Update: 4th Nov - See updated and improved script here As part of my backup for Exchange I was playing with at the weekend, I ended up writing a pretty simple script to run as a scheduled task. Although my Exchange environment is simple as well, the...

I was speaking to a customer this morning about Windows management generally and this happened to come up in conversation. There are many ways to manage servers remotely in Windows, but the customer was asking if there was a way to avoid his nightmare...

So right now, I'm somewhat in a quandry. "Why John", I hear you ask. "Well readers", I respond: At TechEd Europe this year, I'm going to present a couple of sessions. One will be around the contents of the Solution Accelerator for Consolidating and Migrating...

This one crops up frequently on the discussion groups internally at Microsoft but I'd never seen it until a couple of days ago. On some hardware, Virtual guest machines have a very annoying habit of causing the built-in speaker on the host beeping...

I blogged a week or so ago about issues when running Windows Server 2003 SP1 under Virtual Server 2005 . Two days after that, there was a knowledgebase article published (now why didn't that appear in my RSS feed off the support web site ?). The KB article...

Yesterday, I blogged about turning off the thumbnail on the Virtual Server admin interface for a couple of reasons, one being performance or load time of the admin interface. I found it in the admin guide, in the section relating to "Improving Virtual...

If you're interested more in the future of Virtualisation (Virtualization if you're from the other side of the Atlantic from me), or where Microsoft is heading in terms of the broad architecture of the Windows "Hypervisor" check out this link to a publicly...

Although I don't myself use Differencing Disks a great deal for my test environments (mainly as I spent a while building set of about eight finely tuned VMs serving my needs for just about every demonstration), they are a great feature of Virtual Server...

Continuing the theme of digital imagery and photography , I happened to notice an email go through on an internal discussion group today which had something like 4MB of attachments in the form of photos. As you can probably imaging, the sender was somewhat...

I was thinking about this also at the weekend (I really should get out more) about how to reliably backup my Exchange 2003 SP1 Virtual Machine running at home. Now it only supports five users and a few resource mailboxes, but now that my wife's email...

As I blogged about a little while ago, the Microsoft RAW Image Thumbmailer and Viewer application was released last week. You can download it from here . It doesn't install directly under Windows 2003 server as on my laptop, but it will soon :-) Officially...

You would think that this would be something fairly simple to do.... Well, think again, unless you know. In the scenario I was trying to get working, there are essentially three servers involved - a domain controller running Windows Server 2003, a single...

This is a collection of technical papers designed to help organisations understand identity and access management issues and related solutions that can be achieved with Microsoft technologies in heterogeneous IT environments. Version 1.2 of these documents...

OK, so Kevin beat me to this one. I've been busy in meetings is my excuse. Microsoft Update is now live. I've been using this for a while now and it is fantastic. You can patch not just your base OS (as in Windows Update), but Office (as in Office Update...

You may have missed TechEd last week in the US. I did due presenting at the Technical Roadshow, but something rather significant caught my eye just now from an internal email, which I wasn't aware of before. Gordon Mangione in his security keynote mentioned...

If you're a fan of Digital Photography, read on. There was an interesting press release yesterday (which I can't unfortunately find on the Presspass site) about how Microsoft is going to be natively supporting the commonly used RAW file format in Digital...

Enhancing the configuration of my ISA server at 3AM this morning (couldn't sleep), I was trying to resolve an issue that's been nagging me for days now. I wanted to delete a couple of old network Web Listeners I had previously created for testing some...

The latest version of the Server Performance Advisor was released at the end of last week for download here . SPA helps you diagnose the root causes of performance problems in a Windows Server 2003 deployment by collecting performance data and generating...

Virtualisation for migration and consolidation isn't always the best answer. I'm not saying it isn't appropriate always, but there are alternatives. One great example which I was asked by a customer last week about was for migrating and consolidating...

The Branch Office Infrastructure Solution, or BOIS (which is far too easy to mis-type if you've worked in computing for a lot of years - think about it) has been released. The BOIS guidance and tools are designed and structured to address the needs of...

This weekend, I was playing around yet more with my home infrastructure, "dogfooding", so to speak. One of the things I wanted to get running was Windows Sharepoint Services SP1 (the baby brother of Sharepoint Portal Server). However, I've pretty much...

A frequent question by many. The answer is yes in both directions, with one caveat. The .vhd files can easily be moved between the two environments, but before you do, I would recommend that you uninstall the VMAdditions before moving the file across...

As for the capability (now expired) to stop Windows XP SP2 being delivered through Microsoft Update, now a similar toolkit is available for download from Microsoft.com to block SP1 for Windows Server 2003. It is critically important to realise that the...

For those of you who are available on Monday (27th June), this is a reminder that there is an all-day Technet event running at Cavendish Conference Centre in London about how you can deploy, manage, migrate-to, secure and extend the value of your directory...

I know from the presentations, customer meetings and emails I get, many of you are running NT4 server as a guest under Virtual Server 2005. While NT4 itself as a guest is supported, remember that this doesn't increase the supportability of the NT4 OS...