Microsoft is also offering customers a Go Live License, which permits them to deploy beta releases of Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7.0) into live production. So far, 28 companies worldwide have created and launched hosted offerings using this program, and hundreds more have downloaded the Windows Server 2008 beta and begun testing.

With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft is also embracing PHP hosting on Windows via the FastCGI module for IIS 7.0. PHP is a popular open-source scripting language used to build dynamic web applications. This allows IT Professionals to host PHP and ASP.net applications side by side. As a result, the PHP community will be able to take advantage of the increased reliability of PHP on Windows and simplified administration available on the Windows platform.

Customers: On Your Mark…

To help IT professionals evaluate the migration-readiness of their existing networks, Microsoft has created four automated assessment tools, or “Solution Accelerators:”

•	the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) tool, which helps evaluate installed applications on servers, performs hardware assessments and makes recommendations regarding server virtualization;
•	the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides, which describe the architectural considerations involved in implementing the upgrade to Windows Server 2008;
•	the Windows Server 2008 Security Guide, which provides best practices and automated tools to help strengthen the security of servers running Windows Server 2008; and
•	the Microsoft Deployment tool, which decreases the cost of client and server deployments by providing detailed guidance and job aids for every organizational role involved with large-scale deployment projects.

Enterprise customers planning to upgrade can follow a few basic steps to help prepare and plan for the move to Windows Server 2008:

1.	Use Microsoft’s free tools to assess their enterprise’s current servers and determine which can be upgraded and which servers will require a “clean install. “
2.	Engage with their application suppliers for prescriptive guidance.
3.	Test applications they’re planning to run for compatibility with Windows 2008.
4.	Research certified hardware and software solutions in the Windows Server Catalog.

Upgrade Options

Windows Server 2008 uses image-based deployment to make the installation process as efficient as possible. Installation images are the fastest way to deploy an operating system. Image-based setup also is less error-prone than a scripted installation process.

Customers upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 will follow one of two methods, depending upon their current environment. Servers that are running only software applications that came with Windows Server 2003, such as Active Directory, Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), are the best candidates for a simple upgrade.

Microsoft recommends other customers running a wider variety of applications follow IT community best practices and perform a “clean install” of Windows Server 2008. A clean install involves loading Windows Server 2008 on a partition that is not running an existing operating system. Microsoft advises those customers who want to pursue an upgrade to first contact the software manufacturer for prescriptive guidance. Customers running applications whose manufacturers do not provide support during the upgrade process, which did not ship with Windows Server 2003 or that weren’t delivered to Windows Server via Windows Update should remove those applications first, perform the upgrade to Windows Server 2008, verify the applications are supported on Windows Server 2008 and then reinstall the applications.

Windows Server 2008 also offers a barebones installation option called Server Core, in which only the services required to perform the Active Directory Domain Services, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS), DHCP, DNS Server, File Services, Print Server, Streaming Media Services, Web Server (IIS), or Hyper-V (Virtualization), roles are installed. A Server Core installation offers base-level server functionality without any extra overhead, so it will typically require less maintenance and fewer updates than a full installation.

Ensuring Compatibility

To help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and other developers build solutions that IT professionals can deploy immediately with confidence, Microsoft created the Windows Server 2008 Logo Program.

“We’ve been working with more than 1,000 software and hardware partners to help ensure that their products take full advantage of the capabilities and features of Windows Server 2008,” said Visse.

Windows Server 2008 software certification comprises approximately 100 test cases that independently confirm an application’s compliance with best practices for compatibility, security, reliability and availability on the server operating system. The certification identifies top-performing technologies that are ready to deploy in mission-critical environments.

The program features two designations – the “Works with Windows Server 2008” designation ensures that an application is in compliance with best practices for the most common Windows Server 2008 functions, while the “Certified for Windows Server 2008” logo supports rigorous standards for stability, security, reliability and overall performance.

Microsoft expects there to be at least 80 software applications certified for Windows Server 2008 by the end of February, and roughly 300 more that are considered ready for the new platform. A complete list of compatible hardware and software products is available at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com.

