US Proactive Services

The .NET Application Compatibility briefing is designed to assist in the planning, testing or preparation of making applications compatible with multiple versions of .NET Framework. It is delivered by a team of consultants that have extensive knowledge in guiding ISVs and Enterprises with their respective applications and LOB products. This guidance can be delivered on site or in a Live Meeting session.

The 64-bit Developer briefing is designed to provide developers with essentials knowledge required for development on 64-bit Windows platforms. It provides a quick overview of the differences between Windows 64-bit and 32-bit memory architectures, covers techniques for porting 32-bit applications and for running 32-bit applications on 64-bit platforms. It is delivered by a team of consultants that have extensive knowledge in 64-bit software development. This offering can be delivered on site or in a Live Meeting session.

This service provides expert level manual code reviews complemented with proprietary scanning tools to identify common coding vulnerabilities hidden within application implementations. The service also provides proven guidance to help mitigate any identified vulnerabilities within the application implementation.

A key component of SDL-IT, the Microsoft Application Threat Modeling process and associated Threat Analysis & Modeling tool was developed to help non-security subject-matter experts design application with security in mind. Using this tool, application development teams can create a threat model that helps detect security flaws and evaluate application threats and vulnerabilities in the context of defined business objectives. Microsoft ACE Services provides a range of services related to threat modeling including Training Session, Consulting and Process Integration.

This service will enable customers to evaluate and identify potential and existing performance issues. This helps determine when and how to fix or prevent such issues, in order to reduce the number of servers needed to run a business and, ultimately, to improve the end-user experience.

The AD Design and Migration Review provides customers Microsoft best practices, recommendations and validations in terms of their existing or planned Active Directory design or migration. Recommendations and areas of potential risk or concern are outlined in a formal report as part of the engagement.

The Microsoft Advisor Platform is an integrated suite of tools developed for financial professionals who build advice-based client relationships. The solutions in this service area span simple planning concepts to in-depth financial plans covering many types of assets and liabilities, and cover a full spectrum of wealth management scenarios including retirement planning, intergeneration wealth transfers, mid-career asset conservation and analytics as well as financial instruments which provide risk mitigation (options, insurance, and hedges).

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS) Build provides the functionality of a public build lab that is fully integrated with source control, reporting, and work item tracking. By default it only builds Visual Studio 2005 projects.This service offers aid to customers who wish to migrate their existing source code from a VSS repository to TFS and enable building of those legacy project types (Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Studio 2002/2003) within TFS Build, enabling all the benefits of Team Build for older projects.

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Development Workshop is designed to assist customers to become familiar with the development features and capabilities of the VSTS Development Edition, in order to improve the overall Code Quality. Like most workshops, this is generally delivered formally in a class room type of setting with interactive and instructor led sessions. These training workshops also contain demos, hands on exercises and lab work.

Consistently delivering high quality technology solutions on time and on budget is challenging. The Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) offers guidance for working with people and processes based on the proven practices of Microsoft to help teams and organizations become more successful in delivering business driven technology solutions. The Microsoft Visual Studio Team System offers two integrated process templates: MSF for Agile Software Development and MSF for Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Process Improvement. By building on MSF and the Visual Studio Team System process templates, Microsoft Services application lifecycle management workshops are designed to increase your knowledge and productivity. We use our experience, tools, and processes to provide you with knowledge on relevant topics and proven best practices that can help you excel at managing complexity.

Release Management is an integral part of shipping products – but an often over-looked area that invariably contributes to shipping delays, product recalls/re-releases, lack of well-enforced release criteria – be it feature completion, security compliance, development practices, bug bars, build and testing practices, and version control management. The 2 day engagement will focus on how to effectively use Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), Team Foundation Server (TFS) in areas such as: • Governance• Strategies• Best practices• Source Control Management to establish and ensure the success of a release management discipline for the customer’s application lifecycle management.

