A great BUILD session hosted by Mark Russinovich which gives you the internals of Windows Azure OS.

I suggest to view the HQ WMV edition of the video so you can see the screen captures and command consoles clearly

• MP4 (iPod, Zune HD)
• Mid Quality WMV (Lo-band, Mobile)
• High Quality WMV (PC, XBox, MCE)

Mark Russinovich goes under the hood of Microsoft’s new cloud OS . Intended for developers that have already gotten their hands dirty with Windows Azure and understand its basic concepts, this session gives an inside look at the architectural design of Windows Azure’s compute platform. You’ll learn about Microsoft’s data center architecture, what goes on behind the scenes when you deploy and update a Windows Azure app and how it monitors and responds to the health of machines, its own components and the apps it hosts.

View in browser

Nice visual timeline of the Windows 8 development process. So with Sinofsky’s reputation I expect that May 2012 can be a realistic RTM date.

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Traditional antimalware software plays a critical role in defending and remediating attacks. However, reputation-based technologies can help provide effective protection against social engineering attacks before traditional antimalware signatures are available, especially against malware that pretends to be legitimate software programs.

Windows 8 will help protect users with reputation-based technologies when launching applications as well as browsing with Internet Explorer.

Since its release, the SmartScreen filter has used URL reputation to help protect Internet Explorer customers from more than 1.5 billion attempted malware attacks and over 150 million attempted phishing attacks. Application reputation, a new feature added to SmartScreen in Internet Explorer 9, provides an additional layer of defense to help you make a safer decision when URL reputation and traditional antimalware aren’t enough to catch the attack. Telemetry data shows 95% of Internet Explorer 9 users are choosing to delete or not run malware when they receive a SmartScreen application reputation warning.

Microsoft understands that Internet Explorer isn’t the only way users download applications from the Internet, so Windows now uses SmartScreen to perform an application reputation check the first time you launch applications that come from the Internet.

In Windows 7 when launching these downloaded applications, users get the following notification:

In Windows 8, SmartScreen will only notify users when you run an application that has not yet established a reputation and therefore is a higher risk:

The user experience for applications with an established reputation is simple and clean: users just click and run, removing the prompt users would have seen in Windows 7.

SmartScreen uses a marker placed on files at download time to trigger a reputation check. All major web browsers and many mail clients, and IM services already add this marker, known as the “mark of the web,” to downloaded files.

Microsoft expects average users to see a SmartScreen prompt less than twice per year and when they do see it, it will signify a higher risk scenario. Telemetry data shows 92% of applications downloaded via Internet Explorer 9 already have an established reputation and show no warnings. The same data shows that when an application reputation warning is shown, the risk of getting a malware infection by running it is 25-70%. And SmartScreen has administrative controls to prevent the non-techie friends or children from ignoring these warnings.

Here’s a video that shows you Windows Defender and SmartScreen URL and application reputation in action:

High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

According to Microsoft Windows 8 blog, Windows Defender in Windows 8 will include real-time anti-virus protection. Currently Windows Defender protects the system from adware and spyware.

For anti-virus Microsoft now has Security Essentials, with Windows 8 it seems the products will finally be merged in to one product. If this impacts anti-trust issues remains to be seen. In my opinion Microsoft is entitled to protect their own product and customers.

Microsoft announced more ant-malware enhancements in protection and performance:

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). ASLR was first introduced in Windows Vista and works by randomly shuffling the location of most code and data in memory to block assumptions that the code and data are at same address on all PCs. In Windows 8, we extended ASLR’s protection to more parts of Windows and introduced enhancements such as increased randomization that will break many known techniques for circumventing ASLR.

Windows kernel. In Windows 8, we bring many of the mitigations to the Windows kernel that previously only applied to user-mode applications. These will help improve protection against some of the most common type of threats. For example, we now prevent user-mode processes from allocating the low 64K of process memory, which prevents a whole class of kernel-mode NULL dereference vulnerabilities from being exploited. We also added integrity checks to the kernel pool memory allocator to mitigate kernel pool corruption attacks.

