Continue reading »]]> Microsoft has announced the official release date for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview: February 29^th.

The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of tablets and smartphones. With Apple dominating a large chunk of the market share, Microsoft has been hard at work coming up with ways to tap into that booming market. With the upcoming Windows 8 release the tech giant unleashes a wide array of changes to address changes in device technology and to add support in areas that it’s OS hadn’t offered it previously, such as for ARM microprocessors found in tablet computers.

While past versions of Microsoft Windows have been geared towards traditional PCs, the 8th version of the operating system takes a decidedly more contemporary approach. The new Windows PC makes use of smaller screens and touch technology. In fact, the inclusion of touch technology means that users have the option of touch, keyboard, mouse and pen-based navigation through which to operate the system. The redesign of this operating platform makes it more fluid and fast, according to Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Experience.

Gone is the traditional “Start” menu and sliding in its place is the new “Metro” screen, which offers a customized page from which to launch applications from the full list available on your device. This eliminates the current, more muddled way you have to navigate to these apps, which involves going to the “Start” menu and navigating to a “Programs” tab to find your program on the list. The Microsoft 8 interface will also offer regular updates from your apps and create an easier and more fluid way to switch between them. This change is similar to the experience you might get currently through the Windows smartphone.

Moreover, Windows 8 will run a bevy of new apps as well as those programs that have previously run under the Windows platform, such as Windows Explorer and Desktop. The new operating system will be compatible with Windows 7 and any software associated with the previous system.

This latest OS will offer a new method of password authentication; instead of setting the traditional “word-based” password, users will now be able sketch over parts of the picture to log in to the device. Windows 8 will also provide an online store that will sell Windows-based apps. The system can be run from drives connected via USB ports, including flash drives, which is another marked departure from the previous versions of Windows. Dubbed Windows to Go, this feature is aimed at corporate America, allowing employees to work on systems with either Windows 7 or 8 from work, home and just about anywhere else, offering a new kind of mobility.

Windows 8 will also allow users to navigate between numerous monitors as necessary, allowing for a customizable taskbar for each different display. And for those that have had to suffer through a complete system loss due to a virus or other OS issues, Windows 8 offers two possible solutions: Refresh and Reset. The Refresh feature only reverses changes to the operating system, removing any programs and applications without the need to erase all files and settings. The Reset feature reinstalls Windows completely without the need to have access to the hard disk or going through the licensing stuff again.

Windows devotees will likely appreciate the wealth of upgrades and enhancements, but like most operating system products, it is only upon installation to a specific device that users will get the full effect of the Windows 8 experience and determine if the upgrade is beneficial.

Article Contributor: Lynda Belcher

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Microsoft announced that System Center 2012 will be released in the first half of 2012, aiming for the “Microsoft Management Summit” that will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada in April 2012. System Center 2012 is offered in two editions: Standard and Datacenter. Both editions include the full set of System Center server management capabilities and are only differentiated by virtualization rights.

System Center 2012 captures and aggregates knowledge about systems, policies, processes and best practices so that you can optimize your infrastructure to reduce costs, improve application availability and enhance service delivery. System Center is flexible and cost effective that enables self-service and automation while leveraging your existing investments. With these integrated and automated management capabilities, you can become a trusted service provider for your business.

Microsoft System Center 2012 is a comprehensive solution built to manage today’s increasingly virtualized datacenters as well as emerging private and public cloud environments.

System Center 2012 cloud and data-center management solutions empower you with a common management toolset for your private and public cloud applications and services.

Application Management 

System Center offers unique capabilities that can empower your application owners to deliver agile & predictable application services to their business counterparts. It enables the concept of “Application as a Service”. Here, the ‘Service’ is a deployed instance of a cloud style application along with its associated configuration and virtual infrastructure. It helps you manage the full application life cycle, from provisioning services to operating them.

Standardized Application Provisioning

• Utilize service templates to define standardized application blueprints for your private cloud.
• Specify application configuration requirements like topology, elasticity, scale-out rules, upgrade rules and health thresholds.
• Support for multiple package types for Microsoft .NET applications.

