Microsoft Windows
PowerShell is a new command-line shell and scripting language designed for system administration and automation. Built on the
.NET Framework, Windows PowerShell allows IT professionals to manage computers via commands or scripts, improving productivity through system automation.
Windows PowerShell includes:
- One hundred and twenty-nine command-line tools (called "cmdlets") for performing common system administration tasks, such as managing services, processes, event logs, certificates, the registry, and using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
- Command-line tools are easy to learn and easy to use with standard naming conventions and common parameters, and simple tools for sorting, filtering, and formatting data and objects.
- Support for existing scripting languages and existing command-line tools, and multiple versions of Windows, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server code name "Longhorn".
- Feature that allows users to navigate data stores, like the registry and certificate stores, as if they were a file system.
- Standard utilities for managing Windows data in different stores and formats, including Active Directory (ADSI), Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Component Object Model (COM) objects, Active X Data Objects (ADO), HTML and XML.
- Sophisticated expression parsing and .NET object manipulation at the command line, including pipelining of objects, make IT professionals more efficient and productive.
- Extensible interface that allows independent software vendors and enterprise developers to build custom cmdlets to meet their unique application and system administration requirements.
Download Windows PowerShell 1.0 Installation Package for Windows Vista
There are no final prizes for testers this time round, and work on Windows Live Messenger 9.0 has already begun (there will be no more interim releases, or at least if there are, there won’t be any beta programs for it). Current testers of Windows Live Messenger 8.1 who have access to the Microsoft Connect pages will be automatically transferred to the next beta (9.0) so don’t you worry - plenty more to come. In the meanwhile, Microsoft has quietly rolled out Windows Live Messenger 8.1.
Windows Live Messenger 8.1 Final
Windows
Vista is finally here for everyone and is soon to be made available on store shelves and pre-loaded on new PC’s. Windows Vista has been five years in the making; throughout that time we have witnessed
Microsoft reschedule the release of this “major upgrade” over and over and over again. Microsoft, however, throughout that tumultuous time did manage to pick up the pieces and move forward.
Activewin has posted it's Windows Vista Review (
more)
When a user attempts to access an application or setting that requires elevated privileges to run, they are presented with a
UAC prompt, the appearance of which will vary depending on the type of user they are or the type of application that is trying to run. This diagram shows the types of dialog boxes that you might see and the process flow that triggers each type:
Windows XP Starter Edition was released in 24 languages and was sold in more than 130 countries, but with the launch of Vista Starter Edition, were are expanding our initiative to make our products accessible to lower-income families in developing countries. It will therefore be available in 70 languages, and also feature an option that allows use of the operating system in different languages so, if, for example, a parent wants to use the computer in his or her native language but the household's children want to use it in English. Personally, I think that is an absolutely belting feature. As far as I'm aware, this is possible in the other versions too - I have the Spanish Language Pack installed on my machine too - and because I'm currently learning Spanish, it really is a useful thing to have, and best of all, it costs nothing more!
What kind of spec can you expect Vista Starter to run on? Well, get this: Vista will be able to run on a wider variety of processors than its XP predecessor, ranging from Intel's Celerons and older Pentiums to AMD's Duron! Retro or what! That means that Vista will run on a recommended minimum of 300mhz, but it is thought that it will even run on a 233MHz! It will run on a standard SVGA graphics card, and will require a great deal less RAM than the other versions. Now that's crazy!
(more)
As you know, Operations Manager 2007 focusses on Health. An object can be healthy, in an error state or not be monitored yet. When adding an agent or during discovery of objects, the initial status is called "Not monitored". Normally, this goes to the red, yellow or green status within a short time, reflecting the Health.
With the RC2 milestone, sometimes objects or agent computers stay in the "Not monitored" status. While there is no way to force discovery, you can delete the Health Store to force the agent to collect all data again. Please use this procedure to allow for a new discovery of the Health status:
Go to the affected agent and stop the health service
Delete the files in the Health Service State \ Health Service Store folder (normally under %Program Files%)
Start the health service again on the agent
While there will be a report at RTM timeframe that will show all overrides set within System Center Operations Manager, as opposed to MOM 2005 there currently is no easy way to display all overrides in the GUI. Fortunately, there is a Powershell cmdlet that can be used to do just that:
get-managementpack | get-override | format-list name,parameter,value
Arnold Hagens, marketing director at
Jalasoft, held a Livemeeting today showing their new flagship product Xian IO. Their new solution will fully integrate with the upcoming System Center Operations Manager 2007 product, adding monitoring support for networking devices such as Cisco routers and switches. A key feature is the deep integration with OpsMgr 2007.
