John Weston

This is from the Kinect for Windows blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/ On January 9th, Steve Ballmer announced at CES that we would be shipping Kinect for Windows on February 1st. I am very pleased to report that today version 1.0 of our SDK and runtime were made available for download, and distribution partners in our twelve launch countries are starting to ship Kinect for Windows hardware, enabling companies to start to deploy their solutions. The suggested retail price is $249, and later this year, we will offer special academic pricing of $149 for Qualified Educational Users. In the three months since we released Beta 2, we have made many improvements to our SDK and runtime, including: Support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer Significantly improved skeletal tracking, including the ability for developers to control which u... (more)

Hyper-V Security

I continue to be amazed at the useful stuff on technet.com I ran across this the other day, looking something up about Hyper-V. Security is always top of mind these days, so I thought I would share our Hyper-V Security Guide. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd569113.aspx Download This Solution Accelerator Launch the download of the Hyper-V Security Guide. About This Solution Accelerator The Hyper-V Security Guide provides IT professionals with guidance, instructions, and recommendations to address key security concerns about server virtualization. Microsoft Hyper-V te... (more)

Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 6.5

Simplify cloud migration planning with MAP Toolkit 6.5 The Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.5 is now available for download. The journey to the cloud is now smoother than ever with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 6.5. The MAP Toolkit's new capabilities help users to securely assess heterogeneous IT environments while enabling the evaluation of workloads for migration to Microsoft's private and public cloud platforms. Consolidate existing server workloads using the updated Microsoft Private ... (more)

Cloud on Your Terms: Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds

What is a Hybrid Cloud? We keep hearing about "The Cloud" in IT, and how it is supposed to change things in the next few years. People keep using the terms Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud. What do these really mean? First Public Cloud - this is using someone else's Data Center to host applications or subscribe to applications on the Web. Examples from Microsoft of Public Cloud are Office 365, Windows Azure, and Windows Intune. Private Cloud is something different; usually this is in your own data center, possibly hosted by someone else. Microsoft offerings in this a... (more)

Office 365: How Microsoft Does IT

In part 2 of this 30 part series we introduced the topic of Hybrid Cloud. That is the combining of Public, Private, and or traditional IT into a system that works for you. One of the great Hybrid examples I like to talk about is internally here at Microsoft. Microsoft is an extremely email centric company. Email is beyond a mission critical app for us. As such we spend a lot on our internal Exchange infrastructure. I have been on a beta test program for many years helping our Exchange team test the next version of Exchange before they are released. Well we have started moving "So... (more)