At the Microsoft Management Summit this week, Microsoft execs provided some official names and more specific timetables for several products under development. "Monad," the Windows scripting shell, is now "Windows PowerShell."
PowerShell is slated to be available for download in Q4 2006. Microsoft Exchange 12 is now officially (and expectedly) known as "Exchange Server 2007." Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) version 3 is now "System Center Operations Manager 2007," while Systems Management Server (SMS) version 4 will become "System Center Configuration Manager 2007." Both of these rechristened System Center apps are slated to ship next year.
In almost every office, it eventually becomes necessary for users to collaborate on documents. In the past, this has often meant that the administrator has to set up a special location for the shared documents and create a special security group made up of the users who will need access to the shared documents.
In Windows Vista though, it is possible for users to set up some share points of their own, but in a controlled manner that is unlikely to cause administrative headaches.(
continue at source)
Each time a new version of an operating system becomes available, organizations begin a process that eventually leads to a massive deployment of the new technology. One of the key factors that can help make this deployment a success is user-setting migration—specifically, the capture of all custom settings on existing systems and the restoration of those settings to newly deployed systems.
With Microsoft Windows Vista, this activity is facilitated by a revamped Microsoft Windows User State Migration Tool (USMT), which should help ensure that migrations are smooth and error free. This paper describes how migrations work in both corporate and personal situations and how to make these migrations a success.(
continue at source)
MOM 2005 Service Pack 1 operational database and Reporting data warehouse now support SQL Server 2005. To add support for SQL Server 2005 to the MOM operational database and the MOM Reporting data warehouse, you need to download and install the following three MOM 2005 hotfixes which can be found at the KB article link below.
KB article announcing MOM 2005 SP1 support for SQL 2005 is now live at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=917615.
Note: Reporting may sometimes give an error message such as "The version of the report server database is either in a format that is not valid, or it cannot be read." The found version is 'C.0.6.54'. The expected version is 'C.0.8.40'.To continue, update the version of the report server database and verify access rights. (rsInvalidReportServerDatabase). This isssue is fixed in SQL 2005 Service Pack 1 which is avaliable at:
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/sp1.mspx
Today at the Microsoft Management Summit, Bob Muglia announced the new name for our new task-based command line shell and scripting language: Windows PowerShell (What do you think - like it?) Formerly known under the code-name "Monad", Windows PowerShell is now at the Release Candidate (RC1) milestone and will be fully baked in Q4 of 2006.
Windows PowerShell is fairly significant. Windows Server has always prided itself on ease-of-use through the GUI.....no doubt one strong feature that sets us apart from competition. But alas, it has been difficult to automate repetitive tasks due to the lackluster utilities and scripting language (.bat) of cmd.exe....not to mention the lack of a common syntax and naming convention. Even VBScript with all of it strengths still lacks an interactive shell.
(more)
Windows PowerShell RC1 - x86
PIRATED software users be warned. Microsoft Corp is going to start “nagging” Windows users who do not have a legitimate copy of its operating system (OS).
Starting tomorrow, the software giant will permanently flag personal computers that are not running a genuine copy of Windows.
This move affects the six million Windows users in this country, as well as those in the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.
Industry sources informed In.Tech that the software giant is giving Windows the ability to tell if a user's PC is running a genuine or pirated version of the OS, via an update patch that becomes available from tomorrow.
The patch takes effect if a PC user has opted to automatically update Windows the moment he goes online. It will also take effect should a PC user manually download the latest Windows updates.
If the OS is an unauthorised copy, a pop-up dialogue box will appear on the Windows login screen, informing the user that his copy of the OS is counterfeit and that he should get a genuine copy.
For some Windows users, there will be two Patch Tuesdays in April. The Redmond, Wash. software maker plans to rerelease the problematic MS06-015 update on April 25 to correct an issue that has caused system hangs, Windows crashes and the appearance of strange dialog boxes after the original patch was installed. "[We have] re-engineered the MS06-015 update to avoid the conflict altogether," said Stephen Toulouse, program manager in the Microsoft Security Response Center.
