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In this edition: Laptop winner TBA, Movie Night Draws a Crowd,
Virtualisation Event, User Group Events and Meetings, Collaboration
Feature Article, IT Pro Technical Training
Hi!
There certainly has been no shortage of events, meetings and even
nights out in IT professional world in recent weeks! It all started
with a virtualisation seminar (Level 100, so you may not have been
aware of it) here in the Microsoft offices, where attendees received a
good view on both Microsoft and all-up market offerings in this space -
you can read more about this later. One of the evenings, I also got out
to an SBS/EBS user group meeting which gave a good explanation of
what's new and different with SBS 2008. Then of course, the TechNet
screening of Blade Runner: Final Cut took place on 2 October, which
drew in a crowd of 120 or so IT professionals! With all this activity
going on, my time in the office catching up on emails etc got in the
way of me making the Windows
Server User Group event, which was an all day event on Windows
Server 2008 Terminal Services, delivered by Alex Yushchenko!
Win a Laptop
I haven't forgotten about the laptop competition - a lucky winner will
be announced in the October 23rd edition of the TechNet Flash
Newsletter. For those of you who had any trouble accessing the survey,
please reply to this email and I can provide you with an alternative
link.
Movie Night
Thanks to those of you who made it along to the TechNet screening of
Blade Runner. An enjoyable night seemed to be had by all - the Final
Cut has some interesting tweaks, but the movie in general has stood the
test of time amazingly well. Of the 120 or so of you who attended the
screening, a good 70 or 80 joined in the bar after for a drink and a
bit of networking - it was a nice atmosphere for it. I appreciate the
TechNet feedback I received on the night - your input will go towards
shaping how TechNet is run this year (and it won't be all Sci-Fi movies
and free beer!). For those of you who were planning on giving me
feedback on the TechNet programme at this event, you're welcome to
email me directly.
TechNet Deployment Event
This technical level 300 event is well worth attending if you are
considering deploying Windows Vista or Office 2007 in the near future.
Attend this event and some of Microsoft Ireland's top consultants will
walk you through a real life customer deployment project from beginning
to end - what they did, when they did it, what tools were used along
the way.
The session will also update participants on the proven business,
management and technical benefits provided by both technologies, will
address the issue of application compatibility with Windows Vista, and
demonstrate how best to deploy in organisations of all sizes.
At the end of the event you will have a chance to ask questions and
discuss your particular deployment project with a Microsoft expert.
Where: Microsoft Auditorium, Building 2 (EPDC 2), South County
Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18
When: 23rd October - 09:00
Register: Click here.
Agenda
09:00 Registration & Coffee
09:30 Sessions commence
Session 1: Business, management and technical benefits of Vista
and Office 2007
Session 2: Microsoft Deployment Experience - "How To
Deploy" - Windows Vista and Office 2007
Clinics: Customer Deployment Clinics - Small groups can discuss
their particular deployment project with a Microsoft expert.
Lunch: Light Lunch will be served.
14:00 Event Close
Virtualisation Events
Recently I attended an informative seminar which was entitled
'Virtualisation - From the Desktop to the Data Centre'. The seminar did
not go deep into technical content, so it may not have been completely
relevant to all IT professionals - although Dave
Northey did get a brief opportunity to do some nice demos (watch
his blog
for further information). I found the session useful for getting up to
speed on virtualisation, as I only knew the absolute basics before
attending. Gartner gave an independent overview of the virtualisation
market, followed by a Corp Product Director running through an overview
of the Microsoft solutions. What was most powerful for me though, was
hearing from customers speaking on virtualisation 'in action'. The CIOs
from Nissan Ireland and First Rate Exchange Services gave an account of
their deployments of Microsoft Virtualisation solutions in their
organisations, and the benefits they are enjoying as a result. In
Nissan's case in particular, it was very impressive to hear how a small
IT team could do so much, as a result of freeing up resources that were
historically committed to managing servers. Keep an eye on my blog
with video interviews with these guys.
Windows Server User Group Event
Alex Yushchenko recently gave a Level 200 Windows 2008 Terminal Services
Class in association with Windows
Server 2008 Users Group. Alex is a world recognised expert on the
subject. I'd also recommend that you check out the next PubForum
event(Nice, 7-9 November 2008) that Alex is organising. The class
was free to attend for members of the Windows
Server 2008 Users Group. Membership and joining the
group are free. Once you join, you generally receive updates to the
groups meetings or events.
Small Business Server User Group Meeting
I also attended a Small Business Server User Group meeting, which was
delivered by my colleague Will
Craddock. Will's just getting started with Microsoft Ireland, after
moving all the way from Canada - keep an eye on his blog
for great technical content to come. Will presented on the changes in
SBS 2008 as well as giving a quick product demo. There was great
interest and interaction from the audience at the city centre venue
that night!
Feature Article: 'Virtualising SharePoint with Hyper-V'
To kick off the October theme of 'Communication and Collaboration' I
have the support of a Senior Consultant from the Microsoft Consulting
Services team here in Ireland. Daragh
Morrissey's expertise is primarily in the areas of Microsoft
Infrastructure design and deployment and SharePoint. See below for the
training listings for this week's feature article.
