What better Valentine's Day gift could there be for a systems administrator than a bouquet of nine long-stemmed Microsoft security patches?

The Holiday season saw happy revelers unwrap millions of new, Internet-ready mobile devices. From the latest smartphones to tablets and Ultrabooks, a new class of powerful devices has hit the market.

The first Patch Tuesday for 2012 brings seven bulletins from Microsoft. One was held over from December, and only one of the seven is regarded as being critical.

This month's security bulletins from Microsoft include one in an unusual category: 'security feature bypass'.

Microsoft is preparing a scheme to automatically push the latest version of Internet Explorer to users' systems. This can be seen as Microsoft following in Google's footsteps, as part of the thinking behind Chrome was to ensure people stay on the current version.

Microsoft's Christmas stocking of security patches isn't quite as well stuffed as we were led to expect. Nevertheless, 19 vulnerabilities have been addressed.

Research commissioned by virtualisation vendor Citrix suggests that Australian IT decisionmakers are generally thinking along similar lines to their overseas counterparts in terms of the security implications of desktop virtualisation. Not surprisingly, it's seen as a good thing.

- Sponsored Editorial -What is Windows Intune? Today an increasing number of employees are mobile – and need to be able to work effectively anywhere. And that means their PCs need to be always up to date and protected. To vastly simplify this task for businesses of all sizes, Microsoft has introduced a new cloud-based solution called Windows Intune™.

Systems vendor, StayinFront, is to deliver an on-demand CRM and analytics solution to McWilliams Wines as the company transitions from a paper-based field management process to the flexibility and efficiency of a fully hosted and supported cloud-based field force solution.

Microsoft has released just four security bulletins this month, and only one of them is rated critical.