When I started working at Microsoft, I hadn’t been in such an open, technology rich culture before. And with so many IT systems around, and so many different software resources, my head was buzzing. In fact, I remember that at the end of the first week, the number of links in my Favourites was massive – just to internal websites.
I’d never used internet telephony, encryption, instant messaging, live meeting, SharePoint or Groove before, so I was all at sea until I could play around and work out how they were supposed to operate. Meanwhile, people who’d been at Microsoft for a while were metaphorically whizzing past me, as they collaborated, shared, published and distributed information. Whilst I was trying to work out how to answer my desk phone.
One of the godsends for me was a set of documents called Work Smart Guides, which walked me through the basics of some of the new technology I was encountering.
As our IT team describe it, Work Smart Guides bridge the gap between technology and users. Work Smart guides provide employees with scenario-based, best-use productivity aids on Microsoft products and technologies.
We produce them because we expect to see more consistent, productive, and cost-effective use of products and technologies across the company – which helps the business ROI on IT investments, as well as helping people to understand the benefit the IT team deliver to users.
Ready-made IT guides
I found out today that we have also published them for customers to modify and use. This seems a great step – because I’m guessing that every college in the UK is producing user documentation where 80-90% of the content is identical. So these guides would make a good starter for 10, either for the format, or the instructions, or the simple screenshots. As an example, here’s the Email Basics one.
The subjects covered in the step-by-step guides for users include:
- Environmental sustainability (hints like using Balanced power settings on your laptop)
- Protecting data with BitLocker
- Getting started with email
- Transfer files and settings to a new computer
- Collaborating with SharePoint
- An overview of collaboration tools
- Customising SharePoint sites
- Integrating Outlook with SharePoint
- Basics of managing email (Are you a stacker or a filer?)
- Office tips
- Outlook email signatures
- New features for users in Windows 7
Download the Work Smart Guides
You can download the customisable versions of Work Smart materials from TechNet. There are 23 of them, and they come in one big Zip file for you to play with.
Bonus: You should also be looking at the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder, described by Long Zheng as a miracle tool. It does what it says on the tin, and the best bit is that the document it creates is brilliant for creating user guides, with screen shots and step-by-step instructions. Just stick “problem steps” into the search box of your Windows 7 Start menu.
This blog post is definitely for the techies amongst you!
Things are changing very rapidly in the way that ICT services can be delivered and used in education. Although most of the developments from major ICT providers aren’t specific to education, they are addressing the issues that education faces today.
One of the developments is the Windows Azure system, which is designed to allow you to run services and develop applications for a cloud-based system, instead of having a big pile of servers within your college.
Unless you’ve got a pile of developers in your college (and I know that some of you do!) then I guess you aren’t going to be buried in the detail of how these services work – because it will mainly be used by your suppliers, as they think about moving some of their applications to the cloud.
The official summary blurb for Azure describes it thus:
 |
| The Windows Azure platform offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows. Windows Azure offers a platform that is easily implemented alongside your current environment. - Windows Azure: operating system as an online service
- Microsoft SQL Azure: fully relational cloud database solution
- Windows Azure platform AppFabric: makes it simpler to connect cloud services and on-premises applications | |
 |
And I’ve found a short video that provides an overview of Windows Azure in a much more digestible form. Having watched it, I can now describe it to other people much better (and now fully appreciate why it’s a good thing!).
The best simple introduction I’ve seen for Windows Azure
If you can’t see the video above, then here’s a direct link. However, as it’s a YouTube video, it may be blocked by your web filter – unfortunately I couldn’t find a copy anywhere else.
Fascinating fact: Steve Marx has blogged about how he made this video - using just PowerPoint & Community Clips. I’m envious of his talent.
If this is a bit lightweight for you, then you may prefer to read the Introducing Windows Azure whitepaper (PDF) – just one of many whitepapers on Windows Azure
Bookings are now open for our Further Education Briefing day, which this year falls on 19th March in London.
Microsoft will be holding our annual Further Education Briefing on 19th March 2010 at our London offices in Victoria. The agenda for the event runs from 9:45 to 3:00 with breaks to catch up with colleagues from other colleges.
As well as getting the latest news on Microsoft’s product roadmap, there will be the opportunity to hear from other colleges and to hear how they are responding to the economic pressures that all colleges are feeling. Of course, this current academic year is full of launches of new Microsoft products, and we’ll be able to use the day to bring all of this into context – explaining the value and relative importance of some of the key new product launches still to come.
