Microsoft NZ Student and Academic Blog

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 $80 for students.

nzacad — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:01:00 GMT

Microsoft New Zealand is making Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 software available to eligible New Zealand tertiary students for only NZ$80! This is a saving of 94% off the usual RRP. Office Ultimate is a premium software suite, containing 9 different products including Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Excel 2007, so get it today from the program website, www.theultimatesteal.co.nz.

Imagine Cup Roadshow Now On!

nzacad — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:26:00 GMT

The Imagine Cup Team are flying across the country promoting Imagine Cup 2010, stay tuned to our Facebook Profile to see when we are coming to a town near you.

There are heaps of prizes up for grabs, including an HP Mini Net Book or a XBOX360, just for registering. Sumit a proposal and go in the chance win 1 of 3 $1000 cash prizes +

get the support you need to turn your idea into reality.....find out more by going to our local page.

NZ Fashion Week Using Silverlight 3 and Hosted on Windows Azure

nzacad — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:22:00 GMT

Keep up to date with NZ Fashion Week through this cool Silverlight 3 app which is hosted on Windows Azure.

The technologies at play are Silverlight 3 (deep linking), IE8 Web slices and Windows Azure.

This was also previewed at Tech Ed 2009: http://www.msteched.com/newzealand/Public/gallery.aspx

PDC Discount for Academics and Students

nzacad — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:20:00 GMT

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft’s definitive developer event focused on the technical strategy of the Microsoft developer platform, is offering a special discount to faculty and full-time students. Eligible academic attendees will receive a full conference pass for only $595 – that’s $1500 off the full priced pass! Contact the PDC09 Registration Team for details, prior to registering online. Academic registrants must show proof of full-time student enrollment or faculty employment at the PDC09 Onsite Registration Desk.

WHEN: November 17 – 19, 2009

WHERE: Los Angeles Convention Center

>>LEARN MORE ABOUT PDC09

Session 2 Wellington: US Microsoft Speaker Presenting at Victoria University This Friday – Giorgio Sardo

nzacad — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:56:00 GMT

Giorgio Sardo, a recent Imagine Cup Competitor now working for Microsoft Redmond is in New Zealand presenting at Microsoft’s Largest Professional IT Conference, Tech Ed. Come and hear from Giorgio at a free event running at the Victoria University this Friday. Learn how to build a website that gets the most out of IE8. Discover how to use the new integrated Developer Tools, Microsoft Expression SuperPreview and Fiddler to build and debug cross-browser-compatible layout designs. Learn how to build new Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Providers that extend the reach of your content.

Venue: Victoria University of Wellington

Room: Cotton Lecture Theatre 122 (Cotton Building)

Date: Friday 18^th September
Time : 3-4pm

Register on Facebook (optional): http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=131552607422&add

Giorgio Sardo is a Technical Evangelist in Microsoft Corporation. Moving from Italy to the United States, he studied at Polytechnic of Turin and successfully obtained a Master of Computer Engineering with distinction. Before joining Microsoft, Giorgio leaded a national university community forum in Italy and won the Imagine Cup worldwide championship. He started his experience in Microsoft UK as User Experience Consultant, delivering stunning solutions based on Silverlight, WPF and Mobile and presenting several sessions at Microsoft conferences. In 2008 he has been nominated Best Consultant of the Year from the British Computer Society. Early 2009 Giorgio moved to Redmond, where he currently focuses on Web Client technologies, such as Internet Explorer and ASP.Net AJAX.

Visit Giorgio’s blog

Dreamspark Available for High School Students

nzacad — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:44:00 GMT

Dreamspark Program is now available to all high school students. For high school students to get access to the program, the school needs to distribute access codes to the students. A single administrator from the school can request access codes from www.dreamspark.com/highschool and than distribute these keys to the students. The students can then use these keys to activate their account on http://www.dreamspark.co.nz/ for 12 months. They will then be able to download any of the software available as part of the program.

You can also download instructions here to follow the process of obtaining the keys.

High Level View of MS Academic Programs

nzacad — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:43:00 GMT

Dreamspark is a student only program and provides a select group of our developer and designer software free to all tertiary students. You can find out more here: www.dreamspark.co.nz, the program is now available in most tertiary students. If you are not sure if your students have access to this program please email us at nzedu@microsoft.com . You can also join the Dreamspark NZ community and post up qustions on the any aspect of the program - http://www.dreamspark.co.nz/community

MSDNAA is an IT/Design department subscription only, by paying a nominal fee each year the department will get access to all our Microsoft software except Microsoft Office. There is no limitation on number of copies, it is based on the size of the department. Both students and academics can use the software and you can also take a personal copy for home use. You can find out more here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-nz/academic/default(en-us).aspx

