CA Protection Suite Beta Program

CA invites you to participate in the Protection Suite r3.1 Beta Program.

From the product data sheet:

"Designed to meet the unique needs of small and medium sized businesses, CA rotection Suites provide cost-effective, easy-to-manage solutions that help ensure your IT assets are secure and available, enabling you to focus on running and growing your business. CA Protection Suites provide comprehensive data protection for your ritical IT assets, combining security, backup and desktop migration capabilities into egrated solutions that help minimize risks, prevent downtime, and reduce IT management costs."

To participate you will have to register and provide basic personal information.

Online forms are used to submit issues and send your feedback.

VMware Player 2 Beta Program

VMware has released the VMware Player 2 Beta.

"Welcome to VMware Player 2 Beta Program! We invite you to download the beta to try out several new and exciting features, such as:

• Experimental Support for 2-way Virtual SMP - Assign more than a single CPU to a virtual machine to experience better performance
• Share data seamlessly between the virtual machine and host computer - Leverage Shared Folders or simply drag and drop files between the virtual and physical machines to share data efficiently
• Support for Windows Vista - Use Windows Vista as host and guest operating system
• Support for USB 2.0 devices - Use peripherals that require high-speed performance in your VMs, such as MP3 Players and fast storage devices
• Appliance view - Start a virtual appliance in the appliance view to review brief description and other relevant information provided by the appliance author
• New Home Page - Leverage an intuitive home page interface that lets you open existing virtual machines or browse the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace to download any of the 425 virtual appliances. Virtual appliances are pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run enterprise software applications packaged along with an operating system within virtual machines
• Broad host and guest operating system support - Run any of the over 60 supported 32- and 64-bit guest operating systems including Vista, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Ubuntu 6.10 and many more"

[via VMware Betas]

There is a dedicated forum to discuss this beta for registered users.
Only self-help and web-based support is offered for Beta users during the term of the Beta period is . No support will be provided by phone.

They also have other ongoing betas that can be discovered here.

Being a tester for Microsoft Live Hotmail

I just received a letter from Microsoft thanking me for participating in the Hotmail beta.
The letter also contains offer for mail signature indicating I was Beta Tester and also a Windows Vista offer.

The Vista Offer includes:

• Save $100 on a high-performance Gateway FX530 Series PC with Windows Vista Ultimate.
• Get 4 FREE hardware accessories from Epson, Kingston, D-Link and Artec with a custom-built system running Windows Vista Ultimate from a local PC builder.

I'm not sure if I'll use the offer, but it is nice to know that your help is appreciated.

Pidgin, formerly Gaim, version 2 beta

Pidgin, formerly known as Gaim, has released the last beta of version 2.


"While previous betas in the 2.0.0 series have been extremely stable, and we recommended their use, this release is actually of beta quality. This is our first release to reflect the name change from Gaim to Pidgin, and so there are a lot of fairly significant changes here, which we'd like to see have broader testing before declaring it ready for release...

I strongly recommend that you backup your ~/.gaim directory before running Pidgin for the first time. Windows users should see where their version of Windows stores their configuration files at our Win32 FAQ. Things you should be on the lookout for include problems with preferences being lost or forgotten, buddy icons not working as you expect, plugins or other external files not properly being found. If you find an issue that severely prohibits you from using 2.0.0beta7, please report it at http://developer.pidgin.im/. There are a bunch of less fundamental, more cosmetic changes in this release that are sure to jump out at you" [via Pidgin News]

If you would like to help with testing, grab a copy from Sourceforge.net

Microsoft Windows for Home Programs

Microsoft is rolling out two beta programs that are aimed for home users.

The first one is for Windows Home Server.


The program requires having

• two or more PCs,
• a broadband connection and router,
• and a spare PC or server that can be dedicated to Windows Home Server software.

In order to participate you will have to answer initial survey and based on your results Microsoft will contact you (or not) with the next steps.


The second one is for Windows Media Center.


The application process consists of a series of questions that are required for participation in the beta program. Once they receive your application, it will be reviewed for consideration.

Only the chosen will be contacted via e-mail by May 31, 2007.