It seems the newest Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has made quite a stir this week. Many are dubbing it "InPrivate" filter as "Porn Mode".

This is a bit of a weird thing for me considering what has taken place over the past few years.

Users have been crying out for more secure web browsing and with the eventuality of SaaS products this has become even more pertinent.

Yet , Microsoft adds a feature that will allow you to Create a browsing session where cookies, history, passwords, form data and objects will disappear once the browser is closed and this is suddenly "bad".

Mozilla toyed with adding the feature in Firefox 3 and Safari has had it for some time. So apparantly this is a need for Internet users.

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Sometimes the best tools to help create “A Better Windows World” are the ones that help keep the underlying infrastructure running well.

In this podcast I provide tips for bandwidth-management service providers to help organizations successfully deploy these solutions.

After all, users with a quad-core CPU and 4GB of DDR3 memory in their computer will see no difference in data movement to and from their system if the bandwidth is being eaten up by most of the users in the organization listening to my podcasts.

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The first tool I wrote about for A Better Windows World was System Tools Hyena. Of all the tools I have come across thus far in my 11+ years in technology, this is one of my all-time favorites.
As I explained when I first wrote about Hyena, this tool has everything you need to manage Windows servers and desktops.

It even has native support for Exchange Server and Terminal Server account settings. The remote-control functions allow you to use clients like VNC for remote administration of servers and workstations.

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As promised, here is an update to the tools library I posted in July. Enjoy the full list of everything we have featured on A Better Windows World.

Tool Names: A-Z
Altiris Software Virtualization Solution
Amazon Kindle
Angry IP Scanner
Civil Netizen
ClamWin Portable

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In today’s market there are not many really good tools that do not cost you an arm and a leg to implement or that take forever to configure and learn to use since they are free.

ShieldsUp! Is a tool you may or may not be aware of that takes no time to learn and configure and is absolutely free. Provided by Gibson Research Corporation , ShieldsUp! Offers several different tests: File Sharing, Common Ports, All Service Ports ( the first 1056 ports anyway), Messenger Spam, Browser Headings, Custom port probes or Specific Port information.

ShieldsUp! Does not only do a stellar job at testing these security holes, they provide you with information on how to fix them.

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In a day and age when we speak a lot about Server virtualization and consolidation, we need to take a step back and think about the client side of virtualization. One of the challenges all us IT Admins face from time to time is keeping the many applications that exist on a single machine running without any “one” application breaking.

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Today's IT department is faced with the constant question of which platform wins the battle for the corporate network's heart and mind. I won't get into the debate of which platform will reign supreme in the next 5 - 10 years. Quite frankly I do not even want to think that far down the line. (But, can you guess my vote, given the name of this blog, A Better Windows World?) But no matter what your personal preference, the reality is that most corporate networks are a heterogeneous mix of two or more operating systems, with servers and with desktops. So the question really becomes, "What tools can we use to bridge the gap between Windows and the rest of your network?"

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News of Microsoft’s plans for a new OS codenamed ‘Midori’ could signal the end of an era.

No, I am not talking about the end of the Windows operating system, but something much more self-centered, the end of “A Better Windows World”.
Of course Windows 7 is not due out until 2010 so it will be a few years before we need to be concerned. I know all my faithful readers along with me breathe a sigh of relief over the news.

Word around the IT circles is that the next generation of OS may not in fact bare the famed Microsoft Windows name. Microsoft has leaked that the next-gen OS, which is in the very early stages, is being built to address common problems that Windows is not able to address.

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You may have heard by now about Microsoft's Mojave experiment. In a marketing campaign designed to show users that you cannot always believe the negative press you read. Microsoft invited 120 XP users to experience their newest Operating System codenamed Mojave .

After showing off some of the great new features and getting some favorable reactions. They then told them they were actually previewing Windows Vista. Of course, many of the former skeptics were surprised by the fact that the OS they just enjoyed so much was Windows Vista.
There you go point proven; you can't judge a book by its cover.

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When we talk about tools to make technology better we often overlook what is right under our noses. I have been working with Windows Vista since the early Beta stages. I have written articles about the user battle that seems to be raging between Windows XP and Vista .
I have even had the privilege of being named a Windows Vista Master in Que Publishing’s Tricks of the Windows Vista Masters by J. Peter Bruzzese.

