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July 2006 - David Overton's Blog
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  • ISA 2006 Release Candidate available

    This has been discussed in a few places - ISA 2006 is perhaps not going to offer enough to SBS customers , but if you want to have a look, then this is what you need: Download ISA Server 2006 Release Candidate Trial Software Test drive the new features and functionality by downloading the free trial of ISA Server 2006 Release Candidate Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Enterprise Edition Release Candidate http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a7fd89a0-2f8f-4b71-8a37-efc05724c136&DisplayLang=en Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Standard Edition Release Candidate http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7b040fed-64b0-4de9-9d99-bbcfa5779fa2&DisplayLang=en ttfn David

  • So what is new and exciting (such as easier admin) in IIS7 (IIS in Vista and Longhorn), find out here

    The .NET Show: IIS 7.0 Scott Guthrie and Bill Staples provide some details on what IIS 7.0 is, describe new features, and demo how much easier IIS 7.0 is to use and administer. 100k - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2f497db8-06fb-4d30-a00b-abfed571fe9c&DisplayLang=en 300k - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09f5aefa-b5d2-4568-8edd-50b39912f0da&DisplayLang=en Mobile - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1c6878d1-bebb-4e63-ad89-6768c9881fb8&DisplayLang=en ttfn David

  • Upgrading SQL 2000 and MSDE 2000 to SQL 2005 - in SBS R2 - this could be the sharepoint or WSUS database

    Upgrading MSDE 2000 to SQL Server 2005 Express This white paper discusses the new SQL Server 2005 Express Edition features that are important to MSDE users. It covers how to upgrade your existing MSDE installation to SQL Server 2005 Express and presents criteria to help you decide when to upgrade your MSDE installation to other editions of SQL Server 2005. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/msde2sqlexpress.mspx SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Handbook Preparing for a SQL Server 2005 upgrade involves understanding some basic principles that will help you make appropriate decisions and ensure your success. Each SQL Server 2005 component has a unique architecture and life cycle—the two primary areas that will affect your upgrade path. Some SQL Server 2005 components build on a solid foundation to augment, optimize, and stabilize existing functionality. Microsoft has performed extensive, under-the-hood rework of other features to give SQL Server the horsepower and programmability features that your applications...

  • SQL 2005 updates - SP1 - worth having for the new management console

    SQL 2005 only seems like it poped out the door a week ago and already we have SP1. Having said that, it arrived in November 2005 and there were a couple of things that people wanted, but we could not ship in time. One was a management console for the repalcement to the free MSDE - this is now part of SP1. Details on how to impletment SP1 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/sp1.mspx . The press release with all the details is located at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/apr06/04-19SQLExpands06PR.mspx , but the key points are: SP1 delivers on this vision in the following ways: SP1 delivers production-ready Database Mirroring functionality for continuous availability. This complements the existing Always On Technologies in SQL Server 2005 such as failover clustering, database snapshots, snapshot isolation and log shipping. Since launch, Database Mirroring has been extensively tested by Microsoft and its thriving customer community to help ensure that it provides the high availability necessary...

  • July SQL Webcasts

    SQL 2005 Webcasts and Virtual Labs SQL Server 2005 is data management and analysis software that delivers enhanced security, availability, and scalability to mission-critical data applications—while making them easier to develop, deploy, and manage. Choose from a wide range of live and on-demand webcasts. Or take part in a virtual lab, which allows you to cut your teeth on the new platform by experimenting with its different capabilities. http://www.microsoft.com/sql/eval/webcast.mspx?wt.mc_id=sql.ad.01037 Free SQL Server 2005 Training Whether you are interested in database administration, database development, or business intelligence, you can access the E-Learning topic you want, when you want it, and learn at your own pace. Each lesson includes hands-on virtual labs and offline functionality. In addition, you may consider taking a free Microsoft Skills Assessment to help you meet your Microsoft SQL Server 2005 training goals. You'll receive a learning roadmap with additional skills resources including instructor...
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  • Reading and storing everyone's e-mail and why I am glad I work for a small business

