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 Join us for the first in a series of in-depth session on Active Directory with Microsoft technical experts and ask them all your burning questions. Microsoft® Active Directory® forms the critical backbone to support your enterprise’s information structure. A poorly functioning Active Directory environment affects security boundaries, replication, and dele-gate administration, causing significant impact to your business. We are delighted to have Stanley Lopez, Senior Premier Field Engineer, to speak about • how checking the health of your Active Directory Environment regularly will lower your risk of having this issues. • Learn the basic tools which you would need to use to validate your environments health. • What should be in place to ensure that everything will be working well at the end of the day ...

Recently we have series of IT Camps on Virtualization and Private Cloud in Singapore. Check out Spiffy.sg article to find out more about the IT Camps. One of the topics that generates quite a lot interests is the Hyper-V Network Optimization. We covered quite few network optimization technologies during the Camps. Here is a quick summary on these networking optimizations TCP Chimney offload VM Chimney VMQ Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) TCP Chimney TCP Chimney Offload is a networking technology that allows the work associated with moving data across a network to be offloaded from the host computer’s CPU to the physical network adapter. In Windows Server 2008, TCP Chimney Offload enables the Windows networking subsystem to offload the processing of a TCP/IP connection to a network adapter that includes special support for TCP/IP offload processing. The offload capabilities must be enabled in the driver for the physical network adapter in the root partition. VM Chimney VM-Chimney (TCP Offload) allows the CPU workload associated with TCP/IP traffic to be offloaded to the physical NIC, reducing processor usage and increasing network performance. This has been available for physical host, now it is available for the guest operating systems. VMQ VMQ is a technology that allows the physical NIC to create unique virtual network queues for each virtual machine (VM) on the host, allowing network packets to be passed directly from the hypervisor to the VM. This reduces a lot of overhead normally associated with network traffic. Note: If a NIC has support for both VMQ and VM-Chimney, VMQ will be used. Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) resolves the single-processor bottleneck by allowing the receive side network load from a network adapter to be shared across multiple processors. RSS enables packet receive-processing to scale with the number of available processors. This allows the Windows Networking subsystem to take advantage of multi-core and many core processor architectures. Jumbo Frames Jumbo frames are Ethernet frames with more than 1500 bytes of payload. Conventionally, jumbo frames can carry up to 9000 bytes of payload, but variations exist. Many Gigabit Ethernet switches and Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards support jumbo frames. Hyper-V Networking Best Practices Use multiple network adapters on physical hosts To ensure good networking performance, you should use separate physical adapters for the following different networks. ...

With the rising interest of CIOs in cloud computing, it is important for IT Professionals to stay ahead of the curve. Every IT Professional should understand virtualization. When implementing Microsoft Private Cloud, knowing System Center and PowerShell is crucial. While getting IT certifications may bring you bigger paycheck, we are providing you with a Private Cloud learning roadmap that help you stay competitive among your peers. Learn at your own pace. Register at Microsoft Virtual Academy to access a wide range of topics on Microsoft’s cloud offerings. Nothing beats learning by doing. Get hands-on experience with our tools. ...

The result for the Imagine Cup 2012 - Round 1 will be announced here progressively in the next few hours as we complete the paperwork for each team. The order of the team announcement is in random order (1st to be announced != highest score). Typhoon [NYP] AlphaWaves [NYP] Health Angle [NTU] Eynteract [SP/TP] Team Social Cops [NTU] Kinecteract [NYP] Kinect4Sleep [NYP] Oceanic [NUS] BabyGuardian [TP] The Avengers [NYP] PainNix [SP] ShadowHolic [SP] Puff Legacy II [NUS/NYP] Super Mario [NYP] Dyslexic Mediators [TP] TechConnect [SUTD] The results are all out. Thank you! For those who did not qualify into Round 2, we will like to thank you for your participation and hope to see you in our future events!

Startup Asia is the years first big startup conference here in Singapore. Held February 2 and 3 at the Singapore Post Centre. Their tagline of ‘Pitches, Demos, Founders, & NO B.S." is quite straight forward as a reference to other startup events. From the details page alone, you can see that they have an impressive set of guest panelists, investors and attendees from all over Asia. Mobile giants, Gree and Dena as well as several Japanese and Chinese investors. A lot of local players as well representing different industries and sides of the startup world were present. ...

