Darren Straight’s Blog

Last year in 2005, Microsoft outfitted the Microsoft Home, a family house in West London, with some of the latest technology, to show you one vision of how technology can work in the home.

Every room was set up to demonstrate how easy it can be to enjoy a digital lifestyle using technology available now to all consumers. Guests were guided from room to room experiencing how to simplify life and have more fun. The Microsoft Home inspires visitors on new ways to get the most out of staying in touch with their friends and family, organising their day, sorting out their bills, working from home, helping their kids with homework, playing games and listening to music from anywhere within the house.

But sadly you can no longer visit the house, however there are talks of another event like this happening, so it might be worth keeping an eye out on the Microsoft at Home page just in case anything does pop up, and if you do find something out that I dont know about yet why not let me know.

Also though you can no longer visit the house you can watch the Microsoft Home Movie of the Microsoft Home 2005 House,  it’s pretty cool as it’s stuff you can buy now.

Ever wonderd how Microsoft IT copes with the large quantities of unwanted e-mail (a.k.a. spam) and malware-infected messages in its inbound Internet e-mail traffic?

Well you’re in luck because Microsoft IT Showcase have uploaded a paper which documents how Microsoft IT uses Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 technologies, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, and third-party solutions to both reduce the quantity of spam routed through the corporate messaging infrastructure by filtering at the gateway layer and then remove the threats in remaining messages posed by viruses, worms, and their common distribution vectors, such as file attachments.

Situation

• The growing prevalence of spam, viruses, and other malware sent through Internet e-mail has placed a large burden on the enterprise messaging environment, threatening to overwhelm messaging resources.
• More importantly, failure to manage these threats can put the enterprise messaging environment, and possibly the entire enterprise network, at risk for security violations.

Solution

• To manage the influx of spam and malware, Microsoft IT uses a multilayered approach, minimizing the amount of e-mail allowed past the outermost edge of the network.
• Microsoft IT employs multiple scanning and filtering processes to remove spam and malware while minimizing false positives. The multiple technologies for managing this process in Exchange Server 2003 SP2 simplify the process for messaging administrators.

Benefits

• Scanning for spam at the outermost edge of the network significantly reduces the amount of messaging content to be processed and stored internally.
• Removing attachments and scanning for malware before delivery to mailboxes dramatically reduce user exposure to these threats.
• Additional scanning at the client level further reduces the threats of malware and adverse effects on employee productivity, such as time required to sort through and delete spam.

Download the full word document or slideshow here.

Well I got an email from Microsoft this week informing me that I am eligible for the following gratuities as recognition for my testing of Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 Beta:

• License to Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting when the final product is released to the market.
• £100 cash for completing the pre-requisite number of surveys.
• A full copy of Microsoft Office 2007 when it is available.

So as Microsoft were so nice in rewarding me for my beta testing I would just like to say thank you to Microsoft and expecially the Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting Team for such a cool piece of software to beta test and thank you for such a great selection of gifts.

Keep it up Microsoft!

And as for you lot who would like to test Microsoft Office Accounting 2007, you can now download the public beta from here!

Marking the next big milestone for its Connected Entertainment vision, Microsoft have today unveiled details of the first products to be released under its Zune™ brand. Designed around the principles of sharing, discovery and community, Zune will create new ways for consumers to connect and share entertainment experiences. The Zune experience centers around connection — connection to your library, connection to friends, connection to community and connection to other devices.

Available this holiday season in the United States, Zune includes a 30GB digital media player, the Zune Marketplace music service and a foundation for an online community that will enable music fans to discover new music. The Zune device features wireless technology, a built-in FM tuner and a bright, 3-inch screen that allows users to not only show off music, pictures and video, but also to customize the experience with personal pictures or themes to truly make the device their own. Zune comes in three colors: black, brown and white.

A list of features include.

• Wireless Zune-to-Zune sharing. Zune lets you spontaneously share selected full-length sample tracks of your favorite songs, homemade recordings, playlists or pictures with friends wirelessly, device to device. You can listen to any song you receive up to three times in three days. And if you like a song you hear and want to buy it, you can flag it right on your device to easily find it later.
• Your own personalized Zune. Zune is easy to use and easy to love. You can choose one of three base colors, each combined with a distinctive double-shot finish created by the overlay of one color on another. The player also can easily be customized with your favorite pictures.
• Large color screen. Zune comes with a bright 3-inch LCD video screen that works in portrait or landscape mode. Your music, video and pictures never looked better.
• 30GB player. Zune stores up to 7,500 songs, 25,000 pictures or 100 hours of video. You can make playlists on the go and watch a slide show while you’re listening. Watching video in landscape mode gets the most out of the vivid display.
• Zune Pass. Downloads or a subscription? It’s your choice. A Zune Pass subscription gives you “all you can eat” access to discover and explore the Zune Marketplace.
• Built-in FM tuner. With the built-in FM tuner you can listen to local FM radio stations or tune in to programming while you’re at your local health club, for example. Advanced tuning capabilities allow you to see the name of the song currently playing on selected frequencies.

