MSDN Blogs

If you are considering developing solutions around SharePoint, Office, Unified Communications or Business Intelligence think about attending this training... if you are wondering what BPIO-U is, it stands for "Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization University".

BPIO University 2 Day Workshop - Sales Track for Partners

This 2 day interactive workshop – targeted at Partners participating in the BPIO Campaigns – has as its outcomes:

• to provide an overview understanding of the BPIO Campaign
• to provide some relevant sales and marketing knowledge/skills/processes to assist Partners generate and convert leads relevant to the BPIO Campaign
• point Partners towards a range of resources to assist them to capitalise on the opportunity provided by the BPIO Campaign.

By using tools made available by Microsoft to work with customers to understand their current level of optimisation, Partners can work with their customers to plan a path to achieve the highest level of business productivity infrastructure optimisation.

The BPIO University targets a number of solution areas including:

• unified communications
• collaboration
• enterprise content management
• enterprise search
• business intelligence

This course will also supply you with all of the materials and tools you need to expedite the sales process and close deals faster.

REGISTER NOW: https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=300213&linvitation

1 Day Jump-Start on Collaboration (MOSS), Enterprise Content Management and Search - Technical

The Jump-start is an interactive training session which provides you with the technical introduction and understanding of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), Enterprise Content Management and Microsoft Search from an architectural and solution overview perspective. The session is an Instructor led “chalk & talk” and does not include any hands-on technical labs.

These sessions are ideal if you are a technical person needing to cross train your Microsoft skills and gain an understanding of how these technologies work together in an overall solution. These sessions are led by an experienced ‘in the field’ instructor to give you the fast track introduction and guidance you need as part of your skills enablement roadmap.

Audience: Technical Pre-sales, Architects new to these technologies, Technical Consultants & System Engineers needing to cross train.

Technical Level: 200

Topics covered:

• A lap around the architectural landscape – The Microsoft 2007 Office System
• Understanding MOSS 2007 – features out of the box
• Collaboration Overview
• Understanding Enterprise Content Management – what this means to your business
• Enterprise Search capabilities
• Architecting a business solution so that its data is included in the Enterprise Search experience
• An overall solution summary

REGISTER NOW: https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=799160&linvitation

1 Day Jump-Start on Unified Communication (Exchange 2007 and Office Communication Server) - Technical

The Jump-start is an interactive training session which provides you with the technical introduction and understanding of Unified Communication, Exchange 2007 and Office Communication Server from an architectural and solution overview perspective.  The session is an Instructor led “chalk & talk” and does not include any hands-on technical labs.

These sessions are ideal if you are a technical person needing to cross train your Microsoft skills and gain an understanding of how these technologies work together in an overall solution. These sessions are led by an experienced ‘in the field’ instructor to give you the fast track introduction and guidance you need as part of your skills enablement roadmap.

Audience: Technical Pre-sales, Architects new to these technologies, Technical Consultants & System Engineers needing to cross train.

Technical Level: 200

Topics covered:

• A lap around the architectural landscape – The Microsoft Unified Communication story
• Understanding Exchange 2007 – features out of the box
• Unified Messaging Overview
• Understanding Office Communication Server – what this means to your business
• Integration with Exchange 2007
• Office Communication Server capabilities and architecting a solution
• An overall solution summary

REGISTER NOW: https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=371999&linvitation

1 Day Jump-Start on Business Intelligence and Performance Point Server

The Jump-start is an interactive training session which provides you with the technical introduction and understanding of Business Intelligence and Performance Point Sever from an architectural and solution overview perspective.  The session is an Instructor led “chalk & talk” and does not include any hands-on technical labs.

These sessions are ideal if you are a technical person needing to cross train your Microsoft skills and gain an understanding of how these technologies work together in an overall solution. These sessions are led by an experienced ‘in the field’ instructor to give you the fast track introduction and guidance you need as part of your skills enablement roadmap.

Audience: Technical Pre-sales, Architects new to these technologies, Technical Consultants & System Engineers needing to cross train.

