Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 is Microsoft’s latest web browser, now available to download*.
- Safer. Built-in phishing and malware protection along with click-jacking and cross-site scripting prevention protects you from threats on the Internet. InPrivate browsing & filters let you maintain confidentiality when needed.
- Easier. With Web Slices, content updates from your favorite website are now accessible right from your favorites bar no matter where you are on the web. An administrative customization toolkit (IEAK) makes it easy to configure a standard deployment package.
- Faster. IE8 is faster than IE7 by 80% in common micro-benchmarks. In side-by-side measures of speed in opening the top 25 websites worldwide, IE8 was as fast as or faster than Firefox and Chrome. IE8 is faster than IE7 by 80% in common micro-benchmarks. See the video here.
Making your public website compatible
· Please check your public sites for IE 8 site compatibility
· If not compatible, please refer IE Compatibility Center to update the websites
Plan your IE 8 upgrades & implementation
· Internet Explorer 8 Deployment Guide: this guide documents the options and processes involved in deploying Internet Explorer 8.
· Internet Explorer 8 Delivery through Automatic Updates: this article describes overview of the delivery process and options available for IT Administrators to control how and when Internet Explorer 8 is deployed to their organization through Automatic Updates.
· Internet Explorer Administration Kit: The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) simplifies the creation, deployment, and management of customized Windows Internet Explorer 8 packages.
· *Note: PC’s testing Windows 7 beta can receive IE8 as part of the Windows 7 RC1 upgrade later this spring
Resources
o IE8 home page http://www.microsoft.com/ie8
o IE Compatibility Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/cc405106.aspx
o Internet Explorer Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx
SA’s are some tools that will help you do the following and more!!!! Check them out… http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/cc197101.aspx
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Assess your existing environment with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) tool |
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Secure your Windows Server infrastructure |
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Identify Server and Application Virtualization candidates |
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Deploy and Manage resources quickly and reliably |
MSL Virtualization Learning Portal – Get FREE E-Learning Collection
The Microsoft Learning Virtualization v-team has been working hard over the last several months to develop a solutions based learning portfolio, PR story and marketing offer set aligned to the Microsoft virtualization story. Click Here to learn more about the MSL virtualization learning portal.
You can also find E-Learning collection 6333: Exploring Microsoft Virtualization Technologies that include 4 clinics and 7 hours of content for FREE at FreeVirtualizationClinic.
· Clinic 5935: Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
· Clinic 6334: Exploring Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
· Clinic 6335: Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization
· Clinic 6336: Exploring Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008
Ever wonder what REALLY are AD Domain functional levels??? Here is a great doc that explains it…
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754918.aspx
Top line – We are now “officially” supporting SQL Server in virtualized environments (hyper-v, vmware).
Details - Go to http://support.microsoft.com/?id=956893 for the details. Good place to send customers to as well. For licensing questions please direct customers to http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/licensing.aspx
Want to see what Microsoft is doing in Education? Stop by here http://www.educationwebcasts.com/ and take a look at some great webcast’s…..
· Microsoft will be ending support for the Antigen for Exchange 8.0 and Antigen for SMTP Gateways 8.0 products on December 31, 2008. After that time, all engine updating services will cease to operate, and the products will no longer provide up-to-date protection against the latest threats. As soon as possible, we encourage you to take the opportunity to upgrade to Microsoft Antigen for Exchange 9.0 or Microsoft Antigen for SMTP Gateways 9.0. In addition to completing Microsoft’s Secure Development Lifecycle review for secure code development and incorporating all the latest product updates and service release, the new Antigen 9.0 versions include:
o Added protection through inclusion of Microsoft Anti-malware engine – an additional engine to use in your overall protection mix
o Enhanced cluster support to ensure both active and passive nodes have the latest signature updates
o Distributed quarantine management and log file retrieval for easier management
o Microsoft-signed signature updates for added protection against signature tampering
The Microsoft Higher Education Team is organizing a Higher Education Business Intelligence Panel and Summit to be held in conjunction with the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2008.
Microsoft BI Conference 2008
The Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference will be held in Seattle, WA from October 6-8, 2008. At this conference, you will be able to see first the latest technologies being released for Business Intelligence. Click here to register for the conference.
Microsoft BI Panel and Summit
At the same time, we are planning an afternoon dedicated to Higher Education on October 7th. We plan to have an interactive session where you can network with your peers and share best practices. You will also have an opportunity to talk with Business Intelligence
software vendors who have built Higher Education solutions on Microsoft PerformancePoint Server for Scorecards, Key Performance Indicators, Trending and Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) views.