The company's plan is to target the rerelease only to Windows users who are affected. In a blog entry, Toulouse said the company's patch deployment technologies will have "detection logic" built into them to only offer the revised update to customers who don't have MS06-015 or are having the problem. The glitches, which Microsoft claims affect only a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations of the patch, stem from a new binary called VERCLSID.EXE that validates shell extensions before they are instantiated by the Windows Shell or Windows Explorer. On systems running Hewlett-Packard's Share-to-Web software, Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall and some NVIDIA Drivers, users complained that the new binary stopped responding.
(more)
I've been keeping track of the amount of space available to Gmail users ever since the April 1st 2005 "infinite storage + 1" announcement. It seems the growth has been linear, but sometime in late 2005 Google decided to change the rate. Google probably realized they couldn't realistically promise increasing server space by almost 3.3 MB per day and changed the function to 0.4 MB per day. At the current rate, Gmail will reach the 3 GB mark on approximately April 2008, which would be Gmail's 4 year anniversary.
(more)
Apparently, Gmail’s built-in “View as HTML” functionality, which allows you to view the content of PDF files (and other types of documents) as if they were classic webpages, works regardless of the files’ usage restrictions (= DRM). I don’t think this is a bad thing
but just wonder how Google can back up this design decision — or is it a mistake?
(more)
Circumvent PDF DRM with Gmail!
A programmer at Microsoft tells us what it's like working for the software giant. An interesting read: "As a long-time Apple and UNIX user/programmer, I never aspired to work at Microsoft. (And I'm still a little surprised to be here.) I've never despised Microsoft like so many people seem to do — it's just that Microsoft products weren't a part of my world."
"Then my wife got a job at Microsoft, so I needed to leave Caltech/JPL to work in Seattle. I didn't actually apply to Microsoft — a friend of ours who worked there circulated my résumé and Microsoft responded rapidly and set up a last-minute interview. Although I had five other offers, Microsoft made the best impression."
(more)
The Kerberos authentication method originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s, as part of a project called Athena that involved integrating the computers on the MIT campus, which ran on different operating systems, in a network that offered single sign-on (SSO). At that time, most UNIX systems allowed users to access their resources as long as they had an account name and password. Microsoft’s first real networking operating system was NT (Windows for Workgroups supported file and printer sharing but not network logon). It used Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) and later a stronger version, MS-CHAP.
Kerberos is the protocol of choice for mixed network environments. This article explains how to use Kerberos authentication in these mixed environments. (
continue at source)
HP ProLiant Network Adapter Teaming is a software-based technology used to increase a server’s network availability and performance. HP ProLiant Network Adapter Teaming provides network adapter, network port, network cable, switch, and communication path fault recovery in addition to transmit and receive load balancing technology.
The objective of HP ProLiant Network Adapter Teaming is to provide network fault tolerance and load balancing. These two objectives are accomplished by teaming together two or more server network adapter ports. The term “team” refers to the concept of multiple server network adapters from the same server working together as a single server network adapter.(
continue at source)
Mark Russinovich writes on his blog:
As a part of ensuring that they've created a secure environment Windows administrators often need to know what kind of accesses specific users or groups have to resources including files, directories, Registry keys, and Windows services. AccessChk quickly answers these questions with an intuitive interface and output.
Download here
Whenever it officially ships, Windows Vista will bring a lot of new power and flexibility to Microsoft's Group Policy. Some changes are sexy and obvious, while others remain under the covers, but all are significant and could cause some refocusing among third-party vendors that have sprouted up in the Microsoft ecosystem to deal with various deficiencies in previous iterations of Windows and Group Policy.
The Group Policy Management Console will be the primary tool for domainwide Group Policy Objects management for the foreseeable future and that the tool automatically will grow and evolve in step with the Windows operating system.(
continue at source)
With the release of a new operating system comes a heaping helping of broken applications. Some software runs perfectly and just magically breaks one day, while other software doesn't work with the new operating system right from the start.
