The Big Easy Offer 7 qualifying products range from Office, to SQL Server, to Visual Studio. You have 30 days after your purchase to submit your rebate claim, and then 90 days to use the funds. There is no limit on the amount of funds you can receive, and your rebate funds can be used on any software purchase at SoftwareMedia.com. Check out all the Big Easy Offer 7 details. You can view a complete list of the qualifying products, use the Big Easy Calculator to estimate your rebate, and more! It’s the best Microsoft licensing deal you’ll find all year!

As of right now, anyone saying they know when Windows 8 will be released is simply lying. Microsoft is tight-lipped on anything solid—afterall, the anticipated operating system still has far to go to solidify its features—but there are scraps of information which have fallen to the floor from the Microsoft table. Whether obvious or not, Steve Ballmer announced in May Microsoft is planning on a 2012 release. That would put the Windows 8 release about three years after Windows 7 debuted (wow, has it been almost three years already?!).

The Windows 8 developer preview is the first of many steps to come as Microsoft readies for this monumental release. It’ll mark the start of a full operating system being available not only on desktop computers but also on tablets. The buzz over Windows 8 is sure to increase as people try out Windows 8 first-hand.

My Windows 8 Release Prediction

My guess is the Windows 8 beta will be released late winter/early spring of 2012, say March or April. Microsoft will want to make sure the highlight features are ready as this will be around the same time Apple no doubt releases the iPad 3. I won’t go into what Apple plans for the iPad 3 in this article, but Windows 8 as a fully functional operating system will pose a threat needing to be addressed.

Microsoft will hope the Windows 8 beta and ensuing buzz is able to pull at least some of the attention away from Apple and keep the momentum going, leading into an Autumn 2012 retail release (just in time for the holidays).

Microsoft Forefront is a comprehensive product line of security products for business customers, and is designed to be centrally managed and integrated into IT infrastructure products, such as Active Directory, and is intended to scale to many thousands of users. As such, Microsoft Forefront security products are distinct from Microsoft consumer-oriented security products, such as Windows Live OneCare, Windows Defender, and the firewalls built into Windows XP and Windows Vista, which are designed to secure stand-alone PCs.

Forefront Security products deliver protection, access, and management solutions, built around user identity and integrated with a highly secure, interoperable platform. Our solutions help to deliver a more contextual and user-centric security solution aligned to the needs of our customers.

Benefits from Forefront

Forefront provides business customers with highly effective security for Microsoft operating systems, applications, and servers. Beyond that, however, Forefront products are designed to work with your Microsoft infrastructure, such as Active Directory (AD), Group Policies, or Windows Update Services. This means that you can manage security service deployment, distribution, configuration, and enforcement across your organization seamlessly. Security management and reporting becomes more centralized in Forefront; its products integrate with System Center solutions and Windows Server Update Services. More centralized collection and analysis of security management information is possible because all security event information is stored in a single SQL Server repository from which events can be identified and interpreted. The common infrastructure obviates the need to deploy unnecessarily redundant infrastructure, speeding deployment and reducing costs. And of course, this minimizes the need for expensive training and retraining of administrative staff in a variety of unrelated management and reporting consoles.

Why should customers choose Forefront Security?

The industry has concentrated its efforts on adding more and more features to existing products or creating new security products, thus multiplying the number and complexity of point solutions. Despite this, business security issues continue to grow, due in large part to the significant operational challenges:

• Integrating those security products so they work well together and leverage each other
• Integrating them into pre-existing IT infrastructure
• Managing and deploying security simply, pervasively, and without mistakes
• Managing security as a single solution instead of a bunch of disparate products

Forefront provides a comprehensive family of highly effective security products, but this is only the first step. By concentrating our efforts on the integration and management aspects of security, Forefront products can help prevent misconfiguration, enable organizations to deploy security products more pervasively, and give businesses a unified view into the security state of their networks. In fact, addressing these operational issues makes the network more secure—the configurations are correct, security is deployed where it is needed, and management and reporting are simplified.