    I just saw this article at Wired and realised one of the benefits of working for a smaller organisation - this is not me I'm talking about, but you. One of the worrying quotes was: The survey gathered responses concerning e-mail security from 406 companies in the United States and the United Kingdom with more than 1,000 employees. In both regions, 38 percent of respondents said they employed staff to read or otherwise analyze outbound e-mail . In the United States, 44 percent of companies with more than 20,000 employees said they hire workers to snoop on workers' e-mail. Wow, not just the US, but the UK too. Now, should your customer be in the business where they do need to analyze mail, then of course SBS can help - for details on how to set it up, go have a look at the forum entry - http://uksbsguy.com/forums/thread/334.aspx for the answer - simple and effective. ttfn David

  • June Technet Articles on Vista

    Ask the Experts: How Windows Vista Delivers IPv6 Prepare for the next generation in networking with this look at how Windows Vista will allow for more advanced applications and networks with Internet Protocol version 6. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/network/ipv6wv.mspx Enterprise Networking with Windows Vista This article provides a high-level overview of Windows Vista enterprise networking technologies. This article does not discuss consumer networking scenarios http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/network/entnet.mspx Joining a Windows Vista Wireless Client to a Domain http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/network/wifi/vista_bootstrap_wireless.mspx Active Directory Schema Extensions for Windows Vista Wireless and Wired Group Policy Enhancements http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/network/wifi/vista_ad_ext.mspx Windows Vista Step-by-Step Guides for IT Professionals http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=311f4be8-9983-4ab0-9685-f1bfec1e7d62&DisplayLang...

  • Fixes and Updates for Vista and Longhorn Beta 2 - Symantec Antivirus, IPSec / firewall race condition leading to memory corruption and activation problem

    Update for Windows Vista Beta 2 and Windows Codename Longhorn Server Beta 2 Install this update to fix application compatibility issues with Symantec Antivirus version 10.0.1.622 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0ce37fb9-b654-45e7-b006-e1728fe076ca&DisplayLang=en Update for Windows Vista Beta 2 and Windows Codename Longhorn Server Beta 2 Install this update to fix an issue where in the presence of Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or Windows Firewall, a race condition can be hot on multi-processor (or hyper-threaded) systems causing memory corruption, leading to a system crash http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8cf0c2ec-6a31-46a6-8238-dff1b2eb2025&DisplayLang=en Update for Windows Vista Beta 2 and Windows Codename Longhorn Server Beta 2 Install this update to address an issue where you may be unable to activate the product and become blocked from logging in http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5d21d780-a0e6-42e5-b905-d3a6e702ac56&DisplayLang...

  • Vista Webcasts for July

    Using Built-in diagnostics in Windows Vista Monday, July 17, 2006 9:30AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301591&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Windows Vista Deployment Overview (Level 200) Monday, July 17, 2006 1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301597&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Moving to 64-bit Computing with Windows Vista (Level 200) Tuesday, July 18, 2006 11:30AM - 12:30AM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032299835&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Security Features in Windows Vista (Level 200) Wednesday, July 19, 2006 11:00AM - 12:00PM Pacific Time https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032301585&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US Reliability Enhancements in Windows Vista (Level 200) Friday July 21, 2006...

  • Microsoft AntiGen Products - could these be for SBS customers - only if they have one of the Volume License types, but that is becoming easier too

    AntiGen is a great set of products for providing security technologies. Some of these come in very price competative and feature rich. For example, for spam, smtp and a/v filtering the US price is $1.25 per user per month. For more info see below Microsoft Releases Antigen E-Mail Security Products http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5049691 On June 6, Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products -- including Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, Antigen Spam Manager, and Antigen Enterprise Manager -- available to customers July 1, 2006. Microsoft Antigen products help business protect their Exchange, Windows-based SMTP gateway, Live Communications Server, and SharePoint servers from viruses, worms, spam, and inappropriate content. Read about new product features http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5049723 or download the new 90-day trials http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5049724 to see how Antigen can help protect your messaging and collaboration servers. ttfn David