Technical Level: 200

Topics covered:

• A lap around the architectural landscape – The Microsoft Business Intelligence story
• Understanding Performance Point Server 2007 – features out of the box
• Architecting Performance Management solutions
• An overall solution summary

REGISTER NOW: https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=723236&linvitation

After 10.5 years in DevDiv for Visual Studio (from VS6 to VS2005), I decided to move onto the different world.

and now I joined AdCenter team since last Monday. over 2 days, I start feeling the differences between shrink wrapped product and on-line/service based team. and it makes me really excited. Hopefully, I can share my experience more on the way.

This phrase has been bothering me for a while now. I hear it quite a lot on a project I"m involved in and I"m too stubborn to ask what it means so had to go research it. My guess is few others know quite what it means but nod sagely when they hear it so here is the scoop - it actually means nothing in IT terms. Well, compared to it"s real origin that is. As Peter Glaskowsky of C|Net confirms though, it does have a specific meaning in a machine shop:

In a machine shop, the phrase has a definite meaning: "speed" is the rate at which a tool cuts through the workpiece. "Feed" is the rate at which the tool is advanced into the workpiece, thereby determining the depth of the cut.

Meantime, in IT Peter comments:

In the computer industry, "speeds and feeds" has no particular meaning, but it"s generally used as a blanket term for the features and performance of a microprocessor or a whole computer system. I think many of the people who use this phrase in the computer industry have no idea where it came from or what it means; I hope this blog post will help spread the word.

So there you have it, you can continue to nod wisely safe in the knowledge that you now have this knowledge. Thanks Peter!

If you need a great case study of an Australian company deploying OCS, then read on....

"BHP Billiton is the world’s largest diversified resources company. It has 39,000 employees working in 25 countries worldwide and returned a profit of U.S.$13.7 billion (excluding exceptional items) in fiscal year 2007. With global operations demanding frequent inter-office communications, the company found itself hindered by a range of different systems and protocols, and poor call quality from its many remote offices. To consolidate its online meetings solutions worldwide, the company turned to Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 to deliver an integrated communications solution to improve collaboration and communication for its employees. With highly secure content sharing, software-based voice over IP capability, and integrated presence management, the new environment creates a unified communications solution that helps reduce long-distance call costs and travel budgets, and removes company dependence on hardware-based IP telephony solutions."

Get the full case study here:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000785

The October 2007 Windows XP Embedded Monthly Security Updates are now available on the Mobile & Embedded Communications Extranet (ECE) for Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded Service Pack 2, Feature Pack 2007, and Update Rollup 1.0.  This supplement includes updates for both the Desktop QFE Installer (DQI) Tool and the Component Database.

The following updates are included in this release – please see the ECE for more details:   

• KB 933729   Vulnerability in RPC Could Allow Denial of Service.
• KB 939653   Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer.
• KB 941202   Security Update for Outlook Express and Windows Mail.
• KB 938127   Vulnerability in Vector Markup Language Could Allow Remote Code Execution.

The October 2007 Windows XP Embedded Monthly Security Updates are available at the following link on the ECE:

If you have questions on accessing the ECE, please email MS Mobile & Embedded Communications Feedback & Support, ECE@microsoft.com.

- Lynda

Adam Shostack here, with part four of my threat modeling series. This post is a little less philosophical and a lot more prescriptive than the one about flow. It explains exactly how and why I changed a couple of elements of the process. The first is the brainstorming meeting, and the second is the way trust boundaries may be placed.

The brainstorming meeting is a mainstay of expert threat modeling. It’s pretty simple: you put your security experts in a room with system diagrams and a whiteboard. Usually, you put your system designers in there, and make them promise not to strangle your experts. Optionally, you can add beer or scotch. Sometime later, you get a list of threats. How long depends on how big the system is, how well its requirements are documented, and how well your experts work together.

We like having our developers threat model. There are a lot of reasons for this. Not only do they know the system better than anyone else, but getting people involved in a process helps ensure that they buy into it.