Not only do they provide in-line tasks (example: view device information) but also allow wizard-based configuration of alerting thresholds (example: alert above 70% usage of the connection). My personal favorite, and probably the feature most customers really will want for their Line of Business monitoring, is that fact that Xian IO will discover objects and allow them to be used in the Application Designer of OpsMgr:
Xian IO will be available to selected testers as a private beta release in the first half of february. While a RTM date is not yet available, it will probably coincide with the RTM release of Operations Manager 2007.
Jeff Wettlaufer presented a session on System Center Configuration Manager 2007 today at the System Center Airlift. While the session only had information on an overview level of the new product, Jeff was able to comment on the release schedule. First a little history; the beta 1 milestone was release in February 2006 and contained all SMS 2003 functionality and added some new features. The beta 1 refresh release from july 2006 contained extra features like OS deployment of Vista beta 2 and added NAP integration with Longhorn Server. This week, TAP members will receive the beta 2 package, which will be feature complete. At the end of february, beta 2 will also be made publicly avaiable. System Center Configuration Manager 2007 will RTM coming summer and be generally available, some months before Longhorn Servers will see the light.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where after installing some particularly appealing application, a new video driver which promises astonishing effects with your new PC game, and after a reboot the system simply refuses to start? Or maybe you enter your credentials as you already did probably a million times, and you then end up watching a box which tells "Applying computer settings" but this lasts forever?
As you may know System Restore is not available in Windows Server 2003, Carlo shows you how to set up System Restore on a Windows 2003 server (
more)
Ben Srour presented the System Center Airlift session about their product codenamed "Service Desk". One of the key features are the Solution Packs, which work much like Operations Manager' Management Packs. Importing a Solution Pack will add extra functionality. At RTM there will be an Incident Management SP, Asset Management SP, Change Management SP and more. Along with the full console called Analyst Console, there will be a self-service portal fully built on Office Sharepoint Server 2007 which enables the end-user to get information about their current ticket and check a knowledgebase. Another key feature is the workflow, where you - for instance - can define that a change must be emailed to a Change Manager which uses the Outlook voting buttons to decided and where afterwards a SMS package can be run.
Microsoft-IT will deploy the Incident Management SP and Change Management SP in their production environment to convince future customers that the product is ready for enterprise use. "Service Desk" v1 will have deep integration with Configuration Manager 2007 (for discovery and inventory), Operations Manager 2007 (for incident and problem management), Office 2007 (for collaboration and authoring), Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (self-service portal) and VS Team Services (for increased operational awareness). Their new ITL and MOF based product will have easy ways of customization for MS Partners, who can provide a familiar tool and customize forms and workflows.
Ben disclosed that the v1 version of the new product will not contain a GUI based drag-and-drop editor for the workflow but is on the roadmap for v2.
He commented on the release schedule, noting that TAP customers have gotten the Beta 1 milestone several weeks ago with a Technical Release a few weeks ago. He also said that Beta 2 will be publicly available right after the Microsoft Management Summit in April. Release candidate will follow in the second half of 2007 and RTM is slated for H1 2008 (won't make it this year, anymore). More information on System Center "Service Desk " can be found in these articles, earlier on Techlog:
Microsoft ServiceDesk: timeframe
Service Desk v1 Screenshots
First Screenshots System Center “Service Desk”
Mark Hassall presented a session on the Microsoft Forefront brand of products on the System Center Airlift. While the information presented on the current set of products was useful, Mark talked about a new member of the family called "Intelligent Application Gateway 2007". Microsoft aquired Whale Communications last year and will bring out a new product based on their solutions. The new solution, part of Forefront, will build on ISA Server 2006.
Essentially it is a SSL VPN solution and will bring secure publishing of applications. Microsoft as well as non-Microsoft applications can be published, for example: Citrix. Clientless users can access these applications using their web browsers. Systems Administrators can control who can access information and how. For instance, when a user goes to a kiosk and accesses the application, the SysAdmin can configure read-only access and/or time limits. Mark had no information on beta availability or RTM date.
