Creating Custom Templates for Microsoft Producer 2003 white paper (July 5)
Describes how to create your own customized presentation templates to use in Producer 2003. Readers should have a basic understanding of cascading style sheets and HTML.
Download: Creating Custom Templates for Microsoft Producer 2003 white paper
Planning and Deploying Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 (July 5)
Detailed discussion of how Microsoft IT partnered with the Office, Exchange, Windows, and SharePoint product development teams to develop a testing and deployment strategy that delivered Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 to nearly 70,000 computers within the corporation. The testing strategy, which utilized a large, carefully configured control group of several thousand users, has led to a robust product that has been rigorously tested in a real world environment. The deployment validated key productivity and functionality enhancements in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 products, dependent Line of Business applications, and related products such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Best practices from the deployment are detailed.
Download: Planning and Deploying Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
Pictures from Tech-Ed Europe 2004 (July 1)
As promised here are some pictures from Tech-ed. I’ll write the story later as I’m already late for the party!
View Picture; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Microsoft Hosts Over 6,500 Developers and IT Professionals at Tech•Ed Europe (June 29)
In case you were wondering why I wasn’t in the newsgroups; I’m at Tech•Ed Europe this week. If you’re there as well; come and visit me in the Ask the Expert section at the Tablet PC booth. I’m giving demo’s there with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (codename Lonestar), OneNote SP1, InfoPath SP1, the Context Tagging Tool and lots of other cool new features for the Tablet PC. We have 10 Tablet PC’s at our booth to illustrate the variety of Tablets to choose from these days. When you complete the Hand on Lab for the Tablet PC you can collect a 64MB USB Memory Stick at our booth!
Tomorrow I’ll be dragging along my camera so expect some pictures of the event tomorrow or later this week!
View: Microsoft Hosts Over 6,500 Developers and IT Professionals at Tech•Ed Europe
Preserving and Enhancing the Benefits of Email — A Progress Report (June 29)
By Bill Gates;
I’d like to update you on the progress that Microsoft and our industry are making to curb the epidemic of junk email. Since I sent a message to customers on this subject a year ago, we’ve made significant advances against spam. It’s still a major problem — an invasion of privacy, a costly drain on time and resources and, as a carrier of worms and viruses, a significant threat to computer security. The good news is that billions of junk emails are being blocked every day, and spamming has become a more difficult and less rewarding business.
Much of the improvement Microsoft customers have experienced so far has resulted from broad deployment of SmartScreen, our advanced spam-filtering technology. SmartScreen has provided a significant benefit to users of MSN 8 and MSN Premium, MSN Hotmail and Outlook 2003. Since Hotmail deployed it six months ago, SmartScreen has been blocking more than 95 percent of all incoming spam — an average of nearly 3 billion messages every day. Because we believe that SmartScreen is crucial to the war against spam, we recently began making it available free to all users of Exchange Server 2003, via a download of the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter from www.microsoft.com/exchange.
Nonetheless, the actions of spammers over the past year have reinforced our conviction that current filtering technologies are not enough. Knowing that only a small percentage of their output will get past today’s filters, spammers have responded by significantly cranking up the volume of emails they send. So networks are burdened with even more junk than before. According to some surveys, email traffic now consists of nearly four spam messages for every legitimate one.
Clearly, we must find additional ways to counter spam. Microsoft is working on a number of new technologies and strategies that we believe will bring significant improvement.
View full article: Preserving and Enhancing the Benefits of Email — A Progress Report
Exchange Downloads (June 29)
Exchange 2003 SDK Documentation and Samples June 2004
The documentation and samples assist developers in building applications for Exchange 2003 Server.
Exchange 2000 SDK Documentation and Samples June 2004
The documentation and samples assist developers in building applications for Exchange 2000 Server.
Exchange Server 2003 Message Security Guide
Updated July 2004. This book discusses how, when using S/MIME, encryption protects the contents of e-mail messages and digital signatures verify the identity of a purported sender of an e-mail message.
Working with Active Directory Permissions in Microsoft Exchange 2003
This guide helps Exchange architects in their understanding of how Exchange uses Active Directory in the context of permissions. Further, this document is a reference guide for administrators implementing a split permissions model.
OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped (June 25)
Chris Pratley wrote;
Today we had our ship party for OneNote 2003 SP1 down at Sammamish State Park (at the south end of Lake Sammamish in Issaquah for those who might know the greater Seattle area). Although we have signed off on the code, the process of building a patch, verifying it, and creating international versions continues so you won’t see the final SP1 bits for a few more weeks.
Click the link below for some highlights of OneNote 2003 SP1
View: OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped
Key computer coding creator dies (June 25)
The man who invented the Esperanto of the technology world enabling computers to swap information freely has died.
Bob Bemer developed the Ascii coding system to standardise the way computers represent letters, numbers, punctuation marks and some control codes.
He also introduced the backslash and escape key to the world of computers and was one of the first to warn about the dangers of the millennium bug.
Mr Bemer died on 22 June at his home in Texas following a battle with cancer.
View full article: Key computer coding creator dies
Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios (June 25)
Updated June 2004. Extensive improvements were made to the order and details in several procedures. Graphics of warning message boxes were added in procedures, as well as clearer explanations of the actions required from users when various warning messages appear.
The May 28th, 2004 update contained minor corrections for DWORD and global catalog server references. The original update (May 2004) was released for Service Pack 1 (SP1) with information about the new user interface in Exchange System Manager.
Overall, this guide describes four scenarios to deploy the Windows RPC over HTTP feature in a corporate environment, for both Exchange Server 2003 SP1, and Exchange Server 2003.
Download: Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios
Will I see you at TechEd Europe 2004?
Next week it is TechEd Europe time! I’ll be there all week as well where you could find me at the Ask The Expert booth for Tablet PC’s. If you’re there as well; don’t be a stranger and visit the ATE Tablet PC booth. From what I’ve heard so far it’s going to be a nice booth with quite a few demo tablets…
Microsoft TechEd Europe
Microsoft’s definitive European conference for Building, Deploying, Securing and Managing connected solutions
GET INSIDE the code, the products and the technologies… at this year’s Microsoft premier technical conference. Create your own customized four-day technical training program, participate in hands-on training and preview the latest technology.
View: TechEd 2004 Europe
Anti-Spyware Bill Advances in Congress (June 24)
A U.S. congressional committee on Thursday approved a bill designed to crack down on deceptive “spyware” that hides in users’ computers and secretly monitors their activities.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 45-4 for a bill that would require software makers to notify people before loading new programs on their machines that collects information about them.
Spyware can sap computing power, crash machines and bury users under a blizzard of unwanted ads. It can capture passwords, credit-card numbers and other sensitive data.
The bill, introduced by Reps. Mary Bono, a California Republican, and Ed Towns, a New York Democrat, would allow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to seek millions of dollars in fines for some of the practices lawmakers consider most egregious, such as logging users’ keystrokes or stealing their identities.
It also would require that spyware be made easily removable.
View full article: Anti-Spyware Bill Advances in Congress
MSN Announces Comprehensive Worldwide Upgrade to MSN Hotmail (June 24)
MSN® Hotmail®, the world’s most popular free Web-based e-mail service, will undergo a major upgrade, delivering customers world-class e-mail protection as well as enhanced storage to satisfy all their needs. Starting in early July, MSN will roll out free e-mail anti-virus protection to all the 170 million MSN Hotmail customers worldwide, making MSN Hotmail the only free global e-mail service to both scan and clean incoming and outgoing e-mail for viruses and worms before they can enter a customer’s inbox. MSN also announced it will bring increased storage – 250MB inboxes – to free MSN Hotmail customers in multiple markets and will introduce MSN Hotmail Plus, an upgraded premium Web service to help customers get the most out of MSN Hotmail.
“We know from talking with our customers that online safety is their No. 1 concern,” said Blake Irving, corporate vice president of Communication Services and Member Platform for MSN. “MSN is intensely focused on providing a safer and more robust communications experience for consumers. Providing free anti-virus cleaning helps protect our Hotmail customers while guarding members of the overall Hotmail community and the friends and family they e-mail.”
Later this summer, MSN will begin increasing storage limits for free MSN Hotmail accounts in multiple markets around the world. Customers will receive 125 times their current e mail storage with the introduction of 250MB inboxes and have the ability to send attachments up to 10 MB. Upon upgrade, MSN Hotmail customers will also receive MSN Calendar free, enabling both individual and shared calendaring.
