Windows Server 2003 SP1 just released

Microsoft just released the much anticipated Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. (Think XP SP2) . More news on my IT News Log.com.

PMC and SP get Video

Microsoft Portable Media Center and Smartphone devices will now be able to download video content from MSN for daily consumption.

http://www.msnvideodownloads.com/

I wanted to give this a try yet after reading the FAQ's it looks like it's only open to the US.

Orb now free!

Does anyone recall Scoble saying something like "Orb, Media Center's killer application"? Well today Orb announced that it will release the product for free. This little gem lets you access your media from anywhere using your Tablet, Laptop, PDA or Smartphone.

RSS for PDC

Jeff Sandquist linked to two new RSS feeds for the Professional Developers Conference.

Messenger gets 300 slots

News care of Robert Scoble is that the Messenger infrastructure was updated to accommodate for their approx 200 million users. WOW that's a big number!

A freebie for digital music player creators

One of the features I love on my Microsoft Smartphone (thanks to Scoble) is the ability to select automatic in the profiles section. Now I no longer have to worry about which profile my phone is set to because the phone uses information that is already available to it to understand that I want the phone to be in profile X right now. This is done by using the calendar information already in my phone.

This brings me to the above heading. When listening to some music with my friend I noticed that he was using his iPod Mini to adjust the inbuilt equaliser for the new song which was of a completely different style from the previous song. I asked him if the name of the song he had adjusted was automatically added when he copied the content from the CD into iTunes. He said that it was. I asked if the iPod had an automatic option when selecting the equaliser presents. He said there was no such option, which baffled me as the iPod already knew that he was moving from a completely different style of music by the automatically populated meta data attached to the music file. – So if any digital music player makers end up reading this can you please add this to your list of things to do. I hear that space is just a little competitive at the moment.

Windows Mobile vs. Windows CE

Mike Hall says the best way to think about these two products is that Windows CE is the lego and Windows Mobile is one of many platforms that can be created on top.

Office Communication

Eileen Brown has a ton of great links including the keynote speech from Bill Gates on the release of Office Communicator 2005, Office Live Meeting 2005 and Live Communications Server.

6 new fonts for Longhorn ...maybe

link-found on Scoble's linkblog. Very nice!

Portable Favorites for MSN coming soon

Also in the MSN Sandbox is a favorites web tool(more on NeoWin). So your favorites will be able to go where you go. This was previously done by Yahoo. Yet one would imagine the MSN offering will be better integrated with IE. Note: The current tool supports Fire fox.

Microsoft is acquiring Groove Networks

John Evdemon tell us on his weblog that Microsoft are acquiring Groove Networks to include Virtual Office into the Microsoft Office System. More news here and here.

New toy in Microsoft Sandbox

Microsoft have released a test news aggregator http://start.com/1/. I thought this was a joke at first, judging by the URL and the fact that I couldn't see anything until pressing the show link at the top-right of the page. Great to see Microsoft doing some more work towards an RSS aggregator as I requested for earlier. Thanks for the link Scoble.

Game Developers conference

All the developer news on the upcoming tools for the next era of HD gaming. View the keynote on the US Xbox.com website.

Found this on Major Nelson's weblog. - Hay Major - what's with the PHP on your website? The disclaimer at the bottom of your page is not a good enough reason.

Custom Templates for Microsoft Producer 2003

This white paper describes how to create your own customized presentation templates to use in Producer 2003.

Creating Skins For Windows Media Player 9 Series

This white paper describes how to plan, design, and create a skin for Windows Media Player 9 Series.

Images of Ireland Theme

This is a desktop theme for Windows XP Home and Professional Editions. It includes a desktop wallpaper and a screensaver depicting images from around the island of Ireland.

New Office 2003 push

I didn't realize that Office 2003 sales were that slow. Maybe everyone just upgraded to Outlook 2003 for its major updates. Here is the new evolve campaign from the Office team for you to have a look at. Thanks for the update Steve.

MSDN Webcasts Series Archive

Found this on the MSDN Webcasts weblog. Looks like I've got a lot of catching up to do ;-)

Microsoft listens: SP Voice Command on its way!

Great news today that Microsoft Voice Command 1.5 will be released later this year. Yet more importantly it will be available on the Microsoft Smartphone platform. I've been asking for this for a long time. If you did have anything to do to push this along Robert - Thanks!

Found this on SmartphoneThoughts.com and mpx200.org - instructions here.