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Test Workshop is designed to assist customers to become familiar with the test features and capabilities of the VSTS Tester Edition. In VSTS Team Edition, Testing has been made a first class citizen in the development environment and lots of capabilities provided for integrating tests directly with the code being tested. Like most workshops, this is generally delivered formally in a class room type of setting with interactive and instructor led sessions. These training workshops also contain demos, hands on practice exercises and lab work

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) guidance is designed to assist in the planning or preparation of VSTS deployment. Depending on customer needs, this guidance can cover any of several VSTS or Team Foundation Services (TFS) features. Like most guidance services, this guidance in generally delivered informally through a series of discussions with subject-matter experts from Microsoft who can give you feedback on your VSTS issues or questions. These informal discussions can take the form e-mail or phone conversations, informal white-boarding sessions, or briefings via Live Meeting or in person.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS) is a productive, integrated, and extensible suite of lifecycle tools that expands the Visual Studio product line to enable greater communication and collaboration among software development teams. With Visual Studio 2005 Team System, organizations can ensure greater predictability and quality early and often throughout the development process.

The goal of this review is to identify potential Microsoft support issues with an customer's application’s architectural design. The review will provide a comprehensive look at a customer’s existing application architecture and provide feedback on what areas should be addressed to help ensure optimal performance, maintenance and support according to Microsoft best practices.

Activities to evaluate an application’s performance, identify bottlenecks, and determine recommendations for improvement. Customers can also use Lab facilities to evaluate scalability limits based on their objectives and to create prototypes or workarounds to help validate alternate technology implementations.

To ensure IT initiatives positively impact your bottom line, you need a clear view of how your business capabilities contribute to your strategic objectives. Microsoft Services Architecture Transformation supplies your organization with critical insight, allowing you to prioritize projects and make strategic decisions that deliver business value.

The Microsoft® Services Assessment & Roadmap for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the enterprise a decisive, vendor-agnostic perspective regarding their existing and future SOA capabilities. It delivers a tailored SOA Roadmap with prioritized recommendations, supported by comprehensive enterprise SOA assessment findings documentation, the SOA Maturity Model Workshop, and a Services Inventory with dependencies and adoption levels.

This 4 day developer-focused workshop will include an overview of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 along with many presentations, demonstrations and hands-on labs covering how to develop, build, deploy and debug the many features of a BizTalk Server 2006 solution. No prior Microsoft BizTalk Server experience is required.

This briefing provides down-to-earth coverage of the new features in C# 3.0 and their use in Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

Configuration Management Optimization addresses software update, patch management, and many other software management issues through deployment and optimization of System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

This engagement focuses on establishing a services-based approach to managing the IT ecosystem. It includes installation of a Scorecard Solution for measuring key metrics needed to manage a service, creation of a services map to illustrate the true complexity and dependencies for an end-to-end service, definition of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), definition of Operating Level Agreements (OLAs), and implementation of service review meetings to drive a culture of iterative improvement.

Lab facilities are also available for custom activities to meet customers’ most specific needs. Your Premier TAM/ADC or MCS consultant assists you in defining the scope of, and determining availability for, a custom Lab exercise. We plan, coordinate and treat these activities like the custom reviews with which most Premier and MCS customers are already familiar. Additionally, you can rely on Microsoft Studios to prepare a professional-quality video of your lab visit for use as marketing collateral.

Application guidance enables you to create optimal solutions by making the right design decisions upfront. Guidance services should be initiated in the envision or early planning stages of the product development lifecycle before the functional or product specifications are completed. This helps customers understand and plan for how Microsoft technologies should best be utilized in the solution. Data Access Guidance is focused on the design of ADO, ADO.NET, SQL Server, or MSDE components.

Microsoft Services Desktop Optimization using Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office System (DOVO) is built upon proven tools and guidance designed to help you fully capture the benefits of desktop optimization through the effective use of Microsoft Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System. Microsoft Services delivers best practices for desktop optimization based on extensive experience and expertise gained in complex client environments. Through coordination and collaboration with Microsoft product groups and its own IT organization, as well as early adopters, Microsoft Services is able to bring deep knowledge and understanding of products, roadmaps, architectures and methodologies to help you maximize your investment in Microsoft technologies.