David Mills did a session on System Center Essentials 2007 today, at the Airlift. Essentials will replace the former Operations Manager 2007 Workgroup edition and is targeted at the Small Business Server (SBS) and upcoming Codename "Centro" server customers. There will be a hard support limit, supporting up to 30 servers and a maximum of 500 clients. One of the great new features is a Daily Health Report, delivered by email, telling the administrator status about update compliance, problems in their infrastructure, etcetera. Upgrades will be available from the OpsMgr 2005 full and Workgroup product and also supported from the current Windows Server Updates Services v2 and upcoming v3 products.
David also hinted at a System Center Update Tool which could add extra support for software installation on the area of adding Transforms to MSI packages. SC Update Tool might be delivered after the Essentials RTM release. Both Vista RTM and the upcoming Longhorn Server will be supported as clients. A very cool feature is the fact that Management Packs that are written for Operations Manager 2007 will work in Essentials. Licensing was not really disclosed, but will focus more on the platform than on a fee per server. Currently, the product is at the beta 2 milestone publicly available, but the Release Candidate will see the light this quarter (Q1 2007). General availability and RTM will be before the summer, in the first half of 2007.
For Services providers, there will be a Management Pack connecting the downstream Essentials installation to an upstream full Operations Manager 2007 installation. Services provides will be provided with all-ready reports and tools to facilitate customers with a managed solution. This "Connected Services Provider Framework" is currently under way as a TAP program with selected partners. David also said that the next version of Office Sharepoint Server, codenamed "Cougar" will bring tighter integration for the reports.
During the System Center Capacity Planner session on the System Center Airlift, Fergus Stewart disclosed some information on the next release, version 2007. You can expect the following changes:
Support for Exhange 2007
-
New server roles and Clustering
Support for Operations Manager 2007
-
Audit Collection Services
-
Trusted & untrusted agents and Gateway servers
-
Backup servers for Ops DB, Root Mgmt Server and Datawarehouse
Support for 64-bit hardware
Support for background load
-
Including antivirus and antispam
Enhanced pre-deployment wizard
-
Changes based on customer and MS services feedback
-
More granular: different branch configurations
-
Role based: hardware presence
The first beta version will be available during the Microsoft Management Summit in March and RTM is slated for May 2007. There was one slide about the release following 2007. There are three key new features that will be introduced; Operations Manager 2007 R2 "live" integration, Trending & Forecasting and Models for SQL, IIS and ASP.NET.
During the System Center Capacity Planner session on the Airlift, Fergus Stewart confirmed that the next release of Operations Manager - currently codenamed "Katmai" - indeed will be named System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. One of the new features of the R2 release combined with the next version of Capacity Planner (not 2007, but the one planned after that) will bring integration; SCCP can read live information and plan on that. Availability of that SCCP version will coincide with the R2 release of Operations Manager 2007.
Jason Buffington presented a session on Sytem Center Data Protection Manager, codename "v2" this morning at the System Center Airlift. While DPM currently is at the Beta 1 milestone, Jason talked about the next development milestone, Beta 2. While he wouldn't comment on the final name, Techlog has
reported late last year that it will probably be called Data Protection Manager 2008. Besides the current support for SQL and Exchange protection in Beta 1, the next milestone - Beta 2 - will bring the following:
Agent can be deployed using cmd line, Powershell cmdlet, SMS and SCCM and SUS
Manual seed for intial copy (for example: external HDD from remote location to DPM server)
Support for protecting servers across trusted domains
Media encryption support
File & folder exclusions, encrypted files
Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape support (along with D2D and D2T support)
Adding support for Virtual Server 2005 R2; this way you can protect non-Windows servers (as VM) !
Adding support for Sharepoint !
Adding support for System State & Bare Metal Recovery !
Support for database on a separate (existing) SQL server
Jason stated that beta 2 will be generally available at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007, held in San Diego. RTM is slated for early fall (end of Q3 ?).