That's where Microsoft's Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) comes into the picture. Before you upgrade to a new operating system, ACT tells you which installed software will and will not work with the new OS in place, and Microsoft is preparing a whole new 5.0 version for Windows Vista. (
continue at source)
TechNet webcasts are designed specifically for the IT Professional, offering in-depth information on how to plan, deploy, and manage Microsoft products and technologies, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows Server, Microsoft Internet Information Services, and Microsoft Content Management Server. (
continue at source)
Know how the Remote Assistance game works, right? You have to ask them to go into Help & Support center, request assistance, mail it to you, etc? Well, Travis Creighton found a way to get into the box without making the user create a request:
I found how to bring up the "Offer Remote Assistance" app w/o navigating to the "Server Management" app. (I know…I'm breaking the 70-282 rules.) The sweet thing is that I can use this URL on my XP workstation and not have to first connect to the server in order to 'offer' Remote Assistance. And without this URL, I had to talk them through sending me an invite. Here is the jewel (copy and paste it all on the same line):
hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/UnSolicitedRCUI.htm
It usually takes a lot to stop XP in its tracks. Even in those rare cases when the operating system is badly damaged, you'll usually at least have the option of booting into the "Last Known Good" configuration, or to Safe Mode. But sometimes, especially after major hardware failures or part swaps (e.g. moving the operating system to a new hard drive), or after problems with dual- or multi-booting software, you may encounter seemingly intractable errors such as "Missing or corrupt HAL.DLL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," or "Windows could not start..."
There's an easy fix for "Missing HAL.DLL," "Invalid Boot.Ini," and several other fatal startup errors, Fred Langa says.(
continue at source)
The master of text-based search is looking to lend a lend a voice to Internet users everywhere, or so it appears based on Google's latest patent. Patent #7,027,987 issued today by the US Patent and Trademark Office covers a "Voice interface for a search engine," which is described as:
"A system provides search results from a voice search query. The system receives a voice search query from a user, derives one or more recognition hypotheses, each being associated with a weight, from the voice search query, and constructs a weighted boolean query using the recognition hypotheses. The system then provides the weighted boolean query to a search system and provides the results of the search system to a user."
(continue at source)
In order to manage and protect the data in the Exchange server a number of different administrative permissions are required. Exchange uses both the Windows access control model, made up of Access Control Lists (ACL) and a hierarchal permission structure.
Microsoft Exchange interacts with Windows at many different levels and uses different levels of administrative permissions to control access. The goal of this article is to help you understand the different levels of administrative rights and how to delegate these rights to your administrative staff.(
Continue at source)
After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006.
We will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of these three brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers, Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer for the professional Web designer and Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 for the Web developer. (
more)
Apple's decision to move its Macintosh computing platform to Intel processors has opened up a world of possibilities, none more obvious than the release this week of a beta software wizard called Boot Camp. This elegant little application allows Intel-based Mac users to repartition their hard drive, install Windows XP, and dual boot between XP and Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger".
A future version of Boot Camp will be included with Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," due sometime in 2007. That version, presumably, will support Windows Vista as well.(
continue at source)
IPv6 is something that many administrators of Windows-based networks need to start taking seriously. Asian countries like China, South Korea, and Japan are already starting rollouts of IPv6 networks, and Europe and North America are likely to need to follow soon. Why? Because the current version IPv4 has some serious limitations that are causing it to show its age as a protocol. For instance, the exponential growth of the Internet has placed a heavy burden on the core routers in the Internet's backbone by making their routing tables so large that routing performance can be impacted.
IPv4 also falls short in the area of security, and although using IPSec can add the necessary security, IPSec is complex to configure and maintain in real-world networking environments. IPv4 also falls short in the area of quality of service (QoS), and with Internet backbones carrying huge amounts of delay-sensitive voice and video traffic nowadays, maintaining QoS is essential to maintaining end-user satisfaction. Finally, network address translation (NAT) is only a stopgap measure to avoiding IP address exhaustion, and IPSec can't traverse NATs which makes using IPSec to secure small business networks problematic. (
continue at source)
One of the limitations to providing really complete parental controls in the past was that all users of the computers were administrators and could probably undo most of the settings the parent tried to enforce. Windows Vista helps solve that problem by enabling people to use Windows without administrator privileges and adds a robust set of Parental Controls that parents can use to ensure their children are accessing appropriate programs and Web sites, when it is appropriate for them to be doing so.