Finally, we will also discuss how institutions have been integrating with ERP Systems such as PeopleSoft, Sungard Higher Education Banner and DataTel to produce Business Intelligence for their campuses.
BI Panel and Summit Agenda
1:00-2:00pm, Mining ERP Data for Higher Education Analytics and Intelligence
Speaker: Dan Venedam, iStrategy – Vice President Sales & Marketing
iStrategy has collaborated with Higher Education for over 6 years. iStrategy transforms the raw data buried in data sources across campus into actionable information. They have built out analytics, dashboards and scorecards for the following areas:
· Admission
· Enrollment Management
· Retention
· Faculty information
· Building Utilization
· Student Financials
· Human Resources
· Financials
· Contributors Relations and/or Advancement
· Financial Aid (in development)
iStrategy has an out of the box application specifically designed for Higher Education institutions trying to meet new information demands.
This session will discuss how schools can leverage the collective wisdom of other institutions with a Business Intelligence platform that delivers pre-built integration into existing PeopleSoft, Banner and Datatel ERP systems, while providing a multi-dimensional interface that allows non-technical users to interact with the platform without engaging technical resources.
2:00-3:00pm, Implementing Dashboards and Scorecards in Higher Education
Speaker: Nils Rasmussen, Solver, Inc. - Principal
The performance management wave has hit higher education and CIO's, CFO's and budget managers are looking to drive and measure actionable strategies throughout their institutions. In this session, we will look at how you can use Microsoft PerformancePoint Server, SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server to implement a complete business intelligence solution from data warehouse, to key performance indicators and dashboards and scorecards. We will also show you how to simple data mining on your student information data, to find simple answers to complex questions and to predict future trends.
3:00-4:00pm, Performance Management 101, Consolidations, planning & information delivery with Microsoft BI and PerformancePoint Server for Higher Education
Speaker: Trevor Walker, Perfiniti - Principal
In this session attendees will see how Microsoft PerformancePoint Server and BI can handle the key challenges faced by colleges and universities. It will demonstrate the core fundamentals of fund accounting in PerformancePoint Server and how to leverage this for best practices in financial management. Attendees will see how to run regular consolidations, annual budgeting cycles, planning cycles like CapEx and Salary planning and get a handle on their fund and expense tracking. Particular attention will be paid to the common issues of expense management and variance reporting against actual, budget and committed fund expenses for visibility into the true fund balances with drill downs into programs, projects, vendors and other details necessary for better expense management. Understanding how to link this performance management system to common higher education operational systems like PeopleSoft will also be covered. This session will include actual materials used during selection and implementation, PowerPoint presentations to convey key concepts, aspects and learning’s, and a live demo of performance management scenarios for higher education.
4:00-5:00pm, Q&A and Networking
Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of “write once, run anywhere”, freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases.
Here are some great links that will provide additional information you may find useful:
· Internet Explorer 8 main site: http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8
· Internet Explorer Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie
· Internet Explorer Developer Center: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx
· Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit (for web designers and developers): http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/default.htm
· Microsoft Interoperability Principles: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx
How are you doing with your Core Infrastructure? Want to find out what you can do to improve it and as a bonus lower your TCO and get some ROI on that new project... Go here and find out...
http://www.microsoft.com/infrastructure/default.mspx
As many of you know, the much-anticipated Hyper-V hypervisor feature was just released last week. Many of the IT professionals like you have now began to use Hyper-V server virtualization technology to take back the control of your datacenter. With energy costs going sky high and the demand for IT services increasing, no wonder many of you are now looking to consolidate the physical servers using virtualization.
With server consolidation being the direction to go, we are pleased to announce the RTM of Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1 for Hyper-V.
What is the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1?
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1 (or MAP) is a network-wide agent-less tool that can help you quickly find out where your desktops and servers are as well as auto-generate upgrade recommendations for multiple products and technologies including server, desktop and virtualization migration scenarios covering:
· Hyper-V virtualization candidates assessment (New in MAP 3.1)
· SQL server discovery and assessment (New in MAP 3.1)
· Desktop Security Center assessment (New in MAP 3.1)
· Windows Server 2008 hardware and device compatibility assessment including server discovery
· Windows Vista hardware and device compatibility assessment including PC discovery
· Office 2007 hardware compatibility assessment
· Microsoft Application Virtualization hardware compatibility assessment
· SNMP inventory reporting
