right) which shows where power goes in a modern laptop. The bit that I learnt is that the biggest drain on power in a laptop is the screen – so by dimming your screen when you can, you add a big chunk to the battery life.
    
• Turn off or remove devices that you aren't using
  • Many USB devices use power just by being connected.
  • If you use a USB mouse, you can save power by disconnecting the mouse and by using a touch pad or tablet pen.
  • If you use a USB flash drive, unplug it when you're not using it.
    
    
• Turn off PC cards and integrated wireless devices
  • These devices also use power. If you don't need them, turn them off.

Quickly find all the other Money Saving Tips on this blog

Every day is a day closer to the Office 2010 release (due on 12th May for volume licence customers, and June for consumers). And I know of quite a few UK education institutions that are widely using the free Office 2010 beta in teaching already.

If you’re preparing for a rapid roll out of Office 2010, or even if you’re just looking for more information to help you consider your plans, then you’ll be interested in the free ebook from the Microsoft Learning team. It’s called “First Look- Microsoft Office 2010”, and over it’s 186 pages it talks you through some of the most significant enhancements in the Office suite. I’m impressed with the collaboration that Office 2010 encourages, and have got very used to doing things like broadcasting PowerPoint over the internet, and the options to save my files to my SkyDrive on the web, rather than on my local hard disk.

I’ve been using Office 2010 for over six months now, and there are key bits of it that I would definitely not be able to do without now. This ebook does a very good job of explaining all of that, and helping you and your academic staff to get ahead.

My advice? Download it now and pass it around.

Quickly find all the other Office 2010 posts on this blog

We’ve just issued the third edition of our accessibility guide for education, and it’s available as a download from our accessibility site. The site also includes a number of accessibility video case studies.

The Accessibility: A Guide for Educators has been updated to include information on Windows 7 accessibility features, and current assistive technology product recommendations.

This guide provides information about accessibility and accessible technology to help teachers ensure that all students have equal access to learning with technology, specifically:

• An understanding of accessibility and how it impacts learners
• Definitions of impairment types and technology solutions for each type of impairment
• Guidance on choosing accessible technology solutions
• Resources for more information

Download the Accessibility Guide for Educators

Our technical team have put together a fantastic week of technical events from 12-16 April in London. Despite hosting them in a cinema, most of them were full within hours of announcing them, but if you’ve got the chance to get to one, I’d recommend adding your name to the Wait List for the events – because you may get a chance to attend if there are dropouts, and the team will also let you know about the recordings available afterwards.

The subjects to be covered are:

• Virtualisation – covering server and desktop virtualisation – Monday 12th
• Office 2010 – including the core Office applications as well as SharePoint 2010 – Tuesday 13th
• Windows 7 deployment – planning for deployment, application compatibility and deployment tool options – Wednesday 14th
• SQL Server 2008 R2 – data management, reporting and using your data to produce business intelligence – Thursday 15th
• Raising the profile of IT - about the fundamental role of IT to support the business goals of an organisation – and the changes likely in the future – Friday 16th

You can find out more, and register yourself onto the Wait List on the techdays website. At the moment, there are still places available for the Friday, and the rest are Wait List only (check current availability here)

If you’re developing software, then there are still places available for some of the developer events – run in parallel, in another London cinema.

Huddle.net is a web-based collaboration system, which is designed to complement existing learning management systems or virtual learning environments by providing additional tools such as file sharing, task management, discussion forums and live collaboration. It recently won the Microsoft SharePoint SocialFest competition, because of the way that it sits alongside SharePoint – for example, to allow you to widen collaboration to people outside of your own campus. With Huddle for SharePoint 2010, you can invite external teams to collaborate with you inside your SharePoint environment.

You can use it to connect with students, tutors, partners and suppliers outside of your own network – or with other HEIs. Huddle for SharePoint 2010 allows you to enable your users to invite external teams to collaborate with them inside your SharePoint environment.  They can publish documents to or from Huddle workspaces, manage authentication and synchronise their data with other, unconnected SharePoint sites. And your SharePoint users can access their files through Huddle's online, mobile and social networks. It’s clever because it takes your existing university SharePoint, and adds more powerful collaboration to it.

The team at Huddle are holding an event here at our offices in Reading next month, where you can learn more about our Cloud strategy, the SharePoint 2010 introduction, and the Huddle integration. Here’s the details from the Huddle team:

	We would like to cordially invite you to the preview of the Huddle SharePoint Connector, which aims to revolutionise the way education organisations use Microsoft SharePoint externally. Huddle for SharePoint means companies can now work securely and easily with people outside of their institution through their existing SharePoint installation. Our connector also joins up separate instances of SharePoint allowing external users to use either their own SharePoint site or Huddle to work together. This concept has recently won a global Microsoft design competition. Jointly with Microsoft we will be hosting a free event on Wednesday 14th April 2010.  The agenda will be: 9.30am - Coffee and registration 10.00am – Welcome 10.15am – Microsoft: Cloud Computing Strategy 10:45 - SharePoint 2010: A Platform for Learning 11.15am – Coffee 11.45am - Introduction to Huddle & SharePoint integration 12.45pm - Customer case studies 1pm - Lunch and depart  The event will take place at Microsoft's offices at Microsoft Campus, Thames Valley Park, Reading RG6 1WG. The spaces are limited, so please let us know as soon as possible if you are able to attend by e-mailing .