Accessories:

To enhance the Zune experience, three accessory packs help Zune users enjoy their music where they want to, at home or on the road. The packs and the individual accessories, all designed exclusively for Zune, will be available at launch:

• The Zune Car Pack includes everything needed to hit the road with a Zune device, such as the built-in FM tuner with AutoSeek and the Zune Car Charger.
• The Zune Home A/V Pack enhances your experience in the home through five products that integrate Zune with the TV and music speakers: Zune AV Output Cable, Zune Dock, Zune Sync Cable, Zune AC Adapter and the Zune Wireless Remote for Zune Dock.
• Zune Travel Pack is a set of five products designed to keep friends and family entertained on the road: Zune Premium Earphones, Zune Dual Connect Remote, Zune Gear Bag, Zune Sync Cable and the Zune AC Adapter.

Additional Information:

• To get started. Every Zune device is preloaded with content from record labels such as DTS, EMI Music’s Astralwerks Records and Virgin Records, Ninja Tune, Playlouderecordings, Quango Music Group, Sub Pop Records, and V2/Artemis Records. 
• Online music store. You can browse the huge selection of music designed to work seamlessly with your Zune in the Zune Marketplace. When you find new music that you love, it’s simple to buy it and sync it on your player. The Zune Marketplace works with the Microsoft® Points program so you can purchase music online without a credit card.
• Import your music. Zune software can automatically import your existing music, pictures and videos from iTunes and Windows Media® Player in a variety of formats, including your existing playlists and song ratings, as permitted by the online service from which it was purchased.
• It only gets better. As Zune evolves, your device can be easily updated. The Zune software on your PC5 will let you know when updates are available for download. And with built-in wireless capability in each player, the future is filled with possibilities.

I went up to London yesterday to meet up with my friend Eric Cheung to attend the Second Blogger/Web2.0 Mixer Redux which I had been invited to by the organiser Roger Kondrat, and wow what can I say other than it was a pleasure to have been invited by Roger as it was a great event, very nicely oraganised, nice bar, nice location and a great selction of people which let to some interesting dicussions, not to mention a discussion about a Bar called Bananen Bar in Amsterdam, let’s just say it’s best if I dont include a link to it!

I even knew of one other person there who I had meet before, that being Godwin who I meet at the first Brit Blog Meet Up.

Anyway so being such a great event it was I couldnt help but take some pictures of everyone there, and though I had to be a bit sneaky in taking some pictures of the ladies there as they kept hiding I eventually got their pic!

And now they are uploaded to Flickr along with the other 50 or so Photos I took that day, so go ahead and check out my Flickr Set created for this Second Blogger/Web2.0 Mixer Redux.

Here are a select few from the Flickr set:

Remember how I all told you last week how it would soon be Goodbye MSN Search, Hello Windows Live Search, well Microsoft yesterday announced the release from beta of Windows Live Search and of Live.com in 47 markets worldwide, and final availability of Windows Live Local Search in the U.K. and the U.S.

But it dosent stop there, because of course Microsoft also announced that Windows Live Search will now power the Web search capability on MSN, the company’s media and entertainment portal which attracts more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month.

“The launch of Live Search is a significant milestone for our services business, with our core search and monetization platform ready for prime time for MSN and Windows Live as well as for partners through syndication deals,” said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of Live Search at Microsoft. “We now have the base to weave search through our services in ways that bring value to customers. This is just the beginning. We look forward to continued investment in search to deliver services that bring new levels of control and personalization to the Web experience.”

Here’s what’s new in Live Search:

• A clean, custom interface - The new interface updates not only the colors and fonts of the service, but the design and layout as well. The new scope bar enables you to see search results from the Web, images, local maps/directions, videos, etc without having to re-enter your query in the search box. The scope bar remembers your most recent scopes like Video or Academic so your search experience will feel very personalized.
• Related Searches help you refine your query by simply clicking on a list of related terms (try Jaguar, Las Vegas, CSI). We’ve found that helping our customers refine their queries is one of the biggest things we can do to help people find their answers.
• Image Search delivers a new rich experience tailored for the task of searching for pictures. It includes: Smart Scroll, which gets rid of pagination; meta data surfaced by hovering over an image vs. having words clutter up your results; dynamic image resizing; related people lists that are addictive (try Oprah Winfrey, Katharine McPhee, Tom Hanks); and lastly a scratch pad for images since we know most people searching on images want access to multiple images and this is a quick and easy way to save your results to access them later.
• Local Search is getting more robust everyday and this release provides new or updated imagery for 25 U.S. cities, meaning we are covering about 30% of the U.S. population now. There are also some new additions to collections and access to White Pages data. Check out the service or check out the blog for more details.
• Live QnA beta makes its full public debut! We’ve been out for a bit now but are now baked into the search scope bar and are no longer in a closed beta. We are excited about this vertical because it can bring the community into your search experience; if Web search doesn’t answer your questions right away, get the answer from real people! Live QnA is particularly powerful due to its tight integration with other Live social services, like Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces.
• Video Search beta can be found here or under the “More” tab in the scope bar along with a host of other beta verticals like Academic and Product Search as well as links to Live Macros where you effectively create your own search engine, or browse ones created by others in the community (try a macro I created for my hobby Poker – try searching for “Phil”).

