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MSIT Guidance on dealing with daylight saving time at Microsoft

As I noted previously re: our MSIT webcast covering the impact of daylight saving time at Microsoft, here are the links to the documents and guidance the team referenced.



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MSIT Webcasts on daylight saving time: next one on Friday, Feb. 16

We held a public webcast that was very well attended… I’ll include the link when I have it handy.


Today we were joined by some of the intrepid folks from MSIT (thanks, Jan, Bob & Mike) as they talked about how Microsoft’s Information Technology group has prepared and is rolling our internal testing and approach to updating systems for daylight saving time.


If you missed the one today, we’ll post the recorded webcast online shortline, along with Q&A.


But if you missed today’s webcast, we have another one this Friday:



Support WebCast: The impact of daylight saving time within the Enterprise – Level 200; Friday, February 16, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007: 1:00 P.M. Pacific time (Coordinated Universal Time – 2 hours). This Support WebCast will help you understand how products within the Enterprise are approaching this transition.
 


 

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Link: CNET’s video look at Zune

Video: Microsoft’s Zune zooms into CNET Networks – “Due to launch on November 14, the Zune is Microsoft’s addition to the growing portable MP3 player market. Today, we got the chance to try one out before they hit store shelves.”

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Disney: Free Net TV nets “37 million downloads, 1 million visitors a day, 1.5 billion page views”

Last week, CNET News reported that Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, said that their effort to provide current, popular shows has been a success, saying that “free, ad-supported shows are attracting a younger audience that’s more comfortable watching shows on a computer screen than their parents might have been.”


Amazingly, Disney’s Sweeny reported that they had seen “37 million downloads, with an average of 1 million visitors a day, and 1.5 billion page views” over a two month period this summer, when they had Disney Channel shows available on DisneyChannel.com.


And these numbers were hit with kids on summer break: imagine what the numbers will be when kids return home from summer vacation to their broadband connections.


From the article, I found that this data point that watching free TV on the web will improve your memory (seems that Disney is relying on earlier data from June) as I noted earlier this summer. That’s also when I guessed that ABC would extend the free, commercial-supported viewing through the summer… 



“In addition, ABC has experimented with placing episodes of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Alias” and “Commander-in-Chief” on the Internet for free as part of a two-month trial. That garnered 5.6 million downloads during that period, Sweeney said, and 87 percent of the viewers remembered the advertisements they saw (one episode, for instance, was sponsored by Oil of Olay, and all have only one advertiser per episode).”


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TwC’s site on Product Reliability… and “WSYP”

We have a section on Microsoft site that provides an overview on our reliability efforts through our Trustworthy computing effort (aka TwC). We work closely with the group on several efforts (most recently this summer on the Engineering Excellence/Trustworthy Computing Forum that many blog about) and overall improve product security and provacy, quality and reliability…

“Reliability means more to Microsoft than just making dependable software and providing support. It also means continued investments in processes and technology to improve reliability, active partnership with a wide variety of software and hardware companies, and a continuing focus on every customer’s experience.”

You’ll also find a list of resources, which includes links to such sites as…

  • Overview of Windows Vista Reliability: Performance Features and Improvements. Windows Vista was designed to be more reliable and faster than Microsoft Windows XP, to help increase user productivity and decrease support costs.
  • Enterprise Engineering Center. This Microsoft-hosted center enables organizations to test complex business computing scenarios on systems that match their own IT environment.
  • IT Showcase. Get an insider view of how Microsoft develops, deploys, and manages its own enterprise solutions. This Web site offers technical case studies, white papers, presentations and more, direct from Microsoft IT.

The last site — IT Showcase — also includes videos from the UK’s IT’s Showtime site. This reminded me that it’s back to the chairs for those with buggy code, as documented in the video on the “We Share Your Pain” system (or “WSYP” – also available here on YouTube) from Mauro Meanti, GM for STB EMEA. Steve blogged about this clip today (on YouTube now), the video shows how we “leverage customer feedback for software quality” and one that I often show to new employees… many of whom know still recall what it’s like to be a customer who would like to “share their pain” with developers. 😉

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