It has been 18 months since we launched , Microsoft’s mobile barcode technology. In that time, more than one billion Tags have been printed by people and businesses all over the world. In the month of April alone, more than 20 million magazines with Tags were in the hands of U.S. consumers. Today, I am thrilled to announce Tag is coming out of be.. more »

If you read John’s recent post, an , you now know that you can quickly tag the faces in your photos-- using either the contacts in your contacts list, or any name you want. So hopefully by now you’ve played around with people tags in , adding them to photos of your friends, family, and that One reason you tagged all those photos is that at some poin.. more »

Set your DVR to record National Geographic's new documentary: "Sunken Treasures of the Nile" and watch as they plumb the river's murky depths to uncover some amazing new discoveries. It begins airing tomorrow, August 3rd. Our friend Greg Downing from xRez Studio was part of the team that used photogrammetric techniques to document the artifacts, an.. more »

Today Microsoft is posting a commissioned study conducted by The Harrison Group to determine whether there is a high correlation between the presence of unlicensed software in mid-market companies and IT related problems those companies might face. Not surprisingly companies that have more counterfeit software in their environment tend to have more .. more »

Helping small businesses not just survive but thrive is key to our global economic recovery. Together, small and midsize businesses employ the majority of the world’s workforce and as we all know, will be the key to future job creation. Cutting costs and being more productive are top of mind for all of us, including small business owners who had to.. more »

The July 2010 Optional Update is now available on the ECE for Microsoft Windows Embedded Point of Service and/or Windows Embedded POSReady 2009. This update includes additional Japanese fonts, namely the "Meiryo Collection Version 5.00 for Windows XP to increase legibility of characters on LCD screens". If you have questions on accessing the ECE, .. more »

If you are a user of the Point of Service newsgroup you might have seen the announcements in the newsgroup that they are to be discontinued in June. Here is the essence of the announcement which supplies answers to some common questions- What is Happening? This message is to inform you that Microsoft will soon begin discontinuing newsgroups and .. more »

Attempting to login to the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) self-service portal may fail with the following error message in the browser: Could not load file or assembly ‘TraceWrapper, Version=1 .0.523.0, Culture=neutral, PubhcKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load.. more »

Well – this is about the 225th post on the SCSM Engineering Team Blog! The blog has become one of the most read System Center blogs on TechNet. Thanks for supporting us! We have seen a lot of different solutions and tools here on the blog. We have some exciting new ones coming too! There are getting to be enough different solutions and tools now (e.. more »

Awhile back we announced the release of the SCOM MP for monitoring SCSM.  We didn’t mention that about the same time we also released the SCCM Configuration Pack for SCSM to help validate that you have the best practices configuration for SCSM running all the time. Here is the link to the download on the Download Center: .. more »

Client Installation and Assignment SuperFlow is a dynamic, interactive content model that provides you with detailed steps that you can use to prepare for and install the Configuration Manager 2007 client. This SuperFlow also provides you with the dataflow for background processes, additional resources related to client installation, and .. more »

Good morning everyone, our friends over on the ‘Inside OSD’ blog, the OS Deployment PM Team, recently published a blog about the enhancements to Bootable media coming in our next release.  With the continued interested in Windows deployment, bootable media is a key part of the process.  I wanted to get you the details on that blog post, and make y.. more »

Good morning everyone, the next event the Forefront and System Center teams are driving for (well not literally) is This is be far the largest event on our EMEA calendar, and the amount of prep time the team spends to get there is amazing. Keynote demos, breakout sessions, booth setup as well as the pile of announcements we will make there are .. more »

Hey everyone, you may have recently heard about the upcoming CEP for Opalis, from Adam at this .  We wanted to let you know that shortly we will be providing details of 2 additional CEPs for Forefront Endpoint protection and Configuration Manager v.Next.  The CEP program is designed as a regular cadence of webcasts, interviews, demonstrations and le.. more »

This is the second part in a multi-part blog series about securing your connection string in Windows Azure. In the first blog post ( ) a technique was discussed for creating a public/private key pair, using the to store and decrypt the secure connection string. In this blog posts we are going to cover how to import the private key to Windows Azure. .. more »

Recently I asked you to vote on topics you want to see on endpoint.tv . Coming in at #3 was this question on how to Unit Test WF4 Workflows. Because Workflows range from very simple activities to long and complex multi-step processes this can be a very challenging. I found after writing many activities that I began to see opportunities to create a .. more »

In this episode, we discuss the FlowChart activity. Sure, it looks simple—and in fact it is. Watch as Leon Welicki explains how you can use the new WF4 Flowchart activity to build workflows.The sample application shown is a part of the WF4 SDK Samples.Ron Jacobsblog        http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobstwitter    @ronljacobsW.. more »

Current pattern-detection proposals for streaming data recognize the need to move beyond a simple regular-expression model over strictly ordered input. We continue in this direction, relaxing restrictions present in some models, removing the requirement for ordered input, and permitting stream revisions (modification of prior events). Further, .. more »

Microsoft Research reveals that most users don't derive any benefit from the use of multitouch-enabled desktop mice, preferring the speed offered by mechanical buttons and wheels... more »

Three researchers from Microsoft Research and one from Pacific Biosciences have made a significant contribution to insights into the role genetics plays in human disease... more »