  • UK Managing Director Leaves the UK bound for Microsoft Corp - welcome to Gordon Frazer from South Africa

    Today we had a bit of a kick of for FY07 (Financial Year 07 in Microsoft) and a review of FY 06. We had a healthy year with excellent growth (this is no way a prediction of the MS Company results) and we also did a bit of sweeping a few things out. It has been speculated for a little while that Alistair Baker would be moving on and today we had it confirmed. As of 31st July, the new MD of MS UK will be Gordon Frazer from the South African Sub. He did seem like a very positive and fired up person, so I think this will be nothing but goodness, as will having another Brit in the power halls at MS in the States. For the press release, have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/press/content/presscentre/releases/2006/07/PR03662.mspx ttfn David

  • The Information Worker Center aka office podcast place - lots of info on all office 2007 products and technologies

    While browsing the web today I came across this place (The IW Center) which describes itself as "TheIWCenter.Com is a site created and managed by me, Shawn Murray. I happen to work for Microsoft as a Solution Specialist focused on information worker products like Microsoft Office, Sharepoint Portal Server, Live Communications Server, etc. I maintain this site in my spare time and it is not officially associated with my job or Microsoft Corporation. As such, the content and opinions on this site are mine, not necessarily those of Microsoft Corporation. Here you will find webcasts, news and other content on Microsoft's information worker products. These include Office, Sharepoint, Live Meeting, Groove and many others." Sounds pretty interesting I thought, so digging a bit deeper, this site has some great content. I recommend browsing around the site, but some items I thought you might find useful: Office Professional 2007 Prodcast - Mark Alexieff, Product Manager Excel 2007 Prodcast - Michael Worosz, Product Manager...

  • Want training for Windows SharePoint Services V3 - well it has started

    I saw this and thought people might be interested to see that we have various items of training available. The item on the webpage that caught my eye was: Introduction to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Virtual Lab Implementing and Administering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Virtual Lab If you are considering running extra WSS sites for your customers, then this is something to consider for the future. While SBS wizards may not support Office 2007, you might choose to upgrade the Companyweb site anyway, so this is important information. ttfn David

  • So you intend on loading WSS V3 somewhere - read this first

    Just pop along to http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/05/30/607260.aspx and read the WSS information. Simple David

  • Do you wish you could see what you were looking for in documents, mails etc - now you can as search and find are improved

    You may have noticed that enabling people to find the right piece of information has become a bit of a religious event within Microsoft. Search tools to date include LookOut Windows Desktop Search aka WDS MSN Search Live Search Vista However things have continued to improve with these engined and Office 2007. For example, you can be inside Outlook, type a word in the search bar and within a fraction of a second have returned to you all the mails, calendar items or contacts that have that word in. You can even type something like "from:David received:last week" and get the mails from me that I sent last week. One nice featrue is that a nice yellow highlighter pen will show you where in the mail etc the magical words are, so finding them becomes easier. Obviously the new search engine in Vista / WDS will find documents searching the content itself. I then saw this post, saying that the same process can be delivered from inside a document , so highlighting all the nice words you were looking for - makes...

  • What will Vista look like if you don't have an ace graphics card (ala many machines bought over the last 3 years with less than 64MB graphics RAM)

    I saw this over at the Windows Vista blogs and realised that the original graphics for people withotu higher end graphics were really not up to scratch. Looking at the site, you can even see a nice example of "glass" and the new standard theme side by side. hurray! ttfn David

  • Making vista more secure using PatchGuard and Address Space Location Randomisation

    For those really, really into making a system secure you will know that if a system is compromised, if done well, then the machine is owned by someone else. However, that does not mean that you can't make it hard for someone to "do it well". Today I was reading about PatchGuard that will make all this much easier. Amongst other things, it includes the ability to remove the ability to predict where a key piece of information will be in kernel memory. This is how things like Blaster worked - they could predict where key information was. This technology would skupper the route used by Blaster. ttfn David