And here’s what’s new in Live Local:

• Lets start with people search. At the top of the page are the search controls. Select ‘People’ as the type of search, then Enter a name and a place to begin the search. Hit the search button and the map should update and a results panel appears with matching names. Results for People searches work just like a business search - Drag the map or zoom in and the queries will all refresh. You can have up to three queries active at a time, and you can mix and match between people and businesses. You can also search by phone number - just enter a 10 digit number in the first field and hit search to find the corresponding listing.
• Draw on your maps. In the last release of Live Local we introduced the Collection feature, allowing you to draw a series of pushpins on the map, save them, and easily share them with others via a simple perma-link. With this release, we’ve extended Collections with the ability to add lines and closed shapes to your map. Along with the familiar pushpin tool on the Scratchpad, you’ll now find a bunch of drawing tools. You have control over line thickness, fill color, line color and line pattern. You can draw multi-segment lines or complex closed shapes. While its not exactly Adobe Illustrator, it is quite an impressive set of basic drawing and editing tools all implemented in Dynamic HTML; No plugins required, and it works very well in Firefox 1.5 (Windows, Mac, Linux), IE6, and IE7.
• Send to Phone and Call for Free. The Previous release of Live Local introduced a feature that allowed you to dial any business in the US free of charge. We’ve now added the ability to Send a Text message to your phone with a business listing’s details. When I hover over any of the search results I get options to Call the business for Free or to SMS their details to my mobile. Call for Free is slick in that it works with any phone by dialing you and the business simultaneously. Selecting Send to Mobile brigs up a dialog for you to enter the mobile phone you want to send the listing to.
• New Birds Eye Imagery. We’ve added dozens of new cities with birds eye coverage in this release. San Diego, Portland, Milwaukee, … here is a growing Collection of them with the newest additions at the end. Lots of smaller cities have been added and many cities where we had coverage in the past have been greatly expanded. Check out Washington DC for instance, where coverage extends deep into the burbs. Also, in many cases it is really the entire county that is covered and not just the cities listed, so just use the pushpins as a start point for exploration. But it’s not just the US in which we are seeing more Birds Eye Imagery but also in places like Cordoba Spain!
• Other enhancements include adding hundreds of thousands of new WiFI access points to our database used for triangulation. So if you are using the ‘Locate me’ feature on a Laptop or Origami, your determined location will be more accurate than ever. We didn’t forget about our Developer community either. This release adds support for drawing Polygons to the API, and fixes a number of bugs reported over the last cycle. The industries most extensive geographic support for geocoding and routing has grown as well.   

All of this of course with the help of extensive feedback and ongoing testing of each beta service which has led to marked improvements in the user interface and the overall customer experience of Windows Live. So I guess you could say that these Windows Live milestones represent the first of several more to come this fall that will demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to building and delivering services that bring new levels of control and personalization to the Web experience.

So go ahead and check out Live.com, Windows Live Search (search.live.com) and Windows Live Local (local.live.com) and then why not let me know if they have improved or not and what still needs to be improved!

For more information be sure to check out the Microsoft Press Release along with the Windows Live Search Team Blog and Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth Team Blog.

If you haven’t done so already, you might want to check out my latest Flickr Photos as I’ve now finally finished uploading some 113 photos from my afternoon/evening out with my family on the 9th of September 2006 on which my dad flew us from headcorn aerodrome over some surrounding areas of Kent, which is the county I live in here in the UK.

Here are a few but for the full Photo Strem check out My Flickr Set.

Just got an email this morning to inform me that the final major pre-release of Windows Vista - Release Candidate 1 (RC1) - is now available for download for CPP participants.

So if you were a CPP Participant for Windows Vista Beta 2 Back in June then you should have by now receieved this email informing you that Windows Vista - Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available to download at the follwing links:

English:
http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm

German:
http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/de/download.htm

Japanese:
http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/jp/download.htm

Also for your convenience you should have received your Windows Vista Product Key again in the email just in case you can’t find it.

Have you seen Zack Whittaker’s Report Abuse Desktop Client over at MSBlog yet?

There’s probably a chance you havent so let me explain to you what it is.

This Report Abuse Desktop Client is an application which enables younger users of the Internet to report online abuse or suspicious activity of online predators to their local law enforcement agency by the click of the button which lets you fill in an electronic form.

And as Zack states this kind of topic of abuse is a topic which no-one really wants to talk about because of the discomfort and the sickening of this sort of behaviour.

So in my opinion I’m glad to see Zack created this Report Abuse Desktop Client as programs like this will make it an ever easier task to report this kind of abuse.

If you think you would benefit from it or know someone who would go ahead and download it.

So Windows Live Messenger 8.1 was released to testers earlier today, how’s everyone finding the running of Windows Live Messenger 8.1 so far?

I myself have unfortunately already came across one crash in Windows Live Messenger 8.1, then again if there wasn’t any crashes it wouldn’t be much of a fun beta now would it!