Microsoft Surface Tablet Codenamed “Metro” Launched

Microsoft has finally introduced its own series of tablets, thus taking a leap from being just a ‘software company’ to a ‘tablet manufacturer’ giving rise to a healthy competition between its arch rival , Apple which has been somewhat on the decline since the demise of its visionary, Steve Jobs. These tablets will be inculcated with never-seen-before additional features in the form of removable keyboards and fully supporting its latest release, the Windows 8 operating system.

These tablets also have a touch-friendly user interface codenamed “Metro”.

This new launch is currently named as the Microsoft Surface Tablet. And as of now there are only two versions of the tablet that will be available in the market.

1. Microsoft Surface &  2. Microsoft Surface Pro

Image Credit : Microsoft

Microsoft Surface Tablet is an Ultra-portable PC which works on Windows RT and Windows 8 operating system. It can be compared to a highly compact Tablet type computer having a high precision crafted VaporMg casing that protects it fm external damage and gives you a high quality finish and a royal feel.

Its surface is very thin with a 9.3mm thickness which supports a full sized USB port, Micro-SD and other accessories such as the ‘Touch cover’ or the ‘Type cover’. The Touch Cover comes in five vibrant colors and the Type Cover comes with a 3mm thin, pressure sensitive cover as a functioning keyboard and track pad. The cover connects with the Surface with a single magnetic click at the bottom.

There are two normal standard cameras, one at the front and the other at its standard rear position. The front camera can be used as a Live-cam to chat with people and other general purposes. It also contains HD Stereo speakers and dual microphones.

Image Credit : Microsoft

Specifications:

Microsoft Surface:

OS  :  Windows RT

Display : 10.6” HD screen with 16:9 aspect ratio

Operating System : Windows RT

Storage Capacity : 32 or 64 GB and Micro SD slot

CPU : Nvidia Tegra

Power : 31.5 W-h

Input : Multi-touch screen, Touch cover, Type cover

Camera : Two 720p HD LifeCams

Weight : 676g

Price : $699 for 64 GB

Image Credit : Microsoft

Microsoft Surface Pro:

OS : Windows 8

Storage : 64GB*, 128GB

Display : 10.6″ ClearType Full HD Display, 1920×1080 pixels, 10-point multi-touch

CPU : Intel Core i5 Processor with Intel HD Graphics 4000, 4GB RAM

Battery : 42 W-h

Ports : Full-size USB 3.0, microSDXC card slot, Headset jack, Mini DisplayPort

Sensors : Ambient light sensor, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Compass

Price : Not Declared

So what will be your move now? Hope the above review might be useful.

Google Chrome Is Now The Most Popular Web Browser

Global Stats from StatCounter published a report which says Google Chrome is fast approaching and the most popular Web browser worldwide. Last week, Google Chrome surpassed Microsoft Internet Explorer for the first time with 32.76 percent market share, while Internet Explorer dipped to 31.94 percent. Currently both are having a difference of less than a percentage in market share.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

StatCounter is a free, online visitor stats tool. The StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.

Last year, Internet Explorer was leading the web browser market share with 43 percent, followed by Mozilla Firefox with 29 percent, and Chrome at the third position with 19 percent.

Even though Chrome is now leading worldwide, Internet Explorer still leads in the USA with 37 percent, while Chrome is only 23 percent, followed by Mozilla Firefox 22 percent.

Microsoft Office 365 Over Google Mail

Electronics manufacturer Note unified its communication infrastructure and reduced its IT costs by switching from Google Mail to Microsoft Office 365, which delivered greater value and offered a familiar work environment for its employees. In late 2010, Note adopted the Google service, but the IT team at Note soon determined that the collaboration features Google provided were not meeting business needs. By the end of 2011, Note had switched from Google to Office 365.

“Office 365 is much more integrated and advanced than Google and offers more of the functionality our employees need,” said Mikael Johansson, IT and process development manager at Note. “Our employees can use Office 365 without additional training. Combined with the extended functionality in Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Lync Online, we think Office 365 offers much more enterprise value than Google.”

