The main (virtual) Office 2010 launch event will include a keynote speech by Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division at 11am EDT (that’s 4pm BST for readers in the UK).

System administrators everywhere will also be pleased to find that the associated Office 2010 management tools are available to download already to coincide with the launch, unlike the time lag before they were available for Office 2007, or for the later service packs. This nearly 16MB download is a self extracting exe which will force a UAC prompt on newer OS’s, which can be useful so you can put the files in a folder which needs elevated privileges, and the contents expand to a total of about 123MB.

The extracted files include Group Policy templates in ADM and ADMX formats so you can use these on XP/2003 or Windows Vista/7/2008 to create your policies. The ADMX files give you the usual advantage of a single central store versus ADM files being duplicated for every policy that uses them.

Also in the package is an updated version of the Office Customisation Tool (OCT) and opax files which contain settings for all the different apps. You will also find the now standard Excel file full (in .xls format) of GP and OCT settings for all the applications and general ones for the Office 2010 suite as a whole. You should also download and read the release notes as a Word document for these tools from the same download page, which has some late changes that supercede the spreadsheet. Some of these are fairly trivial and simply reflect changes to the explain text or the URL linked from that text.

The associated ADML and OPAL files also enable you to manage your policies across multiple languages. Included in the package at the moment are 11 language variations including English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and two Chinese variants (zh-cn for PRC and zh-tw for Taiwan. Technet says there is a Hong Kong language version included but I can’t see it).

There is more information about what you can find in the ADM/ADMX files and how to use the OCT here on Technet, and more in the deployment sections of the Resource Kit.

Release candidate code has been available since December for various subscribers such as Technet, MSDN and Microsoft partners.

The reviewers’ guide says:

Windows Server 2008, built with web and virtualization technologies, enables you to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure. New virtualization tools, web resources, and security enhancements help you save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a dynamic and optimized datacenter. Powerful new tools like IIS7, Windows Server Manager, and Windows PowerShell, allow you to have more control over your servers and streamline web, configuration, and management tasks. Advanced security and reliability enhancements like Network Access Protection and the Read-Only Domain Controller harden the operating system and protect your server environment to ensure you have a solid foundation on which to build your business.

So, we return to having BDCs read-only domain controllers as an option, which makes great sense from a security point of view, especially for branch locations where physical security may be less well implemented. Further security measures such as Network Access Protection (NAP) should help to provide an extra layer of defence for corporate environments where securing the perimeter is becoming harder, simply because it is so much harder to define where the perimeter actually is. PowerShell is on my list of new year resolutions as something to learn a lot more about. I’m always a believer in using the command line to deal with repetitive tasks and bulk processing, and PowerShell has been written from the ground up to make this so much easier.

There’s a whole raft of tools, training, downloads, and information available. This press release page provides some useful links.

Read more about the release of Service Pack 1 for Vista here. The short version is that it won’t be available to actually download until mid-March

One of the benefits likely to get most press will be the changes to how Microsoft enforce their licencing through the “Windows Genuine Advantage” (WGA) programme which requires the software to be activated in order to continue using the full functionality. This has been held back from all the beta versions and will only take effect in the final released version. Paul Thurrott discusses this at his SuperSite for Windows:

First, Microsoft is disabling the two most common exploits that exist today for bypassing product activation in Vista … Pirate Windows users utilizing one of these hacks will see their systems return to the intended state–typically a grace period countdown–once SP1 is installed.

The second change is more dramatic. … If the product activation period expires, for example, Vista moves into Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM), where the user can only access the IE Web browser for 60 minutes at a time before being logged out; … Non-Genuine State (NGS), occurs when an activated copy of Vista fails a Web-based validation check, such as when you attempt to download software from the Microsoft Web site. In this case, certain features–like Windows Aero and ReadyBoost–are completely disabled, while others–like Windows Update and Windows Defender–work in limited ways only.

Beginning with SP1, RFM and NGS are a thing of the past.

Improvements to the software itself generally focus on performance and stability, but it does also improve on driver support and providing better APIs for third-party products such as anti-virus and desktop search (partly due to complaints that vendors were being “locked out” and could not develop products on an equal footing with Microsoft themselves).

One area which should be much better is the slow copying of files (even within a disk) which has plagued some systems. I will run some test copies of sets of large and small files and once I have the service pack installed I’ll post some results on how much performance gain I get.