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Mike Nash on Securing your Small Business

MikeNash Nash presented an on-demand webcast for the Small Business Summit this past March, and presented a session on “Is Your Business at Risk? Tools To Use.” (View the webcast here.)



“The bad news is there is a lot of bad stuff out there: Malware. Pirates. Viruses. And more evil. The good news is that the industry — and Microsoft — has made great strides in its efforts to combat and prevent malicious software attacks. Mike Nash, Microsoft’s VP of Security discusses the dangers and how you can steer clear of them.”


Mike is on sabbatical (now with Ben Fathi at the helm), and I expect that he’s spending lots of time with family… which in this case includes customers of all sizes, from individual consumers to small businesses. I like that he understands what it’s like to be your family’s resident IT Pro. He’s just as at home with these customers as he is with large enterprise customers when it comes to dicussing security.


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From the Expert Zone: Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender

Got a call this weekend from friends who finally took the plunge and brought home a new Xbox 360. They already have a Media Center PC and they wanted to know how to configure their new game machine as a Media Center Extender.


My response: why read when you can watcn and learn. Just fire up the broadband connection and check out Chris Turkstra’s Expert Zone Support WebCast on just such a scenario: 



“This session provides an overview of the Media Center Extender feature that is included in every Microsoft Xbox 360. With an Xbox 360, a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and a network, you can extend the Media Center experience – in high definition, including all your TV, pictures, music and videos – to any room in your house. This WebCast will cover computer and network requirements, setup, and the features, end user benefits, and limitations of using Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender.”



  • Offline viewing download: If you wish to download a copy of this broadcast to your local hard drive for off-line viewing, it’s provided as a separate file (self-extracting .exe) that you can download.

  • Download the presentation: This is a Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) file.

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Eating Dogfood with Energizer, link to case study

We often talk about the importance of eating our own dogfood. See this article from News.Com on “Managing desktops the Microsoft way,” which describes the effort Microsoft took on to manage desktop PCs at Energizer. Steve Ballmer discussed the effort last year.



“Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in an e-mail interview before the company’s partner conference last year that the effort would not be limited to just Energizer.


“There will be a few others, where we will mirror our own internal IT environment, running the technology hand in hand, as opposed to being a step removed,” Ballmer said. “We’re going to test this out and see where it takes us.”


“In a case study posted to its Web site last month, Microsoft characterized the Energizer effort as a work in progress. It said it is still in the pilot phase of some projects and has only partially completed other efforts, such as desktop management work and a move to SharePoint-based portals.”


Although News doesn’t include the link, you can find the case study here, on the Microsoft Customer Evidence Search Site.


For more on how we do things internally, there’s also this interview from TechEd 2006 with our Ron Markezich, CIO and VP of Managed Solutions, as well as the CIO Webcast Series.


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