Author Archives: Jonathan

About Jonathan

Windows Server infrastructure administrator at Newcastle University since 1999. Microsoft MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management (& previously for PowerShell). Member of the Microsoft Technical Community Council. Co-founder of the NEBytes user group. @jonoble on Twitter.

23rd September: Three fantastic Microsoft enterprise IT presentations

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We are very pleased to be able to announce a stellar line up of technical presentations and speakers from Microsoft at the September VBUG Newcastle IT Pro meeting here on the Newcastle University campus…

The Dynamic Desktop Experience – Windows 7, Windows XP Mode, App-V, MDT, MDOP and System Center – Dan Oliver

Windows 7 offers Microsoft’s customers with an opportunity to deliver a platform that releases new capabilities that deliver real business benefit and significantly reduced cost of ownership. The challenge for most companies is that deploying and migrating desktops is time consuming and traditionally offers service continuity risks with Application Compatibility that can prevent progress. This presentation will show capabilities, architectures and strategies that allow companies to move forward cost effectively to the benefits of a modern operating system. Level: 100

Dan Oliver is a Pre Sales Architect within Microsoft UK’s Speciality Technology Unit with some 14 years’ experience of Microsoft-based solutions primarily in the virtualization and systems management fields. Dan has a background that covers a broad spectrum of industry sectors ranging from Financial, Telecoms, Partners, Legal, Professional Services and Healthcare. Dan has also had the opportunity to work as a Chief Technology Officer for the Faculty of Advocates in the Scottish Legal Sector.

Novell and Lotus Notes – Migrating to Microsoft – Conrad Sidey

The business value of implementing Microsoft technologies like Active Directory, Exchange 2007 and SharePoint are clearly understood within Microsoft. For our customers that are still running their organisation on technologies like Novell and Lotus Notes they are starting to gain an understanding of the value of migrating to Microsoft technologies. The purpose behind this presentation is to provide the technical community with an insight into leading a project and architecting a solution to migrate environment that are running both Novell Netware and Lotus Notes. The presentation will discuss envisioning & planning of a Novell and Notes migration project, approaches to undertaking the migration depending upon the business drivers, providing an overview of the approach we are taking in migrating a UK Local City Council while providing coexistence, as well as presenting a number of migration & coexistence recommendations or lessons learnt from the project. Level: 200

Conrad Sidey is a Solution Architect within Microsoft Consulting Services with some 17 years’ experience of Microsoft-based solutions primarily in the infrastructure field. Conrad has a background that covers a broad spectrum of industry sectors ranging from Financial and Insurance, Manufacturing, Aero-Engineering, Defence, UK and European Government Agencies, Power Generators, Retail and Brewing. Conrad has also had the opportunity to work with large scale outsourcing services providers.

Implementing the “Black Box” – Performance Monitoring and Analysis for proactive and reactive support, server baselining and capacity planning – Richard Diver

All current versions of Windows come with a free tool that can prevent server downtime and solve many mysteries – Perfmon!

A little bit of practice with this tool can really help to solve issues with servers that may not even be performance related. Working at the OS level, you can find cause to most performance bottlenecks regardless of server function (Exchange, DC, Web etc).

This is something that has even more focus in future versions of Windows; a brief overview of these benefits will be shown also! Level: 300

Richard Diver is a Premier Field Engineer with 10 years experience implementing and supporting a range of Microsoft technologies, specialising in Active Directory, Server Platform and Virtualisation.

Wrap up Q&A with all presenters at the end.

Time: 18:45 to 21:00

Location: Room 118, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 7RU

Price: FREE

Please register for your place at the VBUG site so we can make sure we have enough space and refreshments. 🙂

RSAT released for Windows 7

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Microsoft has released the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7. These tools allow you to “manage roles and features that are installed on computers that are running Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server 2003, from a remote computer that is running Windows 7”.

Download from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en

More Microsoft blogs than your body can handle!

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Yesterday BlogMS posted an up to date list of all the official Microsoft team blogs. There’s something for everyone there, with 252 in total!

