Microsoft posted a screenshot of some new Exchange2007 options which made me laugh. Well worth a visit to check out this tool and read the comments too.

Microsoft have for some time made available virtual images of XP with IE6 and IE7 available. With the new beta version of IE8 now available for testing, the download page for IE on XP and Vista has been updated.  You can also try the various IE’s in Vista too.  Note that all the downloads will expire at the end of June 2008 (but new ones will probably be available to download before then.)  Apparently IE8 won’t access Microsoft Update pages unless you run in IE7 emulation and restart your browser.

Most people have probably used the Microsoft knowledge base but did you know that Microsoft Certified Partners (anyone who has passed a Microsoft exam) has access to an internal database that may have more information and articles? As long as you are already certified and have a LiveID then you can access the Microsoft Partner Level Knowledge Base.

Did you know that Microsoft have some free online training courses for Office 2003 and 2007? The Office Training Homepage helpfully shows you popular and new courses - worth checking out and referring your end users to.  If you have Software Assurance then there are additional courses available too under the Microsoft e-learning scheme. To access these courses you will need to request access from the person who administers your Microsoft Licensing. In my experience, getting the e-learning access for my users took about 4 weeks or repeated emails and phone calls with Microsoft before someone could fix the system to allow my users in, but the content was worth it.

Earlier this year Microsoft ran a promotion called Exam Insurance which provided you with a free retake on a failed Microsoft Exam or a discount on the next exam if the first one was passed successfully. A subscription to TechNet was also included (if you passed) but you had to pay extra for the Exam Insurance but the extra was well worth it to get a discounted copy of Technet. Unfortunately this offer expired at the end of July but Microsoft have come back with their 2nd Chance promotion again. This time you get a free retake if you fail the first exam.

This offer runs until the end of January 2008 which provides 4 months of insurance so now is a great time to get cracking on your Microsoft certifications and try those tests that you’ve been meaning to get done but not got around to it just yet.

Personally I’m hoping to get my MCSA by the end of the year - I already have my MCDST (Desktop Support Technician) and Small Business exams, the former qualifies as an elective for the MCSA and the latter an elective for the MCSE which will be my next milestone. It is tough getting the time to sit down and do the studying for these exams as work is very busy but obtaining the qualifications is often part of a professional development plan and often comes up in annual review discussions (which I am about to have very shortly.)

Update This post was actually written a couple of days ago and intended to be released later today but the information has already been posted on In The Trenches and on Mike McBride’s blog so I am now posting it here too! My first exam is scheduled for Friday morning.

I’ve recently had to conduct two interviews for a Network Engineer at our company and at both interviews I asked questions about keeping up to date with technology. I was surprised at the answers considering the job role. I asked if they listened to any podcasts or subscribed to any blogs. Both answered in the negative. I was really surprised as I can’t see how a person can effectively keep up to date with all the latest updates, patches, bugs, tools, software and tips that a network or systems engineer needs without subscribing to a podcast or at the very least some technical blogs.

Sometimes the excuse given is that people don’t have the time to listen to a podcast or read several blogs but they have the time to watch a couple of hours tv each night or spend 30 minutes at the coffee machine discussing the game or their drinking exploits!

Hopefully the Friends In Tech site helps with little tidbits of information that don’t take up a lot of time but do provide useful feedback - and this tip is about Microsoft’s new Technet Webcast Express - webcasts on various subjects lasting about 10-15 minutes to gain a quick overview on a product or it’s features. Currently there are 9 webcasts, 7 on Sharepoint and 2 on the Office2007 document format but keep an eye open for new Webcasts. If Sharepoint doesn’t get you excited then spend 10 minutes catching up with some product news from other bloggers in an area that you are interested in - and if you have an interview in the future - don’t forget to mention Friends In Tech as the blog you read to keep up to date!