DCM helps IT groups apply Microsoft IT and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices, processes, tools and templates to establish baseline settings for servers and applications, standardize these settings among multiple servers and automate ongoing configuration management exception reporting. The offering also includes the installation of the Desired Configuration Monitoring tool to dynamically report on complexity in the environment so remediation can be planned and to automatically audit changes and deviations from baselines. This helps reduce configuration complexities and provides a proactive approach to releasing updates and new products, and managing change.

DCM helps IT groups apply Microsoft IT and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices, processes, tools and templates to establish baseline settings for servers and applications, standardize these settings among multiple servers and automate ongoing configuration management exception reporting. The offering also includes the installation of the Desired Configuration Monitoring tool to dynamically report on complexity in the environment so remediation can be planned and to automatically audit changes and deviations from baselines. This helps reduce configuration complexities and provides a proactive approach to releasing updates and new products, and managing change.

DCM helps IT groups apply Microsoft IT and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices, processes, tools and templates to establish baseline settings for servers and applications, standardize these settings among multiple servers and automate ongoing configuration management exception reporting. The offering also includes the installation of the Desired Configuration Monitoring tool to dynamically report on complexity in the environment so remediation can be planned and to automatically audit changes and deviations from baselines. This helps reduce configuration complexities and provides a proactive approach to releasing updates and new products, and managing change.

This is a 4 day technical training event for developers and architects, focusing on the Windows Workflow Foundation component of the .Net 3.5 Framework. Windows Workflow Foundation is an extensible programming model and runtime components for building solutions on the Windows platform.The .Net 3.5 Framework is the specification for the managed/.NET APIs for new Windows platforms, such as Windows Vista. .Net 3.5 Framework is comprised of a superset of the .NET Framework 2.0 APIs, including Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation.

Microsoft® Enterprise Portal and Collaboration solutions help transform the way people and organizations work together through familiar and pervasive workspaces, portals, and emerging social computing capabilities. By empowering people with a familiar set of tools, built on an enterprise-ready, scalable, and easily managed integrated infrastructure, portal and collaboration solutions from Microsoft Services can extend the value of current IT investments in the enterprise while enabling business process innovation.

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 is the Microsoft enterprise search solution to help you increase productivity and reduce information overload. This provides your employees, partners, and customers with the ability to find relevant content in a wide range of repositories and formats.

This Redmond based fellowship offers our Exchange customers the same world-class training and instructors that Microsoft’s internal Exchange teams receive. Customers can take full advantage of this unique opportunity to tap the deep expertise of the teams that plan, deploy, and support Exchange at Microsoft. This program is tailored to provide in-depth experiences through hands-on work, labs, presentations, and direct feedback and involvement with the Microsoft IT organization and the Product Group that develops Exchange.

PMM combines the implementation of incident and problem management processes with technical tools and reports to tune Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 for your environment. In conjunction with your monitoring and technology teams, Microsoft helps you create Incident Matrices, Major Problem Reviews, and a sustained engineering team. As the operational process implementation progresses, technical resources implement tools that allow you to see the most problematic alerts. In addition, we help you create a scorecard which defines your alert to ticket ratio, alerts per server per day, and number of critical, error, and service unavailable alerts created by MOM.

This review offers Microsoft best practices and technical guidance for migrations to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2000 or 2003. The focus of this engagement is typically on a migration from an existing messaging system to Exchange 2000 or 2003 and has a goal of providing customers with information to help avoid known issues and to help ensure their migration design is thorough and complete according to Microsoft best practices. Recommendations are outlined in a formal report upon engagement closure.

The goal of this service is to provide a thorough review of the overall performance of an existing architecture and implementation of Exchange Server. A formal report identifying key areas of potential risk and Microsoft best practices to help mitigate those risks are provided upon engagement closure. This review is primarily focused on customers who currently have Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 fully deployed or deployed in a testing environment, however it may also assist customers who are looking for further assistance and Microsoft best practices to baseline Exchange Server performance before deploying in production.