Deep Application Diagnostics and Insight

• Offers deep application and transaction monitoring insight for .NET applications and J2EE application server health.
• Offers easy-to-use reporting and custom dash-boarding.
• Helps you efficiently isolate the root cause of application performance issues down to the offending line of code.

Service Delivery & Automation

WithSystemCenter, you can automate core organizational process workflows such as change management and release management. You can also integrate and extend your existing toolsets and build flexible workflows to automate processes across your IT assets and organizations.

Standardize Services Provided to IT Service Consumers

• Define service offerings available for request by leveraging dependencies in central management database to publish standardized service offerings.
• Ensure compliance with pertinent industry regulations and business needs.
• Identify approval processes and workflows to fulfill service requests.

Empower Consumers of IT Services

• Deliver services based upon service consumer roles.
• Provide easy navigation with intuitive interface.
• Ensure capturing and tracking of required service request information.

 Automate Service Processes and Systems

• Automate provisioning of service requests for end-to-end request fulfillment.
• Automate routing of requests for approval and notification.
• Integrate automation acrossSystemCenterand third party management components.

Infrastructure Management

System Center provides a common management toolset to help you configure, provision, monitor, and operate your IT infrastructure. The integrated physical, virtual, private and public cloud management capabilities in System Center ensure efficient IT management and optimized ROI of those resources.

Provision your Physical and Virtual Infrastructure

• Provision everything from operating systems to physical servers, patches, and endpoint protection with Configuration Manager.
• Manage VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer by just using one interface.
• Support deployment and configuration of virtual servers and Hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager

Provision Private Clouds

• Customize and assign private cloud resources to suit your organization’s needs.
• Use “create cloud” functionality in Virtual Machine Manager to aggregate all virtual resources into a unified private cloud fabric.
• Deliver self service capability for application owners to request and automate provisioning of new private cloud resources.

Operate Your Infrastructure

• Leverage a single console and customizable dashboards in Operations Manager to monitor and manage all the resources.
• Protect your physical and virtual resources with Endpoint Protection and Data Protection Manager.
• Automatically patch your physical and virtual resources with Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager.
• Dynamically optimize virtual resources for load balancing and power efficiency.

Key Benefits 

• Reduce application deployment errors by introducing consistency and repeatability.
• Effectively track and communicate your application SLAs.
• Deliver operational efficiencies by simplifying application upgrades.
• Extend familiar on-premise experiences and skills to manage public cloud applications on Windows Azure.
• Reduce time to delivery and improve predictability by reducing error prone manual activities.
• Improve service reliability across multiple tools, systems, and departments.
• Improve infrastructure availability with automated remediation of errors or alerts.

Article Contributor: Satish Kumar

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Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2012 will be released in the first half of 2012 in three versions: Standard (for basic database and reporting capabilities), Business Intelligence (a new version providing premium corporate and self-service BI) and Enterprise (for large scale data warehousing and mission critical applications). Microsoft is holding a “virtual launch event” for SQL Server 2012 on March 7, 2012.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is a significant product release that provides mission critical confidence with greater uptime, blazing-fast performance and enhanced security features.

SQL Server 2012 is a cloud-ready information platform that helps organizations unlock breakthrough insights with pervasive data discovery across their organization.

SQL Server 2012 Enhancements & New Features

 Availability

 For protecting application databases, SQL Server 2012 introduces the AlwaysOn SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances and AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature.

 AlwaysOn SQL Server Failover Clusters:

• A multi-subnet failover cluster provides a disaster recovery solution in addition to high availability.
• The improved failure detection and addition of failure condition level property lets you configure a more flexible failover policy.
• The indirect checkpoints feature provides a database specific alternative to automatic checkpoints that are configured by a server property.  

AlwaysOn Availability Groups:

• An availability group is a container that defines a set user databases (availability databases) to fail over as a single unit. It defines a set of availability replicas to host copies of each user database.
• It also provides a rich set of options that improve resource usage.

Manageability

Manageability of SQL Server 2012 is improved by enhancements to tools and monitoring features.

