Happy Christmas from the TechNet Ireland Team,

Dave Northey and I would just like to wish you a very happy Christmas and a healthy and prosperous New Year!

I'm really looking forward to the Christmas break - I know I'll have a white one as I'm heading off. However, I hope you enjoy it and don't eat too much turkey.

It seems our gift to you this Christmas is service packs... lots of service packs. If you are one of the people who have been waiting for Windows Vista Service Pack 1, you can now incorporate SP1 code into your testing, piloting and deployment planning activity. The Release Candidate of Windows Vista SP1 is now available for download. We have also created a special site within TechNet, the Windows Vista Springboard, to aid you through the entire adoption process. Note that if you do take advantage of the pre-release code programme, do remember that the code will likely change before its final release. In this case, we strongly recommend that you also plan to install the final version of Windows Vista SP1 when it is released in the first quarter of 2008.

For the 2007 Office Servers and Office suite, we've rolled the updates into a single service pack for servers and another one for the suite. Download the 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 and the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1 to get all of the updates released for the 2007 Microsoft Office System servers prior to December 2007, plus important customer-requested stability and performance improvements and further enhancements to user security.

You can get a more complete description of the 2007 Office Servers SP1 and 2007 Office suite SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles 936984: Description of the 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1 and 936982: Description of the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1.

While Windows Vista and 2007 Office Servers are getting their first service pack updates, Windows XP is getting its last. For TechNet subscribers, Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Windows XP SP3 will be a rollup that includes all previously released updates for Windows XP, including security updates, out-of-band releases and hotfixes. It contains a small number of new updates, but should not significantly change the Windows XP experience.

Event Announcement:

Data Mining & Business Intelligence for Enterprises

Date: 15 January 2008
Location: Radisson Hotel Dublin
Registration: Click here to register

This full-day event presented by Rafal Lukawiecki consists of four lectures and aims to educate IT professionals about Microsoft Data Mining. It will show, through practical examples, how data mining can be used in your IT infrastructure to support real business scenarios, demystifying the perception that data mining is complex, untested or designed for IT specialists only.

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Briefing 2008
Date: 21 February 2008
Location: Microsoft's Atrium B Building, Sandyford, Dublin
Registration: Click here to register

Organisations are now demanding a more manageable integrated mobility solution. To date, mobile devices have often been rolled out in a haphazard fashion and the management of those devices has often been achieved in a non-integrated way. If you subjected the mobile phones and PDAs accessing your corporate network to the same rigours of IT risk and management policies that you do your laptops, how would they measure up?

This event will provide you with an answer to some of your key mobility questions. We will bring you through the Windows Mobile roadmap and also take a comprehensive look at Microsoft's System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008. Mobile Device Manager fully integrates with Active Directory/Group Policy implementations and includes features such as policy enforcement, inventory and reporting, and software targeting in one solution. With Mobile Device Manager you will finally be able to manage mobile devices in much the same way as you do your laptops.

Holiday break:
This is your last TechNet Flash of 2007. The next newsletter is scheduled to hit your inbox mid-January. Have a great break and a happy New Year.


Thanks for reading,

Colm Torris
TechNet Ireland Manager