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We have spent a number of weeks looking at tools to make “A Better Windows World” (do not get mad at me, I told that was not going away). Well looking at the tools posting I believe we have reached a good number of tools thus far.
I thought now would be a good time to go back and take the opportunity to post some tips. So I will make it a part of the weekly posts to add one or two posts per week that focus on either a some tips or tricks on some of the tools we feature here.
The tips and tricks will vary from features you may or may not know. To tips and tricks that you will find you cannot live without.

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"If it sounds good, you'll hear it; If it looks good, you'll see it; If it's marketed right, you'll buy it; but if it's real, you'll feel it." - Kid Rock

I've gotta go with Kid on this one... I hope you'll feel it as I expound on the subject of Office Communication Server 2007.

I was recently interviewed by CS Techcast for their weekly podcast special. The guys talked with yours truly about OCS 2007, since we talk about tools to make "A Better Windows World" the podcast seemed like a good launch to this week's blog.

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When we are talking about tools for "A Better Windows World", there is no way I could avoid talking about Hyper-V. What Hyper-V means to the Windows enterprise I will touch upon in the later weeks. I wanted to however share first what I thought was an interesting and quite frankly expected response. Sun's Senior Director of xVM Vijay Sarathy commented on the release of Hyper-V and how Sun’s xVM is offering support for all major operating systems (including Windows). Vijay also had some tough questions for Microsoft about its Hyper-V release.

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"Slow and steady wins the race," said the turtle. Locking down a shared access computer ensures you sleep at night. I must admit when I first saw the Windows Steady State tool. I thought it was a bit parochial. Microsoft, after all, is touting this tool as an answer to shared systems used in libraries, schools, Internet cafes and such. But that is why we have the Group Policy Management Console. Then I thought about the little Internet café by my house and the township library. Both have about a half dozen computers, which are used constantly. Yet neither is part of a client/server network infrastructure. One is a collection of separate systems getting DHCP addresses from a wireless router. The other is more a workgroup lacking a server to handle the Policy based management.

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I cover a broad range of tools on A Better Windows World. So it makes sense to publish an index by tool name and category to make it easier for you to find the ones you need. Here is a list of the tools featured on my blog so far. Please bookmark this page. I will update it regularly. Enjoy

Tools by Name: A-Z
Amazon Kindle
Angry IP Scanner
ClamWin Portable
ClipTraining

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Often in A Better Windows World, I speak about tools to make our life as IT people… well, better. From time to time it is necessary to recognize that some of those improvements come from tools we already know. In August, Microsoft plans to release the Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. I have had the opportunity to test and work with IE8 Beta1 (for Web Developers and Designers), and I must say I am really enjoying myself. Several of IE8's planned new features will help enhance Web browsing.

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I just thought in this day and age of sequels I might produce a sequel to one of my posts. When we last left off our hero, he was recovering lost data… Too Much! OK!

Last week we spoke about a data recovery tool for Windows systems. In a perfect world we would only have need to support a homogenous environment. However, for most IT admins we live in a heterogeneous technology world. This is not necessarily a bad thing in my career I have found that each of these platforms has their strengths.

It does mean though that not every tool works for every platform or does it? While working in these mixed environments I found a tool that I preferred for my non-Windows systems, The tool is called R-Studio.

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In an age of “real time” snapshots and Terabytes of storage, one might start to reason “As long as I live, I will never lose data again”. Sorry for the movie quote rip-off (sort of) my Mom was a big Gone with the Wind fan. You can imagine my horror when it released on VHS tape it played in my house repeatedly. I remember wishing the tape would stretch or break, it never did even after over 300 viewings.
However, I digress; it seems in the area of File recovery tools two scenarios exist. One you have all the latest and greatest backup, replication and Business Continuity tools and still cannot seem to recover than one file that the President of the company is looking for. Two you do not have the budget to justify these recovery methodologies.

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It is not often in this business you get something for free. Recently I spoke with my colleague and my co-author of the book "Administrators Guide to Microsoft Office 2007 Servers". Peter has been doing some pretty cool things and I thought my readers could benefit from some of his latest projects. I spoke to you in May about his company ClipTraining. Here's a little background about Peter and what he's offering to the technology community.

