Microsoft SIR, volume 14

Volume 14 of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR) released - hundreds of pages of new security intelligence is now available, download it here - http://www.microsoft.com/sir

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Skype for Business and VTC Interoperability

Skype for Business (SfB) has a very, very strong potential, I have written about it in my previous post . I can't think of any other platform that shows as much promise in terms of bridging personal and business communications as well as unifying different modes and mediums. And all of this may have started with a strategic acquisition of Skype by Microsoft in 2011. That said, the road ahead is not without challenges. For example, interoperability with other platforms. Making SfB work with existing Video TeleConferencing (VTC) systems, many of which represent significant capital investments in organizations' infrastructure, could be of a particular importance. After reading statements like Skype for Business is based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standards and supports H.264 (MPEG-4 video coding standard) one can come to a quick conclusion that integration and/or interoperability with other VTC solutions is easy or nearly automatic. Unfortunately, the industry is not

WordPress displays weird characters

Sometimes after a database conversion (e.g. from MySQL to MariaDB) or due to encoding issues a situation might arise when WordPress is showing weird characters. A quick way of remedying the situation would involve examining the pages to discover a pattern (what characters are being substituted, in the example below the apostrophe was replaced by â€™ ) then running an queries against the database to reverse the effect. Here's a quick example (common tables that store content): UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'Â' , '' ) UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'â€™' , "'" ) UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE (meta_value, 'Â' , '' ) UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE (meta_value, 'â€™' , "'" ) Please, keep in mind that to permanently resolve the issue you would need to get to the root of the p

Mail-enabled security groups in Office 365

Another update (11/19/2013): further evolution of Office 365 services makes creation of distribution and security groups even easier, plus there's now an option of creating a dynamic distribution group (click here for more information): Update (08/06/2012): a clear sign of Office 365 evolving along the same lines as other agile cloud services - small incremental features and minor new functionality are being delivered almost continuously and, unlike important major service updates, without much fanfare. For example, there's no need to resort to using PowerShell to setup mail-enabled security groups anymore, it can now be done at creation using management portal: Those managing Office 365 ( O365 ) tenant via the Microsoft Online Services Portal ( MOS Portal ) interface would notice that there are two distinct group entities: Security Groups: can be created via MOS Portal (main portal page>Management>Security Groups) and used for assigning

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