IT Professional Subsidised Microsoft Technical Training Courses
Please find below the schedule of upcoming Microsoft Technical
Training courses taking place in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Galway
in October, November and December. Please feel free to pass this on to
relevant individuals within your organisation who might be interested
in attending these technical workshops. Please note the course prices
below are subsidised by Microsoft by 65% in Ireland and Northern
Ireland only. Places are limited and we expect to fill them fast.
Please register your interest by clicking on the email links below. One
of our trainers will then follow up by phone to confirm your place and
collect payment. Please note registrations will be completed on a first
come, first served policy.
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 02/12/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £799
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: Global Knowledge
Start Date: 15/12/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 21/10/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £600
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: Global Knowledge
Start Date: 10/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 24/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 17/11/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £267
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 21/11/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £133
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 19/11/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £267
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Deploying Windows Vista Business and Microsoft
Office 2007 Professional Plus Desktops
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 29/10/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £292
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 26/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £292
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 17/12/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £292
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 27/10/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £533
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 15/12/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £533
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 11/11/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £800
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 08/12/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: Global Knowledge
Start Date: 23/10/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £267
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 20/10/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: New Horizons
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 29/10/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 19/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 19/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 24/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £600
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 20/10/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 03/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 17/11/2008
Duration: 5
Cost: £1,000
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 03/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 01/12/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Windows Vista Operating System
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 29/10/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 11/11/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £183
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 15/10/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: Global Knowledge
Start Date: 13/11/2008
Duration: 2
Cost: £267
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: BTR
Start Date: 17/11/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £450
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Location: Galway
CPLS: New Horizons
Start Date: 08/12/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Belfast
CPLS: BT
Start Date: 09/11/2008
Duration: 3
Cost: £400
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Location: Cork
CPLS: PFH
Start Date: 10/11/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £800
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Location: Dublin
CPLS: Global Knowledge
Start Date: 28/10/2008
Duration: 4
Cost: £533
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Virtualising SharePoint with Hyper -V
Server Virtualisation is a hot topic for Irish companies right now. The
benefits of server virtualisation around reducing hardware costs and
achieving operational flexibility are well understood. Many
organisations use Server Virtualisation as a tool to reduce the costs
of deployment for lab and proof of concept environments. However,
deployments of server applications such as SharePoint into a
virtualised environment for production were rare up until now because
they were not fully supported in a virtualised environment. This
changed on 23 August when Microsoft announced
formal support for virtualised deployment of 31 server applications
such as Exchange 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 and
Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007. This newsletter article should
provide you with helpful guidance if you're planning a virtualised
SharePoint deployment with Hyper-V.
Windows Hyper-V + SharePoint Benefits
Before announcing support for the server applications, Microsoft
announced the Server
Virtualisation Validation Programme(SVVP) in June 2008. The SVVP
enables other server virtualisation vendors to get their server
virtualisation platforms certified as supported by Microsoft to host
guest machines running Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.
Vendors who have successfully applied for certification include Cisco,
Citrix, Novell and VMware (currently 32-bit guest machines only).
Microsoft Hyper-V is the recommended virtualisation platform for
deployment of SharePoint because:
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The entire environment (the Hypervisor, the guest machines and
SharePoint) is supported end to end by Microsoft Premier Support
Services (PSS)
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The SharePoint product group has performed
extensive testing with applications running on Hyper-V to verify that
they perform and behave the same way on a Hyper-V virtual machine as
they do on a physical machine
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Windows Server 2008 - the Best Operating System for
SharePoint
The recommended operating system for all deployments (physical and
virtual) of SharePoint is Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition:
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Windows Server 2008 has been optimised
at the kernel level to take advantage of multi-socket server hardware
so it performs better compared to previous versions
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Support and test data shows that SharePoint
installed on x64 servers provides significant gains in system
throughput and performance during peak loads. In addition, Windows
Server 2008 as a guest operating system has been optimised and tuned
to run as a Hyper-V guest - see Hyper-V
architectureoverview for more information on the architecture of
Hyper-V
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Lastly as a best practice, do not 'mix and match'
x86 and x64 SharePoint servers across your SharePoint farm, as this is
known to cause performance issues. Standardise on either the x86 or x64
platform for all the servers across your server farm. This recommendation
applies to both physical and virtualised deployments of SharePoint.
What You Need to Know Before You Deploy - Supportability
Requirements
Based on their testing, Microsoft has documented the following constraints
and requirementsyou need to be aware of if you're planning to
deploy MOSS 2007 into a virtualised infrastructure:
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The versions of SharePoint supported are Microsoft
Office SharePoint Portal Server (MOSS) 2007 Server Pack 1 and Windows
SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 Service Pack 1
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Sizing and hardware requirements for virtual
deployments of SharePoint are the same as physical server deployments
for SharePoint - TechNet has some terrific resources for planning
your hardware:
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32-bit VMs have a maximum of two logical
processors on Windows 2003 guest VMs - four logical processors are
supported for Windows 2008 guest virtual machines
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64-bit VMs have a maximum of four logical
processors for both Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 guest virtual
machines
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64-bit VMs have a maximum of four logical
processors for both Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 guest virtual
machines
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Best Practices
In addition to the constraints described above, I also recommend:
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Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Do not
put all your child virtual machines on the same physical host -
distribute them across at least two hosts. If High Availability is
your goal, review the underlying server and storage hardware and
eliminate single points of failure where possible.
