Here's (IMHO) an interesting webcast I've just found out about coming up next week covering a topic many people ask me about. The webcast is on 25th May starting at 11:30 PST (which should be, if my timezone calculator is correct 19:30 BST). In the webcast...

A few people emailed me asking where they could locate the download for the webcasts I recently gave, such as on Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Virtual Server 2005. I had to ask internally to find them - unfortunately, it's not as intuitive as I thought...

I was speaking to a customer yesterday who was telling me about a problem he was having with DHCP in his reasonably small office network (something like three servers). He had recently upgraded to Windows Server 2003 and implemented Active Directory....

Just a quick reminder that there are only three days left now to qualify for the "early bird discount" for TechEd Europe 2005 being held in Amsterdam from the 5th to 8th July, with 4th July as an addition pre-conference day packed full of content. For...

I blog about Virtual Server a lot (as you may have noticed), but I'm not alone. Megan Davis is a technical writer/author at Microsoft who especially focuses on Virtual Server & Virtual PC and is extremely active both internally within Microsoft answering...

I know how you all love horror stories, so for what it's worth, here's my sob story for the day. The good news (if there can be such a thing) is that I have a (hopefully) reliable backup of my data as of the end of last week. The bad news is that my Seagate...

Due to some really strange disk partitioning I have on my laptop, I ended up in a situation where one operating system had an incorrect system or boot drive letter. Of course, through the Logical Disk Administrator in computer management, you get an error...

Just gone live are a series of video recordings of live sessions on Technet UK. Come and choose from some of the best recordings of sessions for IT Pro's over the past few months from speakers including John Craddock, Andreas Luther, Jesper Johansson...

I've had a couple of people ask me about this over the past week, so rather than answer individually, here's the location for the latest version of the Group Policy Settings Reference spreadsheet. This spreadsheet lists Group Policy settings described...

Topical after yesterdays webcast on Windows Server 2003 SP1, here's a link to documentation on SCW (Security Configuration Wizard) which contains lots of information to assist you in deployment, extensibility and troubleshooting. Apart from the quick...

I'm simply staggered at the size of the microsoft.com site, so it's not surprising when you find a dead useful page or sub-site up there which you never knew of before. If anyone knows of a link to the stats for microsoft.com, I'd love to hear from you...

Following todays webcast on Windows Server 2003 SP1, here's the blogcast on Access Based Enueration I promised to record and post up. Apologies for the technical difficulties during the webcast - unfortunately I wasn't able to show the last demonstration...

This seemed a timely reminder with my webcast on Windows Server 2003 SP1 this afternoon. A small gotcha which caught me out last week when installing an ADS controller was that when ADS asks for the Windows Server 2003 media, you must use the RTM version...

MBSA 2.0 is the next version of the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, which utilizes the Windows Update Services infrastructure for security update scanning. You can sign up for the beta of MBSA by nominating yourself through visiting http://beta...

Some of you may have heard of DSI - the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Understanding DSI can be difficult, hence I thought I'd alert you to a really great new Flash-based demonstration of DSI which has just gone live on the DSI webpage. This demo examines...

At the end of last week, the long awaited R2 Site on microsoft.com was launched where you can now also register for the R2 Beta 2 Customer Preview Program . I'll be blogging a lot more about R2 in the coming weeks, but for now, have a browse through the...

Just a reminder that I'll be presenting a webcast about the changes to Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1. I'll be talking about the Windows Firewall, the Security Configuration Wizard (SCW), the Post Setup Security Updates (PSSU), Access Based Enumeration...

There are two events in one on 17th June at the Microsoft offices in Thames Valley Park, Reading under the banner of the "European MIIS User Group Meeting". One track is for MIIS, and the second track is for Identity Management. Both are free to attend...

If you're interested in using VSMT (Virtual Server Migration Toolkit) for migrating a physical machine into a virtual machine, there was a new KB article posted up a few days ago which gives you some general guidelines. Note that there is one error in...

Here's some wierdness for the day. My collegue Eileen blogged about the Outlook calendar ending on 31st August 4500 . As soon as she mentioned it, a light-bulb immediately lit up as I've done many years of Exchange developer stuff in the past ranging...

Here's an interesting tidbit which came up a few days ago internally at Microsoft which I've never seen documented anywhere. You learn new things every day.... I always thought that there wasn't a limit to the number of concurrent connections to a...

Another example of a really useful utility is VSPlus written by Jin Mao . VSPlus is essentially a thick client implementation of the web admin interface to Virtual Server 2005. As you may know, Virtual Server 2005 has a very comprehensive scripting capability...

The reasonably well known about danger of users running as local administrators being able to circumvent group policy settings has been excellently documented and explained by Mark Russinovich with an article on his blog . If you didn't know about this...

Back in January , I blogged about remembering to turn off Hyperthreading if you're running Virtual Server 2005 base release. Although well documented, many people contacting me about this. The good news is, if you're now running SP1 Beta, this no longer...

It's rare you see something in a beta release which makes such a dramatic difference to performance. This is one such instance. If you want to save yourself over 5 hours when installing a Virtual Machine under Virtual Server 2005, read on.... Last...