When you setup
Audit Collection Services (ACS) - a part of Operations Manager 2007 - you configure the ACS database. One of the options is how long you want to store the collected data. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to change this. However, there is a table in the ACS database that holds this configuration options. Using the following query, you can specify - afterwards - for how many days ACS should maintain the data:
You can see current config by doing:
USE OperationsManagerAC
SELECT * FROM dtConfig
To update the data retention period:
USE OperationsManagerAC
Update dtConfig
SET Value = -- (number of days to retent data + 1), e.g. to retain 7 days of data, you need to set Value = 8
WHERE Id = 6
Use SQL management studio to execute this query against the ACS database.
Important: please handle this table with care!
(Otherwise, ACS will break)
In Operations Manager 2005, there was a executable called "ManagementModeUtil.exe" to export management packs to file, using the command line. This was especially useful in situations where you would wanna do a separate backup of your management packs, instead of the whole OnePoint database. At first sight, in Operations Manager 2007, there is no tool available to do just that. Fortunately, you can use PowerShell for this. Here you find a sample Powershell script that exports all management packs that have SQL in their name:
param ($serverName)
add-pssnapin "Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client";
set-location "OperationsManagerMonitoring::";
new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$serverName;
set-location $serverName;
$sql_mps = Get-ManagementPack | where{$_.Name -match 'SQL'}
foreach($mp in $sql_mps)
{
export-managementpack -ManagementPack:$mp -Path:"c:\"
}
Copy this contents to a file called "ExportManagementPacks.ps1" and run the following command to start the actual script:
Powershell.exe ExportManagementPacks.ps1 -ServerName:localhost
Today, at the System Center Airlift, Thomas Theiner - an Operations Manager product team program manager - revealed that the next version of System Center Operations Manager has been code named "
Katmai". Baelson Duque, another program manager of the Operations Manager team confirmed that this is the correct code name, but did not confirm that it would be named
Operations Manager 2007 R2.
While the release will not happen this year anymore, there is a good chance that it will follow-up the SCOM 2007 product next year. Unfortunately I cannot comment on the major changes (I am under NDA for this), but they certainly focus on key areas like Notification and Network Monitoring. Thomas did mention one thing that will be fixed in the next release; editting of the reports outside of the Console (using the SRS website) will not break the reporting functionality anymore.
Here are some details that the Operations Manager product team mentioned during the Operations Manager 2007 sessions on monday during the System Center Airlift:
Always use the splash screen to install OpsMgr 2007, because that detects the system architecture (x86 or x64) and installs the correct MSI
RC2 currently supports 50 Operations Console connections and this number will even be bigger at RTM
System Center Capacity Planner v2 (with models for OpsMgr 2007) will be released to coincide with the OpsMgr 2007 RTM
Exchange 2007 Management Pack will be converted from MOM 2005 and provided as a web release directly after OpsMgr 2007 RTM's
A native OpsMgr 2007 Management Pack for Exchange 2007 will be released when Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2007 will be available
The native Exchange 2007 Management Pack will merge both the Exchange BPA MP and Exchange MP and form one MP
There will be a new report in the RTM build, giving an overview of all Overide Rules that have been set
RTM release will have an option called "Display all as box" for the Diagram Views
Future of Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM): integration with Service Desk
AEM reports (Top N Applications crashing, etc) will be available for the RTM build and available for TAP partners 1st week of February
Reliability Reports for the Vista Management Pack will be released when Service Pack 1 for Vista will be available
Today, tuesday, will be another day filled with deep technical sessions of Operations Manager 2007. Later this week, Ken van Hyning will also disclose some more details on the upcoming "Service Desk" product. Techlog will keep you informed!
From monday 22 January through friday 26 January, Microsoft is organizing the
System Center Airlift in Bellevue, WA. Microsoft Partners will get level 300 and level 400 sessions from the various product teams as the launch of the new 2007 versions of the System Center products are coming closer. During the keynote on monday,
Larry Orecklin, general manager for the Windows Enterprise and Management Division at Microsoft, gave some deeper insight in the coming System Center portfolio of products. Larry noted that
Operations Manager 2007 will RTM on the Microsoft Management Summit in San Diego in the last week of March.
