IT edge

The best method to prepare Windows XP and Windows Vista Images is to use Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (or the Business Desktop Deployment 2007 Toolkit). I have had customers ask a lot of question in regard to installing Windows Keys in the images and then activating them after the desktop image is deployed. These toolkits cover [...]

Technorati Tags: internet,windows,beta,development Microsoft has made available the IE8 Readiness Toolkit for download. This beta 1 version of IE8 is focused on developers and the User Interface is still similar to IE7. Expect the UI to change a little in future IE8 beta releases. You can download the toolkit from:  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm Since this is an [...]

Princeton Univeristy has recently released information on how to defeat disk encryption technology such as BitLocker, FileVault, TrueCrypt and others using what is called ‘Cold Boot Attacks’. The entire paper, ”Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys“ (PDF) is available online.  There are major concerns about the possibilty of data getting compromised for those who are responsible for protecting sensitive data. Fortunately [...]

A lot of IT departments are concerned with managing the grwoth of SharePoint resources on their network. To answer this concern, Microsoft has released a SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool, which will allow administrators to scan their network and discover SharePoint resources and data assests. The main purpose of the SharePoint Asset Inventory Tool is to [...]

If you have ever tossed around the idea of building your own computer game, you likely didn’t know where to begin. Dan Waters, Microsoft Developer Evangelist has now changed all that. Dan has created a series of free tutorials and sample source code so anyone can learn how to build their own 3D games from scratch. The tutorials include text [...]

I just posted a detailed Windows Vitsa Editions Features Table chart to the “Technical Guides” area on the blog. The chart takes 4 pages to compare the fetures in Windows Vista – Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. It also page 5 has the ‘channel’ information, or how you can buy them – Retail, [...]

Microsoft continues to update it’s tools and guidance around deploying it new products. Currently available in beta is the ‘Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator’ which is built to assess a client and server environments for possible upgrade to the lastest respective OS’s. There are other great resources consistently released for planning and evaluating ’upgradability’ to Vista and Office 2007. After using [...]

Microsoft has made available a once only Premier Support utility that will automatically diagram your Active Directory enviornment. The “Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer” reads the AD configuration and then automatically generates a Visio diagram. It diagrams both AD and Exchange (2000+) topologies. It includes domains, sites, servers, admin groups, routing groups and connectors. If you have the full version of Visio you [...]

Microsoft has a Solution Accelerator in the form of “Business Desktop Deployment (BDD)” 2007 which is a set of best practice guidance and toll set developed to help you deploy Windows to client desktops.  BDD 2007 contains a new MMC and a task sequencer that originates from System Center Configuration Manager 2007. BDD tools and [...]

Diagnose audio issues within your Office Communications Server 2007 environment using the Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment Validation Tool. A common issue in VoIP deployments is that administrators find out about problems with audio quality only after a user reports a problem. The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment Validation Tool simulates audio traffic so [...]