Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects.

There has been a lot of news blogged from this conference over the last few days.

I have summarised and provided links for the main things from my perspective as it affects me, our business and our clients. Some of this stuff wont impact our clients for several years, but its nice to be able to see glimpses of the future.

Live Mesh

Live Mesh shifted from Tech Preview to Beta in the last few days as we indicated a few days ago it would. However there was lots of good stuff talked about the mesh platform at PDC. Some of these links are about the new features in Beta and some are blogs from PDC.

From Sarah Perez:

Microsoft released an extraordinary security patch yesterday.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)

Published: October 23, 2008

Seeing as Microsoft only release patches once a month, this is totally unexpected, and indicates the critical nature of the flaw. One surmises that there are already hackers and other criminals already exploiting this flaw.

There are lots of details in the MS08-067 bulletin and there is starting to be a fair bit of chatter on the tubes about it – see this from Nick MacKechnie for example where he points to the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog.

We emailed all our clients and suggested they patch immediately, or invite us to remotely connect to them and manage that for them.

Time to clear the tabs in Google Chrome.

SBS2008 news is buzzing with the wrap up of the conferences stateside. Here is some important stuff.

• Susan the SBS Diva screenshots a Hyperv install of SBS2008 and follows up with some Nic settings for HyperV
• Robbie from MSFT Australia has some good technical content on SBS2008 and EBS2008.
• Australians can get their hands on training for SBS2008 and EBS2008 at discounted prices.

Robin Good’s Sharewood guide has a list of the Top 25 screen sharing tools.

Sonia Coleman has 208 free Microsoft PowerPoint templates.

I am now using Tweetdeck to manage my twitter conversations – its great!

TwitterAgency is a Virtual Advertising Agency on how to use / not use Twitter.

Brisbane mountain bike riders, check out Bushranger. They also run adventure tours in New Zealand. And if you are into horse riding the Mountain Lake Adventures crew look as if they provide a pretty decent trail riding experience just west of Brisbane.

I have something like 20 or more websites open in browser that I want to be able to review or recommend. I haven’t got time so I will link them here, tag on delicious and clip into socialmedian as appropriate.

Here goes.

Microsoft

• Windows Live One Care for Server. Free trial. Works on Server 2008 Standard 64 bit, SBS 2008 Standard and Premium.
• File Dialogs – adding My Places in the File Open and File Save As dialog boxes. Quickly find frequently used locations on your PC or network.
• Adding signatures to email in Windows Live Hotmail
• Plugins – Flickr for Live Writer, Flickr for Outlook, Flickr for Word. Zemanta for Windows Live Writer. Hat tip to Sarah Perez from Channel 10 for this. (see our Geek Girl profile on Sarah)
• Another from Sarah is the Circle Dock Application launcher. Go straight to Circle Dock.
• How to share large files without attaching them to email
• Bulk convert old documents to new Office 2007 format from Digital Inspiration. I will be trialing this with a set of copied documents to test the results.