In addition to encouraging customers to look for the certification logo when they make purchasing decisions, Microsoft has done something new for Windows Server 2008. The company has made the same tools that ISVs used to test their products for compatibility available to IT professionals so that they can test both commercial applications and custom applications they’ve developed in-house. The tools are downloadable at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/ready.

There is also a Windows Server 2008 Developer Center site that is a portal for both ISV developers and enterprise developers working on custom applications. The site provides how-to videos, interviews with Microsoft engineers and related documents. It also links to a moderated technical forum for application readiness and certification discussions and questions http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/default.aspx

Windows Microsoft Server 2008

With customer demands rising and prices falling, service excellence alone is no
longer enough to ensure future growth and profitability. That is why – according
to some of the industry’s top independent analysts – many leading professional
services companies that focus on IT are parlaying their customer relationships into
broader opportunities, with business models that extend to postproduction system
support and maintenance. At the same time – analysts report – more and more IT
services firms are following their own advice and streamlining internal processes.
To be sure, these business models require new strategies, new best practices, and
the right tools to implement them. With these elements in place, your rewards can
include more consistent cash flows, higher profit margins, and customer bonds
that are practically unbreakable. To help achieve these goals and set their direction,
many IT services firms seek insights and advice from thought leaders in their
industry.

Built for the Web Windows Server 2008 gives you the ability to deliver rich web-based experiences efficiently and effectively, with improved administration and diagnostics, development and application tools and lower infrastructure costs.

Virtualization Built In With its built-in server virtualization technology, Windows Server 2008 enables you to reduce costs, increase hardware utilization, optimize your infrastructure, and improve server availability.

High Security Windows Server 2008 is the most secure Windows Server ever. Its hardened operating system and security innovations, including Network Access Protection, Federated Rights Management, and Read-Only Domain Controller, provide unprecedented levels of protection for your network, your data, and your business.

Xfile

Human Software has introduced the second version of Xfile, a radical new image adjustment tool for OS X and Windows.

What’s interesting about this software is its use as a tool for image resizing that is capable of adapting elements of an overall image without changing the size of areas around the resized area.

In order to achieve this is uses a technology called ‘Seam Carving’, an operation which can be conducted within Photoshop.

With this technique image resizing of the whole image can be made while keeping the size of the most important elements of the picture. The features of the image remain untouched.XFile removes or adds areas to an image that would be least noticed.

The same very sophisticated technique lets you by simply brushing roughly a mask over an area of an image, remove an area and automatically rebuild the pixels missing

Here’s a video showing how this works.

JavaMail API

The JavaMail API is a messaging framework intended to build platform-independent applications that use e-mail messaging. It is included in the J2EE platform and is available as an optional package in J2SE. The API’s main purpose is not for transporting, delivering, and forwarding messages, but rather providing protocol-independent access to mail infrastructure for sending and receiving messages.

Overview

The JavaMail API is divided into two parts:

• The main part of the API is focused on sending and receiving messages (independent of the protocol).
• The second part implements protocol-specific languages, such as SMTP, POP, IMAP, and NNTP. With the JavaMail API, in order to communicate with a server, you need a provider for a protocol. (The creation of protocol-specific providers is not covered in this article, but Sun provides a sufficient set of providers for free—at least SMTP, POP, and IMAP, which is more than enough for sending and receiving standard e-mail messages over standard Internet infrastructure.)

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All versions of the JavaMail API require the JavaBeans Activation Framework, which adds support for typing arbitrary blocks of data and handling it accordingly. JavaMail uses Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) implementation from that framework. The MIME implementation defines the content of what is transferred in an e-mail: the format of messages, attachments, and so on. In order to use JavaMail, an application must include classpathmail.jar and activation.jar to operate properly. If you use J2EE, there is nothing special you have to do to use the basic JavaMail API—it comes with J2EE classes.

In 2006, JavaMail became open source, and the source code for the JavaMail API Reference Implementation is now available under the open source license as part of the project called GlassFish.

