Microsoft News Tracker

Since Vista shipped to businesses last year they’re a bit late, but today Microsoft announced the final versions of six Vista deployment tools for businesses:

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of six new deployment tools that will help expedite businesses’ migration to Windows Vista™. The recently released tools are the Microsoft® Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007, the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0, Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0, the Volume Activation Management Tool, the Key Management Service for Windows Server® 2003 and Virtual PC 2007.
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The tools being announced today can help customers at every phase of their migration to Windows Vista, including assessment, planning, testing and deployment. Many customers that already have been using pre-release versions of these tools along with earlier pre-release versions of Windows Vista now can move to the final versions to complete their deployment process.

We mentioned Virtual PC 2007 yesterday, but as for the others:

• Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 is a set of guidelines and tools that organizations can use for planning deployments.
• Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0 is the old standby for evaluating whether customer wrtitten applications are compatible with new Microsoft operating systems.
• Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0 is an enterprise-wide tool for assessing PC hardware capability for upgrading to Vista.
• Volume Activation Management Tool and the Key Management Service for Windows Server® 2003 are Microsoft’s new infrastructure for managing Vista activation in a multiple copy environment as promised last year.

As would be expected these are all free downloads - follow the link for more details.

Last week Bink.nu spotted a Microsoft test in the Netherlands of a service called MSN Reporter which bears a strong resemblance to the popular Digg.com social media site. Chris at Liveside has more details:

As an ongoing part of MSN’s efforts to increase the amount of user generated content on its network, the Dutch MSN team has created MSN Reporter, a social news site similar to the likes of digg and reddit. Available in beta since October 2006, currently MSN Reporter has launched only in three markets, Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.

Allowing users to share and rate news on the site, it has a simple interface, much like the Digg of old. It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces. With buttons that says “Kicken!” and “Dumpen!” who doesn’t feel the urge to participate?

If you can hold off a bit on the kicken and dumpen, Marshall Kirpatrick assesses MSN Reporter in light of some other recent prominent Digg clones over at TechCrunch.

Yesterday, Microsoft released the February Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Windows Server Longhorn to select beta testers. So far there is no word on whether it will be available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers as was the December CTP. The ostensible plan is for a public beta around midyear and shipment before the end of 2007, hopefully without the eccentricities of the Vista release.

Update 2/21: David at Microsoft’s Windows Server Division Weblog reports that MSDN and TechNet subscribers will have access to the CTP shortly. Also:

This build also marks the appearance of many of the various editions in which we will release Windows Server “Longhorn”. The list of editions shouldn’t come as a surprise to most people, with Windows Server “Longhorn” Standard, Windows Server “Longhorn” Enterprise, and Windows Server “Longhorn” Datacenter, each being available in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. One other change where the SKUs are concerned is the availability of a separate Windows Server “Longhorn” for Itanium-based Systems edition. This is different from what we did with Windows Server 2003, where we had separate Itanium versions of the Enterprise and Datacenter SKUs, but as disclosed before, this edition will focus primarily on the Application Server and database workloads.

We expect to release one more CTP before Beta 3 and we hope to have it soon.

It’s not clear whether the Web edition that appears today in Windows Server 2003 is being dropped or is just not in the CTP.