This Health Check provides insight into the health of your IIS environment. This multi-day engagement uses a variety of tools to collect data and statistics of the most important and critical aspects of your IIS environment. The goal of this Health Check is to proactively diagnose and analyze the data collected, make recommendations based on Microsoft best practices and help avoid any problems from surfacing in the future.

This initial release of Microsoft Services Interactive Media Manager provides the foundational sales and delivery readiness methodology to support the first 10-20 IMM engagements. IMM provides a set of Web parts, workflow templates, a metadata model, and Web services for building collaborative media production solutions as an extension to Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. IMM makes it easier to extend Office SharePoint Server 2007 into scenarios where digital media, rather than documents, are the primary targets of workflow and collaboration. It also provides the building blocks for an end-to-end collaborative media production workflow by using Microsoft and partner technologies. This Offering content is an early release that has not been used extensively in the field; as such it should be considered a starting point and not a definitive methodology.

The ISA Server Health Check (ISAHC) is an opportunity to review and determine any risks of computer threats associated with the configuration of ISA servers in the enterprise. The engagement leverages a variety of tools to collect data and statistics that is used to identify performance enhancements, security risks, and client configuration concerns. The tools used are passive and only collect information about your ISA configuration; they do not make any changes to the configuration of ISA.

The Microsoft Services Lending Platform provides the tools necessary to build a complete lending system for both consumer and commercial customers, from loan origination, through underwriting, generating legal documents, and progressing through closing and boarding a loan.

The purpose of the Microsoft Messaging High Availability Review is to help the customer optimize their Exchange Server 2003 cluster design to meet current and future business continuity requirements. This engagement will validate current designs as well as provide recommendations to improve and optimize availability. In addition, capacity management will be an additional part of this review. Analysis of the Exchange and Windows cluster configuration will be done to identify areas of risk or concern in relation to meeting high availability requirements.

Microsoft Cluster Server Risk Assessment Program (CSRAP) proactively performs an in-depth analysis of your server cluster configuration and operational procedures. CSRAP identifies potentially disruptive risks to service that can be mitigated through recommended best practices, and ensures our customer’s environment complies with the best possible configuration. A CSRAP engagement is delivered on site by a Microsoft engineer who is accredited to deliver the service; it offers robust tools, detailed collateral, and Microsoft operational Best Practice guidance with an emphasis on knowledge transfer to augment the customer’s operational maturity. CSRAP can automatically run against a large-scale environment to collect and analyze volumes of customer data. The program also auto-generates a key findings report for the customer that highlights critical risks to service availability and provides detailed risk remediation guidance.

Microsoft Office SharePoint System (MOSS) 2007 Workshop contains approximately 32 hours (4 days) of instruction. The material covers search service, crawl, index, best bets, property mappings, query, user search experiences, and alerts.

The Microsoft Project Server 2007 Enterprise Project Management Installation and Migration workshop is a 2 day hands-on workshop intended for IT Professionals as well as Project Managers.The workshop details Installation and Migration best practices. This workshop, provided by experienced instructors, will help equip attendees with practical knowledge of common pitfalls during the deployment and migration process. Some of the key features associated with this workshop include: - Learn key concepts and best practices on Migrating, Deploying and Scaling a Project Server 2007 implementation. - Gain hands on experience in the installation and configuration of Project Server 2007. - Gain a clear understanding of the migration process and the required preparation steps before performing a migration.

Microsoft Risk Security Assessment Program provides a formal methodology for reviewing a critical segment of a customer’s IT environment. It is an in-depth analysis of the Infrastructure, Operations, People, and Applications resulting in a clear remediation roadmap to mitigate core vulnerabilities.

Used to evaluate and remediate customers’ production Active Directory implementations to ensure productive use. Includes a review, hands-on knowledge transfer and a report that details health along with findings and recommendations.

Having an untested plan can be worse than not having a plan at all. An untested plan may give a false sense of security. Customers may use the lab facilities to perform a walk through of their plan to identify potential problem areas before deploying on production systems. Wide Area Network (WAN) simulators can be used to validate complex replication/network configuration scenarios and determine performance characteristics in a controlled environment.