View Full Press Release: MSN Announces Comprehensive Worldwide Upgrade to MSN Hotmail
Sender ID Specification Submitted for Standards Body Consideration (June 24)
Microsoft Corp., author of the Microsoft® Caller ID for E-mail proposal, and Meng Weng Wong, co-founder and CTO of Pobox.com and author of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), have announced today that they have successfully converged the two proposals into one specification named Sender ID and submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for consideration as an industrywide standard for e-mail authentication as part of the IETF’s efforts to define effective industry Internet e-mail standards to address the problem of spam. Sender ID is designed to help verify the source of e-mail to help eliminate domain spoofing and provide greater protection against phishing schemes. By providing a unified specification, Microsoft and Wong hope to simplify industry adoption of effective e-mail authentication technology, thereby helping more swiftly provide greater spam protection to e-mail users worldwide.
“Spoofing,” or sending e-mail purporting to be from someone it’s not, is an increasingly common and relatively simple way for spammers to try to trick filters. It can also pose a security risk when used to deliver e-mail viruses or phisher scams, which attempt to trick users into divulging personal information such as credit card numbers or account passwords by pretending to be from a legitimate source, such as a user’s bank. Sender ID aims to prevent spoofing by confirming what domain a message came from and thereby increase the effectiveness of spam filters.
View full Press Release: Sender ID Specification Submitted for Standards Body Consideration
Anti-Spam Technical Alliance Publishes Industry Recommendations to Help Stop Spam (June 23)
The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA), whose participants include Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq “YHOO”), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq “MSFT”), EarthLink (Nasdaq “ELNK”) and America Online Inc. (NYSE “TWX”), today unveiled the result of more than a year of close collaboration by presenting a host of detailed best practices and technical recommendations for the entire industry in an effort to fight the scourge of spam.
The proposal provides recommended actions and policies for Internet service providers (ISPs) and e-mail service providers (ESPs) as well as large senders of e-mail including governments, private corporations and online marketing organizations. These recommendations primarily focus on two key issues: helping solve the e-mail forgery problem by eliminating domain spoofing through Internet Protocol (IP)-based and signature-based solutions; and best practices to help prevent ISPs and their customers from being sources of spam.
View full article: Anti-Spam Technical Alliance Publishes Industry Recommendations to Help Stop Spam
Porn spammers sneak images into Outlook (June 23)
Not trying to be rude on this but; didn’t we know this already? Embedding pictures goes back to Outlook version …??? At least they are slowed down now; embedding pictures makes their SPAM e-mails a lot larger in size! Also, they won’t be able anymore to check whether your address is valid by means of the downloaded image.
Don’t forget you can always beat them (in displaying pornographic images) by choosing to display all messages in Plain Text;
Outlook 2003; Tools-> Options-> tab Preferences-> button E-mail Options…-> option: Read all standard mail in plain text
When needed you can now change individual messages back to HTML with just 2 clicks.
Alright, enough from me; go on, read the article 
Spammers have found a way to bypass Outlook 2003’s anti-spam security by embedding pornographic images into their emails.
Spammers who send pornographic pictures in the hope of enticing the recipient to signing up to an adult Web site have discovered a way to bypass Outlook 2003’s security features, which are designed to stop potentially offensive content being automatically displayed in the preview window.
The latest version of Microsoft’s Outlook was built with a relatively sophisticated spam filter, but as the product’s first birthday approaches, spammers are finding new ways to ensure that their unsolicited message go undetected.
In order to help fight spam, Microsoft armed Outlook 2003 with a Bayesian filter, which tries to recognise unsolicited messages by examining the words used and, depending on the frequency of certain key words, calculating the probability of that e-mail being spam.
The company also improved on previous versions of Outlook by allowing users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content. This gives the user a chance to prevent the pornography from ever reaching his or her PC.
However, John Cheney, chief executive of email-security firm BlackSpider Technologies, explained that one of the growing trends is for spammers to attach a pornographic image file to their emails and then use HTML code to display the attached image. This means that Outlook doesn’t need to access the Internet before displaying the picture.
View full article: Porn spammers sneak images into Outlook