Windows heap. Applications get dynamically allocated memory from the Windows user-mode heap. Major redesign of the Windows 8 heap adds significant protection in the form of new integrity checks to help defend against many exploit techniques. In addition, the Windows heap now randomizes the order of allocations so that exploits cannot depend on the predictable placement of objects—the same principle that makes ASLR successful. We also added guard pages to certain types of heap allocations, which helps prevent exploits that rely on overrunning the heap.

Internet Explorer. “Use-after-free” vulnerabilities represented nearly 75% of the vulnerabilities reported in Internet Explorer over the last two years. For Windows 8, we implemented guards in Internet Explorer to prevent an attacker from crafting an invalid virtual function table, making these attacks more difficult. Internet Explorer will also take full advantage of the ASLR improvements provided by Windows 8.

Windows Defender.:

The improvements to Windows Defender will help protect you from all types of malware, including viruses, worms, bots and rootkits by using the complete set of malware signatures from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, which Windows Update will deliver regularly along with the latest Microsoft antimalware engine. This expanded set of signatures is a significant improvement over previous versions, which only included signatures for spyware, adware, and potentially unwanted software.

In addition, Windows Defender will now provide you with real-time detection and protection from malware threats using a file system filter, and will interface with Windows secured boot, another new Window 8 protection feature.

When you use a PC that supports UEFI-based Secure Boot (defined in the UEFI 2.3.1 specification), Windows secured boot will help ensure that all firmware and firmware updates are secure, and that the entire Windows boot path up to the antimalware driver has not been tampered with. It does this by loading only properly signed and validated code in the boot path. This helps ensure that malicious code can’t load during boot or resume, and helps to protect you against boot sector and boot loader viruses, as well as bootkit and rootkit malware that try to load as drivers.

The same interfaces for secured boot used by Windows Defender, as well as all APIs used by Windows Defender, are available for use by our antimalware partners to deliver additional protection to Windows customers.

• Improved user experience. We have designed Windows Defender to be unobtrusive for most daily usage, and will notify you only when you need to perform an action, or critical information demands your attention. Windows Defender will also use the new Windows 8 maintenance scheduler to limit interruptions.
• Improved performance. Traditional antimalware technologies are well known for impacting system performance. It’s not uncommon that running antimalware software doubles the amount of time required for core scenarios like file copy and boot. As you read in last week’s blog entry, we have a lot of people working on system performance and Windows Defender dramatically improves performance on all key scenarios compared to common antimalware solutions on Windows 7, while maintaining strong protection. For example, Windows Defender with its full protection functionality enabled adds only 4% to boot time, while dramatically reducing CPU time during boot by 75%, disk I/O by around 50MB, and peak working set by around 100MB.

These same improvements benefit energy efficiency, meaning Windows Defender consumes less power, and gives you longer battery life.

Antimalware partners can participate during the Windows 8 development process so you have the best possible Windows PC experience no matter what antimalware solution you choose. We provide them with resources, such as the technical details of how we architected the performance improvements for Windows Defender, so they have the opportunity to make similar improvements to their products.

Protecting you from malware - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

the Windows 8 developer preview is out, now you can install this in a virtual machine to try it out, but it is more fun to run it direct on your hardware. However this build is pre-beta, so not ready to do all your daily “ production” work on. You can solve this by dual booting, but it is cooler to boot of a VHD! Booting from VHD was introduced in Windows 7.Now there are several methods on the Internet to make this work, I have found this procedure so the procedure is the simplest and quickest.

No need to use WAIK, DISM, x-image, sysprep, WIM2VHD. Even no need for BCEDIT!

