Check it out.

Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate Evaluation, with the 3 descriptions/options

Evaluate the Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate today

With the release of IBM’s Lotus Symphony suite [1], and the rise of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Zoho, and others, there’s now a credible threat to Microsoft’s dominance in office applications. My question for blog readers: do any of these new solutions appeal to you? Why? Are they more or less likely to entice you away from the big Microsoft Office suite? In what way?

[1] http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/buzzentry.jspa?threadID=2581

Systems that can detect when something’s wrong and try to fix it? Systems that look for strange activity and shut it down to protect themselves and others?

If you’re to believe Microsoft, Stirling, their next version of Forefront security products, comes close to this standard. Check it out.

A few months late, but I’ve just stumbled across the Introduction to the Unified Communications Managed API series at Joe Calev’s blog. The series starts here but stretches to part 16 as far as I can tell, and it’s quite interesting.

All of this comes about from the latest rumblings about the Warsaw API—which is indeed the UCMA. Curious? Joe says this about that:

There have been a number of names for this API. Until recently it was called UCP.NET and within our team we still refer to it as Warsaw, which some of you may have heard. Speech Server is built on top of this API and it allows you to create efficient SIP clients and SIP servers. This is the recommended API for creating middle tier applications and it is designed to be highly scalable. I will cover this API in depth in this series.

Looks like it’s in beta 3 now, but surely this is an API developers are interested in if they’re working on the space where Speech Server and SIP converge.

We have a book on Office Communications Server coming, and in the meantime we have a an excellent book, Pro LCS, that covers Live Communication Server administration in great detail.

Microsoft is just about finished with new builds of the first Exchange Server 2007 service pack and their new PerformancePoint Server product, according to Mary Jo Foley.

Never heard of PerformancePoint? It’s Microsoft’s mix of business intelligence with scorecarding and key performance indicator (KPI) displays. It integrates with a variety of data sources, pulls information out and analyzes it, and presents it in a friendly manner to users. New to this build is the ability to use Excel Services as a data source.

More at the official Microsoft site for PerformancePoint Server.

We have a book on PerformancePoint that is curently in the beginning stages. If you’re interested in being a part of the review team, feel free to get in touch.