Faculty Connection is an academic portal that provide resources to academics, such as lecture material, assignment, exams, software, forums to connect with academics around the world. Please feel free to browse the site: www.microsoft.com/faculty , if you would like an invitation code to get activated on the site instantly please email me at nzedu@microsoft.com

Microsoft run a student global technology competition, known as the Imagine Cup, the competition has a software category but also has a number of designer focussed categories, i.e. Photography, Short Film, Interface Design. All categories except the software category are competed globally for two rounds and then in round 3, teams are sent to the world wide finals to compete. We have been running the local competition for the past three years with it picking up alot of momentum. In 2009 we had over 50 teams sign up for the Software Design Challenge, with the biggest value being working with a voluntary industry mentor for the duration of the competition. Check out the local site to find out more: http://www.imaginecup.co.nz

Faculty Connection for K12

nzacad — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:42:00 GMT

Faculty Connection is a site dedicated for academics, it contains lecture material,assignments, and tutorials that can be downloaded and used within their courses. The material has been created by both academics around the world and Microsoft representatives. A range of material is available from our latest gaming technology, XNA, to our web technology, Silverlight, ASP.NET and content on learning our new tools, such as Expression Studio.

The site also contains material for teachers with a focus on K12, there is large range of material available on the site which I plan to post up on this blog. I will try and regularly put up stuff on this blog that I feel could be useful to teachers. If you wish to browse through the site yourself and download material, eiial me at nzedu@microsoft.com with your details and I can provide you with the appropriate access rights.

You can navigate to the site here: www.microsoft.com/faculty

US Microsoft Speaker Presenting at University of Auckland City Campus This Thursday – Giorgio Sardo

nzacad — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:51:00 GMT

Giorgio Sardo, a recent Imagine Cup Competitor now working for Microsoft Redmond is in New Zealand presenting at Microsoft’s Largest Professional IT Conference, Tech Ed. Come and hear from Giorgio at a free event running at the University of Auckland this Thursday. Learn how to build a website that gets the most out of IE8. Discover how to use the new integrated Developer Tools, Microsoft Expression SuperPreview and Fiddler to build and debug cross-browser-compatible layout designs. Learn how to build new Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Providers that extend the reach of your content.

Venue: University of Auckland

Room: Library B28

Date: Thursday 17^th September
Time : 3-4pm

Register on Facebook (optional): http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=135801150657&add

Most Secure Browser: Internet Explorer 8

nzacad — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:18:33 GMT

NSS Labs, a trusted advisor to the information security community, released today two new Web Browser Security Reports:

They’ve been testing intensively the latest browsers (Apple Safari 4, Google Chrome 2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3* and Opera 10 Beta)** to compare their security models and APIs.

Note that Internet Explorer 8 relies on the new SmartScreen® Filter technology, while Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the same SafeBrowsing API (developed by Google).

Let’s have a look at the result of their tests.

1) MALWARE Protection

What is a Malware?

A Malware is software which is deceptive about functionality and is a security risk or a privacy risk. The term malicious software or malware refers to programs that demonstrate illegal, viral, fraudulent, or malicious behavior. For example, viruses, worms, and Trojan horses are malicious software.

Comparative Test Results

The use of reputation systems to assist browsers in the fight against socially engineered malware is a strong use of cloud technologies. But, not all vendor implementations and daily operations yield the same results.

Internet Explorer 8 “was by far the best”, thanks to the SmartScreen® Filter technology
Firefox 3 “comes in a distant second”
Safari 4 presented a declined compared to the previous tests, with two short periods of sever security dips
Chrome 2 performed very consistently, albeit very poorly

Although Firefox, Safari and Chrome are using the same security API, the results are different. From the report:

“The SafeBrowsing products’ protection rates were showing signs of converging just under 25%. This supports the notion that there are operational differences between the implementations of the API, but that the block lists are the same (or very similar)”

2) PHISHING Protection

What is Phishing?

Online phishing is a method of identity theft that tricks you into revealing personal or financial information online. Phishers use phony websites or deceptive email messages that mimic trusted businesses and brands in order to steal personally identifiable information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers.

Since phishing sites have an average lifespan of only 52 hours it is essential that the site is discovered, validated, classified, and added to the reputation system as quickly as possible. A good reputation system must be both accurate and fast in order to realize high catch rates.

Comparative Test Results

Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 are clearly responding quickly to block new phishing sites
Opera had a period during the tests where the protection dropped off significantly
Chrome was below average

From the report:

“We expected better results given the fanfare about Google’s SafeBrowsing initiative. Additionally, a third-party (Firefox) was able to utilize Google’s API to achieve significantly better protection that Google’s own browser.”

What is the SmartScreen® Filter in IE8?

Internet Explorer 8 introduce a new technology called SmartScreen® Filter, an evolution of the previous Phishing Filter in IE8, to help protect IE8 users against the major security threats on the web today.

