"Looks great! Now prove it works before we deploy it." If you’ve ever planned and pitched an Exchange Server solution, you’ve probably heard something like this. Many a messaging architect has quickly responded that they can and will prove the design—throwing around names like LoadSim, JetStress, IOPS, Heavy Profile and Medusa for good measure. And then they proceed to either not run the tests properly or, worse, not run them at all. There’s a reason why that happens: these tools are not always easy to use!
Designing servers for use in anything but the smallest of Exchange deployments is complicated. Availability and reliability are key in Exchange design. So how can you be sure that the servers you have specified can cope with the load that will be placed on them if you haven’t been able to realistically test them over any period of time? Deploying into production should never be the time at which testing takes place! (more)
At Microsoft's financial analyst meeting last week in Redmond, a demo of Windows Vista's Voice Recongnition technology went bad - not picking up much of what the presenter was saying:
In defense to Vista's Voice Recongnition technology, I've used it in Beta 2 and it worked absolutely wonderfully. I was not in a large conference room like the presenter above. Being in such a large room and getting echo could have played a large part in why Vista didn't pick up most of his words. But another thing to keep in mind, and as technical beta testers - you should know this well, with each new build sometimes comes with features that don't quite work.
This presenter may have been given a interim build from Microsoft to use that had some issues with the Voice technology that may have been fixed in another build later on. And the presenter was using a newer build of Office 2007 too for that matter. So in combination with echo, possibly a interim build of Vista, and a newer build of Office 2007 - its a dangerous combination to be demoing something important to a large group of investors and analysts.
REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft said on Friday that it is recalling an update to its Small Business Server product because of a glitch found late in the manufacturing process. The software maker said it found a problem with Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 after the product was released to computer makers but before it was made broadly available.
The MS Small Business Community blog writes: "We wanted to provide you an update regarding Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2. Recently, and during a regular audit as part of our software production process, Microsoft became aware of an issue with the final SBS 2003 R2 software containing non-final versions of a few core components to SBS. Since Microsoft has only just released SBS 2003 R2 to our manufacturing partners (OEMs, System Builders, and Distributors), and it is not yet generally available to customers, the scope of this concern for partners and customers is very limited."(more)
Mary Jo Foley thinks the release will now rather be in September. As a result of the gaffe, the Windows Server team intends to perform its code audits earlier in the development and test process, going forward, officials said.
In the past, administrators who wanted to move users from Windows 2000 desktop computers to Windows XP had two choices: upgrade existing computers to Windows XP or install a fresh copy of Windows XP on a new computer and migrate the user's files and program settings from the old computer to the new one. While upgrading is the easiest option (since it automatically migrates user settings), it has two disadvantages: users are stuck with older hardware, and a messed-up computer just gets messier.
This article walks you through how to use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate user accounts, files and program settings from an existing computer running Windows XP to a freshly installed new computer running Windows Vista. (continue at source)
Deployment has always been a bit of a headache for Windows networks. CD installs are too slow and cumbersome. Unattended installs are preferable but are complicated because of multiple file formats like unattend.txt, sysprep.inf, winbom.ini, and so on. Disk imaging is popular but requires third-party products from Symantec, Altiris, and others. Plus you can end up spending a lot of time building images for different hardware platforms and rebuilding images when service packs and patches are released.
This article examines the new tools and procedures for deploying Windows Vista and how they can make the administrator's job of rolling out workstations easier.
Although it's a way off, still, that doesn't mean you can't start thinking about what Windows Longhorn Server will mean for your environment. And you'll want it in your environment: Longhorn is possibly the most compelling server OS we've had since...well, Windows NT 3.1, I think. It's not the revolutionary change that Win2000 was (with its introduction of Active Directory), but some of the things in Longhorn will just beg to be used in.