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I was thinking about what to write about today and I gave some thought to some tools that are readily available and yet seem to be overlooked.

Why? Mostly because they are tools downloaded directly from Microsoft. These tools are meant to assess vulnerabilities and provide both reporting and links to correct known issues.

I'm talking about the Analyzer tools. Currently Microsoft provides three excellent Analyzer tools that no Enterprise should be without, they are the Microsoft Security Baseline Analyzer (MSBA), Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) and the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer (SQLBPA).

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You may or may not remember my post on May 6: Three great IT tools you can carry with you.
In that post I spoke about tools that admins can carry on a USB thumb drive, some kind of flash drive or a portable hard drive. The great thing about my blog is that there is no shortage of things to help us make a Better Windows World. Therefore, here are a few more great portable tools for admins to help make your world a Better Windows World -- nope, not going to stop using it. I'm taking the Snapple approach (I guess working there for five years rubbed off). Like their commercials, it may be annoying, but you will definitely not forget us.
OK! So, in no particular order, here are some great portable tools:

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Back from Mexico and I am both greatly relaxed and greatly perplexed at the same time.
I spent my week at a 5 star resort in the Riviera Maya, visited the ruins in Chitchin Itza, and had a wonderful time snorkeling with fish in Xel-Ha. Although I wish, they would let you know beforehand that the lake contains Barracudas. The reply I got when I asked, aren’t they dangerous? Was “only if you try to touch them”. Yet here we are swimming in this lake trying to touch all the fish.
That was the first thing that had me perplexed. The next was that I was paying a hefty amount of money to stay at this resort in Riviera Maya and I could not find wireless internet anywhere.

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Today’s Network World story “Gates legacy filled with good, bad and ugly” gives an interesting perspective on the career of Bill Gates. Senior Editor John Fontana did an excellent job in showing just how fragmented the opinions of technology industry is over what Gates’ legacy is and what it ought to be. I find it particularly interesting that one industry insider said, "There are not too many people who can be Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker at the same time." Of course, this was in reference to Microsoft’s villainy of tough competitive and even questionable business practices while at the same time being a major part in bringing technology to where it is today.

 

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So I was waiting for my flight out of Las Vega s, after presenting a 4-hour seminar of SQL Server 2005 Best Practices. I do not know if anyone has ever spoken for 4-hours but man, it is tough. Now my Mom is Italian so for me talking for four hours nonstop should be easy.  However, it is very different when you have a room full of people and no one is talking back. Yep, they are all there to hear what you have to say so they are silent and it is all you.  Well, back to the airport in Vegas, I got the chance to check on some comments to my 20 tools blog. Of course, I loved the ones saying I was the greatest thing to happen since open source.

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In IT, we often call Business Intelligence an oxymoron. It seems that the two words have nothing in common. If you deal with the kinds of decision-making we do daily you'd understand. Nevertheless, BI is a hot topic right now. It seems to be growing hotter thanks to Microsoft's entry into the market.

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No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22% annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

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What's a Kindle?

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Let's face it I expound upon great tools that can be used for managing the network and desktop. I talk about how we can do things better, cheaper, and faster. None of these things matter in the least bit if we do not have an educated user at the end of the keyboard.

Come on how many "ID- 10-T" errors did you deal with this week. How many times did your boss tell you he had a problem with his computer and you thought, "The problem is between the chair and the keyboard"?  Network World's companion magazine Computer World runs a feature called Sharktank which abounds with tales of user (and IT pro) nightmares.

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When I first started out at ERE, we were running Citrix MetaFrame for a 45-person operation. Out of the 45 users, 10 were using MetaFrame to work from remote locations or at home. Of these 10 users, perhaps 4-5 were religious about remote connectivity.

Yet we spent money on having a 20-user connection license for Citrix, 20 user CAL's for Terminal Services, not to mention the expense of a Server, Windows Server Operating System and money spent to have someone come and set this all up. I didn't know Citrix then and this implementation is actually a big reason for my comments on consultants in my earlier post Step up or Back Up.

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When I began writing the Admin Guide to Office 2007 Servers with Peter, I was surprised at the direction Microsoft was taking. I am speaking about the different methods of collaboration that were being offered.

Groove Server allows users to create collaborative work spaces that maintain security. These work spaces work regardless of whether users are in your domain or even in the same time zone.

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