Since we’re in Higher Education, I’m going to highlight the UK HE blog as one that should be interesting to many of the readers of this blog. You can check out the rest of the list for yourself to see what interests you:

http://blogs.technet.com/blogms/pages/directory-of-microsoft-team-blogs.aspx

Windows 7 may ship with IE in Europe after all

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It seems that there may be agreement between the European Commission and Microsoft to Windows 7 being released in Europe with Internet Explorer 8 present, but with consumers being offered a “ballot screen” which would allow them to simply select from a list of other web browsers. This would set the chosen browser as default and disable Internet Explorer.

This would mean that the issues that I discussed in my previous post about Windows 7 E would go away as the versions of Windows 7 shipped in Europe would share the same functionality as the rest of the world out of the box, which is a positive step. PC manufacturers would still be free to choose to pre-install any browser(s) that they choose to be the default of the machines they ship in Europe.

The proposal states that the ballot screen will be populated with up to 10 of the most used web browsers (with a usage share of at least 0.5% in the European Economic Area, and only one version per vendor), with the top 5 being given prominence. The proposal also includes a commitment to bring the ballot screen retrospectively to XP and Vista via Windows Update.

For more detail, read Microsoft’s press release regarding their proposal to the European Commission and the statement from the Commission.

Windows 7 E

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Within the University, the issues in this post aren’t going to be relevant since ISS will deal with it, but I know that we have people reading this from outside, and that those of you who are our colleagues will be the IT support for their family and friends, who may have to deal with it. I’m sure you’ve heard this news before reading this, but in case you haven’t prepare to be shocked and bemused…

Following on from various wrangling and threats of fines after a complaint to the European Union from browser maker Opera about Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows being anti-competitive, Microsoft has stated that it will release special E editions of the different Windows 7 versions in Europe. Windows 7 E editions will not contain a web browser, and unlike the old N (which didn’t contain Windows Media Player, to try to please the EU, and which nobody bought), there’s no option this time – if you’re in Europe, you get the E edition and you can’t purchase a version of Windows 7 that contains IE.

Funnily enough Opera isn’t pleased about this, presumably because they have to now provide a distribution mechanism for people to get their browser onto a PC that doesn’t have a browser already with which to download it, and increasingly may not have an optical disk drive. Opera would like Windows 7 to include a “ballot screen” which would provide a selection of browsers that the user could choose from. It doesn’t take a genius to see why Microsoft would be reluctant to do that since however they ordered the options, someone would be bound to complain (and by “complain”, I mean “probably take legal action”).

It’s not all bad though. The majority of consumers who use Windows get it with a new PC, and the OEMs who manufacture those PCs aren’t going to send one out to retail without a web browser. They’ll undoubtedly do deals with one browser company or another to bundle their offering as they do with anti-virus and other software. The vast numbers of Windows users in a corporate environment don’t need to worry either since their IT department will sort them out. The only people who are really affected by this are the small percentage who buy a boxed (or downloaded) copy of Windows 7 to upgrade an existing computer. It’s a small percentage of people who buy Windows this way simply because the numbers of corporate users and PC buyers are so large, but I expect that the number will be larger with Windows 7 simply because it’s so much better suited to running on existing hardware than Windows Vista was – I’m running it quite happily on my netbook and I also put the release candidate on my mother’s creaking “built for XP” laptop with 512Mb RAM; it works fine!

I said this affects people who are buying a copy to upgrade, but the other caveat to this is that because there were no Windows Vista or XP E editions, Microsoft isn’t providing Windows 7 E upgrade versions as they have done previously. They are providing the full version of Windows 7 E, in the UK, for roughly the equivalent of the upgrade pricing they’re using outside the EU if you pre-order from selected suppliers between now and the 9th August.

So, if you’re moving your old PC to Windows 7 E, not only will you not have a browser, but you’re going to have to do a clean install too. Microsoft have put up a web page which takes you through the steps you can take to make the transition as painless as possible. Obviously it tells you how to get to running Windows 7 E with IE8, but if you already use a different web browser I’m sure you can work out how to switch it in at that point.

Of course it’s not only people using Windows in Europe who are impacted by the release of the E editions. Software developers worldwide, who may have used the fact that IE was present in every version of Windows in their applications, will have to look at ways around it being missing, or another browser being in its place. There is some excellent advice for developers on the Windows blog about this. I’d recommend that Windows sys admins check that out too, since it’ll help them in testing software before rolling it out across their Windows infrastructure.

