Connect with Tech∙Ed Europe

Bookmark the link (http://europe.msteched.com/default.aspx) and watch the event live!

• Watch the Tech∙Ed Europe keynote online at 16:00-17:30 local time (GMT +1) on 8-Nov.
• The TechNet Edge team will be broadcasting live from the Expo Hall starting at 9:30 local time (GMT +1) on 9-Nov.  Detailed schedule and guest list to be posted on TechNet Edge.
• Bookmark the link to the Flickr stream and see the latest photos from the event.

TEE Website

Get the latest IT Pro content and interviews on TechNet Edge. The Edge team will be broadcasting live from the event!

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 now delivers complete presence, instant messaging, conferencing and enterprise voice capabilities through a single, easy-to-use interface that is consistent across PC, browser, and mobile device. Administrators benefit from a single, consistent management infrastructure, new capabilities to increase availability, and interoperability with existing systems.

Unified Experience

• Get easy access to presence, instant messaging, voice, and audio, video, and Web conferencing—all from the new Microsoft Lync 2010.
• Use one set of contacts across Microsoft Lync 2010 and Office applications.
• Communicate with context from within the applications you use most, including Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint.
• Deliver access to presence, instant messaging, and other capabilities for workers on the go via PCs, browsers, and mobile phones.

Connect and Collaborate

• Find the right people, make connections, and communicate more effectively with new rich presence features including pictures and location.
• Leverage internal expertise more effectively with Microsoft SharePoint-based Skill Search.

Simple, Essential, Reliable Conferencing

• Collaborate more effectively with built-in desktop and application sharing, PowerPoint upload, and rich white boarding, including the ability to copy and paste images and other content.
• Schedule and join meetings with a single click in Microsoft Outlook or the meeting reminder.
• Place attendees in a virtual lobby for greater security and control over who can attend.

Complete Enterprise Voice Features

• Delight your users with the features they need, a wide range of IP and USB devices, and the ability to work in the office, at home, or on the road.
• Architect your deployment for high availability using data center resiliency and survivable branch appliances.
• Manage bandwidth utilization and increase Quality of Experience with Call Admission Control, QoS markings, and an adaptive media stack that works well even on unmanaged networks like the Internet.
• Meet North American regulatory requirements with flexible Enhanced 9-1-1 capability.

Powerful Deployment and Management Tools

• Work with a PowerShell-based foundation for administration consistent with Exchange Server, Active Directory, and other Microsoft server products.
• Get consolidated management tasks in one location with dramatically improved navigation through the new Silverlight-based, scenario -driven unified graphical management tool.
• Improve security and administrative productivity with Role-based Access Control (RBAC) with built-in and customer-defined roles.
• Get support for server virtualization of most OCS roles.

Extensibility

• Easily embed Microsoft Lync UI elements in your applications, build your own client experience in .NET with open and documented APIs, and enhance contextual collaboration by launching applications right from Microsoft Lync.
• Get platform support for sophisticated contact center and help desk scenarios, enable access to all UC-enabled services from any phone, and deliver state-of-the-art speech technology in 26 languages.
• Significantly simplify deployment, operations, and interoperability with added features that improve provisioning, load-balancing, fail-over, and draining.

Microsoft has also planned a worldwide launch event on Wednesday, November 17, 2010.  To access the launch event, visit http://www.microsoft.com/lync to watch live demos of the final product, see examples from the more than 100 new Lync certified devices and hear from customers who have deployed early releases of Lync 2010.

Date: 9/14/10 | Time: 1 pm PST
Title: Search Your Way to Success:  Leveraging SharePoint’s Search Capabilities in Public Web Sites
Partner: Ironworks Consulting

Learning Objectives & Key Takeaways: Objective 1: Understand the key principles of enterprise search. Objective 2: Understand the evolution of search within SharePoint (2007 to 2010). Objective 3: Learn how to optimize search for SharePoint sites. Summary: The enterprise search capabilities built in to SharePoint provide an easy win for organizations seeking to achieve a quick return on their SharePoint investment. This technical deep dive will include a discussion of search configuration best practices, strategies for maximizing SharePoint’s capabilities, and simple customizations that can take your search experience to the next level. Special Offer from Ironworks: Ironworks has free certified consulting days set aside for attendees of this webinar.  Reach out to Ironworks (salescontactus@ironworks.com) to find out what consulting help you may qualify for at no cost to you. About Ironworks Consulting Ironworks is a management, IT and web consulting firm with one mission – never fail a client.  Ironworks offers expertise to clients nationwide in the practice areas of Strategy and Program Management, Business Process Improvement, User Experience, Content Management, Portal Solutions, Enterprise Search, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Business Intelligence.  Headquartered in Richmond, Va., Ironworks also operates from offices in Tysons Corner, Va., Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., and Minneapolis, Minn.  For more information, visit http://www.ironworks.com/.