In short:

• Boot from the Win8dev DVD or USB
• When in setup the disk selection appears where to install to you press SHIFT-F10
• A cmd window appears.
• Now your drive letters may have shifted so do some DIR commands where you want the put the VHD file also choose a volume that has enough free space.
• Then run diskpart:
  • create vdisk file=d:\win8dev.vhd type=expandable maximum=50000 (for better performance do not use expandable, but creating the VHD may take some time.
    I choose about 50 GB in size
  • select vdisk file=d:\win8dev.vhd
  • attach vdisk
• Now alt-tab back to the disk selection window and click refresh, the VHD volume should appear, select it to install Windows in it.
• Click next, Windows will install and reboot into next phase of Windows 8 setup
• After another reboot the new Metro style boot menu appears where you can choose to boot from Windows 8 or Windows 7. Advanced options lets you set the default and change timeout. Also troubleshooting options are here.
• The default is Windows 8 and it will run direct on your hardware

A bit longer guide but with screenshots is here:

www.hanselman.com

Today at its developer-focused BUILD conference, Microsoft Corp. showcased a detailed preview of the next major release of Windows, code-named “Windows 8.” The company also detailed new tools for developers to help write applications for more than 1 billion people around the world who use Windows every day.

“We reimagined Windows,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, in his keynote address to the thousands of developers in attendance. “From the chipset to the user experience, Windows 8 brings a new range of capabilities without compromise.”

The company also highlighted a variety of new features in Windows 8, including the following:

Touch-First User Interface

• Metro style. Windows 8 introduces a new Metro style interface built for touch, which shows information important to you, embodies simplicity and gives you control. The Metro style UI is equally at home with a mouse and keyboard as well.

• Touch-first browsing, not just browsing on a touch device. Providing a fast and fluid touch-browsing experience, Internet Explorer 10 puts sites at the center on new Windows 8 devices.

More Ways to Engage With Powerful, Connected Apps

• Powered by apps. Metro style apps built for Windows 8 are the focal point of your experience, filling your entire screen so there are no distractions.

• Apps can work together. Apps communicate with each other in Windows 8. For example, you can easily select and email photos from different places, such as Facebook, Flickr or on your hard drive.

• Your experience syncs across your devices. Live roams all the content from the cloud services you use most — photos, email, calendar and contacts — keeping them up-to-date on your devices. With SkyDrive, you can access your files, photos and documents from virtually anywhere with any browser or with Metro style apps in Windows 8.

Enhanced Fundamentals

• The best of Windows 7, only better. Windows 8 is built on the rock-solid foundation of Windows 7, delivering improvements in performance, security, privacy and system reliability. Windows 8 reduces the memory footprint needed — even on the lowest-end hardware — leaving more room for your apps.

• Preserving power-user favorites and making them better. For those who push the limits of their PC, Windows 8 features an enhanced Task Manager and Windows Explorer and new, flexible options for multimonitor setups.

New Developer Opportunities

• Windows Store. The Windows Store will allow developers to sell their apps anywhere Windows is sold worldwide, whether they’re creating new games or familiar productivity tools.

• Build using more languages. Windows 8 lets you leverage your existing skills and code assets to create great experiences using the programming language you prefer.

• Rich hardware integration leads to richer experiences — particularly for games. DirectX 11 gaming power underlies Windows 8, allowing the easy creation of full-screen games with smooth, flicker-free action.

New Generation of Hardware

• One Windows — many shapes and sizes. Support for ARM-based chipsets, x86 (as well as x32 and x64) devices, touch and sensors means Windows 8 works beautifully across a spectrum of devices, from 10-inch tablets and laptops to all-in-ones with 27-inch high-definition screens.

• Always connected. With Windows 8, new ultrathin PCs and tablets turn on instantly, run all day on a single charge and stay connected to the Internet so your PC is ready when you are. Next-generation system on a chip (SoC) support will also enable greatly extended standby and low-power states.

• Tap the full power of your PC. Windows 8 runs on PCs and is compatible with the devices and programs you use today on Windows 7, without compromise, to deliver the performance you expect of a PC.

