Microsoft announces a host of betas

SOFTWARE FACTORY Microsoft's Windows Group is on a roll this week, as its top brass have announced a bevy of Betas for several core products and even Intune Beta 2, the latest weapon in Microsoft's remote computing cloud-based IT jack-of-all-trades arsenal.

The triple announcement at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference and made by Tami Reller, corporate VP and CFO of the entire Windows business, has its feet firmly planted in cloud computing and virtualization technology, like just about anything Microsoft announces this year, really.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 betas are out the gate as we speak, all for the sake of Azure. These OSs go hand-in-hand and "enhance the deployment and management of virtualized desktop infrastructure", which is code for RemoteFX - part of the Remote Desktop Protocol - and Dynamic Memory, which is a pretty awesome way of Hyper-V assigning memory dynamically depending on what the workload dictates. Need more RAM? Hey presto! Here's another two gigs.... Running just Word for that report you're writing? Well, let's shave a bit off the top, shall we?

Intune, on the other hand, is the Vole's secure remote computing and cloud-managed console that will allow IT guys to monitor their enterprise users and allow them to work remotely from any Internet access point. It's new and improved, it delivers secure on-access computing and it should make many an IT crowd happy. It does come with a per-user license, on top of the usual OS fee, though.

The quasi-updates are available right now from the closest Microsoft server. A sizeable 10,000 new betas are to be made available for Windows Intune and that includes outside the US, and the UK is now included, as are some choice Euroland countries. So get them while they're hot. µ