The event will be suitable for senior managers, whether or not they are involved in IT strategy on a day-to-day basis.
Further Education Briefing Agenda
09:15 Registration and coffee
09:45 Welcome and Introduction
10:00 Looking ahead a decade: The future vision of work
10:40 Office 2010
11:05 Break
11:20 Microsoft SharePoint 2010
11:45 Live@edu
12:10 Lunch
13:00 When budgets don’t meet aspirations - Customer case study
13:25 Linking Moodle to your Microsoft infrastructure
13:35 Introduction to “Cost saving and Revenue Raising”
13:40 Virtualisation to reduce costs
14:10 Office Communications Server
14:40 The Microsoft IT Academy
15:00 Summary and close
Amanda Bicknell, the Microsoft UK Further Education Business Manager will lead the day, introducing experts from Microsoft and case studies from our customers.
We’ll be holding the briefing at our offices in Victoria, and there will be plenty of Microsoft colleagues available for discussions.
You can book your place online now
The Office 2010 Beta is available for free download from the Microsoft website, and it’s something that you could install on some of your campus computers to see what’s in it, and how it helps your staff and students.
Remember how sometimes you felt smug when you were running Windows 7 Beta at least 6 months before everybody else on campus? Well, you can feel it once again!
Why trial the new Office system?
In the past, when we released new software, you had to wait to see what it will do, and whether it is the right thing for your campus. But now, with our new approach of releasing very public Beta versions, you can actually download an early versions months before release, and try it out with some of your staff and students, as well as trying it out from a technical installation perspective. With Office 2010, there’s a bunch of new features which are going to be especially useful for education, such as:
Save to SharePoint allows students and staff to use shared sites or their personal site more easily. A large number of colleges are using SharePoint and looking for new ways to grow it’s use. This removes all the hassle of having to save to your local disk, and then leave and upload the file to SharePoint.
- Let’s face it, anything that makes it easier for staff to use your SharePoint is a good thing, and encourages active sharing of information.
Save to SkyDrive is one step further by connecting your users to their 25GB of free storage on the SkyDrive site. And because SkyDrive allows you to have private folders, shared folders and public folders, each user can easily control what’s visible to others, and available via any Internet connected computer. This is also the way to activate the Office Web Applications – once you’ve saved something on your SkyDrive it can be opened in the web version of Office 2010.
- This is really important for staff, because they can save an assignment, and know that all students can have access to it, whether or not they have Office on their own laptop. Mind you, anecdotally, it appears that students are just as or more likely to have a current version of Office on their laptop than the version on campus machines.
Create PDF Document is something I have used quite a bit since discovering it – I can now take my Word document and turn it into something which is perceived to be more ‘professionally published’ because it’s a PDF. And it’s dead easy to use.
- Although it’s probably not something used every day for assignments, it’s great for staff when they’re publishing anything for external or internal readers.
PowerPoint has a new “Broadcast Slide Show” option, which takes your presentation and presents it live on a web page – with all the fancy animations and everything else. So now, if you’re delivering a lecture to more than just the students in the room, then everybody can be looking at the same thing, in high resolution and in real time, without needing any extra fancy software. All you do is share a weblink, and you’re ready to teach the world!
PowerPoint’s new video features will genuinely make staff smile, because it just makes working with video easier, so that lecturers can include video in their teaching more easily. You can now trim the parts of the video to display – selecting when to start and stop the video automatically. It’s a doddle, just using the ‘Trim Video’ option, and dragging the markers to the start and end position. This is brilliant if you’ve got a long video in your library (eg a TV programme) that you want to only show 2 minutes from. Videos are now embedded in your presentation by default, meaning that your one PowerPoint file has all the bits it needs to run, rather than having to remember to copy all the video files. And finally, you can now easily insert a video from websites like YouTube and TeacherTube just by clicking ‘Insert>Video>Video from Web Site’ and pasting in the embed code from the video.
- I read in the Times today that schools are considering spending up to £10,000 a year on a filtering system for YouTube that stops the comments and related films showing up on the page. I guess this is a cheaper alternative! Because you embed the YouTube video you want in your PowerPoint, and nothing else. Job done – no comments, no related films. Fixed.
There’s plenty more (if, like me, you live in your Outlook Inbox, there’s tons there that will make you happy too!). But the easiest way to discover what it can do is to download it, install it and give it a whirl. That way, you can work out whether it is something you want to build into your summer deployment plans (especially if you have a Campus Agreement, and you’re covered for new releases – it can help you to plan your free deployment!)