For those of you who followed the suggestions in the recent ITT Minute about Microsoft downloads, you should know all about Microsoft Steadystate. This is the new version of Microsoft’s Shared Computer toolkit - a very useful utility that allows you to freeze, rollback and control the configuration of pc’s in schools, home or kiosk machines. The new version has several new features and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Steadystate download page. A handbook for Steadystate is also available.

Or if like me you were using the beta version of the software in order to find out what it does and how useable it is, Microsoft have now released a virtual image of Vista (30 day trial) so you can play around in a virtual environment without breaking anything.

Previously in this mini series, in my previous posts (part 1, part2) the question was asked - What are the likely dangers if all of the users were in the domain admins group and what pitfalls could occur if the users were removed from this group.

The answer? The users profiles would get deleted when they logged out of their machine! A very unexpected result but as mentioned in part 2, the previous administrators decided to add everybody to all of the domain usergroups to ensure that everybody could do anything on the network and so the network administrators would not be bothered with user permission requests. Unfortunately, adding everyone to every group includes the Domain Guests group. It is a VERY little known fact, that if you are a member of Domain guests, your profile is deleted when you log off the network - after all, you are a guest in the domain so why keep your settings? The saving grace for the previous company was that if you are also a member of Domain Admins, your profile is not deleted. See Microsft KB Article 165398 for documentation on this fact.

By removing Domain Admins from the users group, the users were now part of Domain Guests and as they logged off the network, their profile was deleted. This includes all files in My Documents, their archived email, desktop icons and the current work they were using (stored on their desktop) as all these files were stored in the default location, c:\documents and settings - on the desktop machine, in their profile.

Once it was discovered that the profiles were getting deleted after logging off, everyone was told not to log off whilst I did some research to find out why this was happening and the above knowledge base article was found. Everybody was removed from Domain Guests but the problem still existed for the users who were currently logged on as group membership is refreshed at logon and so everyone was still a member of Domain Guests and therefore the profile would be deleted! For the first time in my life I was actually telling people to turn off their computers at the power switch rather than logging off and shutting down their computer. By pulling the power, the logoff functions would not run, the profiles would not be deleted and the subsequent logon and logoffs would work as originally intended.

As you can imagine, the solution to this perplexing problem was very welcome after a VERY long weekend. I hope you have enjoyed this mini series. Let us know whether you would like similar series to run. What did you like/not like about the series. My goal was to make you think, impart a little known fact that might help someone else and give you an answer to Mike Mcbride’s question - What did you learn this week?

A couple of weeks ago I had the experience of working a long weekend to upgrade a clients network from an old NT network to Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2003. The actual upgrade went fairly smoothly but something arose that I thought would make a good puzzler for the Friends In Tech Website……

You come to upgrade a domain from nt4 to sbs2003 and do a swing migration. This transfers all the existing users, groups, email address’s and configuration to a new hardware platform with the minimum of downtime. The old network domain was previously set up by a different IT company so you thoroughly document the setup prior to the upgrade. As part of this routine you notice that all the users are in the domain administrators group. You know this is a very bad idea and plan to remove the users from this domain administrator group.

Judging from the fact that all users are in the domain administrators group, this could imply a certain procedure for how users were setup in the past. What could this procedure be, how risky is it to remove users from the domain administrators group and what unforseen consequences could this have?

Please comment to this post or in the Friends In Tech Forums and an answer will be posted after a week and a clue given if nobody gets it. The idea of this post is to stimulate discussion, brainstorm ideas and warn others of a potential pitfall! You may want to subscribe to the comments feed to see what other suggestions have been made.

Microsoft recently added TV show purchase and movie rentals to the Xbox Live service. This is pretty neat however you have to watch the pricing. Microsoft uses a point system on Xbox Live. So it makes it easy to forget what the true cost is of content you download.