If you’d like to attend, then email Pauline at Huddle directly, and she’ll add you to the attendee list.

Microsoft is hosting an event with its partner RkeyTec on Wednesday 28 April 9:30am-1.30pm .  This is a great opportunity to start thinking SMART, making the most of your current investment, enhancing productivity and saving money.  

It will outline Microsoft’s Core Infrastructure end to end platform, areas of focus will be to increase security, enforce operational change control and improve infrastructure stability covering products such as SCCM and SCOM which is covered in your campus agreement.  The session will be intimate where there will be plenty opportunities to ask questions.

Agenda:

Time    Presenter       Notes 
9:15-> 09:30 Arrival & Breakfast    
09:30 -> 10:00 Andrew Driver  About the Microsoft Focus on Education

Andrew will discuss Microsoft’s approach to the Education Sector, Outline product sets and licensing concerns.

10:00 -> 11:30  Dominic Bland  Fix the Core and the rest will follow

Dominic will discuss some of the latest trends in Windows infrastructure design.  Without spending the earth, it is possible to greatly increase security, enforce operational change controls, and improve infrastructure stability.

11:30 -> 11:45 Break  
11:45 -> 12:30 Andrew Driver  Setting the pattern

Andrew will focus the capabilities of SCCM and SCOM. Different levels of implementation afford greater degrees of control and so ROI, He’ll show that, by understanding the different levels of implementation, they can provide the highest level of configuration control and monitoring appropriate to your budget. 
12:30 -> 12:45 Group Q&A      
12:45 Onwards  Lunch and Breakdown

Target Audience:  This is aimed at Technical decision Makers

Registration Details:  To register for this event, please send an email to gemyus@microsoft.com, with your Full Name, University Name, and contact details. 

Location: The event is being held at our Thames Valley Park offices, Reading. Directions can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/about/map-reading.mspx. On arrival please ask to be directed to Building 2 reception and then ask for Gemma.

Hopefully, you already know about The Ultimate Steal, which is our special student offer on Office 2007. It allows your students to buy Office 2007 Ultimate for just £38.95. And because it is the Ultimate edition, they will get absolutely the whole Office suite in one neat package*.

So students can complete their work quicker, make it look nicer and organise it more easily.

Since 5th March, any student or member of staff (we tell by asking them to register on the site with their ‘ac.uk’ email address) has had an added bonus because they are entitled to get a upgrade to Office 2010 when it is released (it comes as a digital download).

If you’ve got students who want to buy Office, but are waiting for the next version, then all of their worries are over!

We’ve been running this special offer each year for the last 3 years now, and although students have become increasingly aware of it, it may be worth reminding them – either from placing a link on your intranet, or letting them know by email or in your newsletters.

ps You can also pick up Windows 7 with a student discount from The Ultimate Steal site too.

* They get the latest versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, as well as Outlook, Publisher, Access, Groove  and InfoPath. At £38.95, it’s about 90% off estimated retail price. But you’ve got to have a student or faculty email address with a .ac.uk domain from a UK higher or further education institution.

Research says that 40% of organisations are planning to deploy Windows 7 in 2010. I’m not sure if migrating to Windows 7 is currently on your agenda, but if it is, I thought you might be interested in attending one of a series of workshops esteem are holding at the end of March under the title of Accelerating Windows 7 Deployments.  The workshops are being held in London (23^rd March), Leeds (24^th March) and Edinburgh (25^th March). 

These interactive workshops will examine Windows 7, discuss the key challenges associated with the deployment of it (including application compatibility issues), and review the impact it will have on the corporate desktop environment.

Here’s a few of the topics that will be discussed : 

• What are the key features of Windows 7?
• How long can previous releases of Windows continue to run before they represent an excessive risk?
• What are the key challenges associated with delivering a smooth and cost effective migration to Windows 7?
• How can desktop and application virtualisation help with the migration puzzle?

If this sounds of interest, you can view the full agendas and reserve a place via the following links:

Central London (23^rd March) :

http://www.esteem.co.uk/events/Pages/Windows7-Challenges-Workshop-London.aspx

Leeds (24^th March) :

http://www.esteem.co.uk/events/pages/windows7-challenges-workshop-leeds.aspx

Edinburgh (25^th March) :

http://www.esteem.co.uk/events/pages/windows7-challenges-workshop-edinburgh.aspx