The question has come up a couple times in my blog on high availability and redundancy of Database Availability Groups (DAGs) specific to “What happens to the Client Access Server (CAS) and Hub Transport (HT) roles when the Exchange 2010 server fails over to another site?” or “What is the best practice in configuring CAS and HT so that when the DAG fails over, the CAS and HT will also failover?” Read more
John Fontana reports that Microsoft has issued a security advisory regarding a zero-day exploit of Internet Explorer. The exploit code was posted online over the weekend. The company is working on a patch, and is likely to get it out before the next Patch Tuesday.
The attack vector is JavaScript, so users can either disable JavaScript, upgrade to IE 8 (which isn't affected)... or switch to Firefox or Chrome. Read more
You either see Chrome OS's all browser OS approach as revolutionizing the PC industry or then next "technology solution looking for a problem" doomed to fail. Google's approach with Chrome OS is certainly radically different from the Windows, Mac OS and Linux approach we've used since the birth of the personal computer industry in the seventies. Read more
Earlier this month we discussed how special DNS resource records called SRV (service locator) records help Windows systems find domain controllers so they can authenticate to the domain. Interestingly, SRV records also help Windows systems find other kinds of important computers, too. Read more
Google's laying it all out on the table with Chrome OS. My editor posted an excellent article about Chrome OS and we're already expecting a Chrome OS update from Google. Despite the distraction of a bank robbery and shooting in our city last week, I managed to dig my paws into Chrome OS to try and really understand what Google's up to. Read more
Another interesting question came up in a recent SQL Server Business Intelligence class: "Can I perform a UNION in MDX similar to SQL?". There is a UNION operator but it's not quite the same, so we had to think outside of the box for this one...
The question came from a student who was trying to switch a complex report from running against the relational Data Warehouse to produce the same results against the multi-dimensional cube. Read more
So another set of common questions I get is “Do I need to run Outlook 2010 after I migrate to Exchange 2010?” or “What don’t I get if I’m still on Outlook 2007 in an Exchange 2010 environment” or “Can I still use Outlook 2003 against Exchange 2010?” or “Which Outlook 2010 features work against an old Exchange 2003/2007 Environment?” Here are answers to these and Read more
An interesting question came up in a recent class regarding testing SSIS in Visual Studio: "How can we capture the information in the Progress tab after a debug session?". My immediate reaction was to implement package logging but the answer lay elsewhere... Read more
I just returned from the 13th annual KM World conference this week and listened to a really interesting keynote from Andrew McAfee (the "king of Enterprise 2.0" according to KM guru Tom Davenport). McAfee summed up his talk with a list of basically how to get it Enterprise 2.0 wrong: Read more
News of a leak about Microsoft’s Windows 8 sure has stirred something over the Internet. Some say Windows 8 won't happen until Windows 7 is perfected and others say that Microsoft has already begun recruiting employees to help build Windows 8. Read more
I have written the past about portable applications that Admins can carry with them.
I came across a new 'suite' of portable applications that are being touted as the Admins Swiss Army Knife, and for good reason.
The CodySafe Admin pack hosts 75 portable administrative tools into a single suite that installs onto a portable device and takes up less than 63MB of space. Within this tiny package are tools for handling all of the most common Admin tasks such as:
• Data Recovery Read more
• Password Recovery
• Disk tools
• File & FTP managers
• Network Tools
• Security
With the release of Exchange 2007, Microsoft included voicemail as one of the core components of the product, and as a v1.0 technology, we didn’t have a lot of organizations choose to implement the Exchange 2007 voicemail. However with the release of Exchange 2010 and the inclusion of core features in the Exchange update, we’ve been implem Read more
Microsoft today announced a plugin for Office 2010 that let's users access third-party social networks through Outlook.The tool is dubbed Outlook Social Connector. While it's a great concept to turn e-mail into a social network, it may suffer the fate of many cool ideas from Microsoft: iffy execution. Read more
One of the things that have become a reality of our current economy is that IT needs to more with less. In some cases that means taking on more tasks within the network as well. IT departments that once were once extremely segmented are now finding that they have been contracted to minuscule sizes in some cases. Of course, some IT shops have always had that chief, cook and bottle washer scenario. In either case the only way to effectively manage a network (whether an SMB or Enterprise) is to have effective tools that help you to get the job done. Read more
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. Read more
One week after Microsoft's Steven Elop took Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff to task claiming the cloud is not reliable, Microsoft officially launched the almost-final version of its own cloud, Windows Azure. It has newly outfitted its cloud so that an app can live both on Azure and on a local server. Microsoft today announced new management features to Windows Azure that support such dual-location apps. Read more
I’ve been blogging this entire month on Exchange 2010, everything from the basics of what’s new in Exchange 2010 to Migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 to Migrating from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 to Integrating Exchange 2010 with OCS 2007 R2. One of the questions I get asked frequently is “what’s the right size servers for Exchange 2010?” That’s always a fun topic because the answer no doubt is “it depends,” however it’s not like the Read more
Any discussion of DNS and Active Directory must come quickly to a discussion of the AD “signposts” known as the SRV (service locator) records. SRV is just another resource record type, like A and PTR and MX. It is defined in the RFC 2782 document, which states that “The SRV RR allows administrators to use several servers for a single domain, to move services from host to host with little fuss, and to designate some hosts as primary servers for a service and others as backups.” Read more
Lokad has democratized time series forecasting for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're a small coffee shop or a division of a large enterprise, forecasting point-of-sales, scheduling staff, call center management, eCommerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), all became easier because of Lokad's forecast-on-demand service. Read more
One of the improvements made in Exchange 2010 is the redundancy built-in to the routing of messages through the Exchange environment. Microsoft built-in a technology they call “Shadow Redundancy” which the concept behind shadow redundancy is that a message is not deleted from the queue until the next hop has confirmed delivery to the subsequent hop.&nb Read more
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