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To start the new year off right I have an article that is a must read if you IT administrator and using Microsoft products.  It’s in the January edition of Windows IT Pro magazine, in their “What Would Microsoft Support Do?” column.  You can read it from this link . Happy New Year folks!

If you are working in a support or engineering role with Microsoft platform products like the various Windows versions one of the biggest struggles you can have is understanding what to expect in code and on the network when Windows computers communicate to each other and other platforms.  Documentation...

Weeks ago I blogged about how single sign on and credential providers work and a scenario you can run into with them. One reader faced a slightly different scenario but was able to apply that topic toward getting his issue resolved. He had installed a credential provider for testing purposes. Unfortunately...

There will be times when you have to make big changes in your Active Directory. Sometimes those big changes mean deleting a lot of objects. I’ve personally needed to match customer environments by creating tens of thousands of AD objects just to have the beginnings of a matching environment. For my test...

I find myself doing blog posts on things that are not frequent enough for most experienced admins to be aware of since it wouldn’t come across their desk often. The reason for that is that in my role I receive the least common unresolved issues that occur from our customers. When I receive a few...

I was well and truly stumped a few months ago. I joke that once a year I am flat out wrong, and rarely do I have nothing to say on a subject. The 'once a year I may be flat out wrong' statement may be true simply because after 15 years in the IT industry I’ve learned to avoid letting broad definitive...

There’s been a lot of interest in the next version of our free migration tool and guide. Well, it’s now available. The link below can get you to the new Migration Guide, ADMT itself, and a link to the Password Export Server (PES) 3.1 in both x86 and x64 versions. http://www.microsoft.com...

Certificate Services in Server 2008 has had a lot of changes and enhancements. Some are obvious and documented well, and others are not obvious and not so well documented. Case in point is an additional aspect of Server 2008 certificate web enrollment. Some of you may recall some discussion regarding...

For folks who have been interested helping test Active Directory Migration Tool version 3.1 your day has come! The ADMT 3.1 Beta is here! This is a beta , not the finished product, so please test it out in your non-production environment and file bugs when and if you see them. Where do you...

I am very happy to announce that the Certificate Web Enrollment pages from Server 2008 are available as a free download at last. Just click on the links below to get the pages, then follow the steps in the KB article to install them on your Server 2003 certificate server in order to get Vista and Server...

Whenever we release a new product or suite of products we at Microsoft want to ease the adoption of it. For that reason we’ve released tools and scripts over the years to help our customers out. We’ve typically given these as free downloads from the internet, and (I know my opinion is skewed here) frankly...

I’ve had several blog posts about the improved security in Windows Vista and Server 2008, particularly around cryptography. Here’s one more, albeit a short one. This post is about how, generally, Encrypted File System (EFS) works using Advanced Encryption Standards (AES) encryption algorithms to...

Something that is becoming more prevalent over the past few years has been great investments into our security technologies for application oriented reasons. Impersonation, people, that’s what I’m talking about. If anyone ever asks you what the big deal with Kerberos authentication is you can some it...

A while back I did a blog post about some problems that were seen with people testing Windows Vista and then “rolling back” to Windows XP and some problems that could be seen when using the same computer object (also known as account ) in AD. If you didn’t get a chance to read it here’s the post . ...

Some of my colleagues recently had a real puzzler of an issue. When they are that good I want to share it out with everyone so that they don’t have to take the time themselves. The symptoms were when attempting to connect via terminal services from one Vista computer to another Vista computer the...

One of the enhancements in Windows Vista is the new certificate scripting interface called certenroll. In prior client operating system versions we had the xenroll code which would allow users to enroll for certificates via a web page served out by their Windows Server 2003 certificate authority. For...

Recently I posted saying that I’d give a preview of Longhorn Server Active Directory. Well, here it is. I will caution all who read this to take into account that we are still in a beta production phase, so some or all of these items could change (or perhaps not make it in the product if they don’t meet...