Larry also told that System Center
Virtual Machine Manager is slated to RTM at the end of Q3 and that their new product codenamed
"Service Desk" will have a public beta at the end of this quarter. One of the things that showed from his keynote is that System Center will be a brand-name and not so much one giant integrated product. Larry told that Microsoft will launch a $30 million System Center brand campaign starting February 4th worldwide, called "Designed for Big". The supporting website will be
http://designedforbig.com. One other new detail Larry mentioned, was that Microsoft will start focussing on
Remote Managed Services and will be providing a framework to partners to manage client environments smaller than 500 clients as a "hosted solution". Larry closed the keynote by explaining that "
System Center Online Services" will be an addition to the current product portfolio, where the former AssetMetrix' web portal is the first to go under the new System Center title.
Daylight Saving Time change for 2007 is going to cause problems for unpatched technologies. Most vendors, including Microsoft, have released patches. One big area that is lacking is Windows Mobile smartphones & PDAs. Microsoft release a registry fix and instructed the carriers to push out a patch. Most of the carriers, in their infinite wisdom, have neglected to do so. If you rely on your Windows smartphone, you need this fix. Microsoft published the registry fix
here. This fix requires you to build a CAB file and then install it. To save you the trouble, I have bundled the CAB file for you:
Microsoft Windows Mobile Daylight Saving Time Patch
Ben has all the information in his post "
How many virtual machines can Virtual PC run at the same time", a modified snippet is below:
You can have up to 255 configured VMs and registered, but usually only 32 running at the same time:
Virtual PC 2004 = 32
Virtual PC 2007 = 32
Virtual Server = 64
Virtual Server R2 SP1 = 128
There is some exciting news being announced on the
RRAS blog around a new technology in Longhorn Server and Vista SP1 that enables SSL based VPN connectivity. The technology is called Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) and you can read about it
here,
here and
here.
With SSTP, a user can use the built-in VPN client and server in Windows to create Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections over SSL. And, of course, SSTP will support NAP which means that those connections can be authorized based on compliance of the client to corporate security policy. In addition to SSTP, we are working with the ecosystem to achieve NAP support from the major SSL VPN vendors. At
RSA this year, several 3rd party VPN providers will demonstrate NAP interoperability.
One drawback to storing BitLocker recovery passwords in Active Directory is that there's no good way to retrieve the recovery password when you need it, or so I thought. I suggested to the BitLocker team that they consider writing an extension to AD Users & Computers to make it easy for authorized admins to get a recovery password for a given computer-- turns out they'd already done it and were deep into the signoff process!
The tool is officially documented in
KB 928202. It's an AD U&C extension that makes the BitLocker recovery information visible; you need to get it from PSS, but it's a free call, so why not?
Sometimes you get an error message in the ISA Server logs for which you can’t find any information, not in a KB, not on MSDN, not in the ISA Server SDK, or even in your favorite search engine. If the error code looks something like
0x80074E23 – the key here being that it starts with
0x8007 – you can make something useful out of it. Take the last four characters in the error message,
4E23 in our example, open the Windows Calculator (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Calculator). From the View menu, select
Scientific, click
Hex and enter the characters. Then, switch back to
Dec. In our example you will get
20003. Take the result, go to
http://support.microsoft.com and search for it. If you get too many results, narrow it down by adding
ISA and/or
winsock to your search.
This example error code in hex can be found in
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms812624.aspx. You may get an error message that you just cannot find. However, this process still enables you to get a better understanding of what is happening and may help you determine if the error message you see in the log actually is caused by ISA Server or some other device on the network.
For those who thinks this is too cumbersome,
download err.exe (a tool that was developed for Exchange Server) from Microsoft.com and check if that particular error message is indexed. To use err.exe, launch a command prompt, navigate to the folder where err.exe exists and type “err errornumber”, where errornumber is the number of the error, such as
80074E23. In our example, the result would not be that useful from an ISA Server perspective, but in some cases you will obtain useful information about the error.
This is a screensaver which uses the aurora XAML file. To install, extract the SCR file, right-click, and press install.
Longhorn M5 Aurora Moving Screensaver (WPF)
If you’re like me, you have custom scripts you run after you install Windows to get everything “just right”. You may have noticed, you don’t see a checkbox to “Show Windows Welcome Center” until you’ve logged on twice, and that’s by design.
With a simple .reg file though, you can kill Windows Welcome Center dead on first boot — simply put the following into your .reg file and save it, run it, or add it to your scripts:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"WindowsWelcomeCenter"=-
And like magic, it will not bother you again.