We are confirming that we will be bringing Xbox LIVE to the PC with Xbox LIVE on Windows. We are very excited about Xbox LIVE coming to Windows 8. Xbox LIVE brings your games, music, movies, and TV shows to your favorite Microsoft and Windows devices. Bringing Xbox LIVE to Windows 8 is part of our vision to bring you all the entertainment you want, shared with the people you care about, made easy. At BUILD we are showing that it is easy for developers to create games for Windows 8 that take advantage of the power of Xbox LIVE. We have much more detail to share about the capabilities of Xbox LIVE on Windows and look forward to the opportunity to do so in the near future.

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In a nutshell, it allows you to reach across your PC’s as if they were part of one single desktop. I have two PCs on my desk at work connected to 3 LCD screens and using Mouse Without Borders I can move my mouse between the 3 screens, even though one of them is attached to a different PC from the other two. What’s more, I can move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another. In fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local collection of pictures I regularly use it to have one PC dedicated to social media streams while I work away on my other PC connected to two screens. The video above both explains and shows Mouse Without Borders far better than I can using words. The project is testament to the power of The Garage which helped Truong develop the user interface and setup the usability tests that have helped the tool become very accessible and easy to use. As well as that, The Garage and its regular Science Fairs inside Microsoft helped expose the project to 9,000 people before it was ready for external release. Now that day has arrived and I’m delighted to announce here on Next at Microsoft that Mouse Without Borders is ready for download.

Download Now [1.1mb]

More info: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2011/09/09/microsoft-garage-download-mouse-without-borders.aspx

News via: www.activewin.com

File server capacity planning and performance troubleshooting are critical aspects of high-level network administration. File server capacity planning tools can be valuable in choosing new hardware for purchase, identifying the capacity of existing hardware, locating existing bottlenecks, and planning for resource expansion in advance of resource exhaustion.

The throughput capacity of a file server can be expressed either as the maximum number of operations per second or a maximum number of users supported by the configuration. These values are influenced by several factors, some of which include processor speed, available memory, disk speed, network throughput and latency, and the speed with which SMB requests are processed.

This release is an updated release to v1.0. It includes support of File Server in the Windows Clustering configuration. Windows Clustering allows system to be built with redundancy, which provides high availability to tolerate hardware failures. With a two node clustering, you could setup more than one virtual file server instance, and have FSCT clients run load against all the instances. In this release, a new section “Running FSCT against a singleton Windows Cluster” will describe the setup and steps for running against a Windows Cluster.

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Windows 8 boots under 10 seconds on most PC’s trick is to resume from a hibernated kernel session:

….in a traditional shutdown, we close all of the user sessions, and in the kernel session we close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

See video: High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

See full atrticle:

Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8 - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

In this post we talk about how we will support virtualization on the Windows “client” OS. Originally released for Windows Server where the technology has proven very popular and successful, we wanted to bring virtualization to a core set of scenarios for professionals using Windows. The two most common scenarios we focused on are for software developers working across multiple platforms and clients and servers, and IT professionals looking to manage virtualized clients and servers in a seamless manner. Mathew John is a program manager on our Hyper-V team and authored this post. One note is that, as with all features, we’re discussing the engineering of the work and not the ultimate packaging, as those choices are made much later in the project. –Steven PS: We didn’t plan on doing so many posts in a row so we’ll return to more sustainable pace — sorry if we inadvertantly set expectations a bit too high. We’re getting ready for BUILD full time right now!!

Full Story at Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx

Windows Intune brings together Windows cloud services and a Windows 7 Enterprise subscription to help businesses simplify PC management and security, all while getting the benefits of a modern operating system. At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in July, we announced the beta for the next release of Windows Intune. Today we are excited to share with you that our next release of Windows Intune, which includes the new features and updates of the July 2011 beta, will be available on October 17 of this year!