Microsoft Forefront goals for business security

Integrate and extend security across the enterprise

• Deeply integrates with the identity infrastructure and across the stack
• Support for heterogeneous environments
• On-premises and hosted solutions for seamless connectivity
• Open standards and protocols based identity and security platform

Help Protect everywhere and access everywhere

• Defence in depth across multiple layers to help protect across endpoints, servers, and network
• Secure identity-based access products help connect the mobile workforce virtually anywhere
• Identity-aware protection help organizations secure information and enable policy-based access

Simplify the experience and manage compliance

• Enable centralized management of the environment and gain critical visibility into the state of the infrastructure
• Help improve security and compliance through identity tracking and enforcement throughout the enterprise
• Provide policy management features and reporting to enable auditing and compliance

Sushmita contributed to this article.

let's see your physics professor do that

The new school-year is just around the corner. To help students be fully prepared for this upcoming semester, Microsoft is upgrading all Office 2010 Home & Student purchases made between now and September 25, 2011. Simply buy an Office 2010 Home & Student box version or buy Office 2010 Home & Student key card and Microsoft will let you download Outlook, Publisher, and Access FREE! It’s like buying Office 2010 Professional for a fraction of the cost! Plus, right now SoftwareMedia.com is offering super-low prices on all Office 2010 products. Hurry, these deals won’t last!

It’s Easier than Multivariable Calculus!

1. Purchase and Activate Office
2. Go to www.office.com/3appbonus
3. Validate with your active .edu email address

There are many up-front expenses associated with running a business. Microsoft feels software doesn’t have to be one of them. Introducing: Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is a cloud-based subscription service which allows companies to utilize all the features found in the physical retail versions of Microsoft Office, without the expense of each license.

With Office 365, companies purchase low-cost monthly subscriptions which give them instant access to all the tools and features of Microsoft Office. No up-front mass software purchases. No wasted time on installation. No IT headaches.

Office 365 guarantees a 99.9% uptime and is a simple, cost-effective solution for companies of all sizes. Check out our Microsoft Office 365 page to learn more about the subscription plan options as well as download a FREE 30-day trial of Office 365 to see it in action first-hand.

The BlueHat Prize is a $250,000 contest designed to eradicate entire classes of exploits. Some companies, like Google, for example, will offer payments for vulnerability reports submitted by users. These “bug bounties” and as they are often times called, provide companies with much-needed extra sets of eyes to test out products as they are live to help patch security leaks in the software code. With the BlueHat Prize, Microsoft has decided to go in a different direction. They don’t want to just fix the occasional bug and exploit. They want to strike at the heart of hackers and stop entire classes of exploits.

By offering a larger lump cash reward, Microsoft hopes programmers will see this as a serious project and use their found bugs for patching and defense, as opposed to (the also lucrative) selling of bug reports to the highest hacker bidder. Hats-off (pun intended) to Microsoft with this new exploit hunt program, and good luck to all the white knights of the security industry.

Right now, Microsoft is advertising great promotional discounts on some of their top MOLP (Microsoft Open Licensing Program) products. Save up to 25% off select Microsoft licenses during this special event. If your business is in need of some additional Visual Studio 2010 CALs, or wants to try out Lync Server 2010 Plus, now is the best time to visit SoftwareMedia.com’s Microsoft Open Licensing page to pick up a license or two. Not only will you get First-Class service from our Microsoft Gold Certified reps, but go above and beyond to offer our customers our famous Software Licensing Price Match Guarantee. There’s a reason SoftwareMedia.com is “your one stop software shop”; it’s because we work hard every day to make it that way.

Data types play the most vital role to any database, since selecting the incorrect data types can waste storage space and grounds your database solutions to run slowly. Picking the right data types can give you faster, easier, and more flexible options for retrieving data from your database. This SQL Server 2008 review begins by acquainting you with the dozens of data types.

SQL Server 2008 supports dozens of native data types. The data type that you use to accumulate a column’s values say a lot about the data in that column. A few data types are adapted for storing characters, while others are best for holding large numbers or small numbers. Selecting the right data type for a column can save a lot of storage space and improve performance. We’ll go into detail with three main broad categories:

• Numbers and dates
• Character and binary byte streams
• Miscellaneous

Numbers and dates:

Number data types can represent values either precisely or approximately. Data types for numbers have four common characteristics:

• Precision: Refers to how accurately a data type can represent a number value.
• Scale: Refers to the number of digits to the right of a decimal point.
• Length: designates the number of bytes used to store a value.
• Range of legitimate values: provides a very concrete way of appreciating the role of a data type.

In many cases, data types for precise numbers represent integer values with a scale of zero (no digits to the right of the decimal point). Some data types for numbers represent values precisely even while they permit the inclusion of digits to the right of the decimal point. Two data types like this are:

Bit Data Type:

The bit data type is for values that can be either 0 or 1. The SQL Server database engine automatically groups bit data values to fill the bits within a byte. If a table has between 1 and 8 bit values per table row, SQL Server stores the values in a byte. Similarly, from 9 to 16 bit values are stored within 2 bytes.