You have to be seriously freaking into Vista if you're even thinking about the Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Limited Numbered Signature Edition (seriously, we didn't even think Microsoft was capable of a title like that), but at least the price is on target ($259) and they claim it's signed by the man himself, Billy G. Something tells us it's just an embossed signature print or something along those lines, but either way it's down to you and 19,999 others prepared to get their fanboy on with the latest, greatest version of Windows.
The first program, Windows Anytime Upgrade, lets customers in North America, Japan and Europe who already have a version of Vista installed on their PC upgrade to a premium version of the product at a significant discount, told Bill Manion, the director of marketing for consumer and small business on the Windows client team.
The
Windows Anytime Upgrade option is included in the Vista Start menu, which customers can use to buy and download a digital key for the premium edition of Vista that they want to use. They then insert the Vista DVD that came with their PC or retail purchase to complete the upgrade process. So, say a customer with a low-price PC that has Vista Home Basic installed wants the additional features and functionality available in Vista Home Premium. Under the Windows Anytime Upgrade program, they could buy this upgrade for $79—about half of the $159 retail cost for the same boxed upgrade software.
(more)
Short Answer: Check out the
Windows Server Virtualization Calculator, fill in how many servers, VMs and Processors you own; and it will tell you which server licenses you should buy.
Long Answer: Ok, so we all know licensing is a lot of pain. The question on everybody's lips is
"What point does a license for Datacenter become more cost effective than multiple copies of R2?"
Enter the Windows Server Virtualization Calculator hereby referred to as WSVC -- and using the defaults the answer:
16x VMs on a quad CPU box is the break even.
There is no hard and fast rule (enter the
Blades vs Beefy Boxes debate) but the WSVC does a very nice job of crunching some of the numbers. The costs are in
RRP USD.
With Microsoft's Windows Vista finally released to manufacturers and on the verge of making its way to retail, we can at last get down to the business of examining precisely how well the new OS performs. In our first tests, we discovered that while Vista's hardware requirements may be steep, it should run just fine--even with the Aero bells and whistles active--on machines that meet Microsoft's Premium Ready specifications (1GB of RAM, and a DirectX 9-capable graphics board with at least 128MB of dedicated memory).
We installed the RTM (release to manufacturing) Vista Ultimate code on desktop and notebook systems of varying specs and ages, and then we ran a series of benchmarks to answer several key questions about Vista's impact on performance. Our main findings:
- Vista is generally slower than XP, but it's better at multitasking on dual-core PCs.
- Your PC should have 1GB of RAM at the bare minimum.
- Aero won't slow you down if you use a discrete graphics processor and enough memory.
- Apps run slower on the 64-bit version of Vista, but adding RAM closes the gap.
Our conclusions here aren't the last word on Vista performance, however: When we conducted our tests in November, graphics companies were still fine-tuning their drivers (for example, we decided to drop our Doom 3 gaming tests because ATI's drivers didn't yet support that game's OpenGL graphics API). (Continue at source)
Mark Russinovich goes inside the Windows Vista kernel in the February edition of
Technet Magazine to explain the new thread and process performance measurement algorithms that give you a more accurate picture of how your CPU time is spent. He also discusses the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service that provides users with a more seamless playback experience by better managing background tasks such as anti-virus and content indexing.
Read the article "Inside the Windows Vista Kernel Part 1"
The new release of
IEAK offers a few changes over prior versions, with some options added and some retired. You now can add default RSS Web feeds to your Internet Explorer build, point to more than one home page and search page, and add support for an anti-phishing filter. You can also set the Microsoft® Windows® Malicious Software Removal Tool to run and update. However, you can no longer customize Outlook® Express and Windows Media® Player with IEAK as those applicationss aren't included with
Internet Explorer 7.
You can create an Internet Explorer package for 32-bit or 64-bit platforms-Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server® 2003 with SP1, or Windows Vista™-x86-based, x64-based, or Itanium-based. Before you run IEAK 7, Internet Explorer 7 must be installed on the PC you use to create your package. For compatibility, you should run IEAK on a computer with the same OS as the computers on which you'll apply the build.
This article from Technet Magazine will discuss how to use IEAK to create your Internet Explorer 7 installation build and maintain or update your browser settings.(
