Seems to be the week for search related innovation, after Google’s Goggle, etc. MS research announced a really interesting project called entity cube.

http://entitycube.research.microsoft.com/

At the homepage it summarises current hot topics and news

And if you search for someone or an organisation it builds a dynamic page almost like a Wikipedia page about that entity

And even can show a Guanxi map to show the six degrees of separation style results

Forefront Threat management Gateway the successor to ISA server 2006 is now RTM and the eval is available for download form the following link above

Hurrah the CRM Analytics accelerator has been updated to include SQL 2005 definition files. When the R2 release was posted the SQL 2005 RDL’s didn’t work and there was only SQL 2005, well now you can download the SQL 2005  versions too!

Got home from work today and received an email that Office 2010 Beta is available for download from Connect, it is also available on my TechNet and MSDN accounts.

Now to uninstall the tech preview and see what’s new – hopefully things are a little more stable;)

Today Microsoft have made available Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile versions 6 and 6.1 today joining Windows Mobile 6.5 users.

Just go to wm.windowsphone.com on your device and then install the app.

You can also view the available apps for Windows Phone at marketplace.windowsphone.com

There are currently approx 152 apps available today, wonder how long it will take to get to 65k

editorial welcome to our first issue!

Hello and welcome to the first issue of our monthly newsletter from the support services team at risual. Each month we will be sharing our progress as we improve the services we offer to our clients.  We will keep you updated on technology developments, and share our experi­ence of managing hundreds of servers and clients for many customers.

This month as the memories of long summer days leave us behind and our attention focuses on the impending clocks going back, we look at ways to improve your organisation’s backup and data retention, along with details of risual’s events programme and our adoption of in­dustry recognised standards to improve the service we offer you.

Regards, Kate Lincoln, Editor

P.s. Also this month we have launched our new blog site at www.risualblogs.com and you can stay in touch with our twitter feed at www.twitter.com/risual

service focus fully managed DPM solution

A new risual support service, Managed DPM, provides businesses with the peace of mind that important data, applications and services are fully protected and managed daily by risual. Under our Managed DPM service, risual will manage your on premise Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) server instance/s including services for data protection, recovery and full return to service capability. This, coupled with tape data being stored off site in secure and environmentally controlled vaults, offers a flexible and reliable Disaster Recovery solution and service. risual will provide remote administration and operations for your DPM servers and take control of user and application data protection and recovery. The risual service goes a stage further, provisioning a full return to service solution for Microsoft applications and services. Couple this with secure weekly off site tape data storage and all your protection, recovery, and disaster recovery scenarios are covered.

So, what is included in this Service?

Sound interesting? email support@risual.com or hardeepb@risual.com

Hardeep Bains, Support Lead

risual event smart communicator

did you know?

Risual’s phone system is 100% based on Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The unique features allow us to provide single number reach for consultants and directors, dynamic routing for in or out of hours access for support and has allowed us to cut our call charges and provide our own conferencing service.

next month

Risual has recently achieved several ISO accreditations, find out how these enable us to deliver a world class service for our customers.

risual group ltd the company

risual is a dedicated Microsoft solutions partner delivering cutting edge technology solutions and consultancy enabling businesses to gain the most of their technology and their technology investments. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, using our high level competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies and business solutions, risual deliver customer focused Consulting; Solutions and Support services. Our breadth of experience and depth of knowledge allows us to provide a best fit solution for your organisation.

We are interested in the issues facing your business and how we can assist you in utilising the technology available to resolve these.

further to my previous post the OCS product group has now caught up with this issue, see below:

http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/10/14/632.aspx

Current message is don’t install this update on anything with OCS/LCS till further notice.

We are just evaluating an issue with OCS r2 and kb974571 which is one of October’s security updates which has just been released.

Installing the kb causes OCS FE services to fail to start and erroneously reports that the installation is an eval which has expired. Uninstalling the update resolves the issue. At present this may only affect pool/fe servers and edge servers.

Currently we have another example of this further to the one reported below.

The blog post below has plenty of detail. We are raising with Microsoft and will add more detail ourselves once this is understood.

http://projectdream.org/wordpress/2009/10/13/kb974571-crypto-api-update-may-break-office-communications-server-2007-r2-installations/

via the sysinternals website Microsoft have released a new free P2V tool – Disk2VHD which creates a vhd of a machine, using VSS to snapshot the machine while it is running.

While this does not update the HAL and inject drivers you could use it to convert a running Win7 machine to vhd and use it to boot that machine from vhd with little or no fuss or just to create a bootable backup.

you can get it here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-nz/sysinternals/ee656415(en-us).aspx

If you have heard the story this weekend that Microsoft are working on a 128bit version of Windows for Windows 8 then I am afraid this is nothing but unfounded rumour. The story started by reporting of a LinkedIn profile of someone claiming to work on a high security project for Windows 8 and incorporating 128 bit support. Unfortunately the person isn’t real and neither have they worked for Microsoft.

Looks like the Windows 8 hype starts here now 7 has shipped