To illustrate how the Family Safety Settings work and how they are integrated with User Account Control, I will use characters in a fictitious family where Abby is the parent and Toby is the child. Abby and Toby are personas that we’ve been using for years in developing Windows Vista and you will see these names often in screenshots on Microsoft.com and in demonstrations of Windows Vista.
(
continue at source)
Microsoft has developed a RSS Feed Store system built right into Windows Vista using Internet Explorer 7. This feed store can be accessed using other applications such as Outlook 2007 and any other application designed to grab feeds from the store.
Why can't Microsoft do this with Contacts? Why can't there be a centralized Contact store where multiple email applications and IM applications can tap in and grab the same contacts which can be managed by Windows Vista's Contact system? I would love to see this. Then also see the ability to sync up with perhaps Windows Live Contacts too? (
continue at source)
Microsoft today announced several new names for Performance Features coming with Windows Vista later this year.
Windows PC Accelerators is the new term that encompasses Windows Vista’s new performance-enhancing technologies. The Windows PC Accelerators are:
- Windows® SuperFetch™
- Windows® ReadyBoost™ (formerly code-named “EMD”)
- Windows® ReadyDrive™ (formerly code-named “Piton”)
(
continue at source)
Mark Russinovich writes:
ZoomIt is screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. I wrote ZoomIt to fit my specific needs and use it in all my presentations.
(continue at source)
Download ZoomIt (36 KB)
The Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit provides an easy way for any audience that is involved in the development, test or support of web sites, extensions, and/or applications prepare for Internet Explorer 7. This Readiness Toolkit was previewed at MIX06 in March 2006 where it received great reviews and provides the following:
- Pointer to the latest publicly available build of Internet Explorer 7.
- Developer Checklist of new features and changes that application and web developers should be aware of.
- Testing guidance and tips for isolating and identifying a particular compatibility problem.
- Tools for development and testing.
- Links to resources, technical articles and helpful blog posts.
- Various methods to provide feedback to Microsoft.
If you have any questions or feedback about the Readiness Toolkit, please email IE7Ready@microsoft.com. If you have feedback about Internet Explorer 7, please see the Provide Feedback link in the toolkit for links and information.
Download the Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Kit from Techlog
While Microsoft's Windows Hypervisor technology, code-named Viridian and currently under development, will not be ready when Windows "Longhorn" Server ships sometime next year, company officials are optimistic that it will be available "sooner rather than later."
But they are not yet prepared to say exactly when "sooner" might be, especially in light of the recently announced slips in the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007. (
continue at source)
Apple Computer said on Wednesday that it has released a public beta version of Boot Camp, software that enables Microsoft Windows XP to run natively on Intel-based Macs.
The software, which will be included in Mac OS X 10.5, called Leopard, is available for download now. Apple will also preview Boot Camp in August at its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company said.
"Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple's superior hardware, now that we use Intel processors," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. "We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch."
Download Apple Bootcamp Public Beta
Microsoft is under increasing pressure to do something with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Like little dogs nipping at its heels, other browsers have raised the bar of user expectations. Microsoft has had to respond. If you haven't looked at IE7 yet, check out the
overview from Microsoft, and download a copy of your own. The second you test it with your existing applications, you'll see why this new release will cause so much developer heartburn.
IE7 has inched a little closer to the standards provided by organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), added privacy, and includes additional security. Even though the eye candy will delight your users, the underlying changes will cause you nightmares. This article can help reduce the pain.(
continue at source)
Microsoft is working to commercialize "BitVault," a Microsoft Research technology designed to store large volumes of seldom-changing information – the kind of material that overwhelms enterprises needing to house lots of compliance and reference data.