The Microsoft® Services Mission Critical Program helps to ensure that your Microsoft software-based mission-critical applications are architected, implemented, and operated to increase quality and maintainability for the life of the solution. This offering is designed to deliver the confidence that your data center-class systems achieve target levels of availability and performance, based on Microsoft and industry best practices. The Mission Critical Program is our commitment and contribution to your success for mission-critical IT systems.

The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) Essentials 2-day Workshop introduces MOF and its three major components: Process Model, Team Model, and Risk Management Discipline. The workshop also provides an overview of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and explains its foundational relationship to MOF. The workshop includes the McKinley simulation where students run a fictional airport applying the key concepts in the lecture to improve critical IT systems availability.

A Service Improvement Project (SIP) engagement may be appropriate for customers who have gone through an MOF Operations Assessment (OA) or a MOF Service Management Assessment (SMA) to identify opportunities for process improvement. The SIP addresses the specific processes targeted for improvement in an OA or SMA. This formal project follows an approach based on the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) and typically includes process design, development, testing, and implementation.

The Microsoft Operations Manager Health Check (MOMHC) is an insight into the health of your MOM 2005 environment. This multi-day engagement uses a variety of tools to collect data and statistics of the most important and critical aspects of your MOM 2005 environment. The goal of this health check is to proactively diagnose and analyze the data collected, make recommendations based on best practices and potentially avoid any problems from surfacing in the future.

The MSMQ Health Check inspects and analyzes the configuration of your organization’s MSMQ enterprise. It includes a review of the following areas: MSMQ clients/servers, domain controllers, enterprise-wide configuration settings, clustering, queue configuration, and MSMQ related code.

The OSR develops a high-level two-year roadmap for operations improvement which is validated with the customer IT team and aligned with business vision, strategy and project plans. The OSR combines the best practices of the Infrastructure Optimization Model (IOM), the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to help define actions to address immediate and long term needs. This roadmap is developed by uncovering significant weak points and identifying corresponding solutions that deliver specific levels of IT service to your business.

Provides the tools, methods and practices to enhance the application’s performance and stability.

PMM combines the implementation of incident and problem management processes with technical tools and reports to tune Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) for a customer’s environment. PMOM does the same for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

The PKI Design and Implementation offering assists with creating a PKI design that will support the current certificate needs for Encrypting File System (EFS), as well as have the flexibility for future growth. Senior Security Professionals work to identify the requirements for certificate-based applications and create a design which will meet those requirements. After the conceptual design is approved, Microsoft assists in developing and implementing a Proof of Concept and Pilot implementation.

RSCA is designed to provide a detailed, accurate assessment of the security status of Windows based operating systems. The RSCA service utilizes Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) to collect detailed configuration information from selected servers and workstations. The operations consulting team analyzes and compares an organization’s key security, operating system and applications settings against Microsoft recommended best practices, IT standards and government mandates through a number of pre-built ECM compliance templates. The RSCA engagement provides executives and IT professionals with insight regarding the state of security and compliance within the enterprise and provides a detailed roadmap for securing and hardening these systems.

Used to evaluate customers’ production SQL Server implementations to ensure productive use. Includes a review, a hands-on knowledge transfer and a report that details health along with findings and recommendations.

Security Health Check (SECHC) is a proactive security engagement created by the Microsoft Services group to help Microsoft customers identify security gaps in their Microsoft platform environment. This goal is accomplished by evaluating customer’s environment against a continuously updated checklist for hosts configurations, security processes and network environment. All recommendations are based on Microsoft official security guidance.

Server Consolidation using Virtualization utilizes both System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and includes discovery and assessment of current server workloads, architecture and planning, and physical-to-virtual migration.

Service Level Management (SLM) for MOM and Operations Manager 2007 is designed to help IT groups evaluate the availability of their enterprise-wide IT infrastructure services, and manage by a set of agreed upon metrics to keep their Microsoft server infrastructures running at peak efficiency and availability for all users.