New Release standard definition movies cost 320 points to rent. You get to hold the item for up to 14 days then for 24 hours from the time you play it. So you had best watch it within those two weeks or you lose the content. At $20 for 1600 points gift card at stores like Bestbuy and Target that comes to $4.00 to rent a standard definition movie. And $6.00 for the HD version. A standard definition movie is about 1.2GB and HD 4.3GB. My experience on the highest speed Comcast is that it takes about an hour per GB to download with iTunes. Keep in mind if you purchased your Xbox360 with the hard drive it is only 20GB. That is not a lot of video content when you factor in downloaded games as well.

Ultimately you are better off using the Xbox as a dvd player than the downloadable content for now and at the current pricing. Movielink or Cinemanow offer similar or better pricing on a wider selection of standard definition movies. Combine those with a media center PC like the z656 from HP and you get both decent movie rentals with a DVR.

That being said. Being a FiT Geek I cannot wait till tonight when the download finishes and see what Poseidon looks like in HD on my Sony HDTV via the xbox360. Not my favorite movie but decent and it was in HD for download.

Microsoft released the Technet Sysinternals website this week with the entire suite of tools available in a single file download. Other tutorials and videos are also available to download for free including Mark’s presentation of Windows crash file analysis and a video tour of the sysinternals suite. The newest release is a merge of Filemon and Regmoninto one new tool, -processmonitor

Just a heads up that you may not want to start blindly clicking yes to Windows Update patches as IE7 is now appearing in a Windows Update Screen near you.  This seems to be a break in the patch Tuesday release schedule, so if you were thinking you had until next Tuesday until the upgrade - wrong!

Note that this won’t install automatically on the users desktop as various EULA’s and agreements need to be acknowledged.

Microsoft issued a press release today stating that they are partnering with Zend to improve the experience of using php on the Windows platform. It is already possible to run php with IIS but it is not a simple installation and often needs various tweaks and configurations to be made to get php working.

It will be interesting to see if this affects WAMP packages such as Xampp that bundle php, mysql and apache as a web server to make it easier to use php on the windows platform.

It will be interesting to see if this means that the preferred programming language on windows web servers becomes php rather than asp.

via downloadsquad

For the release of Internet Explorer 7, that is.

At my workplace, I had given folks a head’s up that it was coming, and that it was coming through Automatic Updates. We weren’t prepared for it to hit our desktop machines. Not surprising that we haven’t been able to test it on our network, we’re still finishing rolling out Office 2003. Now, we can use our Windows Update Server to keep it from hitting any of them but we decided to do something to kind of nudge people to get used to it in small doses. Since our pool laptops don’t access the network, we get our updates for them directly from Microsoft Update. We decided to allow that, and I’m sure we’ll be hitting those over the next few days. That will allow our folks to see it, without having to use it on an every day basis right now.

I think that’s a good compromise.

The surprising thing to me, though, was hearing from some other IT professionals who we interact with through mail lists and other avenues who had no idea this was coming. Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed in them. The blogosphere and podosphere have been full of talk about IE7, from folks using the beta, to details about when and how it would be released earlier this month. I know all of us as IT professionals are busy, but clearly this shows the need to spend at least a few minutes keeping an eye for what’s coming. I hate to think there are folks who are going to get updated to IE7 who won’t have a techie to turn to for support because their techie is behind on this.

I’m sure that many of you are aware that there is an option in Windows that will allow the computer to reboot automatically after a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). Turning this option on is great if the bsod occurs frequently and you need to get the machine (typically a server) back online as soon as possible. (However, it is really important that the cause of the blue screen is investigated as soon as possible!)

This option is available by right clicking on my computer, choosing properties, going to the advanced tab, select the settings button under Startup Settings and checking the box automatically restart as shown in the screenshot.

However, the situation can arise when a blue screen of death occurs whilst the machine is rebooting. If this is the case then typically this will continue to happen over and over again and it is not possible to see the details of the blue screen as the machine reboots immediately. Troubleshooting this problem can be very tricky, especially if the problem occurs whilst in safe mode too. Normally the solution would be to use safe mode (which may not work) and uncheck the check mark - alternatively alternative boot methods (such as installing another copy of the os to a different directory) will work to provide a login prompt and then access to the registry (which is beyond the scope of this blog post).

