Here's an interesting post from Mark Wilson which he's allowed me to reproduce here. Often Exchange and messaging problems are not the fault of the application, but often an underlying issue further down the stack. DNS is often the culprit too, so Mark...

Nathan has put together a comprehensive and technical article explaining how the Windows Time service works and how the time on desktop machines are synchronised with the server. There are some useful best practices that you need to consider, tips as...

Microsoft Operations Manager A Solution for the SME Managed Service Provider Background The expansion of broadband availability in the UK is having a significant impact on the complexity and penetration of IT systems and technology in the...

Adrian Beasley sent me this article the other day explaining how he managed to connect his Windows mobile 6 phone to connect to Exchange Server 2007. It's certainly worth a read if you're struggling to get connectied and are running out of ideas.....

Stephen works with a lot of customers who ask him about SharePoint, and the sort of questions that they should ask candidates at interviews in order to demonstrate what they know about the product and their strengths in particular areas. He's put together...

SharePoint has been a phenominal success as a product for Microsoft. It has successfully penetrated almost every industry as collaboration & portal platform. SharePoint's role in the enrichment of secondary education has been particularly strong....

This article was written by Mark Wilson . One of the joys of virtualisation is the flexibility afforded by the ability to copy virtual machine files around the network for backup purposes or just to create a new machine (especially with Microsoft's...

Mark Wilson has written an interesting and comprehensive article on his blog which he's kindly given me permission to reproduce here. It not only talks about migrating the content and configuration from one WSUS server to another, but also includes a...

Blake has compiled an amazing collection of all of the support resources, newsgroups, how to articles, team blogs and tips and published it here ... This must have taken an amazing amount of time to review and research and is just about the most comprehensive...

Although I understand what Powershell is I didn't understand really get it until I worked with James on our last TechNet road shows. I did know that there were special extensions and support for it in SQL Server 2008, so I suggested to our good friend...

This week, Brian has written about how to connect Smartphones to the Exchange server when the server has a digital certificate provided by a private authority. If you have a phone that has been locked by the provider, then you can't install any software...

In this article, Dan outlines vital considerations when planning and designing an Active Directory implementation. Dan covers the process end to end - from initial business decisions such as why you are undertaking the implementation, to high level...

Rodney Buike has written a detailed article about the importance of Physical security. I often talk about this topic myself as it's often depricated at the expense of the more technical aspects of security such as wireless, cryptography, biometrics et...

Thanks again to Jennifer Stirrup from Aspective (A Vodafone company) for writing up how she gets data into SQL Server using its in built Integration Services (SSIS) from an AS400 in this useful guide . This takes me back to my first ever BI project which...

Mark has written an article which talks about some of the challenges that can be encountered by sloppy Exchange design after he carried out an Exchange health check for a customer. He talks about problems with the original implementation which could have...

Matthew has written a very comprehensive article about all the things that you need to think about and all of the questions that you need to ask before embarking on your messaging upgrade or migration. He covers all the different parts of the planning...

Mark did some work for a local authority in the UK when they were going through their technology refresh recently. His article briefly summarises what would normally be a multi page case study of how a customer brought technology to bear in order to reduce...

Mark has done some excellent investigation into deploying Windows XP using ADS (Automated Deployment Services). ADS is intended, from a support perspective at least, to deploy server images. As such, deploying client operating systems through ADS is not...

Mark has written a good article about email archiving and different options that you can use to achieve your goals. Its a constantly recurring question in our architecture discussions about messaging systems, and so this article sets all of the options...

In this article, Kim talks about the challenges he faced implementing Blackberry in his organisation. I asked him whether he'd done a bakeoff with the Smartphone and he told me: About the smartphones...no we didn't do a bake off. BB came in as it does...

Adrian has written a short article enumerating many of the security threats that can be mitigated using asymmetric encryption. Click here to read Adrian's overview of the benefits of PKI As Adrian goes on to explain, Public Key Infrastructure technologies...

Mark is a new contributor to the Industry Insiders forum, and has started his contribution with a really good article on how to use an LDAP query find the values you require, and then to create a mailbox quota report for mailboxes on his Exchange cluster...

Dennis has written an excellent article on Office Communications Server 2007 which he's given me permission to reproduce here. He brings in vision, VOIP, news articles and our own press release on Unified Communications. If you're unfamiliar with how...

Finding stuff about one Microsoft technology isn’t too hard it’s when you try and use two things get a little harder at Adrian J. Beasley found out when he was looking for nothing in particular; the use of SQL Server nulls in a Powershell script. ...

This article, from Jamie Thomson, is a very clear and concise introduction into customised SSIS package logging, using Event Handlers. Jamie takes you through the steps involved and provides an example you can download. All the supporting SQL is provided...