Microsoft revealed details on Office 2010 SP1 and updates for Windows Phone 7 at the TechEd North America conference in Atlanta this week.
The first service pack for Office 2010 and SharePoint will contain updates to improve stability, performance, and security. With it, Microsoft promised a better Internet Explorer 9 browsing experience, improved Office Web Apps functionality, and better SharePoint database performance.
It’ll include minor updates as well; including all public updates through June 2011 and all cumulative updates through April 2011, in addition to some previously unreleased fixes made specifically for this service pack. SP1 will be available for download at the end of June and will be offered as an automatic update 90 days later.
The new Windows Phone 7 will boast organization, security, and search enhancements in Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile, and Outlook Mobile includes a conversation view, pinnable email folders, server search, and complex password support. Information Rights management is now included for email and documents as well as targeted distribution for business apps from the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Windows Phone 7 has also been updated to support Office 365. Users can access Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online. Microsoft Lync 2010 Mobile for Windows Phone, a solution to deliver unified communications to mobile workers, will be showcased for the first time at TechEd North America.
Other announcements include*:
- Additional supported hypervisor scenarios for virtualized Exchange Server 2010, including Unified Messaging, combining Exchange’s high availability solutions, Database Availability Groups (DAG) with hypervisor based clustering and failover solutions.
- An updated Exchange Server 2010 Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program for Exchange 2010 server experts to get MCM certified.
- New license mobility options, which will be available on July 1, 2011 through Microsoft Volume License agreements with an active Software Assurance benefit. Customers will be able to deploy application services on-premise or through hosted service providers for the cloud.
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will support Linux-based CentOS.
- Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) v3.5 Extension for SAML 2.0 Protocol enables .NET developers to build applications for the enterprise and government that require the SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language) protocol.
- Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit beta 6.0 will be released on May 31. The toolkit provides data and analysis on IT infrastructure. It was designed to help ease the process of migrating existing software to a virtualized or cloud environment. Version 6.0 includes the ability to provide consolidation guidance for Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Infrastructures, including computing power, network, and storage architectures.
(*info via PCmag.com)
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