Based near Stockholm, Note is one of the largest contract manufacturers of electronics equipment in Scandinavia, with nine factories and 1,000 employees in six countries. Since Note centralized its communications with Office 365, the company is now able to better manage information and provide its employees with new opportunities to collaborate easily and productively.

“Office 365 is a better fit with our overall IT strategy,” Johansson said. “Now we have a single environment we can use to help organize and share information between business teams and across multiple facilities and devices. Google offers no equivalent to the deep integration between Office 365, Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.”

Instead of managing multiple solutions from Google and other providers, Note has reduced costs by consolidating its collaboration environment with Office 365. The company can manage its Office 365 subscriptions under a single agreement and avoid the cost of third-party solutions.“We are a manufacturing company,” Johansson said. “Whenever we can effectively outsource our IT burden like we can with Office 365, we build competitive advantages for our business.”

More information on Microsoft’s customer success stories is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/customerspotlight. More information on Office 365 is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/office.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0

Microsoft Security Essentials 4.0 (free) released so quietly that I almost missed it. In truth, Microsoft doesn't refer to the version number at all, just to "the latest version of Microsoft Security Essentials." There isn't a lot that's new here, and my test results were about the same as before, so perhaps downplaying the new version makes sense.

This product is a straight-up antivirus, not a feature-stuffed suite wannabe. Its main window shows current security status, with a button to resolve any problems. Another button launches an on-demand scan. That's it!

Saved by Windows Defender Offline

Microsoft Security Essentials installed successfully on ten of my twelve malware-infested test systems. Ransomware on one test system made launching normal Windows impossible, and Microsoft Security Essentials won't install in Safe Mode. On the advice of Microsoft Tech Support I downloaded the bootable Windows Defender Offline. A full scan with this tool solved the problem and allowed me to complete the installation.

On another test system, Microsoft Security Essentials refused to update or scan because it claimed the system was not running a valid copy of Windows. In truth, the Windows installation was fine, but malware fooled the antivirus into thinking otherwise. Tech support advised reinstalling Windows, an entirely inappropriate course given that Microsoft's own validation tools report a genuine installation.

I ran a full scan using Windows Defender Offline, but it didn't solve the problem. On this particular system the malware bamboozled Microsoft Security Essentials.

Mediocre Malware Cleanup

On the malware-infested systems where Microsoft Security Essentials installed and ran correctly, a full scan took hours. Scanning my standard clean test system took 72 minutes, about twice the average. And despite these lengthy scans, the cleanup wasn't very thorough.

Microsoft Security Essentials detected 63 percent of the threats, lower than any product tested with the current or previous set of malware samples. It left behind executable files for more than half of those it did detect, and several of them were still running after their alleged removal. Its overall score of 4.3 points for malware cleanup is the lowest of any current product.

40 percent detection of rootkit samples is also a new low. However, Microsoft thoroughly cleaned up all the rootkits it did find, scoring 4.0 points. Quite a few products tested with the previous malware collection scored lower, despite higher detection rates. Even so, I wouldn't rely on Microsoft to clean up a malware-infested system.

Source : PCMAG.com

Social Computing Microsoft Cloud 2.0

As per the title and the whole idea of this site in general is that it maps vendor technologies to best practice programs. In this case how Microsoft offers tools for implementing Cloud 2.0.

FAST Social Computing

Using Microsoft for this type of Enterprise 2.0 working mode, is what they refer to as 'Social Computing'.

In their white paper People working together (13-page PDF) Microsoft describe how their ‘Information Worker’ product set (Office, Sharepoint, Unified Comms etc.) is ideal for what can be referred to as `Knowledge Process Management`.

In the case of Salesforce.com they`ve bought companies like Chatter, Rypple and Radian6 to add a `social layer` to their core CRM platform, so it will be a pound for pound comparison of these two main areas. With Microsoft the other main technology that will be incorporated comes from their 2008 acquisition of FAST, the enterprise search engine software start-up.

Hence the title, not only is social media intended to be quick and lightweight, but literally the inclusion of the FAST product is what makes the formula really successful. So I`ll mainly be focusing on what FAST can do and how it augments social media working practices.