My current favorite is Server Core, a 500MB, stripped-down, "windowless" version of Longhorn that can act as a file server, domain controller (DC), DNS server and/or DHCP server. I know, 500MB. I'm thinking a nice 1U rackmount server or blade that has, oh, 8GB of RAM (x64 processor, of course) and a pretty small hard drive. And this is what you should be thinking of now: how you'll utilize Server Core when it finally arrives. This is going to be the most stable version of Windows ever, simply because it has so few "moving parts." If the industry estimate of 1 bug per 1,000 lines of code is close, I'm betting 500MB of code will contain a lot fewer bugs than the full-on version of Longhorn, which is going to be huge. 500MB means less patches, less potential vulnerabilities and less maintenance. "Windowless" means servers you can lock in a closet and manage entirely from your desktop, since there's no GUI on the server in the first place.
Microsoft has published a free Virtual PC 2004 service pack 1 that in fact contains the whole product. It does not allows to be installed on XP Home, but you can doing these easy steps:
1. Download the ZIP file from Microsoft and unzip it.
2. execute: msiexec /a VPC2004SP1Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 MSDN.msi
3. Run Virtual PC 2004 setup.exe
Consolidation is a highly touted benefit of Microsoft Virtual Server. Being able to merge five or more older servers into one new one saves energy and frees up needed rack space or floor space. What's confusing is how to consolidate in the right way. In order to boost the odds for success, you have to address the nitty-gritty technical details and create a step-by-step plan for before and after the physical migration.
Migrating a computer into Virtual Server is typically done with Microsoft's Virtual Server Migration Toolkit, or VSMT. Microsoft has provided detailed instructions on how to use VSMT, so rather than recapitulate those instructions here, this article will be about the other things you need to do before, during and after a migration.
More than 9,000 tools, templates, white papers, and other items are currently available from the Microsoft Download Center, and all of them are free. What's a busy admin to do? To help you sort the wheat from the chaff, WindowsDevCenter has compiled a list of must-have downloads every Windows admin should have from the Download Center. To make it easier for you, they have categorized the selections into two groups -- product downloads, and documentation and templates -- with the focus on general tools and documentation for administering Windows Server 2003-based networks.
WhoIsConnected is a nifty tool that let's you see what connections are open on your systems. The tool goes beyond the functionality found in Microsoft's staple Netstat command line tool. It let's you monitor your open network connections and open resources, disconnect any selected connection and close any open resource, control processes, show open IP ports, and disable connections.
Microsoft on Tuesday said it has bought Winternals Software, a small maker of Windows utility programs, in a deal that the software maker hopes will add key technical talent to its operating system development team.
Terms of the deal to acquire the Austin, Texas-based company were not announced. Among the software that Winternals offers is a set of freely downloadable tools known as Sysinternals.
As part of the deal, the software maker is naming Winternals co-founder Mark Russinovich as a technical fellow.
"I've had my eye on Mark for some time," Jim Allchin, Microsoft divisional co-president, said in a statement. "The work he and Bryce (Cogswell, Winternal's other co-founder) have completed in system recovery and data protection illustrates the depth of thinking and skill they will bring to future versions of Windows. The addition of their deep kernel-level expertise to our existing strong talent will help provide us with the edge we need to continue to raise the quality and functionality bar for Windows on both the client and the server."
In buying Winternals, Microsoft is getting the company's free tools, its Sysinternals community Web site as well as several paid-for software products for businesses. However, it appears Microsoft made the deal, in large part, to hire the company's two co-founders.
DPM 2006 was one of the first products to be brought under the umbrella of Microsoft System Center, a family of systems management products. DPM uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create disk-based protection and recovery for file servers in an Active Directory domain. You can still store backups on tapes by using third party backup software that will be responsible for managing the tape library.
Coming from MSExchange.org:I like to consider Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) as a natural evolution of the Shadow Copy Service, which was introduced with Windows Server 2003. Since Shadow Copies are really neat, why not extend the kind of service they provide and make it available centrally at the datacenter?(continue at source)
In earlier versions of Windows, TCP/IP was a separate optional component that could be added or removed like any other protocol. In Windows XP/2003, TCP/IP can't be removed because now it's a core component of the operating system. Especially on a Windows Server 2003, TCP/IP functionally is critical for network operations and the Active Directory domain environment. The entire Active Directory architecture is based on DNS hierarchy, which relies on TCP/IP.
