Your cloud requirements?

Microsoft recently partnered with WIRED magazine to ask the WIRED.com community what they think is important when looking at cloud solutions. The answers are below and shouldn't come as a surprise:

• High security standards.
• A familiar experience regardless of the device you're working on.
• Compatibility with the systems you already have in place.
• The ability to work where and how you want.

These are all things that you should not just expect but demand from your cloud solution.

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If you take a look at Office 365 you will see some similarities:

• Multiple security levels that meet leading EU and US standards, the highest level of privacy, plus built-in anti-virus and anti-spam
• The Office experience no matter whether you're using your phone, PC, or web browser
• Ability to work on- and off-line
• Email, calendars, shared document editing, creation, and storage, web conferencing.

Naturally this is a cut down version with lots of other capability listed here: if you need help with your cloud strategy talk to us.

Microsoft unveils its cloud management bundle

It was expected that Microsoft would unveil it’s cloud management bundle (System Center 2012) details yesterday and that is exactly what they did into two editions: Standard and Datacentre.  It had been rumored that Microsoft would take this move rather than sell individual products. 

The announcements from Microsoft positioned System Center 2012 as a public and private cloud management platform with a number of new additions to the bundle.

There will be two System Center 2012 SKUs: Standard and Datacenter. Each includes the same group of eight point products, but with only two “operating system environments” (OSEs) supported for Standard, and an unlimited number supported for Datacenter. (OSEs can be physical and/or virtual machines).

Microsoft didn’t officially name a RTM date for the final version of System Center, but it is expected that this will be announced sometime in April.

So what is in the System Center 2012 bundle?  Those in italics are new additions for 2012.

• App Controller – This is a new addition to System Center and provides a single management portal showing both public and private cloud resources providing administrators with a single view of their private and public cloud resources.
• EndPoint Protection: The security client formerly known as Forefront EndPoint Protection is now part of System Center and is integrated with Configuration Manager.
• Orchestrator (Was Opalis): Adds workflow automation and third-party integration with the 2012 release.
• Virtual Machine Manager: The 2012 release can now manage even more hypervisors from not just Microsoft, but also additional third parties.  Microsoft have also got the market pretty excited over the last year around server application virtualisation and this is the edition that supports that vision.
• Configuration Manager: Has more valuable features such as settings management with remediation and also provides integration with System Center Endpoint Protection.
• Service Manager: Adds more self-service management capabilities and new data warehousing and reporting features.
• Operations Manager: There is more support for Unix/Linux management functionality, customisable dashboards and more app-performance management and network monitoring.
• Data Protection Manager: New in this release is new role-based administration and item-level recovery for VMs which is a big requirement for virtualisation administrators.

So all in all some long awaited functionality and yet more additional value added by Microsoft and should help you make the move to a private cloud and any subsequent public cloud simpler.

Microsoft to increase it’s Office365 Basic Offering

Microsoft is adding some new capabilities such as Exchange ActiveSync support to its lowest K-plan service.

In a post to his “The Office 365 Display Board” blog, Microsoft Senior Partner Technology Advisor Jesper Osgaard described some of the tweaks the Softies are making to the Office 365 K-plan:

Exchange Online Kiosk Plan: Microsoft is adding Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) support for mobile devices to the current Exchange Online Kiosk plan. Currently, users with that plan only have POP mail capabilities. “With this change, we will enable all smartphones that support EAS, including iPhone, Android phones, Nokia phones (Symbian), and Windows phones,” Osgaard blogged.

EAS is designed for the synchronisation of email, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes from a messaging server to a mobile device, where as POP is limited to e-mail only.

E-mail storage: Microsoft is doubling e-mail storage for K plan users from 500 MB to 1 GB.

Exchange Online Archiving: Microsoft will be enabling “Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) including legal hold and unlimited storage, to be offered as an add-on to any Exchange Online plan, including Kiosk and Exchange Plan 1,” they said.

When the new capabilities will be available was not disclosed but it is expected it will be within Q1/Q2 2012.

For workers on the road most of their day  the above changes obviously will add a lot of increased functionality if they have a smart device, e.g. being able maintain to an updated schedule in their calendars, set reminders via tasks etc.

Windows 8 to Sync user settings and apps

Since the Microsoft Build event the other week features have been coming out of the woodwork about some of the new capabilities of Windows 8.  One of the key capabilities is the ability to allow Windows 8 users the option to log onto their devices with their Windows Live ID.  The benefits of which are below.

Microsoft revealed at the Build conference that users will be allowed to sign into their Windows 8 PCs using a Windows Live ID, this is only an option and not compulsory.  Some of the key features stated by Microsoft in doing this are as follows:

• Associate the most commonly used Windows settings with your user account. Saved settings are available when you sign in to your account on any Windows 8 PC.
• Reacquire your Metro style apps on multiple Windows 8 PCs. (”The app’s settings and last-used state persist across all your Windows 8 PCs.”)
• Save sign-in credentials for the different apps and websites you use and easily get back into them without having to enter credentials every time.
• Automatically sign in to apps and services that use Windows Live ID for authentication

The Windows 8 control panel has a section called Sync PC Settings to enable of disable this capability.  This can be dictated by users or administrators through GPO.  The configuration allows for variable settings to be synced such as Personalisation, Themes, Ease of access, Language preferences, Apps, Web browser and Some passwords.

The syncrhonised settings data is stored in the Microsoft cloud separately from users’ other Windows Live data.

Microsoft said on their blog “Using the new Restore/Refresh tools, it is possible to easily create an image that has your preferred desktop apps installed, and then use that as a refresh point.  If you do want to roam your settings for desktop apps then you can continue to use the mechanisms available for roaming profiles and client side caching of files available with Active Directory and Windows Server.”

Should make the transition between tablets and desktop a lot smoother allowing for personalisation of the user profile is a key concept that businesses consider when transforming to Windows 7 or virtualising the desktop.  We think that this is a shrewd move by Microsoft to close the gap between desktop and tablet.

Microsoft releases Release Candidate of VMM 2012

Microsoft have announced the availability of the Release Candidate of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 as publicly available.

SCVMM will no longer be virtual machine manager tool and will transition to a Service Management and Fabric Management tool, by providing lifecycle management of VMs and the applications inside them.

SCVMM includes Server App-V.  Server App-V provides application virtualisation technology for backend services, the technology will also become available as a complementary technology to Windows Azure (PaaS).

Communication with the storage will be supported through the Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S) providers, so that SCVMM will be able to provision LUNs at the cluster level, currently three providers are available NetApp FAS, EMC CX,VMAX and HP EVA (Built-in to HP StorageWorks CommandView EVA 10.0).

The RC introduces the following new features:

• Support for upgrade to RTM when released
• Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management
• Network Management
• Storage Management
• Update Management
• Power Optimization
• Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO)
• Service Lifecycle Management.

Some pretty nice features I am sure that you will agree.