Now this desire is great, but it leads to some issues, first and foremost is that many of the people who are now involved aren’t security experts. This means that they lack both direct experience of the process and the background that informs it. This isn’t a slam on them. I lack experience in the database design process, and I don’t have years of experience to help orient me. So I’d make mistakes designing a database, and someone who isn’t a security expert may make mistakes in security. For example, someone might try to use encryption to mitigate tampering threats. (The SDL crypto requirements cover this, and I try to gently correct them to integrity mechanisms like MACs or signatures.) This is a reality that we have to account for at the process design level.

Adding Structure to Chaos

So how does this relate to the brainstorming meeting? It’s a dramatic increase in the need for structure. Where experts may think they do better threat modeling with scotch in hand, , it certainly doesn’t lead to beginners having a flow experience. So we need a structure, and we need to provide it.

We encourage people to get started by drawing a whiteboard diagram. Almost everyone in software draws on whiteboards regularly, and this makes it an ideal first step. It’s an ideal first step because everyone can do it, see that they’ve done it, and feel like they’re making progress.

The core mechanism we’ve used to provide it is the STRIDE/element chart. (I’ll talk a lot more about its origins and limits in a few posts, but for now, let’s pretend it’s gospel, and enumerates all possible threats.) Given this gospel, it becomes possible to step through the threat modeling diagram, “turn the crank,” and have threats come out. “Item 7 is a data flow? Let’s look for T,I and D.” (Tampering, Information disclosure, and Denial of service.)

Similarly, we have four ways of addressing threats – redesign, standard mitigations, new mitigations, and risk acceptance. We have training on mitigating threats, we have explanation of why and when to use each (and they’re presented in a preferred order).

Lastly, we provide advice about how to validate the threat model and it’s relation to reality.

Between these four steps and the hamster wheel which ties them together, we give people the structure in which they can take on the process. The other thing I wanted to address is how we respond to consistent “errors” that we see.

Where Trust Boundaries Show Up

We used to give people clear guidance that trust boundaries should only intersect with data flows. After all, you can’t really have a process that’s half-running as admin, and half as a normal user. Logically, you have two entities. And people kept drawing trust boundaries across processes and data stores. It drove me up the wall. It was wrong.

As people kept doing it, I decided to swallow my pride and accept it. I now tell people to put their trust boundaries wherever they believe one exists. And they’ve continued exactly as before, but I’m a lot happier, because I’ve found a way to help them draw more detailed diagrams where they need them. Which includes anywhere a trust boundary crosses a process or data store. They’re happier too. No one is telling them that they’re wrong.

I was going to title this post “Lord grant me the strength to change the things I can, the courage to accept what I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference,” but, first, it’s too long, and second, if we started that way, it would be wrong to add beer or scotch.

This 2 day interactive workshop – targeted at Partners participating in the BPIO Campaigns – has as its outcomes:

·     to provide an overview understanding of the BPIO Campaign

·     to provide some relevant sales and marketing knowledge/skills/processes to assist Partners generate and convert leads relevant to the BPIO Campaign

·     point Partners towards a range of resources to assist them to capitalise on the opportunity provided by the BPIO Campaign.

By using tools made available by Microsoft to work with customers to understand their current level of optimisation, Partners can work with their customers to plan a path to achieve the highest level of business productivity infrastructure optimisation.

The BPIO University targets a number of solution areas including:

·     unified communications

·     collaboration

·     enterprise content management

·     enterprise search

·     business intelligence

This course will also supply you with all of the materials and tools you need to expedite the sales process and close deals faster.

REGISTER NOW https://www.local.microsoft.com.au/australia/events/register/home.aspx?levent=300213&linvitation

I"m writing a series of blog posts over on the Team WIT Tools blog about how we"re managing our documentation projects using TFS. Look here for the first post. http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/10/16/managing-documentation-projects-in-team-foundation-server-part-1-planning-the-sprint.aspx

Te invitamos a ser parte del Tour Tecnológico 2007, que consiste en 20 eventos dónde platicaremos sobre las últimas tendencias de tecnología de Microsoft en todo el país! Queremos que seas parte del Tour escogiendo la AGENDA del evento en el sitio de votación! además podrás ganar alguno de los XBox 360 que obsequiaremos!

Entra aquí y crea la agenda para el Tour Tecnológico 2007!