If you currently own Visual Studio 2008, here is a great way to upgrade to Visual Studio 20 10 and get an MSDN subscription at a great price! If you own Visual Studio 2010 but don’t currently have an MSDN subscription, you can now upgrade and get all the advantages of MSDN! Attaching an MSDN® subscription to Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 conveniently and cost-effectively gives you comprehensive access to the Microsoft development platform, tools, and resources to build high-quality applications for the Web, Mobile, Cloud, and Windows®. ...

Skype and Facebook have teamed up to make it easier than ever to stay in touch. Now the newest version of Skype for Windows, Skype 5.8.0.154 allows you to make video and voice calls to all your Facebook friends direct from Skype. The feature works even with Facebook friends who are not Skype users. Even before this update, Skype was already integrated with Facebook and allowed you to chat with friends, read status updates and more. Highlights of the new Skype for Windows update includes: ...

[vimeo width=“600” height=“300”]http://vimeo.com/35533524[/vimeo] At the 2012 NRF Convention & Expo in NYC, in partnership with NEC and Microsoft, the team from Razorfish has created the first ever Retail Experience Platform code-named “5D”. Leveraging Windows Embedded, Microsoft Surface, MS Tag, Windows Phone and Kinect for Windows, they created a prototype around a fictitious brand “Razorfashion” that demonstrates how various touch points along the customer journey can attract consumers into the store, drive product engagement and arm store associates with more contextualized digital tools. The 5 in 5D itself refers to the integration of digital devices (such as kiosks, large-screen displays, smartphones), content, experiences, analytics and CRM - with a touch of digital magic. It’s very exciting to see how they have successfully shown us the potential of combining Microsoft technologies to build new digitalized user experience in retail platform. Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the future market! And now, 5D is available as a beta version. You can read the full press release here, and also the official announcement on the Emerging Experiences blog.

Singapore SQL User Group is running a special meet up with industry expert to talk about their expereince on implementing Data Mining. Join your peers for a special meet up on 6th Feb. Data Mini****ng for Social Moderation The BBC (the British Broadcasting Company), a known media force in Europe, implemented an in-database data mining solution for their public-facing website. The BBC encourages users to post comments and become part of their social media community. In this project, the BBC needed a way to improve the social moderation of millions of posts on thousands of forums. This presentation covers how SQL Server helped designing a model to dramatically help improving the quality and efficiency of the moderation. We also discuss cost efficiencies obtained in this project. More and more organizations will need to use enterprise solutions to handle high-volume social networking, learn from it, and eventually take actions that make sense to achieve their goals. Data Mining is one of the areas with more potential growth for SQL Server, and perhaps one of the least known ones by the SQL Server professionals. Speaker Profile: Fernando G. Guerrero. Global CEO of SolidQ. a Civil Engineer and former lecturer of Surveying and Photogrammetry at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, he spent 15 years working in Indonesia, Morocco, Bolivia, Ecuador, the UK and the USA, in projects financed by the European Union, the European Investment Bank, The World Bank, and the Spanish International Cooperation Agency. Mr Guerrero is a published author and a frequent speaker at international conferences. He holds the honorific title of Microsoft Regional Director for Spain, and received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for SQL Server from 2000 until 2007 Venue: Microsoft Singapore Pte. Ltd. 1 Marina Boulevard #22-01 One Marina Boulevard Singapore 018989 Date/Time: 6 February 2012/7 pm onwards For confirmation please send email to sgsql@live.com

The #WhereIsMyLumia campaign proposal period is now over. Thank you for your tremendous support! Yes, we are giving away Nokia Lumia 800 to our developers and here is how: Follow us on Spiffy and Join us at Facebook page Spiffy to receive information on this program. Submit your three app ideas* to whereismylumia@hotmail.com with subject “#WhereIsMyLumia”. Include the name and description of your app. The applications need to be implemented using PhoneGap HTML5 mobile framework. If your app is approved, you will be informed through email, along with instructions to pick up your loaner device** in our Microsoft Singapore office. You are required to submit one approved application to Marketplace every month, for 3 months - to keep the device. Until then, it’s a loaner device. If you fail to propose/send in an approved app and submit to Marketplace on the agreed month, you will have to return the device to Microsoft Singapore. *You are encouraged to utilize native phone functions (camera, geolocation and etc). Refer to PhoneGap’s Supported Feature page. Your proposals will have higher chance if you are porting over an existing HTML5 from iOS or Android. **First come first serve due to devices availability. For developers in Singapore only. ...