Registration:   https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032458983&Culture=en-US

Date: 9/21/10 | Time: 1 pm PST
Title: Engaging Users with Content-Driven Web Sites Powered by SharePoint and FAST
Partner:  PointBridge

Content: it’s what attracts visitors to your web site and, more importantly, it’s what keeps them coming back. In this webinar, we’ll see how technologies from Microsoft enable an organization to easily publish information to the web and then allow visitors to interact with the content on their sites. Specifically, we’ll cover: (1) Content management and publishing processes, (2) More than just pages: rich content in SharePoint, (3) Creating search experiences that users love, (4) Pushing content to users dynamically: using search in new way. This webinar will showcase the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint to act as powerful engines for powering Internet growth.

Registration:  https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032459051&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 helps you achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that help to simplify your administration, protect your communications, and delight your customers by meeting their demands for greater business mobility.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=50b32685-4356-49cc-8b37-d9c9d4ea3f5b

System Requirements

· Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit; Windows Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise; Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise; Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard; Windows Vista 64-bit Editions Service Pack 1

Exchange Server 2010 SP1 System Requirements and Prerequisites
This SP1 software may be used to both update an existing Exchange 2010 installation to Service Pack 1 (SP1) and perform new installations.
For information about Exchange 2010 system requirements and prerequisites, see the following topics:

· Exchange 2010 System Requirements

· Exchange 2010 Prerequisites

Actual requirements will vary based on system configuration and specific features installed. For more detailed system requirements, please refer to the Exchange Server 2010 Technical Documentation Library. For a list of Windows Server 2008 requirements, visit http://technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2008.

MIX Online has released a new Azure-hosted lab called The Archivist. The Archivist allows you to create archives of Twitter topics that you can save, export and analyze.

There are now over 50,000,000 tweets being created each day. But, tweets are transitory. Twitter itself doesn’t allow access into their database more than two weeks – and for a trending topic, one may not be able to access tweets older than 24 hours. Enter The Archivist, a new lab from Mix Online. It is a website that allows people to archive, analyze and export tweets.

The Archivist can create archives of tweets equivalent to any search done at http://search.twitter.com.  What is the difference between searching directly on Twitter versus searching from The Archivist?  Well, once you save a search from The Archivist, your search will continue to run, day and night, every day, every night, creating an archive for you based on that search.

Once you have started an archive, The Archivist data mines on your behalf, providing six visualizations that offer insight into a given archive of tweets. Any additional data mining you’d like to do can be done by exporting and saving the entire archive, to be manipulated in a program such as Excel.

• Is this a replacement for Bing or Twitter as a Twitter search tool?
  • No. Bing and Twitter are excellent search engines, but The Archivist’s main features are the ability to save, export, and analyze tweets based on a search. The Archivist will also continue to update your archive.
• How long will you store my tweets?
  • As long as you log in within 60 days of your last log in, we will continue to store your tweets.
• Hey, I looked at search.twitter.com and The Archivist and they do not match exactly, what’s up?
  • There’s probably nothing wrong. We’ve found a great resource for explaining the limitations of Twitter search.
• Why did you use Azure?
  • We wanted to take advantage of our cloud offering and the functionality it gave us. It provided background services, scaling, monitoring, database and more.
• Hey, this is cool, can I build my own version of The Archivist?
  • Absolutely. With all MIX Online labs, we make the code and design assets available for folks to peruse and use in their own apps. In fact, you can also contribute to the project if you like. For more information, please visit the Developers’ page. It will help you get started building services and applications using The Archivist and it’s codebase.
• What is MIX Online?
  • MIX Online (at http://visitmix.com) is a community site for Designers, Developers and Web Builders. MIX Online provides insights from our team and other industry pros with articles and opinions; free, open source, ready-to-download prototypes and tools from our labs; and we host, speak at and attend lots of industry events.
• What is a MIX Online Lab?
  • A Lab is a free, open source, ready-to-download tool or website prototype. Labs are not official products from Microsoft (e.g. Microsoft Office, MSN, etc.). Check out our other Labs we have built on our Labs page.

Can’t make it down to South Africa to watch the games? No worries, the Bing Home Turf Finder has you covered! You can find out where to watch matches around the Seattle area and across the US with our new Bing map app.

In select cities, we populated a Bing map app with venue information such as name, country affiliation, special hours and website info courtesy of Thrillist  while you can use the Foursquare API to display current check-ins and venue tips. In addition, with the World Cup Bing Badge Program on Foursquare, Bing will award a Bing badge to users and also provide incentives during game time at select local venues.

Find your place to watch the games now on The Bing Home Turf Finder map app.

• Instant Answers: Try World Cup
• Schedules/fixtures: Try World Cup Fixtures
• Standings: Try world cup group b standings
• Teams & Players: Try England World Cup
• Visual Search – Teams Gallery: Try World Cup Teams
• World Cup Map App: Try Bing Map Apps
• Facebook Fan App: Try Bing Fan Flair

It’s wonderful to learn that media giant Tribune Company is betting on Windows Azure to help bring the company into the digital age by providing targeted content to its online readers and increased opportunities for advertisers.