Here is a quick reminder of some of the features included in the next version – and these are just a few of them. For a full list of features visit Windows Intune on Springboard.

• Software Distribution: With this release, administrators can deploy most Microsoft and third-party updates or applications to PCs nearly anywhere over the Internet.
• Remote Tasks: IT can remotely perform the following tasks on Windows Intune managed PCs from the administration console: Full scan, Quick scan, Update Malware Definition, and Restart.
• Read-Only Access: IT pros and partners can give select administrators read-only access to the administration console so they can view PC information as needed, but not perform any configuration tasks.
• Enhanced Reporting: Create hardware reports based on new hardware filters for common hardware characteristics. Additionally, you can now create and save report parameters to make it easy and efficient to run a report again in the future.

How do you get this next release?

• Current Subscribing Windows Intune Customers: Your service will be automatically upgraded in the few weeks following October 17; no action is required of you. Two weeks prior to your upgrade date, you’ll see an alert displayed in the Windows Intune administration console indicating the exact date and time when your subscription will be upgraded.
• New Windows Intune Customers: Sign up on October 17 to receive the latest version immediately.
• Beta Customers: The beta service will conclude on November 17. After this date, you will not be able to access your beta account and all account data will be deleted. We highly recommend that you remove the client software and restore computers to their pre-beta state.

Full Story At Source

Welcome to the public Beta for new Data Protection Manager 2012. Please download the beta and try it for yourself.

The key DPM 2012 features that will be available for BETA validations are -

• Centralized Management (Built on the Ops Manager platform)
  • Centralized Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  • Remote Administration
  • Remote Recovery
  • Push To Resume Backups
  • Role Based Access
• Continued Best of Breed Application Support
  • SharePoint Item Level recovery without restoring Content DB
  • SQL FILESTREAM support
  • SharePoint RBS support
  • Hyper-V Item Level Restore from a DPM running in a VM
  • Faster protection of VMs on stand-alone Hyper-V servers.
• Fresh DPM 2012 Console User Interface
• Data Source Extensibility Framework
• Certificate Based Protection of non-AD machines
  • File Server
  • SQL Servers
  • Hyper-V servers
  • Clustered Data sources
  • Secondary DPM servers.
• Tape Enhancements:
  • Enhanced Granular Media Co-Location
  • Tape Reliability Enhancements
• Multiple DPM DB databases share a single remote SQL Instance
• Upgrade support from DPM 2010

We do not recommend to deploy this Beta into Production. This Beta is not supported by Customer Services and Support (CSS). If you have questions, please visit the DPM 2012 Beta Forum on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dataprotectionmanager
Help improve SCDPM 2012 Beta by submitting bugs to the Connect Feedback Center.

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Windows 8 is about reimagining Windows, so we took on the challenge to improve the most widely used desktop tool (except maybe for Solitaire) in Windows. Alex Simons on the program management team authored this post with a detailed look at the evolution of Explorer and the major improvements to its interface and functionality for Windows 8. Judging by the passion on file operations and user interface design, we know this is an important subject so we expect a pretty engaged dialog on the topic. We put this in one lengthy post, will watch the comments and dialog, and down the road we’ll continue the discussion.
– Steven

It’s exciting to have this opportunity to share the improvements we’re making to the file management capabilities of Windows Explorer. Explorer is one of the most venerable parts of Windows with a heritage you can trace back to the “MS-DOS Executive” in Windows 1.0!

The new ribbon

The Home tab is focused on the core file management tasks, and we’ve put all the major file management commands there in prominent locations: Copy, Paste, Delete, Rename, Cut, and Properties. We’ve also given new prominence to two popular heritage features, Move to and Copy to, along with exposing a hidden gem, Copy path, which is really useful when you need to paste a file path into a file dialog, or when you want to email someone a link to a file on a server.

