News Summary - w/e 14th September 2008

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There were 594 articles from the Microsoft Team Blogs and feeds in the past three weeks.  Here is my summary of interesting announcements: 

  • The Microsoft Shared Source Initiative (SSI) was expanded with Reference Source Code. The SSI initiative provides technologies, programs and licenses to customers, partners, developers, academics and governments worldwide to share Microsoft source code. Reference source code for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 has now been made available. Read more…
  • Microsoft Solution Accelerators for Desktop, Server, Virtualization, Security, IT Governance and Compliance, and Collaboration support customers in adopting Microsoft products and technologies. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) available since February 2008 has been adopted by customers and partners as a de facto standard for IT Assessment and planning of IT migration projects. Read more…
  • The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for Software Assurance includes a suite of five products to help customers reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the Windows desktop. Read more… (The MDOP Team Blog will be included into the team blogs directory in the next couple of days).
  • The New Windows Consumer Campaign:   Have you heard of the latest buzz about the Microsoft consumer ad campaign featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. Read more…
  • Are you ready for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) ?    The Deployment Guys Blog has started the first in a series of posts to explain VDI and get into the technical detail. Simply put VDI is the provision of a full desktop Operating System (OS) provided remotely. Read more…
  • Have you been online to see the Microsoft Office Live Workspaces yet?   A fantastic milestone has been reached in just six months with over one million people collaborating online at Office Live Workspàces. To find out more read the press announcement or on the team blog. Read more
  • Microsoft officially launched a number of virtualization products including Windows Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft Application Virtualization 2008 and the new Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. The press announcement provides the full details or you can find out further insight on the Environment Software Enabled Earth Blog. Read more…
  • Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (App-V) released to manufacturing (RTM) . The product represents a huge step forward and is an expansion of SoftGrid 4.2 which was released in 2007 and the new name for SoftGrid. It provides new capabilities designed to help IT support large-scale virtualization across many sites, new localization capabilities, compliance with Microsoft´s Trustworthy Computing Initiative and integration with Microsoft System Center Management products and Windows Update. Read more…
  • Microsoft Research announced the release of AutoCollage 2008which allows you to automatically create a collage of all your favorite holiday photos at the click of a button. Read more…
  • The SQL Server team announced the first Release Candidate (RC) of the Report Builder 2.0 (RC1) for SQL Server Reporting Services. The new release provides a number of new enhancements including wizards, an updated ribbon, query designer for Microsoft SQL Server data sources and support for using server resources such as shared data resources. Read more...
  • Internet Explorer (IE) 8.0 Beta 2 was released at the end of August and has a number of cool new features including: Search suggestions, InPrivate Browsing, Accelerators, SmartScreen Filter, Compatibility View and Web Slices. If you are an IT Professional, website administrator or website developer be sure to read the information on the readiness toolkit to ensure you are ready for the new release. The Internet Explorer team blog has a number of articles about the new features and capabilities. Read more…