However in Windows XP service pack2 , help is at hand with the little known entry that has been added to the startup screen that occurs when windows detects the last startup was not successful OR if F8 is pressed as soon as XP starts to load (before the splash screen and typically after the POST BIOS messages have disappeared.) With SP2 installed, the option “Disable automatic restart on system failure” can be selected and the machine will not reboot on the Blue Screen of Death allowing time to analyze the error message (and hopefully come up with a solution).

Hopefully this will provide some help when faced with a machine that is continually rebooting and should also be a good incentive to ensure that all desktops in your care are upgraded to service pack 2 (especially as support for XP and XP SP1 expires very soon on the 10th October 2006.)

I’m sure you’ve seen the news, the technical refresh will be available tomorrow, so get your download engines ready. I’ll be a bit busy so I may not be able to grab it until the weekend, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how well it works as we get closer to final release. In the meantime, Jensen Harris has a pretty good rundown of what to expect in the technical refresh.

For those of you that deal with non-profit organizations there is a site that will help you save on software purchases.  The site is TechSoup.org.

TechSoup is an organization that acts like a clearing house for software (and a few hardware) companies that contribute products to qualified charitable non-profits.  The original draw to TechSoup was for the Microsoft licensing, but we have also had clients purchase Adobe, Quickbooks and Symantec products.

Cisco even offers up to $15,000.00 worth of network gear to a qualified organization although we have not yet taken advantage of that offer for any client. 

I discovered TechSoup about 3 years ago and it helped a client save several thousand dollars on a server upgrade. Since then we have had many clients utilize the TechSoup program.

One thing that I will point out is that there is a cost for ordering products from TechSoup.  TechSoup calles these “Administrative Fees”.  The fees are per product license and are very reasonable.  I assume these are simply the costs needed to keep this organization alive.  Any organization should be happy to pay these fees as opposed to the alternative of buying through commercial channels.  As an example, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Premium sells for over $1100.00 from CDW only costs $60.00 from TechSoup.  Check out the rest of the products on the TechSoup Stock page.

Be sure to review the program rules from each vendor as they are all different.  I think that eligibility is all the same but the ordering rules can be different.

So I am talking to a good friend of mine about deploying technology for small business clients.  For many of our clients that have less that 50 desktops we install Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.  My buddy asked why we wouldn’t just save the customer the cost of the Microsoft licensing and install a Linux equivalent.  My response was, “there isn’t any Linux equivalent to SBS”.  Now my friend isn’t a Linux expert but he did have some good points so I decided to give Linux another shot.  I looked around and found that Ubuntu has been getting some good reviews so I went with that.

I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 Server and installed it on a P4 with 2G of RAM.  The install was easy enough, actually VERY easy.  (My daughter accompanied me on this and helped name the server BobUbuntu).  After the install I decided to start my review with mail services.  I reviewed the Ubuntu documentation for mail services and that is where I gave up..  Is this what Linux distros have to offer for mail?  I’m sorry but our clients are used to a bit more functionality than a basic POP/SMTP server.

Ok, that wasn’t a fair fight at all and I didn’t give it a chance.  If this is typical of a Linux server mail system, then I don’t think Microsoft has anything to worry about.  Where is the web mail interface, calendaring, public folders, etc?  These are all things that are just part of Exchange.  What about collaboration tools like Sharepoint? 

I did a cursory search for connecting a mobile device to a Linux based mail server and found little useful information or anything that looked very easy.  These days connecting a Palm or Windows Mobile device to an Exchange server is child’s play.

I really don’t get it.  What benefits do small businesses get from implementing Linux?

I will openly admit that I am certainly lacking on my Linux skills, but I don’t see how even a seasoned Linux pro could provide the same functionality as Microsoft does with an SBS server.  I know I shouldn’t even post this, but I just can’t help myself.  I’ll take this as an opportunity for someone to point me in the direction of a resource that can prove me wrong.