• The Database Engine Query Editor introduces enhanced functionality for Transact-SQL debugging and IntelliSense.
• Point-in-time restore has improved by the addition of a visual timeline.
• Restore plan algorithm has improved and a lot of edge cases are dealt more efficiently than in previous versions.
• Data tier applications now support many more objects than in SQL Server 2008 R2.
• The new Windows PowerShell 2.0 feature loads SQL Server components into a PowerShell environment.

Programmability 

Programmability enhancements include FileTables, statistical semantic search, ad-hoc query paging, support for sequence objects and numerous improvements to Transact-SQL.

• You can now store files and documents in special tables in SQL Server.  You can access them from Windows applications as if they were stored in the file system, without making changes to the Windows applications.
• Semantic search enables new scenarios that extend beyond syntactical keyword searches. Semantic search lets you query the meaning of a document.
• You can specify a range of rows returned by a SELECT statement based on row offset and row count values that you provide.
• A sequence object generates a sequence of numeric values according to the specification with which the sequence was created. Here the sequence numbers are not restricted.
• The THROW statement can be used to raise an exception and transfer the control to a CATCH block of a TRY-CATCH construct.
• The OVER clause has been extended to support window functions.

Scalability & Performance 

Scalability and performance enhancements in the Database Engine include columnstore indexes.

• The columnstore index improves data warehouse query performance by hundreds to thousands of times and can routinely give a tenfold speedup for a wide range of decision support queries.
• This allows end users to get more business value from their data.
• As columnstore indexes can eliminate the need of pre-built aggregates, IT workers can reduce the development costs and ETL times.

Security

Security enhancements include new SEARCH PROPERTY LIST permissions and new user-defined server roles.

• New GRANT, REVOKE, and DENY permissions are available to a SEARCH PROPERTY LIST.
• To manage user-defined server roles and to add and remove members from all server roles, CREATE SERVER ROLE, ALTER SERVER ROLE, and DROP SERVER ROLE are available.

Key Benefits

• The new MDS Add-in for Excel helps end users to manage and maintain central data.
• Create and scale business solutions from server to cloud.
• Provide complete view across business data through integration, cleansing and management.
• Reduce complexity and accelerate time to solution through SQL Server appliances and cloud offerings.
• Ensure peace of mind with premier services and support, and free access to software service packs.

The upcoming release of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 promises to further protect the infrastructure of an organization, especially for mission critical workloads. As you bet on Microsoft, you get more than a trusted platform. You also get a trusted business partner as well as a trusted ecosystem of experienced vendors.

Article Contributor: Satish Kumar

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Continue reading »]]> For the past few months, the internet has been abuzz with news of some controversial -many would say dangerous- pieces of legislation:  The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). If you are not yet familiar with these proposed pieces of Orwellian control, you can read the full text of the Stop Online Piracy Act here.

Today, January 18th, 2011, SoftwareMedia.com and Software News Daily have joined hundreds if not thousands of websites (including Google, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Tumblr, and many others) in the National Internet Blackout Day, one of the largest online protests the world has ever seen.

You too can do your part to help tell Congress that We The People oppose SOPA and PIPA, by signing Google’s Online Petition.

Protect the freedom of information – say NO to SOPA and PIPA!

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Continue reading »]]> Back in November 2011 Adobe announced that you would need the most recent versions of Creative Suite, 5 or 5.5, in order to upgrade to CS6. This policy meant that if you had an older version, such as CS3 or CS4, you would need to upgrade to CS5 or CS5.5, which could run you anywhere from $400 – $1000, and then have to pay a fee to upgrade again to CS6 once it comes out. When Adobe announced this in November they offered a 20% off promotion till the end of the year for upgrades to CS5.5.

Here at SoftwareMedia.com we felt the pain of being forced to upgrade and dropped our CS5.5 upgrade prices even lower than Adobe’s advertised discount and now include a free gift with purchase. Late December, in an attempt to give customers a break, Adobe announced their 20% off promotion would continue until March 15th. But this plan still wasn’t satisfactory with customers and, most likely due to the overwhelmingly negative response, there was a change of heart over at Adobe.