Source : CloudBestPractices

Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer

Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer is a free tool which will scan your Outlook profile and report on any issues which might be causing you problems. This report includes many parameters about your profile and highlights any known problems that it found in your profile. For any problems that are listed in the report, you are provided with a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article that outlines a possible fix for the problem. If you are a Help Desk professional, you can also save the report to file so that the report can be viewed in the Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool on another client where the tool is installed.

Download Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer 

To use the program, first make sure Outlook is running, then launch the Configuration Analyzer and start a scan. On our test PC the progress bar estimated a very long scan time (ten minutes or so), but in reality it only took maybe three minutes, so very soon we were browsing the report to see what it had to say.

The first details you’ll see are information on your Outlook configuration: your various profiles, all the addins and third-party modules you’ve installed, the Outlook updates installed on this system, and any settings issues the program thinks might be relevant.

The more interesting details are usually to be found on the All Issues tab, though, where the Configuration Analyzer will highlight any problems it considers to be significant. These can be very specific – you’ve the wrong version of a particular DLL, or a Registry setting may be incorrect – or a little vaguer (“Folder too big”), but either way if you click the issue then you’ll find a link to a Microsoft support page which tells you more about the problem and how to resolve it.

This isn’t always brimming with useful information, unfortunately – it report had only two items – but fortunately the program does also gather details of any recent Outlook crashes you might have had. And if you switch to the Tree Report format then you’ll be able to view those last error messages, including details of the faulting file, which may help you to figure out the cause of the problem.

Microsoft Introduces ReFS (Resilient File System) For Windows Server 8

The very next generation file system ‘ReFS‘ for Windows 8 has arrived in the market. Microsoft explained about this in its blog post. ReFS stands for Resilient File System which is built on the foundations of NTFS, as usual it is compatible at the same time it has been architected and engineered for a new generation of storage technologies and for large infrastructure .

Image  Credit : Microsoft

ReFS will be introduced only as part of Windows Server 8. At the application level, ReFS stored data can be accessed from clients just as NTFS data used to be or in use.

The key goals of ReFS are:

1. Maintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint.
2. Verify and auto-correct data. Data can get corrupted due to a number of reasons and therefore must be verified and, when possible, corrected automatically. Metadata must not be written in place to avoid the possibility of “torn writes”.
3. Optimize for extreme scale. Use scalable structures for everything. Don’t assume that disk-checking algorithms, in particular, can scale to the size of the entire file system.
4. Never take the file system offline. Assume that in the event of corruptions, it is advantageous to isolate the fault while allowing access to the rest of the volume. This is done while salvaging the maximum amount of data possible, all done live.
5. Provide a full end-to-end resiliency architecture when used in conjunction with the Storage Spaces feature, which was co-designed and built in conjunction with ReFS.

The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces).

1. Metadata integrity with checksums
2. Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
3. Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write)
4. Large volume, file and directory sizes
5. Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
6. Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
7. Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
8. Resiliency to corruptions with “salvage” for maximum volume availability in all cases
9. Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing

ReFS inherits the features and semantics from NTFS including BitLocker encryption, access-control lists for security, USN journal, change notifications, symbolic links, junction points, mount points, reparse points, volume snapshots, file IDs, and oplocks.

Data stored on ReFS is accessible through the same file access APIs on clients that are used on any operating system that can access today’s NTFS volumes.

Cloud Privacy [Infographic]

A new infographic on cloud computing privacy outlines concerns with privacy in the cloud with Microsoft’s approach to addressing them – Transparency, Control, and Responsibility.

There’s much more on cloud computing privacy on the cloud computing section of our Privacy Site. Find the below infographic which describes the privacy in cloud and its transparency.

Source : Microsoft

Android OS Tops The Mobile And Smartphone Market

There are a lot of mobile phones available all around world and the popularity is increasing day by day. Here are the summary of the Mobile OS and Mobile phones/Gadgets around the world.