  • Off to Partner Conference in Boston - see you blogging from there

    Hello, just a quick note to say that I am due to fly today @ 11am to Boston for the Partner Conference - if you are going then I will see you there, if not, you can read about it here. ttfn David

  • Virtualising SBS 2003 - the low down

    This question was asked internally and I thought the information was worth sharing, so thanks to Mark Stanfill for providing the answer: SBS 2003 is supported in virtual environments. The only unsupported component is ISA 2004, which (for rather obvious reasons) is not supported on Virtual Server (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897614/ ). Exchange also has a number of hardware and software requirements that need to be very carefully weighed against a hardware solution. For the complete rundown, see these articles: Support policy for Exchange Server 2003 running on hardware virtualization software http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;[LN];320220 Microsoft Virtual Server support policy http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;[LN];897613 Running Domain Controllers in Virtual Server 2005 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=64DB845D-F7A3-4209-8ED2-E261A117FC6B&displaylang=en Virtual Server Technical Overview White Paper http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem...
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  • Site Usage stats in – what a month – thank-you

    Hello folks, I have just been looking at my nice log based tool for analyzing site usage and I have to say that the site has grown a trooper. We have more than doubled traffic in terms of web hits and are up at least 50% on unique IP addresses, which is the closest I can get to unique users from my simple logs. To see the stats, go to http://uksbsguy.com/usage_report/jun06 for the June ones and http://uksbsguy.com/usage_report/ytd I have had a couple of people ask me about getting the software I use – I am very happy to provide it, but it still needs some tidying up. My software produces the numbers, but I still have to tweak the spreadsheet (delete a column or two) to import them into MapPoint to get the mapped data. The summary of the site usage is now: Summary Stats Total Hits 174438 Total Unique IPs 5195 Total Web Page Hits 140650 Total Feed downloads 33788 Top consolidated referrers Page URL Hits Google 1962 Bloglines 1010 Newsgator 641 community+server 639 msmvps.com 289 ukvistaguy.com 216 blo.gs 145 search...
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  • Microsoft and Xensource work together to ensure cross-platform simplicity in new virtual world

    Howdy folks, Just saw this over at the Xensource web site . It basically says that Microsoft and Xensource – organization leading the Xen Linux based virtualization tools – have extended their working agreements. A few months ago Xensource licensed Microsoft's VHD (virtual hard disk) format and now this has been further enhanced so that Xen will work with the Hypervisor that will ship for Longhorn Server. This means that if you need to run Windows and Linux, the virtualization technology underneath will actually work for you as opposed to against you. Another step towards MS and Linux interop. We already now support Linux guests on Virtual Server!! A bit more about Virtualization and Xen can be found at http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org/2006/07/18/microsoft-and-xen-sitting-in-a-tree/ Ttfn David
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  • Web site layout changes – temporary while site is upgraded

    I have just updated the site to a beta of the next version of Community Server which means the nice theme I normally use has stopped working. I will look at why next week, so again we are back to the "old" style of interface. Ttfn David

  • Summary of Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) just before I leave

    so, I have about 5 mins to write this, so it will be short & sweet. From the Small Business pre-day: event was sold out people told us licensing was still not up to scratch, but Eric Ligman's lessthancoffee.com site was very useful Much of the information for people was how to run a small business as it 1) enables us all to understand what is going on in the minds of our customers and 2) since many SBSC members are small businesses, hopefully gives them some ideas on how to be more successful as a business The Sloan Brothers were the highlight for me in advice ( http://startupnation.com ) - they said Got for 10% of the Watermelon, not 90% of the grape - this basically meant get funding and help to grow your business - keeping ownership of your business is more than just the number of shares - it is being there, so even if other people own 90% of the equity, you are still in charge. Outsource non-core skills Hitch your wagon to a star - eg Microsoft, but also someone local who will recommend you - so you get...
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(c)David Overton 2006-23