MS Update Tuesday – December 14th – Announcement

I started this sometime ago and will continue to post this just for information.

First, for December we’re releasing 17 updates addressing 40 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SharePoint and Exchange. Of the 17, two bulletins are rated Critical, 14 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate. As always, we recommend that customers review the ANS summary page for more information and prepare for the testing and deployment of these bulletins as soon as possible.

Back to this month’s bulletins. We’re addressing two issues this month that have attracted interest recently. First, we will be closing the last Stuxnet-related issues this month. This is a local Elevation of Privilege vulnerability and we’ve seen no evidence of its use in active exploits aside from the Stuxnet malware. We’re also addressing the Internet Explorer vulnerability described in Security Advisory 2458511. Over the past month, Microsoft and our MAPP partners actively monitored the threat landscape surrounding this vulnerability and the total number of exploit attempts we monitored remained pretty low. Furthermore, customers running Internet Explorer 8 remained protected by default due to the extra protection provided by Data Execution Prevention (DEP). On that note, I want to point you to a new post on the Security Research & Defense team blog describing the effectiveness of DEP and ASLR against the types of exploits we see in the wild today.

FULL ARTICLE

OFFICE in the SKY – Teacher Guides

I have posted about Microsoft Office live in the past.  This allows you to create / Edit and print your office documents in the Cloud.  It can be used with Office or on its own. 

It is great when anyone has different version of Office and need to work together.  If you running Office 2003 at home and your School or Office is running 2007 or 2010 – why not use Office live.  You get Storage (Skydrive 25G) – Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote to use and share as any document can be shared with others online.  This becomes a great tool when multiple people are working on a project!

All you need is a Windows live ID – Hotmail, LIVE, MSN etc…

There are also teacher guides for Bing, Windows Live Movie Maker, and other free tools. In addition, there’s a lesson plans database.

Office Web Apps are available free through Windows Live SkyDrive. All you need is a Windows Live ID, which you may already have through Microsoft Hotmail, Messenger, Xbox Live, the Partners in Learning network, or other Windows Live services.

For a sneak peak at the videos offered on www.microsoft.com/education, take a look at this video about the OneNote Web App. It’s completely directed at teachers and how they can use the OneNote Web App both inside and outside the classroom.

FULL ARTICLE – The Microsoft Office Blog – Teachers guides for Office WEB Apps

Are you using – Office XP, 2000 & 2003 – docx doesn’t work!

For those running Office XP, 2000 and 2003 – guess what if you get a document from your friends or office and the document was created in 2007 or 2010 – you can’t open these files.  Microsoft has a free compatibility pack that is available which allows users to open these files.

You can always ask that person to save it in a format that you can load up!

 Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats

Microsoft in the CLOUD – OFFICE Web Based & Hosted – OFFICE 365

Being that Office is huge portion of Microsoft revenue – this is something that is a bit of surprise, but really they had no choice in the matter.  This is where the market and competition is taking everyone….

OFFICE 365 is the new name.

Educators – Watch out as there is an educational version of this coming out as well – Same product, just with educational pricing.  You should see this coming earlier next year.

What is Office 365, beyond the new release of BPOS, Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite? 

Office 365 includes a new SMB version of what’s currently called BPOS; an enterprise version of BPOS v2; a new government version of BPOS (which is currently known as BPOS Federal); and a refresh of the student/education-focused Live@Edu offering. All of these are supposed to be out by next year.

 Some great information from someone’s opinion I have always trusted – ZCNet – Mary-Jo Foley

Ten more tidbits on Microsoft’s new Office 365 cloud play

Related Articles

• Microsoft Office 365: Guide to a Slew of Versions, Prices (pcworld.com)
• Microsoft to offer hosted, subscription versions of Office (news.cnet.com)

Microsoft Rolls Up Cloud Services Into Office 365, Takes Aim At Google Apps (via TechCrunch)

Might be interesting – we will have to wait and see!  More and more applications are moving to the cloud with 24×7 access – anywhere – anytime.

Today at an event in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Office division is unveiling a new product: a suite of the company’s productivity services called Office 365. Before now, Microsoft’s business-facing cloud services have been broken up in a few places: SharePoint, Lync Online, Exchange, and Office web apps. Office 365 looks to unify these. Microsoft SVP Chris Capossela says “This is everything we know about productivity brought to the cloud”. The me … Read More

via TechCrunch