Eric Lawrence, Security Lead in the IE Team, has written many blog post where he introduce the feature and describe how it works. A FAQ about the Filter is available here.

If you want to know more about security in IE8, check out this video on Channel9.

Demo

For the sake of this post, based so far only on numbers, I’d like to show in action how IE8 identify and display an unsafe site to the end-user. We will use a test web site marked from the SmartScreen Filter as unsafe***.

If you browse to the site with IE8, the browser will start download the content of the page but shortly it will understand that the site is not safe and switch to a different view: a red warning alert will be offered to the end user.

The experience on other browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, would be completely different – since they don’t detect the site as unsafe…creating a big security threat for the end-user.

Is this really relevant?

NSS Labs is not The Word; it is one of the (many) trusted voices on the web, with a deep expertise in this field. You might not trust their results (btw, have a look at the Appendix of their reports to understand the architecture/methodology they have in place…).

It’s interesting however what they call “an easy apple-to-apple comparison”: they run those tests back in February and they are now comparing the trend over time for each browser. I’m surprised (and pleased :)) to see that IE is the only browser with a positive trend == it’s getting better over time. All of the other browsers decreased protection, between 3 and 8% - within the margin in the error.

Does all this mean that IE8 is 100% secure? Absolutely not, but I feel secure now… :-D

NOTE:

* I wished they tested with Firefox 3.5. From the report, “Firefox 3.5 was not stable enough to be tested during the course of this test. A patch has subsequently become available to address the stability issue. We were able to manually verify that the protection was identical between versions 3.0.11 and 3.5”.

** They used the “vanilla versions” (as downloaded from site and updated). No antivirus, no add-on installed, no security group policy, no special settings…. Just the browser, as it is.

*** This site has been designed for demonstration purposes only. The test performed from the NSS Labs used a list of 12000 real suspicious sites.

Office Enterprise Promotion

nzacad — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:34:23 GMT

Hey everyone- there has never been a better time to buy Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. For a limited time Lapshop.co.nz, a Microsoft New Zealand partner, is offering a HUGE discount on Office Enterprise 2007 for eligible New Zealand students. Check out the incredible deal at the Lapshop website.

Office Enterprise is a premium software suite comprising of the following individual applications;

Office Word 2007

Office Excel 2007

Office Publisher 2007

Office Access 2007

Office InfoPath 2007

Office Communicator 2007

Office Groove 2007

Office Outlook 2007

Office OneNote 2007

Office Excel 2007

Microsoft Office Ultimate for $80…just for tertiary students

nzacad — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:30:58 GMT

Windows 7 RTM coming to MSDNAA this August

nzacad — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:31:06 GMT

Improved taskbar and full-screen previews

The taskbar at the bottom of your screen is what you use to launch programs and switch between them when they're open. In Windows 7 you can pin any program to the taskbar so it’s always just a click away, and you can rearrange the icons on the taskbar just by clicking and dragging. We’ve made the icons considerably bigger, too, so they’re easier to use. Hover over the icons and you’ll see thumbnails of every file or window that open in that program, and if you hover over the thumbnail, you’ll see a full-screen preview of that window. Move the cursor off the thumbnail and the full-screen preview disappears.

Faster, more responsive performance

Nobody likes to wait, so we all want our PCs to perform well. We looked at a number of ways to improve performance on PCs running Windows 7. We designed the operating system to be more responsive and simpler to use.

To improve performance, Windows 7 is designed to make PCs start up, shut down, resume from standby, and respond faster. To help you zip through your day, we’ve added new features to simplify the number of steps required to do common things. Some of the features that’ll help you save time include:

Windows Taskbar simplifies working with your applications and files
Jump Lists put the documents you want handy and the ones you’ve used recently a couple clicks away

We’ve also focused on making it more convenient to work with the operating system. For example, the Action Center gives you more control over how the operating system notifies you about system changes. You can recover more quickly from problems when they do occur because when you’re ready to address issues, Windows 7 will help you fix them.

Easier TV, movies, and video

With a streamlined user interface and support for new content types and digital TV, Windows Media Center in certain editions of Windows 7 makes watching TV, movies, and other video content on your PC easier than ever. With a simple USB TV Tuner you can record and watch shows on your schedule. Windows Media Center has been updated to manage a single TV guide containing both standard and digital high definition TV shows.

2009 World Wide Winners of the Imagine Cup

nzacad — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:21:00 GMT

Watch this 10 minute video where the winning team of the World Wide Imagine Cup Competition talk about thier idea and how they plan to change the world.

Imagine Cup 2010 - Poland

nzacad — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:13:00 GMT

Get ready for the 2010 competition - check out more details here: http://www.imaginecup.co.nz

The 2010 competition has begun with a revised look:

Only three categories - Software Design : Game Development : Multimedia.

Extra Elimination Round - Winners from each country go through an elimination round prior to going to World Wide Finals.