Hrvoje Kusulja, 3 PRO’s Chief Operating Officer, became a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Office 365. It is an award for prominent, independent community leaders who share their technical expertise related to Microsoft, and it is given for contributions over the previous year – especially for sharing knowledge within the technical community that utilizes Microsoft technologies.
Only Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 Update will be able upgrade to Windows 10 through the Windows Update service. Users with older editions will have to install the upgrade from a USB drive or DVD media, loaded with a disk image downloaded from Microsoft’s servers. It will not be possible to upgrade retired versions like Windows XP; Windows Vista will also not be upgradeable.
Windows 10 will use less storage space on your computer. Microsoft revealed information about a new compression algorithm for compressing system files that saves ~1.5 GB of storage for 32-bit and ~2.6 GB of storage for 64-bit Windows.
Also, a new build of Windows 10, 10049, is available at this time. With this release comes the new, awaited Project Spartan web browser.
You can download the Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10049 here.
Last week Microsoft rebranded Lync into Skype for Business. It was announced that Video Conferencing Solutions – Skype Rooms – will be provided by Polycom. The new series of video collaboration solutions is called Polycom RoundTable®; an affordable and easy-to-use video solution for small and midsized businesses and teams, including voice, video and content collaboration.
Skype for Business will be fully functional in the Cloud. Microsoft is partnering with big telecommunications companies in order to make this possible. Their plan is to integrate Enterprise Voice into Office 365, so that Customers will be able to call people on any phone.
Skype for Business is coming in April and it will be available to Office 365 customers, as well as for on-premises deployments. You’ll be able to connect with your colleagues and with anyone who has a Skype account.
The exact date has not been specified yet, but it was officially announced that Windows 10 will be out this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages and it will be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users for one year after the operating system launches.
So, it will be launched sooner than expected.
Windows 10 will also be available for smartphones and the Xbox One. It will include Windows Hello biometric authentication – providing instant access to your devices. You’ll be able to unlock your devices with your face, fingerprint and iris scan, instead of a password.
For now, you can download the Windows 10 Technical Preview build 10041 here.
Read more about Windows 10 features on our previous blog post ‘Windows 10 – One OS to Rule Them All’.
Next year on April 12th, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will reach its end of extended support. This means that Microsoft will stop providing updates and all types of support. We recommend that you upgrade to one of the supported Microsoft SQL Server versions – SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2014.
If you don’t upgrade on time, you may become a target for cybercriminals. Unsupported software can present a potential security issue and business risk. Completely supported versions of SQL Server help to improve the performance of your application platform and also save you money.
Currently there are discounts for licensing. Contact us for more questions about upgrading and migrating to a newer version.