Microsoft Services Service Management Optimization (SMO) is a fixed-scope consulting engagement for large organizations. It provides a management solution for proactive monitoring and capacity management of systems, applications, and services that can help you to meet and exceed service-level goals, improve IT productivity, and implement best practices.

Smart Client Guidance is designed to assist in the planning or preparation of migrations from web or Windows-based applications to Smart Client architecture. The guidance provided will focus on one or more of the following Smart Client capabilities: local resources (leveraging the desktop and local software resources – i.e. Microsoft Office), connectivity, off-line capability, intelligent deployment/updates, and/or device flexibility.

Informal guidance is available to help your team answer specific questions related to the implementation of Systems Management Server in your environment. This service is applicable in all phases of a product lifecycle and can be delivered in a variety of ways from onsite briefings, question and answer sessions via phone/email or onsite meetings. Microsoft best practices and knowledge transfer regarding SMS are provided where applicable dependent on the scope of the engagement.

This engagement helps assist customers with the process of installing SMS 2003 into a non-production environment as part of a proof of concept. By leveraging a customer or Microsoft Services lab environment, subject matter experts are available to model SMS 2003 to help meet their individual needs and business requirements.

Implements a consistent and healthy System Management Server (SMS) 2003 environment using proven guidance from Microsoft Services to produce an implementation plan, architecture recommendations, and delivery tools.

Provides the architecture, tools, and best practices to build and deploy cost efficient, secure, and connected systems for a government to enable quality e-Government services.

Informal guidance is available to help your team answer specific questions related to the implementation of SQL Server in your environment. This service is applicable in all phases of a product lifecycle and can be delivered in a variety of ways from onsite briefings, question and answer sessions via phone/email or onsite meetings. Microsoft best practices and knowledge transfer regarding SQL Server are provided where applicable dependent on the scope of the engagement.

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is a comprehensive reporting platform that can be used to author, manage and deliver paper-oriented and interactive web-based reports. This intense 4 day workshop id designed to take participants from level 0 to 300 using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to design, implement and deploy reporting solutions. The workshop is comprised of instructor led presentations and hands-on lab sessions with a greater focus on labs. The lecture-to-lab ratio is approximately 30%:70%. Each core topic encompasses instructor-led presentations and multiple interwoven lab exercises that will re-enforce the concepts covered and help develop skills required for the real world.

The purpose of this review is to help customers to develop a solutions and processes to recover a SQL Server system based on Microsoft best practices. This service provides a comprehensive review of all aspects of a critical SQL Server from various technologies to systematic planning and preparation as they relate to disaster recovery. Recommendations are outlined in a formal report upon engagement closure.

The goal of this review is to help a customer ensure that their SQL Server environment is performing optimally. This includes a customized analysis of system bottlenecks, database design, and identifies potential SQL Server performance issues. Guidance on key settings including memory and database configuration to help prevent performance and scalability problems is also provided. All recommendations are outlined in a formal report upon engagement closure.

This offering provides an end-to-end implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX using Microsoft Services for overall program management for implementing and integrating large complex, multi-site, or global implementations that are primed by Microsoft Services.

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 workshop is designed to prepare a customer to design, deploy and operate Operations Manager 2007 efficiently within their environment. This workshop incorporates best practices learned from numerous System Center Operations Manager 2007 implementations and imparts knowledge about lessons learned from those engagements.

These services are available to assist customers with the process and methodology of executing performance tests using tools such as Segue SilkPerformer and Microsoft Application Center Test. This may include assistance with utilization of the tools for performance testing, assistance with collection of data during test execution and analysis and interpretation of collected data. Some of the data collection tools used include Performance Monitor, SQL Profiler, Network Monitor as well as those facilities provided by the load testing tools. This service can be delivered at the customer site, at a third-party testing facility or in the Microsoft Services Labs.

The Virtualization Health Check (VHC) is an insight into your virtualization infrastructure planning as well as the configuration of your Virtual Server environment. This single or multiday engagement leverages an experienced Premier Field Engineer (PFE) and variety of tools to collect data and statistics crucial to your Virtualization initiative.