Classes

Here is an overview of some of the most important classes used in JavaMail applications:

• javax.mail.Session: This class is used to control access to the implementations of the other mail classes that represent the services offered by the mail system, for instance javax.mail.Store. (Be careful not to confuse this class with javax.servlet.http.HttpSession.)
• javax.mail.Transport: This class is used for sending mail messages via a specific protocol such as SMTP, as implemented by the service provider.
• javax.mail.Store: This class is implemented by the service provider. It aims to allow access to read, write, monitor, and search activities for a particular mail protocol such as POP3 or IMAP4. A reference to the javax.mail.Folder class is obtained via this class.
• javax.mail.Folder: This class gives a hierarchical view of javax.mail.Message objects and provides access to specific messages for read, delete, and reply actions.
• javax.mail.internet.MimeMessage: This class models the actual mail message. It holds very little information and data about the message when it is first instantiated; as successive methods retrieve more data about the message, this class is used to store that data.
• javax.mail.internet.InternetAddress: This class models a RFC822 (Internet standard) e-mail address, i.e., an address of the form peter@mikhalenko.ru. If an incorrect address format is encountered, an error occurs and an AddressException is thrown within the Java method processing the e-mail address.

Usage example

Listing A contains sample code that sends a test message. In this example, you should replace the placeholder e-mail addresses with real addresses and replace smtp.address.com with the address of a real SMTP server that is used by your Internet provider or company.

A Session object is created representing our e-mail session. The Session object’s constructor requires a java.util.Properties object representing the session’s key information. For this example, you only need to set the “mail.smtp.host” property to an appropriate SMTP host. After that, you create the actual MimeMessage object and customize it for the e-mail. Two InternetAddress objects are needed representing the “from” and “to” addresses respectively. In your code, these should be valid e-mail addresses that you can access. Once the addresses are set for the e-mail, a subject and a simple message is set.

Finally, the message is ready to be sent. In JavaMail, the Transport object handles sending messages. Since we only have one, the static send method is used. This method uses the SMTP server specified as the “mail.smtp.host” address.

Going beyond the basics

The JavaMail API has many advanced capabilities. As an example, you can add any mail headers to the message, set up multiple recipients, create blind copies of a message (what BCC is intended for), recode the message text into different charset encodings, and so on. For example, Listing B shows how to add multiple recipients.

If you send a message with a non-ASCII character (an accentuated character), the recipient may have problems reading it. To make the message easier to read, try adding the following lines to give a hint about the encoding:

MimeMessagemimeMsg = new MimeMessage(session);
mimeMsg.setHeader("Content-Transfert-Encoding", "8Bit");
mimeMsg.setText(frenchMsg, "iso-8859-1");
Transport.send((Message)frenchMsg);

This is fine for the body, but in order to correctly display accentuated characters in a title, you need to encode it using the ‘quoted-printable’ or ‘base64′ encodings. Hopefully, you can also use the javax.mail.internet.MimeUtility class. The encodeText() method will make sure that a passed string is “mail safe.” Listing C shows how you will send an e-mail with an attachment.

Conclusion

The ways in which you can use the JavaMail API are beyond the scope of this article. For a full description, refer to JSR 919, which is the latest JavaMail 1.4 specification. The Sun JavaMail API is the full reference implementation of this specification, so just install it and then take the rich features out for a test drive.

Peter V. Mikhalenko is a Sun certified professional who works for Deutsche Bank as a business consultant.

Second life grid

InfiniteCanvas

InfiniteCanvas is a freeware/open source application for arranging and displaying infinite canvas comics. If you want to learn more about infinite canvas comics read the Infinite Canvas Wikipedia article or have a look at the comics that were arranged with the InfiniteCanvas application.

InfiniteCanvas consists of an easy to use nativ Mac OS X Editor application and viewer based on Adobe Flash.

Features

• Allows arranging, scaling and rotating of panels on an infinite canvas.
• Trails can be created directly on the canvas.
• To aid the end user, artists can create a multi-path navigation layer on top of the comic.

