Windows OS

Beta exam 71-680: TS: Windows 7, Configuring
Registration begins: April 27, 2009

71-680: TS: Windows 7, Configuring counts as credit towards the following certification: MCTS: Windows 7, Configuration

Registration begins: April 27, 2009
Beta exam period runs: May 5, 2009 – May 18, 2009

Prometric: http://www.register.prometric.com/ClientInformation.asp

Please use the following promotional code when registering for the exam: WIN7J

Read more about it here.

The Edge Planning Tool asks questions about your proposed or current edge server deployment. The tool uses your answers and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 best practices to generate the following reports:

Settings that you can use to configure your certificates, DNS services, and firewalls
Custom documentation for configuring your edge servers, reverse proxy, and next hop server
A comparison of your answers to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 best practices

Download it from here.

Also don't forget to check out the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool, recently released too.

This tool originally was a long fabled internal Microsoft tool that finally has a somewhat proper "official" release to the web with plenty of warnings and caveats. It is an add-in for Outlook 2000/XP/2003/2007 which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others. You would be surprised how often this happens!

It reduced the size of my Outlook mailbox by almost 1/5th tonight. Down to nearly 400MB from the original 500MB size.

Keep in mind - this program can and will delete e-mail content!
If you're in any doubt about this, then do not use this add-in.



You can download the add-in from here and read more about it. The installation instructions might seem a little daunting, and it can act a little quirky on initial launch, but it is definitely worth running from time to time.

Original description rom the website with some history behind the plug-in:
Thread Compressor is an add-in to Microsoft Outlook, which removed unnecessary emails from a "thread" - reducing the amount of storage required (maybe keeping your mailbox within its size quota) and reducing the number of emails you need to read.

TC was developed inside Microsoft from 1999 onwards, and attracted a large following (up to 30,000 users) but has never (officially) been made available externally, due to the fact that it will delete data unless it is configured not to. I've decided to share it more widely now.

Originally spotted here.

This is a relatively new blog site and has a lot of great information about drivers and applications for EVDO/UTMS/3G adapters in Windows 7. Having a hard time getting proper support from Sprint/Verizon/AT&T/HP/Dell/etc? Go to this site first!

And on an even better note, there are actions underway to do away with most of the 3rd party connection software tools that seem to be the root cause of most of the Windows 7 connection issues.

The following manufacturers are on board: Acer, Asus, Birdstep Technology, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Huawei Communications Technologies, Option, Qualcomm, Sierra Wireless, Smith Micro, T-Mobile International, and ZTE.

You can read more about this announcement here.

Thanks go out to Patrick Elliot for the heads up on both links.

This is a fascinating project from a technical standpoint. They are implementing missing API calls used by newer applications that are missing from Windows 98 and Windows ME. I know what you are thinking, why? Well, why not! Even though their numbers are dwindling, there are still some users that want to use new applications on the old platforms. I'm not going to question it - I just know they exist.

The list of newly compatible applications is pretty impressive:
Mozilla Firefox 3, Adobe Flash 10, OpenOffice.org 3.0, Java Developer Kit 6, Java Runtime Environment 6, Google Picasa 3, PDF-XChange Viewer, Doom 3, Quake 4, Prey, Need for Speed: Most Wanted and many other programs.

You can read more about it and download the bits from here.

An old coworker/friend IM'd me out of the blue today asking me how I ended up on the Community Spotlight for Windows 7.. and I had no idea what he was talking about until he sent me the link. Check it out! Very cool! I am honored and humbled to be on the same page as Mark Russinovich.