I wouldn’t advise you to do something I wouldn’t do myself. I’ve been running the early versions of Office 2010 since last September, and this beta version since November. It’s given me the confidence that it works, and I know I wouldn’t go back now.
PS If you’re going to do install it, can I highly recommend installing the Ribbon Hero too – and giving it to one of your least-innovative lecturers (the one that’s glued to their Office 2003 Menu, and doesn’t like the new Office Ribbon menus). Ask them to try it for a fortnight with Ribbon Hero, and see if they’ll go back!
A few years ago, when we first started the http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/further-education/products/live-at-edu.aspx email service, it was running on the same system as Hotmail. Since then we’ve moved it onto a completely Exchange-based system, which has actually been running Exchange 2010 for quite some time. And so I’d forgotten about Hotmail. But running cloud services at a massive scale requires quite a lot of work in the background, and I was surprised me when I read the “peek behind the scenes at Hotmail” article, on the Inside Windows Live blog, because there are some stunning stats about how Hotmail is now run:
- We deliver localised versions of Hotmail to 59 regional markets, in 36 languages*
- We host well over 1.3 billion inboxes.
- Over 350 million people are actively using Hotmail on a monthly basis.
- We handle over 3 billion messages a day and filter out over 1 billion spam messages.
- We are growing storage at over 2 petabytes a month (a petabyte is ~1 million gigabytes or ~1,000 terabytes).
- We currently have over 155 petabytes of storage deployed (70% of storage is taken up with attachments, typically photos).
- We’re the largest SQL Server 2008 deployment in the world (we monitor and manage many thousands of SQL servers).
And the team go on to describe how they keep all of that running, and how they keep the deployment of new storage and systems ahead of the demand for it. I can’t imagine adding 2 million gigabytes of storage every month. That’s an awful lot of disks!
Gizmodo have a nice graphic which tries to put a petabyte into scale – 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets, or 13.3 years of HD-TV. And it equates 50 petabytes to the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages. And there’s three times as much as that in the Hotmail data centres!
* As I mentioned, our Live@edu service actually runs on a different system. For example, data for UK customers is stored in our new Dublin datacentre, rather than outside of Europe or simply spread over a range of different worldwide data centres
My colleague Daniel Good, keeps a directory of all of the Microsoft team blogs – those that are run by, or on behalf of, Microsoft teams. It’s a really handy reference if you’ve got a burning interest in a subject, product or programme. It’s just been updated, and checking it out today I realised we have blogs for all kinds of stuff, like:
Of course, they’re not all as regularly updated as this one, or as beautiful 
. But I bet that 99% of them are more technical. And the ones I’ve highlighted answer about 1/3 of the regular questions I get asked (and especially “How do I get a job at Microsoft?” question).
For individual blogs, then take a look at the Microsoft Technical Communities website – as well as pointing towards all the places you can go to discuss and get self-help, the blogs page lets you search all of the blogs written by individual Microsoft people, with just one search box. I only found that today, but already I’m addicted.
I know, I know, this is an FE blog. BUT every now and again there’s something published in the HE community that is going to be useful for you. And some of the detail in these reports is really handy for reviewing your own ICT strategy in college.
The final report from the University of Northumbria, completed through the Eduserv-funded ‘Investigation into the uptake and use of Microsoft SharePoint by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)’ is now available for download. I’ve taken the key findings directly from the website:
- Most UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are using SharePoint to some extent (78% of the 40 UK HEIs interviewed in a telephone survey of IT Directors said that they were making some use of SharePoint)
- SharePoint’s rapid rise in the HE sector can be attributed to several factors: (i) the ease with which it can be procured; (ii) its wide variety of functionality the gap in the HE information environment for such a product; (iii) its devolution of a lot of power to local users which suits the federal culture of HEIs.
- Two distinct types of SharePoint implementation were discerned: organic (bottom-up) implementations and corporate (top-down) implementations
- Drivers for implementing SharePoint included: improving document management; supporting collaboration (internally and externally); improving an intranet or external website; targeting information to particular audiences; improving and automating cross-institution processes; providing a personalised portal for staff and students; bring together and managing data from different information systems in the HEI
- A range of critical success factors for SharePoint implementations were identified.
