Anna just showed up

Well, Anna finally showed up at Tech*Ed.  She stumbled over to where I am (I think she’s been drinking).  She said that she has posted about 10 blog entries, though.  Hmmm, don’t think I saw those.

… ok, had to have a little fun since she’s stressing out over here.  Don’t worry, Anna, Andy will take care of Countrywide.

IE8 – What’s New for the Enterprise?

 

So, this was a pretty good session.  Most of the guts are listed out below.  The areas I liked the most, which

 

Customer Trust

• Phishing
  • IE7 – Phishing Filter included & International Domain Name protection (make sure you’re not fooled by international characters)
  • IE8 – the *actual* domain name is highlighted in the address bar after you click link in phishing email.

Security

• Targeted Phishing Attacks
  • see above
• Exploits in common ActiveX controls
  • IE7 – “opt-in” option so users approve the ActiveX control for use.
  • IE7 – ActiveX Kill Bits that allow control with known flaw to be prevented from loading in IE
  • IE8 – Per-User ActiveX contains risk to a single user account
  • IE8 – Per-site ActiveX allows developer to restrict the control to only their site/app (things like flash controls are on a pre-approved list)
• Compromised Partner Site
  • IE7 – No protection
  • IE8 – Cross Domain Requests object ensures data is only shared after a mutual validation of identity
  • IE8 – Cross Document Messaging helps apps send messages between apps only after mutual validation of identity.

Group Policy

• There’s over 1,300 policies in IE8
• New features are exposed via group policy

Safari, Firefox and IE8 ALL support the same standards!

• Decide when your business can afford to stop supporting IE6 & IE7 so you only have to support 1 browser standard (IE8).
• IE8 will run in “standards” mode, by default, which adheres to only standards.  User can switch to IE7 compatibility mode if a site looks funky (b/c it was written for IE7, but IE8 rendered in standards mode).
• Go to:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/iecompat to learn how developers can use the page/site compatibility meta tag so that it notifies IE8 that it has code specifically for IE7.  If you use the Meta tag, then user can leave browser in ’standards’ mode and it will still render fine.

IS Dept can enforce the mode that IE8 uses via Group Policy.

• You can use Group Policy Editor to set IE8 to IE7 mode if you need to.  That will override any end-user settings.  If end-user sets it to IE8 mode, it will still render sites using IE7 mode.  Very cool.

Crash Recovery (Very Nice)

• Tabs now isolated into separate processes – one tab crashing does NOT bring down the browser
• Crash recovery reloads tabs when they crash (like Firefox now)

Announcement regarding Slipstream

• IE8 – Will be able to add IE8 to your current WinXP image!

Couple new user Features:

• Activities - Highlight text, like an address, on page and you get a floating box with activities (like ‘translate’, ‘map’, ‘define’, etc.).  You can click to map the address, etc.
• Webslices - allows you to subscribe to portions of websites and include them in your link bar.  Pretty cool.

Forefront Security for Sharepoint

Current version of Forefront provides features like:

• Scans for infected documents and has content filtering solution (can tell if user attempts to upload .mp3 files that have been renamed to .mp5, for instance)
• Supports IRM protected docs & Open XML
• Supports blocking/filtering files based upon both size & type … block .mp3’s > 5 MB.
• Supports scanning of .zip files, detects prohibited file(s), removes offending file & re-zips package omitting the prohibited file.  (THIS IS PRETTY SLICK!)

Codename “Stirling”

• Focus is on more enterprise security and support for MOSS & Sharepoint v014 (next version)
• Unfortunately, no reference to support for encryption & sharepoint … obviously, not something within the Forefront space.

Certifiable

Hey, I took advantage of the deeply discounted certification exams here at Tech*Ed this morning.  I took & passed the exam for MCTS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Configuration.  Woohoo!

Keynote

Well, the IT Pro Tech*Ed didn’t have the pizzazz of the Developer Tech*Ed from last week … we had “Bob Muglia” and they had “Bill Gates”.  That’s probably enough said.

Anyway, the keynote started off with some funky, music performed by a group dressed up in African attire.  Kinda good/neat, but a bit odd for Tech*Ed.  The keynote then focused on stuff like Identity Lifecycle Management & Virtualization.  Cool stuff on the upcoming 2008 & Hyper-V virtualization technology.  Muglia stated that they had low expectations for performance (against VMWare) with this initial product, but that tests show that it performs as good as, and in some cases better than VMWare ESX.  That sure sounds impressive, but I’m not sure exactly what the tests were and how ‘unbiased’ Muglia is.