In some situations, you may encounter a corrupt TCP/IP stack. Although rare, this situation can be disruptive because you can't remove and reinstall TCP/IP anymore. So, what's the solution? Reinstalling the operating system? Well, that's one option.(continue at source)
Microsoft’s Eiger arrives! From the press article: "Microsoft Windows® Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is now available to Software Assurance customers. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs extends the security and stability of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 to legacy PCs and eases the transition to Windows Vista™ Enterprise."
Microsoft Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is a Windows-based operating system designed for customers who have older computers running earlier operating systems and who are not in a position to purchase new hardware. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is based on Microsoft Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 (SP2), enabling you to upgrade to the security and stability of the Microsoft Windows XP platform. This eases the transition to Windows Vista Enterprise when you eventually replace your computers. (more)
Today Microsoft announced a couple of cool things:
Virtual PC 2004 SP1 will be available free - now!
Virtual PC 2007 will be available for free in 2007, with support for Microsoft Windows Vista
Windows Vista Enterprise customers will have the right to install four copies of the operating system on a desktop for a single user
Why are you giving Virtual PC away for free? Microsoft answers: "Microsoft views virtualization as a tool. Virtual PC is used for a number of reasons, but the primary reasons are for development and test scenarios and application compatibility. We already provide Virtual PC as part of MSDN for development and test users, and given that all our other application compatibility tools are free - charging for Virtual PC did not make much sense."
The new taskbar is a thinner and has a far more transparent background. The application buttons are thinner and wider, with a faint white border. The ‘hover’ state sports a trendy blue gradient button that reminds me of the new Vista Media Center style, also the Live Preview no longer reports the name of the application on top.
Overall, a subtle change over the current design, but makes the taskbar more aesthetically pleasing and cleaner. Also on a side note, there are two new icons on in the Quick Launch bar, although I do not know what they represent, presumably one is Flip 3D (right).
Microsoft has just released Configuration Manager 2007 (SMSv4) Beta 1 Refresh Download (build 5224) to the Microsoft Connect website. This release enables two new key feature areas/scenarios:
Network Access Protection – in conjunction with the Windows Server “Longhorn” Network Access Protection (NAP) feature, you can use Configuration Manager 2007 Beta 1 Refresh to restrict network access for computers that do not have security updates you identify as required. They can then be required to install the necessary updates before being given full network access.
Windows Vista Image-based Deployment - Using the Operating System Deployment (OSD) feature, you can now deploy Windows Vista Beta 2 (build 5384.4) to computers managed by Configuration Manager. Please note that versions of Vista other than the official Beta 2 release (build 5384), both older and newer, are currently not supported and will not work properly with OS Deployment in Configuration Manager 2007 Beta 1 Refresh.
Microsoft, on monday, released three new guides to configure and test Network Access Protection (NAP). First featured in the upcoming Longhorn Server, Microsoft provides higher protection against uncontrolled clients in the corporate network by providing NAP. The following step-by-step guides can be used with the last month released Beta 2 Longhorn milestone:
Microsoft plans to release seven security bulletins on July 11 to cover a range of critical vulnerabilities affecting Windows and Office users. Four of the seven bulletins will include patches for flaws in the Windows operating system, while three will deal with bugs in the Microsoft Office productivity suite.
