Ah ha, said the blind man. Now I see why Stephen Elop left Microsoft for Nokia.

BLOOMBERG NEWS

Nokia, Microsoft to Join Forces to Challenge Apple Dominance


Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, said it’s forming a software partnership with Microsoft Corp., a bet that together the two companies can better challenge Google Inc. and Apple Inc.

Shares fell as much as 9.8 percent, after the Finnish company’s plan to move to Microsoft’s Windows as its primary software platform was seen as a sign of the depth of its challenge taking on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms.

“It’s a clear admission that Nokia’s own-platform strategy has faltered,” said Ben Wood, a London-based analyst with CCS Insight. “Microsoft is the big winner in this deal, but there are no silver bullets for either company given strength of iPhone and Android.”...

FULL STORY


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-11/nokia-joins-forces-with-microsoft-to-challenge-dominance-of-apple-google.html

VIDEO

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/66647390/

Microsoft misses opportunity as Twitter for sale

Google, Facebook named as Twitter suitors


#wsj #reports #takeover #talks


According to the Wall Street Journal, both Google and Facebook have emerged as possible buyers of Twitter.

The newspaper’s Website says insiders told it that as well as the ad giant and the user-data sales house, “other companies” have discussed a Twitter takeover...

FULL STORY

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/10/google_facebook_twitter_suitors/

EMC's answer to Microsoft's cloud? The Hybrid Cloud.

Opinion : On Premise, not dead, just yet.

The Road to Office 365

"The combination of Azure, Lync Online, Office 365, BPOS (aka MS Online 2) will force businesses to give Microsoft a second chance at taking the rest of their Enterprise IT budget. The cloud will transfrom Microsoft and the entire industry. As the rate of cloud migrations from on-premise pickup traditional hardware & software vendors will be forced to respond. EMC/VMware has a response...." -Karl Preddie


Article : EMC & Hybrid Cloud

Wednesday, 09 February 2011 Written by Rakesh Dogra

EMC has recently announced a far reaching plan to take leadership status in hybrid cloud migration. This plan relies heavily on VMware’s virtualization platform. EMC is confident that cloud computing is the biggest game changing technology to drive the future. The company has put its weight behind this faith and has realigned business to be able to meet client demand. The hybrid cloud is the goal in sight for most companies and they will go from virtualizing tier 2 and 3 applications to offering IT as a service.

EMC has set itself to occupy a strategic middle position in the confluence of cloud and enterprise data. Data storage, according to their CEO, Joe Tucci, is also a critical area since there is an explosion of data and information taking place. Coupled with the growing trend of virtualization, big data storage is also going to become critical. EMC has also positioned itself to offer effective storage for the cloud.



Read more at - http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/EMC-VMware-Poised-to-Lead-Hybrid-Cloud-Migration-in-2011-Tucci-584386/

Google does good! - Speak to Tweet Service Launched for Egypt

Like many people GOOGLE DEVELOPMENT has been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt.

No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Best Practice - Build out Exchange 2010 CAS Arrays.

(BASIC) Architecture Changes:

With Exchange Server 2010 all protocols should go through the Client Access Server and cannot connect to Mailbox servers to MAPI clients directly. This is done by using new Client Access Server(CAS) Windows Server service known as the RPC Client Access service.

(BASIC) Installation:

(ADVANCED) Site-to-Site-Proxying:

How do you deal with a two (2) AD site scenario (i.e cross data center) and you have to redirect Outlook Web App clients between these sites transparently. -> Exchange 2010 SP1 Proxyng

---- THREAD UPDATE ---

GAL Segmentation, Exchange 2010 Address policies

The Exchange Customer Experience Team has heard the feedback our customers have provided to us and are now working to incorporate a set of features that will provide a Global Address Segmentation capability directly into Service Pack 2, which will be available to customers in the second half of 2011. We plan on posting more about Service Pack 2 in the next couple of weeks.

This decision was taken in order to simplify the deployment and configuration of the feature for all customers by providing a consistent and controlled experience through the standard Exchange management interface.

As a result of the decision to build the functionality into the product, we have also decided that we will not release an updated version of the Configuring Virtual Organizations and Address List Segregation Whitepaper that was published for Exchange Server 2007


LYNC REACH CLIENT - http://blogs.technet.com/b/toml/archive/2011/02/04/how-to-force-the-use-of-the-lync-reach-client-just-append-this-to-the-url-sl-1.aspx