BitVault is Microsoft's code name for a "content-addressable retention platform for large volumes of reference data." BitVault incorporates P2P (peer-to-peer) technology for self-managing and self-healing and uses "massively parallel repair" to reduce the vulnerability of data loss, according to a white paper on the project. Much, if not all of the work on the BitVault strategy and working prototype seems to be coming out of Microsoft Research Asia.(
continue at source)
Analyst company Gartner has warned that Microsoft's recent delay to the next edition of Office could take the update just out of the reach of many Software Assurance subscribers.
Software Assurance gives companies the automatic right to any update released during the subscription period, typically three years, but doesn't guarantee that any particular software will be released during the contract period. Last month Microsoft announced that Office 2007 will be available to volume licensing customers in October 2006, three years and one month after Office 2003's volume-licensing launch. (
continue at source)
VMware is taking another step to try to maintain its market dominance. VMware announced today that it is opening its virtual machine disk format specification to allow other vendors to use it in their products.
Technically, VMware is not releasing the disk format under an open source license -- or, really, any license. According to Dan Chu, VMware's senior director of developer and ISV products, the company will release "language to make sure folks are comfortable," but the company will not require developers to accept any license terms in order to have access to the format.
We're taking it even further; you don't even have to enter into a specific open source license [to use the format].
So far, in the last year VMware has released its free VMware Player to run guest operating systems on the desktop, as well as VMware Server, a free "entry level virtualization" product similar to VMware GSX.
It's fair to wonder whether VMware is reacting to market pressure from other vendors and projects entering the virtualization space. While VMware is the market leader, a number of other companies and open source projects have started to take aim at the virtualization market as well. VMware is now competing with SWsoft, Virtual Iron, Microsoft, the Xen and Qemu projects, and others.
From Marshall's perspective, releasing the disk format is "a natural progression" for VMware trying to keep its leadership position.
I would say there's lots of competitive technology on the horizon, and big investments being made. VMware is trying to maintain its significant leadership position. If you're not aggressive about thinking two steps ahead [of competitors] that can be lost.
If you do a Google search for the terms Windows Vista and Hardware, there is no telling what you are going to find. Right now the Internet is chocked full of various rumors regarding the hardware requirements for Windows Vista.
As you might expect, the information on some of these sites tends to be accurate, while the information on many other sites appears to be hear say or just a wild guess. (
continue at source)
Although group policies are an extremely powerful security mechanism, it can be a bit tricky to deploy them in an effective manner. That’s because the effective group policy is made up of multiple and sometimes contradictory group policy elements that are applied to the user object and / or to the computer that the user is working from.
It is therefore critically important that you manage your group policy objects in a way that will allow you to keep them well organized so that you can always figure out which policy elements apply in a given situation.(
continue at source)
Coming from Windows Connected:
David Cross a Director of Program Management with Windows Security has posted today over at the UAC blog that the users accounts created on Windows Vista Beta2 will be standard users. Yep, thats right...not an Admin, not a Protected Admin, but a standard user.
I think this is a great move by the Windows Security team. It will hieghten awareness of the challenges of running as a standard user since the Beta2 build will be a widely distributed build and the one that most software vendors will target many of their early products at.
So, if you are an ISV, pay attention to this and make sure that your code can run as a standard users as many users will be running this way. I hope.
Dual-core, quad-core and processors with 24MB of cache; Intel is determined to take the top spot for servers
At the Intel Developer Forum a few weeks ago, Intel got the attention of the PC community by demonstrating its next-generation CPU architecture: Core. It almost seemed as though Intel's other products and technologies were being overshadowed by Conroe and Core, which won't be released for several months still.(
continue at source)
Microsoft will support customers who chose to run Linux with Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2, software for running multiple operating systems on one machine.
In addition, the company on Monday said that it has now made Virtual Server 2005 R2--which the company had charged either $99 for up to four physical processors or $199 for an unlimited number of processors--a free download. The announcements were made in conjunction with the LinuxWorld conference in Boston this week.(
continue at source)
| news source ~