- With most HEIs already having a virtual learning environment (VLE) in place only two HEIs were found to be using SharePoint as a VLE; but SharePoint is being used in teaching and learning, particularly for functions such as group collaborative work, ad-hoc non-repeated courses, and work that cuts across different courses
- Several HEIs are using SharePoint to support collaborative research work with colleagues in other institutions; whilst there is plenty of scope for SharePoint to support research groups it will face strong competition from open source systems in this space.
The research is the first study into the use of SharePoint in UK HE, and was very comprehensive – it involved telephone interviews with 40 HEIs (mostly IT Directors and Project Managers); an online survey attracting 51 responses from 47 universities; three case studies; an online community consultation and a literature review. It was conducted in the summer and autumn of 2009, and one conclusions is that “2010-11 is likely to see significant development in the SharePoint space”
This study was funded under Eduserv’s Research Programme to improve HEIs’ understanding about the level and nature of interest in SharePoint and whether it is justified in terms of accepted good practice, and to enhance Eduserv’s understanding about the uptake and usage of SharePoint solutions in the UK HE community and influence their 2-3 year plans for service provision in line with their charitable mission.
You can download the SharePoint in Higher Education Final Report from the University of Northumbria website, as well as download all of the detailed appendices.
After reading a post on Dave Morrison’s blog (I have no idea whether he’s right or wrong about having bought fake software, but the pricing certainly seems too,too low!) I found out a bit more about the Product Identification Service that our licensing team run here in the UK.
It’s ideal if you’ve bought a copy of software (for example, if a student on your campus has a query, or a lecturer has just received a new computer with software) and although it looks legit, you think there might be something be wrong.
Basically, what you can do is send it in to our team, and they’ll check it out.
- If it is legitimate, they’ll send it straight back to you, along with a letter confirming it is genuine.
- If it is a fake copy, then they will replace it with a legitimate replacement.
Of course, this only applies to a single copy – if you’ve bought 100, we’re only going to send you one back!
Of course, it has to be a sophisticated fake – if you knew it was a fake when you were buying it, then we’re not going to swap it for a legitimate version! But if you’ve genuinely been taken in, then its your route to rescue!
Take a look at the “Product Identification Service” and perhaps keep a bookmark for it – even if you don’t need it, I’m sure one day a student might need your help.
What’s in it for you? Well, if somebody has scammed you, you get a full legit copy in return. (And avoid the risk of viruses & trojans that exist in fake copies, or the risk that at some future point your fake version stops running)
What’s in it for us? We get some help in trying to track down the suppliers of fake software, because it’s bad for us and our legitimate Microsoft partners.
It seems that one of the trendy topics discussed at education conferences these days is the combination of gaming and learning. Most of the time, it’s discussed in the context of the classroom or of students, but I’ve just learnt that we’ve now applied it to product training, in one of our experimental Office Labs releases
Today Microsoft Office Labs released Ribbon Hero, a free prototype app that works with Office 2007 and with Office 2010 beta. The new prototype is designed to test the effectiveness, feasibility and appeal of delivering Office training in a game-like setting. The heart of Ribbon Hero is a set of challenges that users play right in the Office applications. These challenges expose users to features that they might not be aware of and which can help users get their work done faster.
In addition, Ribbon Hero awards points for using both basic features, such as, Bold and Italic, and for using the features introduced in the challenges. Ribbon Hero does some analysis of the person’s usage patterns to prioritise the order in which it presents challenges.
And then to add the competitive element, Ribbon Hero integrates with Facebook so you can share your success (or in my case, failures) with your friends. Ribbon Hero offers to post an update to your Facebook profile when impressive point levels have been reached. This feature enables you to compare your success with Ribbon Hero with your friends and compete for bragging rights.
Ribbon Hero is a free download, and has got to be a big step up from conventional training ideas and manuals. And timely too, as Office 2010 approaches, it’s another useful tool to help with the migration from Office 2003.
You can read more about it on the Office Labs blog, or watch the short videos to see how it works.
And finally, to download free Office 2010 beta visit
www.microsoft.com/2010
Ever since Windows 7 was launched, I’ve had a steady stream of people asking me if I know of educational establishments who have implemented DirectAccess.
DirectAccess allows you to setup your staff laptops so that they can always have secure access to your college network wherever they are, but without forcing them to use a VPN connection. There are a number of benefits for colleges and staff:
- Unlike a VPN connection, it only reroutes some network access through your network connection, not all Internet access. Which means it doesn’t slow down or filter normal Internet access at home from the laptop.
- It is transparent to the user – so they just access a network share or VLE folder as they normally would, just as if they are in college.