No. 1 : Google’s Android Mobile Operating System tops with 46.9 percent market share. It basically came up 3.1 percentage points of market share from the prior three-month period till November.

No. 2 : Apple as usual maintained its No. 2 position. A growth of 1.4 percentage points to 28.7 percent of the smartphone market.

No. 3 : BlackBerry ranked third, with 16.6 percent share.

No. 4 :  Microsoft (5.2 percent) and

No. 5 : Symbian (1.5 percent).

It also revealed that 91.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in November, up 8 percent from the preceding three-month period, and 234 million Americans aged 13 and older used mobile devices respectively.

In case of device manufacturer of mobiles, gadgets, smartphones :

No. 1 : Samsung ranked as the top OEM, with 25.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 0.3 percentage points)

No. 2 : LG, with 20.5 percent share.

No. 3 : Motorola, with 13.7 percent share.

No. 4 : Apple strengthened its position in fourth place, with 11.2 percent share of total mobile subscribers (up 1.4 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five, with 6.5 percent share.

In the month of November, 72.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile devices, up 2.1 percentage points, the study found. Downloaded applications were used by 44.9 percent of subscribers (up 3.3 percentage points), while browsers were used by 44.4 percent (up 2.3 percentage points). Accessing of social-networking sites like Facebook or Twitter or blogs increased 2.1 percentage points to 33 percent of mobile subscribers. Playing mobile games was done by 29.7 percent of the mobile audience (up 1.2 percentage points), while 21.7 percent listened to music on their phones (up 1.0 percentage points).

This survey and the study revealed about the key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three-month average period ending November 2011. The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers and found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.6 percent market share.

Smartphones, gadgets, mobile users are just adding to the steady growth of social-networking sites, a recent  study revealed the popularity and usage of social-networking sites, which says :

No. 1 : Facebook remains the undisputed leader in the U.S. social-networking market, with 166 million unique visitors in November. The average user spent 6.6 hours per person engaged on the site during the month, an increase of 37 percent in the past year.

No. 2 : Micro blogging site Twitter and LinkedIn have been in use over the past several months with huge number of social network users.

No. 3 : In the month of November, Twitter got the second position, with 35.4 million unique visitors, just slightly ahead of LinkedIn which is now at No. 3, with 35 million.

No. 4 : Myspace with 25 million visitors, but the report notes it has seen a steady decline in audience over the past two years.

Source : eweek & images credit : Google

SOCL, A Hybrid Social Search Networking Effort By Microsoft

The very new entry to Social Media platform is made by socl, an effort by Microsoft and Microsoft calls it as a "social search", a hybrid social networking site which will provide the platform for the social media and a web search too. We can say that it is a site whcih mixes search, discovery, and a social network.

Image Credit : Microsoft

Initially the service offered Facebook and Twitter sign-in buttons, but little else was known about Socl.com.

Here are some features which attracts users to use it.

Tagging :

It relies heavily on tagging and allows users to identify topics they are interested in and receive social updates on those interests.

Video Party :

 Socl also has a video party feature that allows users to chat and view YouTube videos with their friends. This feature is really awesome.

Social Search :

This is an unique search criteria where you will search something and your friends will be able to see it and can make comments on it. Say, you are searching for a "Restaurant". So you searched with the string "Volt Restaurant" and this will ping the bing server and pulls some informative links which you can add to your post.

Design :

There is a three column layout, with basic navigation in the left rail, a social feed down the middle, and invites and video party options on the right. As usual, you can follow other friends, but you won't find any list-making tools. Core to the experience is the large search field at the top that asks, "What are you searching for?" effectively creating a new type of status update. You can also toggle the field to a traditional status update.

Limitations :

There are so many limitations as compared to other sites that we have on the web like Facebook and Twitter or G+. No private messages, no picture album, no @replies or even any "like" under comment option is there. Only ":)" is available below each and every post, which is similar like f-like in Facebook. As this is a research project of Microsoft and this is not yet publically released with various features, still it is under testing phase.

So as of now we can watch the development progress of this newly launched social search site. Hopefully we will get some amazing features with some of the already provided ones.