Screenshots

Internet commerce startup steps

What is the biggest reason you want to build a product management team?
i want to be a product manager. the responsibilities include market research, product definition and design,product and project management, evangelizing of product, product marketing, and product cycle life marketing.
Market Research:
This refers to the activities of studying a market to understand the customer needs, competitive landscape, and market forces – with the ultimate goal of uncovering opportunities for creating product enhancements as well as new products.
This is done via conversations with customers or potential customers, talking to customer-facing teams such as sales and support, studying reports and articles on the marketplace, test driving competitive products, keeping tabs on customer behavior, and other such activities.
This culminates with the PM preparing a business case, product strategy and/or business requirements document (BRD) detailing how to capitalize on the uncovered opportunities.
Product Definition and Design:

a) Product Definition refers to the activities of specifying what a product needs to do. This is usually done via what is referred to as Market Requirements Document (MRD) or Product Requirements Document (PRD). This document may include information such as product vision, target market, competitive summary, detailed description of product features, prioritization of features, use cases, system requirements, performance requirements, sales and support requirements, etc.
b) Product Design refers to the activities of specifying the look and feel of the product including the user interface (UI) and the user interaction with the product – covering the whole spectrum of user experience. In larger companies the PM works with UI designers or interaction designers to create this, while in startups the PM may do all of these. the uncovered opportunities.
Project Management:
This refers to the activities of leading cross-functional teams including engineering, QA, UI design, marketing, sales and support to develop and launch the product on-time and on-budget. This may include securing resources, creating project timelines, tracking progress against timeline, identifying critical paths, getting additional resources when needed, and communicating status to the executive team.
In larger companies, Project Managers actually perform most of these activities with the support of PM’s. In very small startups, the PM may be asked to do these by herself. In some companies, the Engineering Lead may do most of these activities as well.

Evangelizing the Product:
This includes the activities of communicating the product benefits, features and target markets, and in general championing the product to internal teams such as sales, marketing, support and executives. This also includes evangelizing the product to external audience such as press, analysts and customers.
15. In larger companies, the PM is supported by the Product Marketing, Marketing Communications (MarCom) and/or Press Relations (PR) teams in evangelizing to external audience.
16. I consider this to be the second most valuable among a PM’s activities – especially evangelizing to the sales & marketing teams, and the executives to create excitement around the product.
17. Product Marketing:
18. This refers to the activities of outbound messaging – telling the world about the product. This includes creating collateral such as datasheets, brochures, website, flash presentations, press packages, trade shows and more.
19. In larger companies, the product marketing activities are almost always separated from the PM. They’re instead performed by the Product Marketing Manager. The biggest shortcoming of this arrangement is the resultant inefficiencies in communication and the weakening of outbound messaging.
In some companies the terms ‘Product Management’ and ‘Product Marketing’ are used synonymously and one person is responsible for all activities. In companies where there are separate ‘Product Management’ and ‘Product Marketing’ groups, the latter group performs all the activities mentioned in this category. They may also perform some of the activities in categories 1, 4 and 6.
Product Life Cycle Management
This refers to the activities of managing a product as it goes through its life cycle from ideation to launch to growth to maturity, and eventually to decline.
This includes tasks such as product positioning, pricing and promotion, product portfolio management, competitive strategy, making build/buy/partner decisions, and identifying and developing partnerships. The PM works with Product Marketing, Business Development and MarCom teams on many of these activities.
There you have it – my attempt at demystifying the role of product management (and the associated role of product marketing). I hope this helps product managers and product marketers as well as those who work with them.

To add on, advertising on the internet proves to be intriguing to me. try ABCsearch.
ABCSearch is the world’s largest privately held meta search engine conducting over 80 million daily searches through our network of specialized engines and metacrawlers. With the high cost of advertising on Google and Yahoo, we offer a more affordable alternative with a minimum bid price set at $.05 per click. Our geo targeting capability, quality control and optimization tools enable us to drive quality traffic to help achieve your company’s online marketing goals.

Still worry about security , viruses on the internet? i recently came across intego, which did’nt prove to be very impressive, but still workable.
Intego uses industry-standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology for the encryption of your information. If you are using a security-enabled browser (such as Safari, Firefox, Netscape or Internet Explorer), your information is secure.