As is customary, the company is not releasing details on the vulnerabilities except to say that the updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scan Tool. Some of the updates will require a restart. The Microsoft Office patches are expected to include a fix for a known code execution hole in the Excel spreadsheet program. That flaw is already being used in targeted attacks against an unidentified business interest, Microsoft confirmed. The Excel attack includes the use of Trojan horse program called Trojan.Mdropper.J that arrives as an Excel spreadsheet with the file name "okN.xls." (more)
Exchange Server 2007 introduces a new feature called cluster continuous replication (CCR). CCR combines the log shipping and replay functionality in Exchange 2007 with the failover functionality in the Microsoft cluster service (MSCS). Unlike previous versions of Exchange that also supported clustering, CCR does not require shared storage. Instead, each node in the cluster has it own locally connected storage (e.g., SAS, DAS, iSCSI). On the active node in the cluster is the production clustered mailbox server (CMS). On the passive node is a relatively up-to-date copy of the CMS that is created and maintained by log shipping and replay.
Because CCR does not use shared storage for the Exchange data, we wanted to make sure we didn't need shared storage anywhere in the cluster. The only other resource in the cluster besides the CMS is the default cluster group, which contains the quorum resource. To eliminate the need for shared storage to host the quorum resource, Exchange 2007 supports the Majority Node Set (MNS) quorum.(continue at source)
The Microsoft Exchange Server ArchiveSink is used to log all message and recipient details for incoming and outgoing messages on an Exchange server. It is a diagnostic tool which enhances the out-of-box message archiving features in Exchange. For Exchange Server 2003, ArchiveSink has been enhanced to log all message and recipient details of an e-mail message. You can enable archiving as you did before, but now you have the option to enable message logging.
When ArchiveSink is enabled, by default all messages and their recipients (with the exception of Bcc recipients) are archived to an .eml file. When you enable BCC archiving, ArchiveSink creates an additional .xml file for each message. The .xml file includes message information such as Internet message ID, subject, and it also lists all the recipients of the message (including Bcc recipients). (continue at source)
Microsoft have released Private Folder 1.0, which lets you have a folder called ‘My Private Folder’ which you can password protect.
Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is a useful tool for you to protect your private data when your friends, colleagues, kids or other people share your PC or account. With this tool, you will get one password protected folder called ‘My Private Folder’ in your account to save your personal files.
You can grab a copy of it HERE (However this requires a “Genuine” version of Windows-As most free Microsoft software requires now days.)
On the Website of iexbeta you can find a wiki with specific information about which software is and is not working on Windows Vista. The list of tested software is very long, so i suppose that before you want to try Windows Vista check out if any software you would also like to use is compatible with Vista.
Tablet PCs previously used a separate version of Windows XP (known as Windows XP Tablet PC Edition) that was available only with the purchase of a Tablet PC or with an MSDN subscription that could be used for development purposes. These limitations made installing a separate image for Tablet PCs time-consuming and less cost-effective, and as a result many IT departments simply didnt support the use of Tablet PCs on their networks.
The incorporation of Tablet PC technology into Windows Vista will change this dramatically, making it much easier for enterprise and business to incorporate Tablet PCs into their workplace by using the same image that they use on other mobile computers.(continue at source)
"Looks great! Now prove it works before we deploy it." If you’ve ever planned and pitched an Exchange Server solution, you’ve probably heard something like this. Many a messaging architect has quickly responded that they can and will prove the design—throwing around names like LoadSim, JetStress, IOPS, Heavy Profile and Medusa for good measure. And then they proceed to either not run the tests properly or, worse, not run them at all. There’s a reason why that happens: these tools are not always easy to use! 
In the past, administrators who wanted to move users from Windows 2000 desktop computers to Windows XP had two choices: upgrade existing computers to Windows XP or install a fresh copy of Windows XP on a new computer and migrate the user's files and program settings from the old computer to the new one. While upgrading is the easiest option (since it automatically migrates user settings), it has two disadvantages: users are stuck with older hardware, and a messed-up computer just gets messier. 
Although it's a way off, still, that doesn't mean you can't start thinking about what Windows Longhorn Server will mean for your environment. And you'll want it in your environment: Longhorn is possibly the most compelling server OS we've had since...well, Windows NT 3.1, I think. It's not the revolutionary change that Win2000 was (with its introduction of Active Directory), but some of the things in Longhorn will just beg to be used in.