The new Home tab

The Home tab is the heart of our new, much more streamlined Explorer experience. The commands that make up 84% of what customers do in Explorer are now all available on this one tab:

Overlay showing Command usage % by button on the new Home tab

The Share tab is for sharing files by typical methods like zipping them up and emailing them to a friend, or burning them to optical media. Or you can quickly share files with other people in your home group or your network domain. It also provides one-click access to the ACLs for the currently highlighted file.

The new Share tab

The View tab provides access to options for view customization. We’ve enabled one-click access for turning on/off the Navigation pane, Preview pane, and Details pane, a live preview gallery for the different icon display sizes, quick access to sorting and grouping by column, the ability to quickly add columns, plus easy access to three hidden features: show file name extensions, show hidden items, and hide selected items.

The View tab

The customization options for the Navigation pane are also much easier to access – in the drop-down menu, you get one-click access to them, including a new option to show or hide favorites.

Navigation pane options

The file menu and other tools

The file menu lets you quickly open new Explorer windows, access your shortcuts, and change folder and search options. It also includes a hidden feature that we love, Open command prompt, and a really useful new command, Open command prompt as administrator, both of which launch a command prompt with the path set to the currently selected folder.

File menu

We’ve provided a variety of contextual tabs that activate in the context of specific files and folders, and for tasks like searching, managing libraries, viewing pictures, and playing music. One of the best examples is the new Search Tools contextual tab which launches when you click in the search box.

Search tab

The Search tab surfaces a bunch of hidden gems that most people are not aware of, but that could solve some common problems for them. You can quickly adjust the scope of any search, filter by common date ranges, file type, file size, and other properties like the author or name. Then you can save these searches for future use.

Here are examples of some of the other Explorer context tabs:

Library Tools

Picture Tools

Disk Tools

Designing for a wider screen

When considering the ribbon UI, we knew we had to be conscious of one of the primary customer concerns we hear about: screen real estate. As we looked at ways to mitigate this issue, we dug up some more telemetry data for Windows 7:

This approach gives you a new Details pane that is much easier to read, makes better use of widescreen formats, and preserves screen real estate for the main file/folder pane. The exact number of lines might vary a bit from PC to PC depending on what add-ins you have, but for the out-of-the-box configuration running full screen at 1366 X 768, you can actually fit two more lines on the screen than you could in Windows 7.

And this comparison assumes you have the ribbon open. If you collapse the ribbon (double-click the tab, or click the Minimize arrow on the right side of the ribbon), you get even more vertical real estate with our new approach.

Full Story At Source

During Interspeech 2011, the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, from Aug. 28 to 31, researchers from Microsoft Research will present work that dramatically improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech recognition.

Dong Yu, researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, and Frank Seide, senior researcher and research manager with Microsoft Research Asia, have been spearheading this work, and their teams have collaborated on what has developed into a research breakthrough in the use of artificial neural networks for large-vocabulary speech recognition.

The Holy Grail of Speech Recognition

Commercially available speech-recognition technology is behind applications such as voice-to-text software and automated phone services. Accuracy is paramount, and voice-to-text typically achieves this by having the user “train” the software during setup and by adapting more closely to the user’s speech patterns over time. Automated voice services that interact with multiple speakers do not allow for speaker training because they must be usable instantly by any user. To cope with the lower accuracy, they either handle only a small vocabulary or strongly restrict the words or patterns that users can say.

The ultimate goal of automatic speech recognition is to deliver out-of-the-box, speaker-independent speech-recognition services—a system that does not require user training to perform well for all users under all conditions.

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For many companies, the robust messaging and calendaring features offered by Office 365 for enterprises presents an opportunity to transition all messaging functionality from the on-premises organization into the cloud. Office 365 for enterprises includes a full suite of e-mail migration tools.

However, there are dependencies and restrictions on the migration tools that you may be able to use with Office 365. Variables such as your on-premises Exchange Server version, the number of mailboxes you want to move, and how you want to handle user identity will dictate the tools and processes you can use to migrate to the cloud.

