Archive for July, 2007

If you were unabel to make it to Orlando and were jsut dying to catch the MSCOM Operations Presentation Microsoft.com: Employing Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services 7 As A Next Generation Platform for SaaS Web Applications , here...(read more)

You’ve probably seen the postings in the past on this blog about the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS. SSE was originally introduced by Ray Ozzie on his blog as a way to enable syncing items between different points on the web. We’ve recently updated the spec to support Atom feeds as well.

I posted the latest Simple Sharing Extensions spec to MSDN last month, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse. I’ve received a bunch of great comments and suggestions on the spec, and I’m in the process of incorporating those into a new draft. I’ll be sending out the proposed updates to the FEED-TECH list over the next few days. You can see the first change set here. I’ll also be discussing these changes on my personal blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/stevenlees.

It would be great to hear people’s thoughts about the spec and the updates. The best way to respond is to join the FEED-TECH list and post your comments there. Thanks!

--Steven

We know you love searching for people with our image search engine—we’ve worked hard to make it easy and fun. Now we’ve made it even better. Today we shipped three new features that help you find faces, portraits and black and white images. Try these links to see them in action:

1. without the new features – jimi hendrix
2. with new face filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:face
3. with new portrait filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:portrait
4. with new black and white filtering on – jimi hendrix filter:bw

While some people are born with a green thumb, others of us have the brown thumb that comes from working to get a garden to grow. While we dream of sweet fruits and crisp, fresh vegetables, sometimes all we get for our troubles is dirt under our fingernails...(read more)

Hey all, if you recall, back in April we released the PREVIEW version of our new portal affectionately known as the Microsoft Malware Protection Center Portal.  Since then we’ve received loads of feedback from customers and partners on what they like about the portal and the features they really want to see now and in the future. All of it great stuff!

The official Version 1 of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center Portal is now live!

You can check it out here:  http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/

Some of the features you asked for and we included are:

·         Access to our malware encyclopedia. 

o        When you need to do some research on a particular threat or family you can search or browse our encyclopedia and get the details we’ve written about on it.

·         Download our antivirus and/or our antispyware signatures. 

o        We recommend updating daily, the products will do it for you, BUT if want you can do it yourself for the Forefront client or Windows Defender products  both the 32 bit and 64 bit systems.

·         Threat and Potentially Unwanted Software Telemetry. 

o        The portal provides information on the top threats and potentially unwanted software that we are observing and that’s being reported to us by YOU. Each top ten category  provides links to read up on those listed

·         Tools and Resources. 

o        We have a collection of links to tools and resources that we think can be useful and interesting to you including blogs and the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report.

·         Microsoft Security Intelligence Report. 

o        And of course no blog would be complete without me mentioning the SIR, we have a page dedicated to hosting the various reports we produce:  http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/SIR.aspx 

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And last but not least we have the Sample Submission feature! You got a file that you think is infected and want to know for sure?? Upload it to us, we’ll take a look and let you know.

This is just the start – literally a v1 release.  As always we want to hear what you think about the portal – the good, the bad, and the ugly (don’t be shy).  Please send us feedback and let us know which features you want to see in future releases.  mpcfb@microsoft.com

Take care, more soon!!

 

Vinny

As mentioned here before, the del.icio.us team is presently in the midst of a major project: building a new platform which will speed up the site and help us grow even faster. At the same time we’re also taking a close look at our UI and exploring ways to make it both easier to use and more functional. Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Many folks like the simple and terse nature of the site, while others take issue with certain elements of the design (shockingly, some of you think that light-blue-on-salmon-pink is not a good color combination; more shockingly, some of you think that it is). Our challenge then is to make del.icio.us better without messing up the stuff that already works.

We’ve been working on some new design ideas and recently conducted a series of usability tests to see if these ideas work. We brought in about a dozen people, both existing users and a few people who were new to del.icio.us. Yahoo! (our parent company) has some great facilities for this sort of thing which we basically moved into and hogged for about a week. It was a lot of fun for us (and, it seemed, for the participants), and we learned a lot from watching people use the site and try out our new designs. As we expected, we heard feedback all across the spectrum, and nearly all of it is proving deeply useful in our continuing work.

Here’s some stats from the tests:

• 20 participants
• Over 2000 post-it notes used
• 562 unique observations recorded
• Hundreds of design tweaks made as a result of feedback
• 62 cups of drip coffee and 23 lattes consumed
• Most disappointing thing overheard: “I don’t really get tags”
• Most gratifying thing overheard: “del.icio.us has totally changed my life”
• Funniest thing overheard: “I’m pleased; this new design doesn’t look like an angry fruit salad”

In the very near future we’re going to have a beta of the new design so we can get even more feedback (watch this space for announcements). Please also feel free to use this blog to share your thoughts about what you’d like to see different in del.icio.us. More cowbell? Less pink? Let us know.

Stephen Hood
Product Manager

If you use Google Apps at your business, organization or school, you can now use the Google Talk Gadget on your Start Page to have chats with colleagues or classmates (including group chats). Google Apps lets your organization create Gmail accounts that use your domain name -- like me@my-organization.com -- instead of @gmail.com in the email address. It also offers collaborative tools, like Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and the customizable Start Page, where all your students, employees, or members can view relevant content, preview their inboxes and calendars, and now, chat with one or more colleagues or classmates -- all from the same webpage.

As a Google Apps user, you can add the Google Talk Gadget to your Start Page by clicking on the "Add stuff" link on the top left corner of your homepage, opening the 'Google Apps' category of gadgets, and clicking 'add it now.' If you're a Google Apps administrator, click here to learn how to add the Google Talk Gadget and other content to your users' Start Page. If your organization doesn't use Google Apps yet, you can learn more about getting started at http://www.google.com/a.

Adam Fass
Software Engineer