Some further reading regarding Windows 7:
…for IT Pros: Talking About Windows and IT Pro at Home
…for people building hardware or developing software: Ready. Set. 7.

Office 2010 reaches Technical Preview

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Yesterday, at their Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced that the next release of Office has reached the Technical Preview milestone. The announcement included demos of some features, and there are more on their site Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview (unfortunately the site appeared to be struggling under the load, but Long Zheng contacted me to say he had reliable mirrors of the videos on his fantastic blog).

Office 2010 isn’t the revolutionary product that Office 2007 was, where Microsoft introduced it’s new Ribbon interface, but the Ribbon has evolved (and spread to the places where it wasn’t last time round, like Outlook), and they appear to have added some handy new features. You should check the videos out to see what may be most appealing to you, but there are some things that I think will give productivity gains to most users (albeit small ones, but they all add up over the lifetime of a version of version of Office).

I particularly like the new printing UI in Word which incorporates the printing dialogue options along with the print preview – it removes at least one step (checking the preview before going to the print the document), but it could potentially remove several iterations of checking the preview, altering the print options, checking the preview again, etc. This feature is actually part of what Microsoft call Backstage, which should be consistent across the whole Office suite. Also in Word, the Navigation Pane looks like a handy way to search and manage the order of sections in a large document.

In Outlook, if you’re going to send a message to someone on your Exchange infrastructure who has an out of office auto-reply setup, the new MailTips will tell you that when you add them to the recipient list, rather than you composing the message and sending it before you find out that the person isn’t there to read it. Something else in Outlook that got a lot of positive feedback on Twitter from the people watching the streaming video of the WPC keynote was the option to ignore a mail conversation, which would throw out all the past and future messages in a conversation (the conversation view of your inbox has been promoted to be the default in Outlook 2010).

For the first time, Office has an online version – Office Web Apps provide trimmed down versions of the desktop applications in the browser (IE/FF/Safari). This won’t be part of the Technical Preview, instead debuting later in the year. I don’t know if this has been announced before, but when you look at Google Docs it’s probably an obvious step – Office Web Apps will be free to consumers with a Windows Live ID. In addition, Microsoft will provide a hosted version for businesses (like Google do), but they also allow companies to host them locally, in case you don’t want to give your data to Microsoft (not an option with Google Docs).

Although I’m not a heavy user of Office (other than Outlook), I’m a bit of an Office junkie, so I expect I’ll post more about it up to the release, but in the meantime you can go and check out those vids and you might want to check out Paul Thurrott’s write-up of the Technical Preview on his SuperSite for Windows. If that makes you desperate to get your hands on the Technical Preview, you can add yourself to the Waitlist.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Event – 8th July

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For Windows sys admins, the biggest contacts on your approach radar right now are Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, due to release later in the year (but be complete and released to manufacture next month). This free evening event, right here on the campus, couldn’t be much more timely then.

Rik Hepworth, the IT Director at Black Marble, will cover some of the great new features of the new operating systems, including BranchCache, XP Mode and what I personally think is the number one feature, DirectAccess.

This is bound to be a popular event, so sign up early over at the VBUG site.

Active Directory Spring Cleaning: Unnecessary Computer Objects

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Yesterday, a PowerShell script I’d written sent an email to the members of the Active Directory security groups that are delegated control of computer objects within the OUs for various sections of the University under the “Departments” OU. These messages contained a list of all the computer objects in each departmental OU which haven’t contacted the domain to change their password for 90 days (by default a computer will change its password every 30 days) – that being an indication that the computer object may be unneccesary and could possibly be deleted.

In order to generate these reports, I use Windows PowerShell and the Active Directory cmdlets from Quest Software. Once you have those installed, you’ll find a “Quest Software” folder in the Start menu, which contains the “ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory” – you should run this as a member of the admin group that has permissions on the OU you want to report on. Then it’s just a case of a couple of lines of PowerShell.