Microsoft has published a free Virtual PC 2004 service pack 1 that in fact contains the whole product. It does not allows to be installed on XP Home, but you can doing these easy steps: 
Consolidation is a highly touted benefit of Microsoft Virtual Server. Being able to merge five or more older servers into one new one saves energy and frees up needed rack space or floor space. What's confusing is how to consolidate in the right way. In order to boost the odds for success, you have to address the nitty-gritty technical details and create a step-by-step plan for before and after the physical migration. 
More than 9,000 tools, templates, white papers, and other items are currently available from the Microsoft Download Center, and all of them are free. What's a busy admin to do? To help you sort the wheat from the chaff, WindowsDevCenter has compiled a list of must-have downloads every Windows admin should have from the Download Center. To make it easier for you, they have categorized the selections into two groups -- product downloads, and documentation and templates -- with the focus on general tools and documentation for administering Windows Server 2003-based networks.
Visit the Best Windows Admin Downloads page on WindowsDevCenter
WhoIsConnected is a nifty tool that let's you see what connections are open on your systems. The tool goes beyond the functionality found in Microsoft's staple Netstat command line tool. It let's you monitor your open network connections and open resources, disconnect any selected connection and close any open resource, control processes, show open IP ports, and disable connections. 
Download WhoIsConnected from Native Computer Systems
Microsoft on Tuesday said it has bought Winternals Software, a small maker of Windows utility programs, in a deal that the software maker hopes will add key technical talent to its operating system development team.
DPM 2006 was one of the first products to be brought under the umbrella of Microsoft System Center, a family of systems management products. DPM uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create disk-based protection and recovery for file servers in an Active Directory domain. You can still store backups on tapes by using third party backup software that will be responsible for managing the tape library.
In earlier versions of Windows, TCP/IP was a separate optional component that could be added or removed like any other protocol. In Windows XP/2003, TCP/IP can't be removed because now it's a core component of the operating system. Especially on a Windows Server 2003, TCP/IP functionally is critical for network operations and the Active Directory domain environment. The entire Active Directory architecture is based on DNS hierarchy, which relies on TCP/IP.
Microsoft’s Eiger arrives! From the press article: "Microsoft Windows® Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is now available to Software Assurance customers. Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs extends the security and stability of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 to legacy PCs and eases the transition to Windows Vista™ Enterprise."
Download Virtual PC 2004
The new taskbar is a thinner and has a far more transparent background. The application buttons are thinner and wider, with a faint white border. The ‘hover’ state sports a trendy blue gradient button that reminds me of the new Vista Media Center style, also the Live Preview no longer reports the name of the application on top.
Microsoft has just released Configuration Manager 2007 (SMSv4) Beta 1 Refresh Download (build 5224) to the Microsoft Connect website. This release enables two new key feature areas/scenarios:
Exchange Server 2007 introduces a new feature called cluster continuous replication (CCR). CCR combines the log shipping and replay functionality in Exchange 2007 with the failover functionality in the Microsoft cluster service (MSCS). Unlike previous versions of Exchange that also supported clustering, CCR does not require shared storage. Instead, each node in the cluster has it own locally connected storage (e.g., SAS, DAS, iSCSI). On the active node in the cluster is the production clustered mailbox server (CMS). On the passive node is a relatively up-to-date copy of the CMS that is created and maintained by log shipping and replay.
The Microsoft Exchange Server ArchiveSink is used to log all message and recipient details for incoming and outgoing messages on an Exchange server. It is a diagnostic tool which enhances the out-of-box message archiving features in Exchange. For Exchange Server 2003, ArchiveSink has been enhanced to log all message and recipient details of an e-mail message. You can enable archiving as you did before, but now you have the option to enable message logging.
Microsoft have released Private Folder 1.0, which lets you have a folder called ‘My Private Folder’ which you can password protect.