Fuzzing is a testing method that generates large amounts of invalid input to help uncover buffer overruns, integer overflows and other security and reliability issues in computer software. By applying advanced fuzzing techniques to files consumed by various software systems and their components the FileFuzzer tool and corresponding best practices help find security vulnerabilities software, including buffer overruns, elevation of privilege issues and other critical security problems.

Guidance is available for a customer’s implementation of an application that uses Microsoft technologies. Subject matter experts will analyze an application's design, architecture, and code implementation to determine if Microsoft best practices are being followed and provide recommendations. This service can have various deliverables depending on the scope and customer need including focus on a single module or the entire application code.

The Windows Compute Cluster Server/HPC Developer briefing is designed to assist developers to get started with porting HPC (High Performance Computing) applications to the Microsoft platform, running them, and diagnosing issues such as configuration and performance problems. It is delivered by a team of consultants that have extensive knowledge in guiding HPC ISVs and Enterprises with their respective applications. This offering can be delivered on site or in a Live Meeting session.

The Windows Live Platform (WLP) provides a set of web services that enable developers, to quickly and easily create compelling Web applications with open and easily accessible APIs. Learn how you can leverage the services in the Windows Live Platform to deliver rich, interactive experiences on the Web. During this technical briefing you will get a broad look at the Windows Live APIs and development platform. You will learn:- What is the Windows Live Platform - Why would a web site integrate Windows Live services into their platform - How the Windows Live Platform is used by Microsoft partners today

This is a 4-day workshop intended to provide a Developer tour of the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services version 3 (WSS 3.0). WSS 3.0 is available as a Microsoft Update for Windows Server 2003 and later versions. WSS 3.0 is the underlying layer for a separately licensed product: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that provides other value-add components. All development done for WSS 3.0 will work without any additional effort on SharePoint Server 2007 websites.

The Windows Vista Application Compatibility workshop is designed to assist in the planning or preparation of making applications compatible with Windows Vista. It is delivered by a team of consultants that has extensive knowledge in guiding ISVs and Enterprises with their respective applications and LOB products. This workshop is delivered at a customer site. The typical duration is between a day and a half and two days.

Works With Windows Server 2008 guidance assists in the preparation for submitting applications for the Works With Windows Server 2008 certification. It is delivered by a team of consultants that has extensive knowledge in guiding ISVs and Enterprises with their respective applications and LOB products. This guidance will be delivered on site. The typical duration is two days but depends on the complexity of the application.

This 4-day workshop provides the skills required to understand and successfully troubleshoot Active Directory Installation, Group Policies, and Logon Failures within Active Directory, File Replication Service, and Active Directory Replication.

4-day WorkshopPLUS course provides a background on Win32 User Mode processes and explains different debug scenarios and troubleshooting strategies. It also discusses debug symbols, verifying symbols, mapping from source code to Assembly Language, use of Watson,debugging of USER.DMP files, and advanced debugging techniques.

This 3-day delivery provides students with the skills required to successfully back-up, restore, repair, and recover Exchange Server 2003 databases.

The IIS 6.0 Critical Problem Management 3-day WorkshopPLUS course provides participants with skills and techniques that will enable them to implement processes and utilize tools to achieve the following objectives in a production environment:- Reduce mean time to restoration of service by ensuring that all critical systems are properly configured for debugging before a critical problem occurs, thus avoiding reboots to enable debug support - Reduce mean time to resolution by teaching the skills to diagnose the cause of many critical problems and the skills to make quick and effective decisions about next steps.

This 4-day workshop provides information on SQL 2000 index and page structures, performance troubleshooting tools, memory architecture, programming efficiency, and optimization techniques.

This 5-day workshop provides hands-on experience to automate Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP environments by leveraging the power of Scripting, WMI, and ADSI.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Failover Clustering workshop is a 3 day workshop. This workshop provides database administrators the knowledge and skill on how to install, configure, maintain and troubleshoot Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Failover Clustering. This workshop also points out differences in the failover clustering implementation of SQL Server 2005 compared to that of SQL Server 2000.

Provides students with the technical skills required to develop embedded solutions with Windows XP Embedded.