[If none of this makes any sense, then I’m going to recommend that you go and read the Getting Started chapter from the TechNet Script Center’s PowerShell Owner’s Manual]

First we’ll put the OU’s distinguished name in a string variable, just to reduce the amount of wrapping we’re going to have on the next line…

$OU = "OU=ISS,OU=Departments,DC=campus,DC=ncl,DC=ac,DC=uk"

Then we find the computer objects by using Quest’s Get-QADComputer cmdlet, and filtering it to find the pwdLastSet property longer than 90 days ago…

Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot $OU -SearchScope Subtree
-IncludedProperties pwdPastSet -SizeLimit 0 | where {$_.pwdLastSet -le $((Get-Date).AddDays(-90))}

That gives you a table of computer objects using the default formatting, but we can do better than that.

If we pipe the output of the filter to the Select-Object cmdlet, we can select interesting properties to look at. I’m going to select the computer object’s name, description and parentcontainerdn so we can see how we’ve labelled it and exactly where it is in our OU structure…

Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot $OU -SearchScope Subtree
-IncludedProperties pwdPastSet -SizeLimit 0 | where {$_.pwdLastSet -le $((Get-Date).AddDays(-90))} | select name,description,parentcontainerdn

These might not be the most helpful properties for the computers you manage, so you can check the full list of properties of the computer objects by piping one into the Get-Member cmdlet.

We might have some useful data at this point, but there’s probably going to be some truncation going on, and it might be more useful if we could sort it. You could use the Sort-Object and Format-Table cmdlets to help, but I’m going to suggest that we might be better getting it out into Excel so you can order it and play with it in any way you want. To that end, we’ll pipe the whole lot into the Export-Csv cmdlet…

Get-QADComputer -SearchRoot $OU -SearchScope Subtree
-IncludedProperties pwdPastSet -SizeLimit 0 | where {$_.pwdLastSet -le $((Get-Date).AddDays(-90))} | select name,description,parentcontainerdn | Export-Csv "C:\temp\computers.csv" -noTypeInformation

I hope that helps. 🙂

Free events on campus in May

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As I previously posted, Thursday 14th May sees Eileen Brown from Microsoft come up to the campus to talk about Unified Messaging. This should be a really interesting presentation, especially as WIT are looking to expand our Exchange systems into the UM area. Unfortunately, it’s possibly the last time we’ll get to see Eileen presenting in the North East as a member of the TechNet team, since she blogged yesterday that her current role is being impacted by the recently announced layoffs at Microsoft.

Sign up for your free place at the VBUG site (membership is not required).

Since the last Monday of May is a bank holiday, the SuperMondays event this month is being held on a Tuesday, but don’t let that put you off because the line-up is one of the best yet. The event is being held on the 26th May in the University’s Culture Lab and will feature some of the really interesting work being done there and more.

See SuperMondays.org for more details and sign up at Eventbrite.

IT Pro Event 14th May: Unified Communications with Eileen Brown

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For the second VBUG Newcastle IT Pro event, we’re fortunate to have a great speaker. Eileen Brown is the manager of Microsoft’s TechNet UK IT Professional Evangelist Team, and writes a hugely popular blog on Management, Messaging, Mobility and Real Time Collaboration.

Here’s the overview of Eileen’s talk:

“If the PCs on our desks do much more than they did 10 years ago, why don’t our phones ?

On a Mobile phone calls are dialled from your phone book – UC allows your PC contacts to be used to place calls rather than re-keying the number into a desk, and identifies your contacts by name when they call you and routes your calls to the best phone. Unified communications is bringing together Voice, Fax, Video, Email and Instant messaging, into one system. So Voice mail which arrives in your mailbox And e-mail which can be read to you over the phone. With UC you can see if someone is around to take a call or answer a message before you contact them – and choose the best medium. And a conversation can move seamlessly from email, to instant message, to data sharing and video conference. Harnessing UC can mean less travel, less frustration and greater productivity.”

This presentation is particularly timely in the University, since this year we’ll be looking at adding some unified messaging features to our existing Exchange infrastructure. This is a great opportunity to hear about what the future might look like, from a real expert in this area.

The presentation will take place in Room 118 of Claremont Tower on Thursday 14th May, 18:30 (for a 19:00 start). If you plan to attend, please could you sign up at the VBUG site (just so we have numbers for refreshments, etc): http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/May-2009/VBUG-Newcastle-Unified-Communications-with-Eileen-Brown.aspx

You don’t have to be a VBUG member and the event is free to attend.

If you’re on Twitter, you might like to follow Eileen.