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Microsoft Extends Product Support to 10 Years
by Arie Slob
Hello Windows users,
 This week, at Microsoft® TechEd 2004, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Server and Tools Marketing Andrew Lees announced to attendees the June 1 launch of an expanded and enhanced product support life-cycle policy. The updated policy will provide customers with a minimum total of 10 years of mainstream and extended support for business and developer products. In addition to the expanded time frame, the updated policy provides customers with increased support for IT infrastructure security assistance. Customers requested support from Microsoft that is predictable, expanded and mirrors their changing needs for IT infrastructure management. With this announcement, Microsoft delivers the predictable support customers need to successfully do more with less.
"Both the original and updated Microsoft support life-cycle policy were the result of the company's dedication to continually listening and acting on customer needs," Lees said. "We have heard our customers' requests and are quickly expanding and enhancing the policy to provide a minimum total of 10 years of support for business and developer products."
Previously, Microsoft Corp. offered five years of mainstream support and two years of extended support for business and developer products. The updated policy provides customers with five years of mainstream support after the date of general availability or two years after the successor product ships, whichever is longer. Microsoft also will provide extended support for five years after mainstream support ends or two years after the second successor product ships, whichever is longer. The policy now provides customers with a minimum total of 10 years of product support, including security updates and paid incident support, as well as increased flexibility and peace of mind about the level of support provided throughout the life cycle of the product and during subsequent product release migrations.
The updated support life-cycle policy primarily affects business and developer products currently in the mainstream support phase as well as future products. The new policy update does not apply to consumer, hardware, multimedia and Microsoft Business Solutions products.
Detailed information regarding how the updated support policy specifically affects individual Microsoft products can be found at the Microsoft support life-cycle policy Web site.
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Microsoft Merges Anti-Spam Technology Proposals
 Last Tuesday, Microsoft announced that they have agreed to converge their Caller ID for E-mail proposal with a proposal put forward by Meng Wong called the Sender Policy Framework (SPF). The two proposals will be merged into one specification designed to help eliminate domain spoofing and provide greater protection against phishing schemes. By providing a unified specification, Microsoft and Wong hope to simplify industry adoption of effective e-mail authentication technology, thereby helping to more swiftly provide greater spam protection to e-mail users worldwide.
"Spoofing," or sending e-mail purporting to be from someone it's not, is an increasingly common and relatively simple way for spammers to try to trick filters. It can also pose a security risk when used to deliver e-mail viruses or phisher scams, which attempt to trick users into divulging personal information such as credit card numbers or account passwords by pretending to be from a legitimate source, such as a user's bank. Caller ID and SPF aim to prevent spoofing by confirming what domain a message came from and thereby increase the effectiveness of spam filters.
Under the merged proposal, organizations will publish information about their outgoing e-mail servers, such as IP addresses, in the Domain Name System (DNS) using the industry-standard XML format. Backward compatibility will be provided for the many domains that have already published information in the SPF TXT format.
A formal specification will be published next month and submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards body for evaluation and review, as part of its work to define effective industry Internet e-mail standards to address the problem of spam.
"Convergence of these two technical specifications is a critical step in our efforts to eliminate the spam problem and a big win for e-mail users worldwide," said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of the Anti-Spam Technology and Strategy group at Microsoft. "By working together with Meng Wong and the SPF community, we plan to create one technical specification that we believe the entire industry can rally around that will virtually eliminate domain spoofing and help restore user trust and value to e-mail."
To be more effective in the fight against junk e-mail, filters need additional information that is not available in e-mail messages today. By making simple but important changes to the e-mail infrastructure, such as those outlined in the merged SPF-Caller ID proposal, greater certainty can be provided about the origin of an e-mail message and enable legitimate senders to more clearly distinguish themselves from spammers.
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Rose City Software
Throw all other tweaking programs away!
Tweaking Toolbox XP is the definite tweaking program. There are so many tweaks you can make its like having a registry bible explained in child's language. The administrator options are incredible. There is also total support from the online help. Just get all the other tweaking programs and throw them away. This is clearly programmed in C as the file is so small for all the functions it incorporates. Windows-Help.NET knows what they are doing. The best tweaker around for miles and miles. I highly recommend it.
-- Dave, USA
Download Trial [1,004 KB] - More Info
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Added: Microsoft and Meng Wong to Merge Anti-Spam Technology Proposals
Added: Microsoft Extends Product Support for Business and Developer Products to 10 Years
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Highlights
Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1
Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) offers new updates and improvements to Exchange Server 2003. Enhancements include new language support for Outlook Mobile Access and Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access spelling checkers, and out-of-office modification, a larger text entry field, search folder support, and improved menu navigation for the Outlook Mobile Access user interface.
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003
Release Notes
Download [99.5 MB - Eng]
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Server Performance Advisor V1.0
Service Performance Advisor is a server performance diagnostic tool developed to diagnose root causes of performance problems in a Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, particularly performance problems for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and the Active Directory® directory service. Server Performance Advisor measures the performance and use of resources by your computer to report on the parts that are stressed under workload.
Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003
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Windows XP Tip: Remove Microsoft Java Virtual Machine and Install Sun Java
If you want to remove Microsoft's JVM, and install the latest offering from Sun, here's how.
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FREE Software: System Properties - advanced system information
System Properties provides detailed information for various system properties, including ODBC, ADSI, File System, Network, Running tasks, Services and tons of other things.
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First known 64-bit virus threat found
Security technology company Symantec reported Thursday that it has analyzed what it believes to be the first known threat to 64-bit Windows systems, a virus labeled W64.Rugrat.3344.
Read C|Net Article
To New Friends!
Just a small note thanking Microsoft for inviting us MVP's to the regional conference in Istanbul, Turkey. A lovely opportunity to meet & talk with some Microsoft people, and to get to know other people from this region, not to mention the sight-seeing tour we got. I'll have to mention the MVP's from Czech Republic, Israel and South Africa, and others who I met, it was a great time! Thanks to Çigdem for the organization! And keep on "Flanging!"
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29 May 2004, Vol 7 No. 18