Integer Data Types:

The four integer data types are:

• Tinyint: Range of values: 0 through 255, precision: 3, scale: 0, length: 1
• Smallint: Range of values: –32, 768 (–2^15), through 32, 767 (2^15 – 1), precision: 5, scale: 0, length: 2
• Int: Range of values: –2,147,483,648 (–2^31), through 2,147,483,647 (2^31 – 1) precision: 10, scale: 0, length: 4
• Bigint: Range of values: –9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (–2^63), through 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (2^63 – 1), precision: 19, scale: 0, length: 8

Currency Data Types:

These Data types explicitly target the representation of currency values.

• Money: Range of values: –214,748.3648 through 214,748.3647, precision: 10, scale: 0, length: 4
• Smallmoney: Range of values: –922,337,203,685,477.5808 through 922,337,203,685,477.5807, precision: 19, scale: 0, length: 8

Date and Time Data Types:

SQL Server 2008 offers two data types for representing date and time values, these data types store their values as numbers with digits to the left and right of a decimal point.

• Smalldatetime: date range: January 1, 1900, through June 6, 2079, time resolution: 1 minute, length: 4.
• Datetime: date range: January 1, 1753, through December 31, 9999, time resolution: 3.33 milliseconds, length: 8

Decimal and Numeric Data Types:

The decimal & numeric data type both describe the same kind of data. A table designer can specify both the precision (p) and scale (s) of table columns with either a numeric or decimal data type at the time that they designate the column for the table.

• Decimal or numeric: Range of values: –10^38 + 1 through 10^38 – 1,

Precision: minimum of 0 and maximum of 38, scale: minimum of 0 and 3 maximum of 38, Length: varies (for p of 1–9, the length is 5; for p of 10–19, the length is 9; for p of 20–28, the length is 13; for p of 29–38, the length is 17)

Approximate Data Types:

Real and float data types can represent values approximately instead of precisely, as with integer data types, such as int and bigint.

• Real: range of values: –3.40E + 38 through 3.40E + 38, precision: from 1 to 7Scale: Null, length: 4
• Float: Range of values: –1.79E + 308 through 1.79E + 308, precision: from 1 to 15, scale: Null, length: 8

Character and Binary Byte Streams:

A sequence of 1 or more bytes is a byte stream. SQL Server 2008 can decode a byte stream to characters, such as letters, numbers, and symbols, or it can just save and retrieve a byte stream without decoding the byte(s). There are basically three types of byte stream types:

• Character: The three character data types are char, varchar, and text. These data types correspond, respectively, to the fixed-length, variable-length, and large object data types.
• Unicode character: The fixed-length, variable-length, and large object data types for Unicode characters are nchar,nvarchar, and ntext.
• Binary: The fixed-length, variable-length, and large object binary string data types are binary, varbinary, and image

1. Use binary (n) to designate the fixed-length binary string data type for a column of binary
2. Strings. The n parameter can assume values from 1 through 8,000.
3. Use varbinary(n) to specify a variable length binary string data type. Values for n can range from 1 through 8,000.
4. Use image or varbinary(max) to specify a data type for a large object binary string with image or varbinary(max). Because of the future obsolescence of the image data type (along with the text and ntext data types), use varbinary(max) for all new database applications.

Miscellaneous:

The remaining SQL Server 2008 data types serve a variety of specialized purposes. Unless your database application has special needs, you may find no use for these data types.

• Timestamp: You can use this data type for timestamping table rows for an insert or identifying the last update. Instead of assigning a datetime value to a row, the timestamp data type assigns a sequential binary(8) number that is unique throughout a database. rowversion is another name for the timestamp data type.

• Uniqueidentifier: The uniqueidentifier data type holds globally unique identifier (GUID) values, which have a 16-byte length. It is common to express uniqueidentifier values with a 32-character hexadecimal representation (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx); two hexadecimal characters represent 1 byte.

• Cursor: The cursor data type represents a result set, such as one returned from a stored procedure, which you can scroll through. Set techniques that you implement with SELECT statements are generally a much more efficient way to recover values from a data source than for scrolling through result set rows with a cursor.

• sql_variant: The sql_variant data type can store values declared with data types, except for text, ntext, image, timestamp, sql_variant, and the max data types for varchar, nvarchar, and varbinary. The sql_variant data type is similar to the variant type in Visual Basic.