Since 1847, the American Public has relied on Tribune for its news. Today, the newspaper industry faces declining readership and a tough economy. In order to stay relevant in today’s digital age, Tribune found it crucial to adopt Windows Azure to enable the company to transform from a traditional media company to an interactive and digital media company that embraces innovative technologies such as cloud computing.

Tribune is truly a media giant; it operates 8 newspapers (including LA Times and Chicago Tribune), 23 television stations and 50 websites that receive 6.1 billion page views per month. Managing these properties required that Tribune operate 32 data centers, 4,000 servers, 75,000 feet of raised floor — Windows Azure presents Tribune with an opportunity to cut the 1.5 million in annual costs spent on managing their existing infrastructure and allow for additional growth opportunities.

Expression Studio 4 has a wealth of new features to make it easier than ever to create engaging user experiences for the Web, the desktop, mobile devices, & Silverlight. All of the products now support Silverlight 4 and .NET 4 as well as the following specific new features in each of the products.

Expression Blend 4 New Features include:

• VS2010 compatibility
• Windows Phone support
• Deeper Adobe Photoshop import (layer effects)
• New behaviors & conditional behaviors
• Enhanced sample data support
• Listbox path layout for designing with data
• Pixel Shader effects (including animations)
• Easier styling and customization
• Model View View-Model support

Expression Web 4 New Features include

• SEO Reporting from inside of the application
• New extensibility model enables creating add-ins with HTML, JS, and CSS
• New SuperPreview online service beta for browser compatibility testing now supports Macintosh Safari

Expression Encoder 4 Pro New features include

• Live Smooth Streaming (VC-1 & H.264)
• New H.264 encoder from MainConcept
• Enhanced Screen Capture
• DRM (PlayReady) for Live Content

FREE UPGRADE

Microsoft is offering a free upgrade to users of version of Expression Studio 3 and Expression Web 3. Once version 4 trial versions are available, you can download and install the trial and Expression will find the version 3 license on your hard. Once the version 3 license is found, the version 4 trial will be automatically converted to full product with no expiration. Note that this is true only for customers who have obtained their version 3 products via FPP or ESD.

For customers who have received their version 3 products through Microsoft programs (MSDN, MAPS, Bizspark, Websitespark, etc.), please download the version 4 products from the respective program download sites.

Did you Know? A Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics fact sheet.

- Over 25% of the entire population of Norway viewed the Olympics using Silverlight for an average of 111 minutes each viewing!

- Host nation Canada’s CTV saw 4 million visitors consume over 6 PetaBytes, or 7 million hours of video, peaking at over 130,000 concurrent viewers. Viewers watched videos on the site for an average of 111 minutes per visit – unprecedented and great news for broadcasters and advertisers alike. [Read More]

- In the United States, NBC built on its experiences using Silverlight for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and NFL Sunday Night Football. For the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, they provided live and on-demand video to an online audience of 16 million viewers, while also delivering a very sophisticated and efficient ad platform to its sponsors, making the best use of planned and spontaneous opportunities for ad insertion. [Read More]

- More than 1 in 4 of Norway’s 4.8 million citizens showed their enthusiasm for winter sports by tuning into the 720p, HD, IIS Smooth Streaming experience delivered by Norway’s NRK. Viewers liked what they saw; consuming over a million hours of video in total and an average of 78 minutes each visit. [Read More]

- Since broadcast HD TV is relatively new in France, France Télévisions used the opportunity to bring the HD experience to a younger generation who, in many cases, prefer to consume video on a computer. With previous successes using Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming to broadcast the Roland Garros Tennis Championships and the Tour de France cycling race, France Télévisions knew it could deliver a multi-platform, high quality live and on-demand video experience for the Olympics. With only two weeks to the event and not a single line of code written, the Silverlight Media Framework allowed FranceTV to deliver the player on schedule, resulting in an amazing average viewing time of 64 minutes. [Read More]

The official Silverlight Team Blog

• CTV Casestudy
• NRK Casestudy
• FranceTV Casestudy
• Behind the scenes video

Microsoft Desktop Player aggregates content across various Microsoft properties and maps it to your role as a developer, IT Pro and IT Adoption lifecycle. Also if you configure the local settings you get local IT resources like your Developer or IT Evangelist in your area, local user groups, local training resources to get your certification etc.

(In Phase I the local settings are US only)

In addition it streams breaking news from MSDN/TechNet to the desktop player. One additional advantage for site publishers is it can be embedded in their sites to give their readers rich content via the embedded player.

You can check it out at:

• Online: www.microsoft.com/click/desktopplayer
• Downloadable version:  http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/4/5/645D41E4-C48A-431D-9EAC-73D1A1901D29/MicrosoftDesktopPlayer.msi