- It can be used with two-factor security (eg a smartcard) so that it meets Becta’s guidance for colleges on remote access to sensitive student data
- It minimises the amount of sensitive data that your staff put on their laptop. This could save you getting into hot water with the Information Commissioner’s Office if a laptop goes missing.
- You can manage your laptops through policies, even if they are rarely connected to your college network
Although I use it myself (and as a user, I’m a big fan of it, because VPN access used to be slow, and I’d avoid VPN’ing as much as possible) I don’t know of any colleges that have implemented it fully.
So I thought that perhaps I should share some resources to help people who are experimenting.
A short video introduction to DirectAccess
There’s a 2 minute video demonstration of it which you can download, which shows how very simple it is for the user.
DirectAccess webcast
View the TechNet DirectAccess webcast home page
In this webcast, John Baker from the TechNet team focuses on the DirectAccess feature in the Windows 7 operating system, which provides secure anywhere access on the network. We explore how DirectAccess makes it easier for IT professionals to manage the network infrastructure and how it helps reduces IT costs. We also discuss how DirectAccess works and how to set up and configure DirectAccess in the network infrastructure. The session includes demonstrations on how to setup and configure DirectAccess on Windows 7-based clients and the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.
Networking Enhancements Whitepaper
There’s a whitepaper, called (takes deep breath) “Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Networking Enhancements for Enterprises” which takes a detailed look at new networking technologies in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, with particular emphasis on enhancements to improve connectivity for a mobile workforce. New features and enhancments including DirectAccess, BranchCache, VPN Reconnect, mobile broadband device support, URL-based QoS, DNSSEC, and support for green computing.
There’s a lot of technical details on DirectAccess (and a lot of acronyms like IPv6, IPsec and 56-bit key encryption) on page 5-6 of this whitepaper
Infrastructure and Planning Guide for DirectAccess
The TechNet site has a growing series of Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for all kinds of areas – virtualisation, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Online Services and the Optimised Desktop. The one that’s relevant is the IPD Guide for DirectAccess in Windows 7.
Want more on DirectAccess?
Head to the TechNet DirectAccess page, for a big bundle of further documents and information that will help.
And if you’ve implemented it in your college, then drop me a line or add a comment, to share your story.
I keep an eye on the Information Commissioner’s Office press releases on their website (in the hope that we’re not going to see schools appearing too often), where I suspect they have a busy Press Officer producing a constant stream of news (last 2 weeks : Recruitment firms fined; mobile phone customers record sold illegally; Primary Care Trusts break the law; One third of data security breaches result from burglary and theft).
On Thursday I saw that the ICO announced that it’s latest publication “demystifies data protection”.
It even quoted Stephen Alambritis, Head of Public Affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses:
Small businesses do not have time for pages and pages of jargon and gobbledegook, but getting data protection right makes good business sense. Data protection lapses cost reputations and can affect the bottom line. But, many organisations tell us that data protection law is difficult to understand. This new
no-nonsense guide will help the business community to understand and comply with the law
It even promised to demystify plainly wrong stories, such as “It is illegal to take photographs of your children in their nativity play at school.” (It points out “The Data Protection Act does not prevent parents taking photographs of their children and friends participating in school events.”)
Well, after all the mystery that has surrounded information security in the public sector, I jumped straight over to the new guide, and downloaded the PDF version, with high hopes.
As a positive, it’s definitely written in plain English. Which is a relief after so many migraine-inducing data protection documents.
And there are many specific examples which are really useful to help understand it all. So if your job gets close to protecting data, then this is a must read.
But it runs to 92 pages. 92 pages for an easy-to-understand guide? One to pass to the Head I think!
Also a great source of facts to shout at the telly/newspaper with next time you see one of those idiotic data protection stories…
The Microsoft UK Education team has a dozen people in it (surprised?) who are focused full-time on education – across schools, colleges and universities. Which means that we’re awfully busy and spread across many, many things all the time. But fortunately we have the help of other similar teams around the world, and a much bigger team in our offices in America. Sometimes we produce work for the rest of the world (like the Innovative Schools case studies, focusing on journeys of innovation and the lessons that innovative schools have learnt on their way), and sometimes the work flows the other way – towards us.
One of the things that has been done as part of the worldwide Partners in Learning programme is The Scaling Framework – an interactive tool that helps analyse how you move an innovation from being something done by 1 or 2 people, to making it widespread.