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Ensure that the other software products such as
anti-virus software and monitoring agents you're planning to deploy
into your virtualised environment are supported in a virtual
environment and certified to run on Windows Server 2008. Refer to the
Windows
Server Cataloguefor the latest list of certified products or
contact your software vendor.
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Wrapping up
I hope this newsletter was helpful! Before deploying SharePoint on
Hyper-V, take time out to get to grips with Hyper-V and make use of all
the guidance listed here. Make the Performance
and Capacity Planning Resource Centre for SharePoint your first
stop.
Daragh
Morrissey is a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services
Ireland. Daragh's expertise is primarily in the areas of Microsoft
Infrastructure design and deployment and SharePoint. He holds the Microsoft
Certified Architect Infrastructure: certification and has written
articles for Windows IT Pro magazine and presented at Industry events
such as Exchange Connections.
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Ensure that the content most relevant to you is
presented in this section.
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Take advantage of SharePoint Online to communicate
and collaborate virtually anywhere. This webcast helps you understand
the steps for configuring and managing the service.
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Labcast: Desktop Deployment:
Planning, Deploying and Managing the 2007 Office System (Part 1 of 2)
(Level 200)
October
14, 2008, 7:00 A.M. Pacific Time
October
14, 2008, 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time
Join part one of this two-part series to learn about new tools and
technologies for deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Get
practical technical information and proven techniques to help simply your
2007 Office system deployment.
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Customers who purchase at
least 10 licences of Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007 or
Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 through a new or true-up
Enterprise Agreement or Select Licence Agreement with Microsoft
Software Assurance can earn up to 15% back on the estimated retail
price in Microsoft partner subsidy funds. These funds can be used
toward purchasing future hardware, software or services from their
Microsoft Partner of choice.
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Slipstream installation
enables the deployment of Internet Explorer 8 and customisations as
part of an operating system image, eliminating the need to install the
browser separately. Building a desktop image with Vista and
slipstreaming Internet Explorer 8 takes 15 minutes as opposed to
anywhere from 2 to 3 hours using XP and Internet Explorer 7.
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The Microsoft Licence
Advisor is an easy-to-use online tool that can help you find and select
Microsoft products, choose the right volume licensing programme,
quantify Software Assurance benefits, and determine estimated retail
pricing (ERP) based on your software needs.
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Evaluation
Center Updates
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Get the free Windows HPC Server 2008 trial by
visiting the TechNet Evaluation Center or the Microsoft Download
Center.
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Support
and Troubleshooting
See a selection of new
Knowledge Base (KB) articles on the TechNet website. KB articles
feature an Article Translations box in the right-hand column. You can
select a language from the drop-down list and read the article in the selected
language.
Also available via RSS 
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October 14, 2008, 9:30 A.M.
Pacific Time
Learn about Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express along with our
portfolio of Enterprise Search Solutions that integrate with Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007 and find the right search solution you
need to increase business productivity.
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Learn what constitutes a
security boundary, take a tour through core Windows technologies, and
gain insight into defining boundaries.
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Join host Kai Axford as he
interviews a Federal cybercrime agent while getting the audience
involved in the action.
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It's a collection of free,
authoritative tools and guidance to help you quickly and efficiently
assess, protect and manage your security infrastructure.
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This lab will demonstrate
the steps necessary to enable federation for Microsoft Office Live
Communications Server 2005 Standard Edition in a lab environment in a
multiple forest topology.
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This lab will demonstrate
the steps necessary to enable Remote Access for Microsoft Office Live
Communications Server 2005 Standard Edition in a lab environment.
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Received
TechNet Flash from a Friend?
TechNet Flash is full of pointers to
in-depth technical information that we encourage subscribers to forward
to friends and co-workers. If you've received this issue from someone by
email and would like to receive the free TechNet Flash
newsletter biweekly, all you have to do is register.
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Volume 10, Issue 19
16 October 2008
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National and Global Events
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Register
for PDC 2008
October 27 - 30
Los Angeles, CA
Pre-cons October 26
This year's Professional Developers Conference is the place to see
the coolest new technology, and get your hands on the latest
pre-beta bits (including Windows 7). Attendees will also receive a
160-GB drive loaded with all PDC bits.
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Find
a TechNet Event in Your Local Area
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Full library of
Microsoft software for evaluation without limits
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Immediate access through
subscriber downloads
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Two Professional Support
incidents
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Access to beta software
before public beta releases
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Exclusive tools and
utilities
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Let us know your technology interests. When you personalise
your Flash experience, additional content for your selected topics
can be found in every edition in Your Featured Content.
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