Jonathan Hassell

These seven core ideas should be a part of any good Bring Your Own Device program. Each idea comes with many important questions to ask yourself, your IT associates, and your executive team while developing a BYOD policy.

1. Specify What Devices are Permitted.

This afternoon, Microsoft announced that it has finished the development work on Windows Server 2008 R2. The company released gold code to manufacturing, which means that customers, partners, OEMs and subscribers to TechNet and MSDN services will receive the code over the coming few weeks.

I have written extensive previews on a variety of aspects of Windows Server 2008 R2 during the beta and release candidate process. But now that the product is fully baked, in this RTM review I'll focus mainly on areas I haven't yet touched on, including Hyper-V 2.0, enhancements to Remote Desktop Services (also known as Terminal Services) and improved power management and power-use reduction.

On Tuesday, Microsoft released to manufacturing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The final code will be shipped on Nov. 1. The company bills the software as one-stop organization, allowing administrators to set up and deploy new virtual machines and manage hosts and other virtual infrastructure elements from one console.

The 2008 version of SCVMM introduces a wide scope of virtual platform support, performance and resource optimization, and enhances support of high-availability host clusters, among other improvements. In testing RTM escrow code in my lab over the past month or so, I found SCVMM to be a competent and convenient place to manage virtual machines.

Thursday afternoon, Microsoft released its virtualization product, Hyper-V, to manufacturing. Previously, the company had promised to make a production-supported version of Hyper-V available to Windows Server 2008 customers within 180 days of the official release of the operating system itself.

By releasing Hyper-V in late June, Microsoft beat its self-imposed deadline by about a month, although delivering less than was originally promised. There have been public release candidates available since early 2008. In this piece, I'll take a look specifically at the release-to-manufacturing, or RTM, edition, noting improvements and changes.