Short Takes Daily: What's going on in the world of Microsoft for Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Today's news: Windows 10 Mobile Build 10149 arrives for Slow Ring Insiders, the Lumia 640 XL is awesome and Rod Trent's about to take on Microsoft's customer support.

FRESH ON OUR SITES ...

Windows 10 Mobile Build 10149 arrives for Slow Ring Insiders — Some movement on the Windows 10 Mobile front did occur today when our Ring Master, Gabe Aul, announced on Twitter that build 10149 for Windows devices moved into the Slow Ring for Windows Insiders.

Product Review: Microsoft Lumia 640 XL — The screen is amazing, the phone's easy to handle despite the size, the battery life is better than expected and the camera is amazing.

Microsoft's new Groove music service creates familiar naming confusion — The branding story continues to be convoluted when it comes to Microsoft’s newly announced Groove name for their music service — at least for many in the IT world who remember Groove's previous incarnation as a collaborative workspace technology, or for those who are aware of the existence of Groove Music App. 

Microsoft Band Retail Channel Suffers from Windows Phone-itis? — Microsoft definitely has a retail channel problem. But, whose fault is it?

I Call Foul on Microsoft Band Support — Rod Trent vs. Microsoft. We know who we're betting on.

Security Sense: Watching the Watchers: What We’re Learning from the Hacking Team Breach — There are a lot of different angles with this breach and clearly one of the most obvious is how on earth did the guys who are meant to be the experts in this space get so comprehensively owned?

Securing an Exchange on-premises mailbox after an employee is fired — An harassed HR manager bursts into your office to demand that the mailbox of an employee who has just been fired is immediately secured. What are the next steps that should be taken to secure the data inside the mailbox and stop the now unhappy ex-employee messing things up? We'll tell you.

Esri Maps the Way to Virtual Desktops for Complex Tasks — Few power users of computer graphics are more demanding than professional cartographers and planners in the world of Geographic Information Systems. Theirs is the sort of high-end, graphically intense application that, for many users, is not ordinarily associated with desktop virtualization.  But that's changing, fast, with the introduction of graphics processors for VDI servers. 

Maximizing Hyper-V Performance — While the latest release of vSphere 6.0 has jumped ahead of Hyper-V scalability for the moment that is sure to change as Microsoft readies Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V. Today both platforms are clearly capable of running the most demanding virtualization workloads.