Launch of the Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security

Tuesday 9th February is the EU’s Safer Internet Day, and the University’s recently formed Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security is getting involved by hosting a half day event to raise awareness in order to protect young children from dangers on the internet. This will take the form of interactive workshops for parents and children.

This will be followed on Wednesday 10th February by the official launch event of the CCCS with a group of presentations on a range of topics including Counterfeiting, Internet Grooming, Gambling Websites and Security.

Both events will be held at St.James Park.

For more details, head over to http://cccs.ncl.ac.uk

Introducing North East Bytes (NEBytes) a new Microsoft Usergroup for the North East of England

We are pleased to announce a new User Group in the North East of England, based around Microsoft technologies: North East Bytes (NEBytes). We have decided to start this group in order to help Developers and IT Pros in the community with the constant battle to learn, stay current and broaden their knowledge.

North East Bytes (NEBytes)

We run monthly meetings every third Wednesday of the month (except on the second Wednesday in December – to allow time for Christmas parties and shopping!) on the Newcastle University campus. Each meeting consists of two one hour presentations (one Developer topic and one IT Pro topic) and we have refreshments, food, giveaways and prizes.

Attendance at our meetings is completely FREE!! The venue is provided kindly by the University, our Speakers kindly provide their time for free, and the organisers provide their time for free to organise the events. We will provide refreshments and we also provide hot food, all we ask is if you would like to partake in the the hot food, please make a small donation towards the cost via the open contribution box at each meeting.

Our Launch Event is to be on Wednesday 20th January 2010 (from 6pm), we are delighted to have Mike Taulty visiting to cover Silverlight and James O’Neill to cover Hyper-V, and we’re teaming up with the SharePoint User Group UK to bring an overview of SharePoint 2010 too! We are really looking forward to this great event and hope to see lots there to help us celebrate our launch!

Head over to NEBytes.net for more details.

Free presentation, 25th November: Sysinternals Tools

Following on from his very well received presentation on Windows performance monitoring and analysis at the September VBUG meeting, Richard Diver returns to dive deeper into the range of Windows Sysinternals tools. These tools are extremely useful to both Windows system administrators, but also developers who are trying to make their software run with the best performance the system can offer. Richard will specifically cover Memory Concepts; how to make the most of Process Explorer; when to use Process Monitor; and how to debug Blue Screens and other crashes.

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

Location: Room 118, Claremont Tower

Time: 18:45

Price: FREE

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

23rd September: Three fantastic Microsoft enterprise IT presentations

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. 🙂

The March of Progress Continues…

March of Progress

I thought it would be interesting to see where things stand with Operating System usage in the Active Directory compared with the data I collected in March. These figures are based on Active Computer Objects.

Windows Clients: 10960

Windows Clients

Windows Vista: (March) 472 (5%)
Windows Vista: (Today) 1571 (14%)
Windows XP: (March) 9894 (95%)
Windows XP: (Today) 9386 (86%)

Windows Server: 392

Windows Server

Windows Server 2008(March): 65 (17%)
Windows Server 2008(Today): 136 (31%)
Windows Server 2003(March): 323 (83%)
Windows Server 2003(Today): 307 (69%)

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Event – great success! But what about Windows 7 XP Mode?

Last night, I attended the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Event publicised by Jonathan below. I hadn’t attended any of the VBUG stuff before, thinking it probably wouldn’t be that relevant to my work and interests, being (as I had thought) aimed more at techie VB/Powershell developers. How wrong!

The talk was entirely relevant and I’m actually very glad I went because it made me realise that I’d made some incorrect assumptions about Windows 7. One item, in particular, set off some alarm bells…

XP Mode – the answer to all our prayers for running legacy Windows XP applications on Windows 7 on all our existing PCs – wrong! XP Mode requires Windows 7 Virtual PC which in turn requires hardware virtualisation support on the motherboard. Hardware virtualisation on machines older than 1 or 2 years is simply non-existent. Even some new laptops and PCs don’t come with hardware virtualisation and even when they do, it isn’t always possible to switch it on!

It is a shame that Microsoft have insisted on developing XP Mode to work only when hardware virtualisation is present as it seems to be in opposition to the purpose of XP Mode. Given that Windows 7 will run so well on older kit where Vista wouldn’t, and you can get away with much less memory, it just seems senseless that XP Mode needs brand new boxes in order to work. One can only get cynical about these things… and wonder about the Intel sales and marketing influence…

But the real message here is: if you want to run XP Mode make sure you’re buying machines that fully support hardware virtualisation.

There’s plenty of good news though. With improved deployment utilities for Windows 7, we are looking at a lot quicker turn around times for getting driver support into images. Bitlocker setup is a much more straight-forward process in Windows 7 and ‘Bitlocker To Go’ means USB pen drives can be easily encrypted with little technical know-how required. UAC is now fully working and is far less intrusive than in Vista. Allegedly the User State Migration Tools now work too… we’ll see.

All in all, last night’s talk was enjoyable and very informative, with an excellent and knowledgeable speaker, who really knew his stuff.

The VBUG group are taking a summer break but will be back in September to host some more events in conjunction with Microsoft Professionals. They are wanting ideas for topics to cover so please post your ideas on this blog.

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

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.

TechNet Conference goes virtual (19 June 2009)

From Microsoft:

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the very first TechNet Virtual Conference taking place on 19 June 2009.

You told us that time and budget pressures make attending in person events difficult – so to help both you and the environment we decided to take the TechNet Conference virtual. Now you and your colleagues can join us to get a flavour of some key Microsoft technologies from the comfort of your own desks.

  • Windows 7 – Deployment and Management
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 – 10 things to make life easier for IT Pros
  • An overview of Office Communications Server R2 and voice capabilities
  • The trials and tribulations of SharePoint implementation

We are also really pleased to announce an exclusive Keynote featuring Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Technical Fellow specialising in the Windows platform.

And that’s not the only difference this year. In addition to Microsoft technology news and product overviews from the experts, the TechNet Virtual Conference will also feature a second auditorium focused on IT Management, including:

  • How IT will change over the next 10 years and why you should care – an exclusive session delivered at TechEd EMEA
  • Growing the Business and Managing Costs at Microsoft – An Insider’s View, presented by Asif Jinnah, IT Manager, Microsoft UK

Click here to see the full agenda.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/dd819085.aspx

Free events on campus in May

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.

OU Admin Day 2009: Slides and Handouts

After a slight delay here are downloadable Slides and Handouts from OU Admin Day 2009.

The files are all included in a single ZIP file.

The Sixth Annual “OU Admin Day” took place this year on 8th April 2009

Programme of talks

  • 09:30 – Registration and coffee
  • 10:00 – Introduction to the day
  • 10:05 – ISS Strategy
  • 10:30 – Green Computing and Procurement Guidelines
  • 11:00 – Coffee Break
  • 11:15 – Hosted Infrastructure and Research Storage
  • 12:00 – Lunch
  • 13:00 – ISS Services Roadmap
  • 14:00 – Coffee Break
  • 14:15 – ISS Desktop Roadmap
  • 14:45 – ISS Demonstrations
  • 15:15 – Questions to ISS
  • 16:30 – Close of Day

Thanks to all who attended.