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July 2005 - Posts

Windows Vista

It appears that Longhorn will be Windows Vista, according to ActiveWin and reported also on WinInformant, Bink and Microsoft Watch.
Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments

Office forms server

Software Answers, as part of its ProgressBook product suite, includes a state-standard-compliant Special Education form management system.  Special Eduction teachers have a lot of state-mandated paperwork behind their teaching their students, and managing those forms without the appropriate software is quite difficult.

Anyway, when creating the system, we initially looked at InfoPath, the Microsoft form-management product introduced in Office 2003 (Office 11).  However, this product has a major shortcoming - the web client must have InfoPath available.  (There are actually many things wrong with InfoPath, but for us, that was the killer, because we can't mandate paid-for software on teacher PCs.)  So, we chose Adobe Acrobat instead, which brings with it a whole other set of problems.... 

However, there has been a lot of talk about there being a Forms Server of some sort in Office 12.  Well, last week, InformationWeek wrote up a story which basically says that they will have a cross-browser, no client software way to submit XML form data.  I think this is pretty exciting, because this fills many needs without necessarily writing forms in FrontPage, DreamWeaver, Visual Studio, and so on.

We'll need to wait until the product makes it (in Beta form) to outsiders before we can see if it would meet the ProgressBook need.

 

Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments

Longhorn Server AD Changes

Bink has a nice list of changes coming in Longhorn Server Active Directory functionality, according to TechEd Europe 2005.  I like the read-only DC functionality a lot for some of our customers with remote branch offices.
Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments

New mid-size business promotion!

I did not have time to post on this yesterday, but at TechEd Europe Microsoft announced a new promotion for the small-to-medium business market which will allow reduced pricing purchases (under Open License pricing) for Windows 2003 Standard Edition (3 licenses), Microsoft Exchange 2003 Standard Edition, and Microsoft MOM Workgroup Edition, plus 50 CALs (with up to 250 more available at the reduced price).  This is going to be very nice for many of our customers currently looking at the 2000 to 2003 move!  This also includes the launch of the new Midsize Business IT Center, helping to point IT staff in these smaller organizations at resources useful at that size.

(Edit 10:46 am: ArsTechnica has a nice short write-up in their M-Dollar journal as well...)
Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments

New MBSA release, 2.0, posted

A new release of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, 2.0, was released on July 1.  It adds WSUS compatibility, among other things.  Check it out...
Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments

Troubling Microsoft Anti-Spyware Definition Change

A very interesting thing happened at the end of March - Microsoft took some well-known, widely despised adware, and marked it as "Ignore", at about the same time rumors were beginning to surface about Microsoft buying the company. This is extremely disturbing, frankly. I'm hoping this will turn out to be some kind of huge misunderstanding, but it's not looking good right now.
Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments

Public Folders - they have a definate death date

Many folks are reporting from TechEd Europe that Microsoft has made it official - public folders are depreciated in Exchange 12, and dead in Exchange 13. Windows SharePoint Services is the way to go... so start spreading the news!
Posted by BazarewskyM | 0 Comments