Category Archives: Announcements

Microsoft Tech Ed EMEA 2008 IT Professionals

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Next week Jonathan and I are off to Barcelona to join 5000 other IT Professionals at Microsoft Tech Ed EMEA 2008 for IT Professionals.

Tech Ed will give us the opportunity to learn about new the new products and features coming from Microsoft as well as drilling down into our own areas of interest. So far I have booked some sessions on Group Policy, Server Core, Security and Windows 7.

I will be trying to make at least a couple of blog posts each day and I am sure Jonathan will too.

Feel free to make comments, suggestions and ask questions. We will have the opportunity to put questions directly to Microsoft and we will be happy to do so on your behalf so please let us know.

You can also keep up with the action as it unfolds on Tech Ed TV.

TechEd

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/itpro/

Everything Must Go!

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Rather than email campus-support every time we have some new equipment to trickle down we’ve created a web page (see campus-support for URL) for *server room* and general equipment.

Desktops\cluster room equipment will still be trickled down in the usual fashion.

The page will be updated as new equipment becomes available so you may wish to bookmark it.

In the spirit of green IT I’m happy to add any surplus equipment from departments too, just let me know.

IE8 Beta 2 released

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This is an end user beta (unlike beta 1) so have a look. The current ETA for IE8 is before the end of the year and some people have said November so not long now. Please note we are only starting to test this internally within ISS so we’re not sure what works/doesn’t yet so please try it on a test PC 🙂

IE8

New features include…

Web Slices

Web Slices This new feature takes feeds to a whole new level! Now you can subscribe to specific sections within a site and have updated content delivered directly to your Internet Explorer 8 menu bar. Whether it’s a gossip column, favorite blog, auction item, or a weather report, with Web Slices you’ll never skip a beat.

Accelerators

No longer do you have to open multiple browser tabs or windows to get the information you need. Accelerators are tools in Internet Explorer 8 that easily allow access to multiple points of information (maps, definitions, web searches, translations, etc.) within a single Internet Explorer 8 window. Finally, web browsing feels automatic.

Domain Highlighting

When you visit a site, its domain is highlighted in the Address Bar. This helps alert you to Web sites that are imposters of trusted sites, thus reducing the chance of compromising your personal information.

InPrivate browsing

With industry-leading security features like InPrivate, you can browse and shop confidently using Internet Explorer 8, wherever you go on the Web, knowing you have control over the protection of your personal information.

Tab Grouping

Tab Grouping makes it easier to stay organized while browsing multiple Web pages. Tabs are now visually related to one another, and you can save time by closing a set of related tabs as a group instead of one at a time. You also can right-click on a tab to close tab groups, ungroup a single tab, or clone a tab.

Please let us know your experiences.

http://www.microsoft.com/…-explorer/beta/

Welcome to the WIT Blog

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The Windows Infrastructure Team in ISS at Newcastle University, as the name suggests, is responsible for the Windows Infrastructure of the University, meaning that we’re the ones who look after, among other things:

  • Active Directory, which is the management framework for user accounts, managed Windows PCs and servers and the policies that manage settings and software. We delegate control of various aspects of the Active Directory to the appropriate people in ISS and around the campus.
  • Exchange, which is the home of the email mailboxes and calendars of most computer users in the institution.
  • Central File Store, which most of our users will see as their personal H: drive, and shared storage for a number of schools/services.
  • IIS and SQL Servers, offering centrally managed hosting of ASP.NET web sites and SQL databases.
  • And various other services which run on Windows Server.

The purpose of this blog is to keep people using our services up to date with developments, share handy tips and more general tech news that we think may be of interest. On that basis, you’re going to get the most out of this if you have a keen or vested interest in the systems at Newcastle University, but if even if you’re nothing to do with the University, but have an interest in technology in general, or enterprise computing using Microsoft technologies in particular, we hope you’ll find something of interest here…