Figure 1 : A screen shot from the new “Cloud Only” scenario in the Deployment AssistantTo help you sort through the available options and plan your migration to the cloud, we’re happy to announce the “Cloud Only” option in the latest release of the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. Like the other scenarios in the Deployment Assistant, the “Cloud Only” option allows you to step through a wizard that asks you questions about your current infrastructure and your migration goals. The Deployment Assistant will provide a migration solution that is based on your answers.

Full Story At Source

This Solution Accelerator is designed to help enable an organization to identify, classify, and protect data on their file servers. The out-of-the-box classification and rule examples help organizations build and deploy their policies to protect critical information.

The Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 is designed to help enable an organization to identify, classify, and protect data on their file servers. The out-of-the-box classification and rule examples help organizations build and deploy their policies to protect critical information in a cost-effective manner. This release includes sample classification rules for PCI DSS and NIST 800-53.
Note: Use of the Microsoft Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 does not constitute advice from an auditor, accountant, attorney or other compliance professional, and does not guarantee fulfillment of your organization’s legal or compliance obligations. Conformance with these obligations requires input and interpretation by your organization’s compliance professionals.
Successful data classification programs require proper planning around these key critical areas:

• Identification of applicable IT GRC authority documents
• Definition of appropriate classification policies
• Implementation and evidence of appropriate controls

When used with the Microsoft System Center Service Manager IT GRC Process Management Pack, organizations can easily map classification requirements from various authority documents, such as PCI DSS and NIST 800-53. In addition, they can build and deploy their data classification policies, implement controls through Windows Server 2008 R2 File Classification Infrastructure, and provide evidence of data classification policies to auditors.
The Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 includes the following components:

• Microsoft Data Classification Toolkit.msi – Microsoft Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 Installer
• Data Classification Toolkit for WS2008R2 - Release Notes.rtf – Microsoft Data Classification Toolkit for Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Notes

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Today we’re happy to announce the release of the “We’re In” app for Windows Phone.

We’re In makes organizing get- together’s, carpooling and trying to find people in a crowd a breeze. Any time you want to see where your friends are—We’re In can help you. It’s simple, invite your friends, and when they join, they’ll see your location and you’ll see theirs. When the invite expires, so does the shared location – no complicated process to worry about.

We’re In is a great way to save time and frustration when planning your roadtrip or meeting your friend at the mall – helping you connect with your friend faster. Let’s take a closer look at the new We’re In product features and how they work.

We’ve made We’re In super simple to use – all you need is your phone number to sign up. Simply invite your friends (via your contacts) to start sharing location info with each other including who, why, and how long:

Pick your friends from the contact list or enter their phone number, tell them what the plan is. At this point you can choose how long you want to share location info.

Your friends receive a text message with these details. They can use the app to join you or, for friends that don’t have a Windows Phone, they can join from the mobile website via the invite.

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Today we are beginning to re-enable the ability to create new Linked IDs. This change is rolling out in the next couple days and should be complete this week.

For some customers – particularly power users – you’ve told us that it’s essential to be able to juggle multiple accounts. Over the last year we’ve added several powerful new ways to do this – specifically aliases and email aggregation (“POP aggregation), on top of existing features like “plus addresses”. Each of these is a great solution designed to help a different scenario:

• Aliases and plus addresses are a great way to create unique email addresses – great to manage a particular event (shopping for a car or planning wedding for example) or to manage mail from marketing sites.
• Email aggregation is a great way to take multiple accounts from different email providers and consolidate them all in your Hotmail inbox.

As we have made these changes, we looked at how most people use Linked IDs and found that, for the most part, they were used to solve exactly these problems – managing multiple email addresses and accounts. In our major update last month, one of the things we did is turn off the ability to create new Linked IDs, instead encouraging use of our new features. However it became clear from listening to your feedback that there were many people who used Linked IDs for other reasons, and so we are making a change today to re-enable the creation of Linked IDs.

Full Story At Source - here