• xml: The xml data type enables you to assign an XML document or XML fragment as a value for a column in a table’s row, a variable, or a parameter. An XML document consists of a single root element with one or more nested other elements. An XML fragment consists of one or more elements without an outer root element.

• Table: The table data type can represent a result set from a SELECT statement. You can return a table value from a table-valued, user-defined function. The returned table value can be referenced by the FROM clause of a SELECT statement in a script or a stored procedure. Table values can be assigned to local variables.
• Alias: The alias data type corresponds to what was called a user-defined type in earlier versions of SQL Server. However, the introduction of user-defined types based on classes

SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services include APIs to assist developers in integrating and extending data and report processing in custom applications. Reporting Services also includes a comprehensive set of tools required to create, deploy, manage and deliver reports across organization.

In order to be able to make effective decisions in business, users across the organization need to have access to informative reports that contains data from different data sources across enterprise. Reporting services enables you to create a wide variety of data sources including interactive, graphical, and tabular. Other free form reports from multidimensional, relational or XML-based data sources are also supported.

SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services allow you to interactively explore data within the predefined model while creating an ad-hoc report. The reports created with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services can be viewed using a variety formats. The reports can be easily exported to other applications and viewed as a part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site.

Reporting Services consists of a complete set of report authoring tools and a wide variety of report formats that facilitate in creating reports quickly and delivering the reports that users need in whatever format across the organization. SQL Server 2008 provides distinct report development tools to meet the needs of both experienced business intelligence developers and business users who have little or no knowledge of database schema designs. The report designer tool allows developers to define data sets from a wide range of data sources, design the report structure and then preview the report in the design environment even before deploying it on the report server. Another interesting feature that SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services provides is a business-oriented report query tool known as Report Builder that abstracts the underlying business data through report models. Business users can create robust reports without having to know the underlying database structure or query syntaxes. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services supports accessing a wide variety of data sources including SQL relational databases, SQL server analysis services, Oracle, DB2 and Hyperion Essbase.

With SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, business data can be presented in different types of formats. Businesses are provided with a set of compelling report authoring features such as multiple display, rich text formatting, interactivity and charting capabilities.

Managing reporting services was never so easy. SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services provide two different management modes to the administrators: Native mode and SharePoint mode. Administrators can use integrate management of reporting services instances with SQL server database engine management in native mode. While running in Share point integrated mode, administrators can take full advantage of integrated management capabilities of SharePoint.

Manasa contributed to this article.

SQL Server 2008 R2 builds upon all the best features of the regular SQL Server 2008 version. In addition, it includes new features not found in the first release. One such feature is the new Master Data Service; which is a server that brings all the different entities and power structure. It also features Power Pivot for Excel and SharePoint and Report Builder 3.0.  Microsoft has revamped the visual features of the program and SQL Server 2008 R2 has earned high-ranking marks in support options.

SQL Server 2008 R2 gives users the option to apply two studios: one is for developing tasks and the other is for management tasks. In the management studio, for instance, one can make the server database. The development studio is much suited to business concerns and may be applied to develop solutions related to the business-world.

“Not only does SQL Server 2008 R2 give a lot of power to small businesses, it also helps software developers who write applications designed to be applied by small business,” says Microsoft’s Herain Oberio, a group production manager for R2. One example of this is a feature known as StreamInsight, which permits developers to create applications which can deal streaming result data by sources such as RFID, sensors and web logs.

As you may already know, at its core, SQL Server is a database builder. SQL Server 2008 R2 establishes a few significant modifications to that underlying database engine, but it controls a number of meaningful new services and features on lead of it.

An exciting new feature with the R2 version of SQL Server 2008 is Powerpivot; a tool that permits users to take out data from multiple origins, not only a SQL database, and drop it into Excel 2010 for analytic thinking. For example: Atom feeds in, a syndication acceptable similar to RSS but centered data rather than text, can be pullulated into SQL Server, combined with an existent application to build a mashup, which could be mutual using Sharepoint 2010.

Data in SQL Server can be used applying a reporting tool that lets users make more complex graphs and other visualization devices than those accessible in Excel. Elements of a report can be preserved, shared and applied again, when the data is updated.

SQL Server 2008 R2 is a valuable data management tool perfect for businesses of any size: SQL Server 2008 R2 for Small Business is an entry-level edition which allows up to 75 users, or for larger companies, SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise may be the ideal choice.

Md. Mofakhkharol contributed to this article.