Fortunately, Adobe has revised their upgrade policy once again. For a limited time customers will be able to upgrade to CS6 from versions going back to CS3, reverting to the previous “3 versions back” upgrade policy. So, if you have CS3 or CS4 you will no longer have to upgrade to CS5 or CS5.5 before upgrading to CS6 when it is released. But, this offer is scheduled to be a special introductory price only.

This special upgrade policy will be in effect from the release of CS6 until December 31st, 2012.

This change in upgrade pricing will hopefully allow industry professionals to stay on top of their game with all the new features in CS6, without breaking the bank. But, as we mentioned before, the previous policy wasn’t unanimously disagreed with. Some argued that encouraging people to stay up to date will make collaboration easier among teams by avoiding the headache of sharing files with older versions. In any case, creative professionals will now have more flexibility with upgrading older versions or upgrading to CS6 once it comes out. We’ll have to wait and see what Adobe does with later versions but we’ll keep you updated if Adobe releases any information.

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Continue reading »]]> 2011 has been a crazy year for software. Between hacktivists, anti-trust litigation, software subscriptions and Final Cut Pro X (hahahahaha), we thought we’d seen it all. That was, of course, until earlier this week when our Adobe contact informed us that the makers of such beloved creative software as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects would be making drastic -and, to some, infuriating- changes to their current pricing models.

For years, Adobe has had a “three versions back” upgrade model, meaning that anyone using a Creative Suite that was less than three versions out of date would receive discounted prices when upgrading. Well, say goodbye to that, because as of next year, with the scheduled Adobe CS6 release, Adobe Systems Incorporated will require that anyone wishing to receive upgrade pricing own the latest version of the software.  In other words, individuals using copies of CS5 or CS5.5 will still be eligible for discounts when upgrading to CS6, however anyone using CS4 or earlier will be forced to pay full price for the latest release.

Considering that a large portion of Adobe’s (notably loyal) user base tends to remain at least one or two versions behind in order to keep costs low, this move could seem to some to be a betrayal of those very same customers who made the company what it is today. Despite an overwhelmingly negative response, however, Adobe seems unlikely to revert to the original upgrade model, pushing instead for customers to pay a monthly fee for the Creative Suite Subscription Editions or the newly announced Adobe Creative Cloud.

While many Adobe customers may be angered (or at least a bit irritated) by Adobe’s restructuring of the Creative Suite upgrade pricing, the outrage is seemingly not unanimous. Some have argued that the change is not entirely without merit, speculating that the move will create an incentive for users to stay current with their creative software and discourage people from straggling two or three versions behind the industry standard. As anyone who has done creative collaboration knows, trying to send a CS5 file to a CS3 user ranges somewhere between frustrating and cataclysmically stressful.

This move by Adobe, whether a change for good or ill, will definitely affect people where it hurts the most: the wallet. So, to help alleviate the possible financial burdens that Creative Suite users may be facing in the future, SoftwareMedia.com has dropped their prices on Adobe CS5.5 upgrades to more than 20% off, which is lower even than Adobe’s advertised discounts. We urge CS users one and all to make the upgrade before CS6 is released and avoid the inevitably pricey full-cost CS6 license.

Save now... save more later!

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Since 1982 Cougar Mountain Software has provided business accounting software and hardware solutions to more than 20,000 retail, wholesale, nonprofit, and service-based businesses throughout the world.

Cougar Mountain Software employs accounting and business experts for their product development, sales, support, and training staff, many with accounting degrees. For 29 years these teams have worked together to build and enhance accounting applications based on feedback and requests from businesses across many industries. Through accounting expertise and customer input, Cougar Mountain Software has designed a robust, scalable, and user-friendly accounting solution, meeting the needs of small to large businesses.

Cougar Mountain Software was recently given the highest ranking in its class for the DENALI product line by CPA Practice Advisor.

Product Highlight

DENALI is a fully integrated module system scalable to meet the accounting and business needs of small to large companies.