It made me think of two specific cases where today there is a challenge of scaling innovation. The first is Virtual Learning Environments, where it is proving to be difficult to take good practice from one lecturer/department/college to the whole system. And the other is taking an innovative ICT teaching initiative and spreading it to other departments.
The Scaling Framework is a simple interactive tool that explains the five dimensions of scale, and then digs down into areas such as “Traps to Avoid” and “Next Steps to Explore”.
You can either us this as an individual, or pop it up on your whiteboard next time you’re holding a leadership team meeting, and explore interactively.
Take a look at the interactive Scaling Framework, and see if it can help you
I was interested in the “Spread” dimension – and the trap to avoid: “Developers should realise a somewhat less powerful innovation that reaches much greater numbers of use is a step forward”. We were talking about this at lunchtime today, discussing a new piece of software for teachers which may only appeal to innovators, meaning that the majority of users won’t be affected by it. So is it better to try and promote something a little less innovative, but likely to be used by more people?
Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 have all reached the Beta milestone and are now available for download.
Remember how sometimes you felt smug when you were running Windows 7 Beta at least 6 months before your colleagues and friends? Well, you can feel it once again!
What’s new in the Office system?
On Monday 9 November, Microsoft Exchange 2010 became the first product launch in wave of innovation across the Office system. The first half of 2010 will see this wave continue with the release of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 .
- Microsoft Office 2010 provides rich and powerful new ways to deliver work. New features include enhanced tools, customisable templates, photo editing and the ability to work with multiple people from different locations at the exact same time using new co-authoring capabilities. By offering more ways to access files from virtually anywhere, Office 2010 gives users greater control. Learn More
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010 enables organisations to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features. SharePoint 2010 facilitates business collaboration in its broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners and customers to work together in new and effective ways. Learn More
- Microsoft Project 2010 provides teams and organisations of all sizes with the right project collaboration tools, and a pathway to step up to more advanced Project and Portfolio Management capabilities as their needs evolve. Learn More
- The advanced diagramming tools of Microsoft Visio 2010 help you simplify complexity with intuitive and professional-looking diagrams, dynamic and data-driven visuals and new ways to share these on the Web in real-time. Learn More
In addition, with this beta we are unveiling several new features and products:
- Office Web Apps for business customers, available through SharePoint Server, allows SharePoint sites to host browser-based Web Apps accessible from virtually anywhere.
To me, this is one of the most significant developments of SharePoint 2010 – you can provide Office applications, from your SharePoint server, to your students whether they are on campus or off. Which means they can start a piece of work on campus using Office on a library computer, and then continue it at home using their laptop or home PC – either using Office if they have it, or Office Web Apps in a browser.
- Outlook Social Connector, a new feature that brings communications history and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.
Happy downloading
XMA and Toshiba have launched a competition, called “The next Bill Gates”. In a world of competitions and campaigns all the time, it’s a bit of a “does what it says on the tin” competition. It’s for students who’ll be applying for university next year, and students enter by recording a 60-second video answering the question “Why are you the next Bill Gates?”
The prize is £3,500 of tuition fees, a Toshiba laptop and a summer 2010 placement with XMA.
As far as I know, it has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but darn, why weren’t we quicker thinking of this idea :-) Every year we take in about 80 interns for a full year as well as offering work experience for pupils from local schools, but hadn’t thought of offering it as the chance to become the next Bill Gates…
The TechNet site has a growing series of Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for all kinds of areas – virtualisation, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Online Services and the Optimised Desktop.
The one that jumped out as me was the IPD Guide for DirectAccess in Windows 7. This is especially useful in colleges, where you have staff who are as likely to need access to your network from home as they are in college (especially if you have a large number of part time staff).
With DirectAccess, your users can have access to your college network without having to use a VPN or Remote Access setup – whenever they have access to the internet from their college laptop, they have access to your network. To get this level of convenience without compromising security means that you need to setup your network carefully, and the IPD guide is designed to help with that.
The Infrastructure Planning and Design series guide for DirectAccess provides actionable guidance for designing a DirectAccess infrastructure. The guide’s easy-to-follow, four-step process gives a straightforward explanation of the infrastructure required for clients to be connected from the Internet to resources on the corporate network, whether or not the organization has begun deploying IPv6.
You can download the Direct Access Guide here
On the same subject, you may find the IPD Guide for Network Access Protection useful too, as it talks you through the ways that you can allow students and staff to connect their own laptops to your network without compromising security. In an environment where students are increasingly arriving with their own laptop, it allows you to save money and improve capabilities.
