Vista News
All the latest Windows Vista and Tech news.
The Get On The Bus tour reached historic Richmond, VA today. We had a great audience filled with lots of excitement and lots of questions around Windows, Office and MDOP. Take a peek and check out the event!
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We were excited to share with you last week a preview of the brand new Hotmail, available starting later this summer. To follow up, we wanted to share a little more detail around some of the security investments we’ve made in the new Hotmail.
Security remains the number one concern of people who use email and a top priority for all Microsoft development efforts, products, and services – Hotmail included.
Among the several security enhancements we made in the new Hotmail, here are a few in particular that we’d like to call out.
Account recovery
The new security platform elements we've built up around Hotmail now enable you to use your cell phone or other items as proof of account ownership. For...
As of June 1st, we are folding the Volume Activation Blog into the Springboard Series blog to ensure that IT pros can always get the key Windows information in one location. Today post is the final part in the series about using the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) to assist with managing tasks related to Windows activation. Sometimes you need to activate systems in disconnected networks, such as branch offices and high-security zones within a production environment. If you manage systems in such an environment, you may be wondering about product activation options.
You have several alternatives for activation in disconnected environments, explained in a white paper, Volume Activation in Disconnected Environments. One of the...
The University of Michigan published their annual American Customer Satisfaction Index report earlier this week and Microsoft shows quite a jump. In 2009, our score was 70. For 2010, our score is 76 – our highest score on the report yet! Ed Bott published a blog post earlier this week diving deep into the results of the report. He highlights that the difference between 2009 and 2010 that likely led to such an amazing improvement in Microsoft’s score was the release of Windows 7. It just serves as another good example that people are not only excited to get Windows 7 (or a Windows 7 PC), they are also very happy with Windows 7 once they have it. I suggest reading Ed’s post for more analysis.
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Hotmail's fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we've made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name we use for a cloud-based set of technologies and algorithms that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to assign a “spam probability” score to each incoming message. This enables us to filter out over 98% of the spam sent to Hotmail inboxes, blocking 5.5 billion spam messages per day. Microsoft utilizes SmartScreen across Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Forefront, bringing consumers the benefit of business-grade spam protection on Hotmail.
With the...
In previous posts, we described why IE9 will support H.264-encoded HTML5 video. Microsoft and other browser providers see hardware support, customer and partner readiness, and intellectual property rights as key factors making H.264 an excellent choice for video encoding and playback. These posts generated a significant amount of support and suggestions. This feedback together with today’s industry announcements create a good opportunity to follow up and provide more information about HTML5 video support in IE9.
In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.
As we said at MIX recently, when it comes to HTML5, we’re all in. This level...
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how consumers are using their email and how they manage their inboxes. We've also talked about how we decide what to build based on what we hear from customers.
Today, we’re excited to give you a preview of the new Windows Live Hotmail, representing the next generation in personal email.
Email has changed a lot over the last five years. These days, you’re getting more email than ever – email that often requires you to leave your inbox to complete an action; you’re getting bigger and bigger attachments; and you’re using smart phones where you want to sync not only your email, but your contacts and calendar, too. In this post, we’ll talk about...
Last week we blogged about how the newly released Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0 helps manage product keys. This week, we cover how VAMT can help you centrally manage Windows 7 activations. VAMT 2.0 also manages activations for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Office 2010 client suites and applications, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.
You can perform KMS, MAK and retail activations on remotely managed systems, all from a single VAMT console. The process is simple; VAMT first discovers the computers and installed products. Then, the product key is installed for the target systems to be activated.
VAMT uses two primary activation methods: 1) online activation, where each computer connects to...
For the past few months, I have been traveling to many corners of the world visiting customers large and small. Everywhere I went, IT pros gave me very positive reviews about their experience and satisfaction with Windows 7. Many organizations are also evaluating optimized desktop technologies such as Office Professional Plus 2010, Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) and Internet Explorer 8.
For example, Sanofo-aventis, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world began evaluating Windows 7 Enterprise and App-V virtualization through a formal pilot program with over 500 desktop users in 2009. During this pilot stage, with the help of Microsoft deployment tools such as Microsoft Application Compatibility...
Today we released an optional update for Wave 3 of the Windows Live Essentials suite in all 48 languages. This is a minor release that updates Windows Live Messenger, Mail, Family Safety, and Sync. You can install it from http://download.live.com, or through Microsoft Update as an optional update. While this is our last planned update for Wave 3, we will continue to support this release for the foreseeable future as it will be the last version that supports Windows XP.
This is a minor release with a small set of targeted bug fixes and minor changes. Even though most users will not run into the issues we addressed, we felt they were important to fix. This update also contains a small set of changes to ensure that Essentials supports...
As an IT administrator, you probably are responsible for managing product keys, often for multiple products that are acquired from multiple sources. Sometimes it can be challenging to keep track of these keys and prevent their distribution to unauthorized personnel. Now you can use the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0 to manage and protect many of your product keys.
VAMT 2.0 lets you manage the following product key types, for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Office 2010 client suites and applications, Visio 2010, and Project 2010:
Key Management Service (KMS) host keys
KMS client setup keys
Multiple Activation Key keys (MAK)
Retail keys
VAMT 2.0 supports...
These are exciting times to be working on an email product. This is perhaps surprising, given that email has been with us since the very first days of the Internet. It is one of the most ubiquitous and well understood communication technologies, right up there with the telephone and the (snail mail) postal service. One could be forgiven for assuming that all the problems inherent in this communication method have been solved already.
Yet email has been evolving to meet our growing communications needs since day one, and the innovation continues apace. Just as we've been working hard on Hotmail improvements (see Mike’s post), we also continue to invest heavily in our client email program Windows Live Mail, part of our Windows Live...