Primary Accounting and Financial Modules Include:

• Accounts Payable
• Accounts Receivable
• Bank Reconciliation
• Budget Management
• Donor Tracking (Nonprofit)
• General Ledger
• Fixed Assets
• Inventory Control
• Payroll
• Point of Sale
• Purchase Order

For more information, visit Cougar Mountain Software on the web at www.cougarmtn.com

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Survey says…

Yesterday, Apple launched the newest incarnation of it’s professional Non-Linear Editing System, Final Cut Pro X. The long awaited release came amid a throng of negative reviews among app store reviewers and professional video editors. According to the angry mobs, Final Cut Pro X has been over-simplified to appeal to more casual, home-video editors despite its past, mainly professional user-base.

Final Cut Pro X is currently the #1 most downloaded app on the Mac App Store, and -ironically- also one of the lowest-rated. In an interesting move by Apple, the price for the newest version of Final Cut Pro has been drastically reduced to $300, in order to appeal to more casual home-users. This price drop -which would seem a good move on the surface- has apparently been made possible by sacrificing professional utility.

One of the most common complaints among FCP users regards the “dumbing-down” of the interface to make the program more accessible to amateurs, which alienates many professional editors who require the more difficult, advanced controls necessary for pro-quality editing. Final Cut Pro X is not backward compatible, making any of your Final Cut Pro 7 projects virtually useless – only iMovie events can be imported (what?!).

Here are some excerpts of Final Cut Pro X customer reviews:

• “I run my my business on FCP and my first impression of the new app is that it is horrible. This is an enhanced version of iMovie. It DOES NOT open your existing FCP files.”
• “I get the impression that folks at Apple that design software don’t actually run a production environment, and don’t understand our needs at all. Finally, this dot-zero release is extremely buggy, and abnormally ended (blew up) within 20 minutes of working on a project.”
• “I love the idea of 64bit editing and all of the other features, but the basics for pros are gone. Here’s what’s missing:

We here at Software News Daily like to think of ourselves as optimists, and while many FCP users are disheartened at Apple’s new release, there are quite a few improvements and promising new features present in the software. For example:

• 64-bit support, allowing users to utilize the power of 64-bit systems(though Apple seems to be trying to catch-up to Premiere Pro and Avid)
• Utilizing the graphics processing unit to allow faster renders, exports and more powerful effects processing.
• Rendering effects in the background as you work, which is a considerable time-saver, as any video editor knows.
• Resolution independence, allowing for increased flexibility in video formats, from SD to 4k.
• ColorSync managed color pipeline, allowing for greater color consistency between FCP, Motion, Compressor and Quicktime.
• Shared render engine, which provides for more consistent render quality between FCP, Motion and Compressor.

Despite the overwhelmingly negative reaction that Final Cut Pro X has received, it is important to keep in mind that the software is in its point-zero stage, and many users hold out hope that the features and precision controls required for professional editing will be re-implemented, and that the bugs and crashes will be addressed.

There are a number of powerful, professional quality non-linear editing systems available on the market today, and choosing the best one can often be difficult. Check out our Professional Video Editing Software Guide at SoftwareMedia.com!

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Continue reading »]]> Those of us in the software industry know that Microsoft and SAP are typically in competition, mostly for products like business intelligence software.

It seems the two have turned a new leaf. Earlier this year they created Duet, which enables users of Microsoft Sharepoint software to pull some data from SAP documents.

Now they are enabling application development for SAP software using Microsoft’s .NET development tools. What does this mean, exactly? Easy cloud deployment to their combined customer base. Up until now, Microsoft developers would have to change applications to Java in order to access SAP software. Now they can use the native .NET language.

As a result, their products can be used in a wider variety of collaboration applications, such as mobile and cloud computing. Specifically, .NET applications, such as Microsoft Virtualization or the Windows Azure cloud computing service, can more quickly interact with SAP programs and systems.

This means better integration, enhanced flexibility, shorter development cycles and ultimately, lower costs. Something everyone in the SAP/Microsoft developer landscape can get behind.

This announcement came at SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference last week, where Microsoft was also named “SAP Global Technology Partner of the Year”.

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