He was a skeptic, but Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes has determined that Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) , a component of the Windows Performance Toolkit (downloadable here ), offers a level of depth and insight not currently available...

Summary : This article was contributed by Amber Goins , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) SP1 introduced important and often-requested new Anti-Tampering features for the Antimalware service, and Amber...

Summary: Sam Hassani , Microsoft Certified Master (SharePoint 2010) and Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in the UK provides us with an introduction of SharePoint 2013 Apps, explains why there is a need for Apps in SharePoint, and then demonstrates...

This article has been contributed by Ryan Doon , a PFE working with Microsoft Canada. In this post, he talks about why storing PST files on a file server will lead to performance issues, and presents some options to proactively avoid those issues. ...

Written by Samuel Drey, a Premier Field Engineer based in Canada. 1. An introduction to the RBAC permissions model Exchange 2010 introduces a brand new permissions model named “RBAC”, meaning Role Based Access Control. There’s...

Article written by Bhumit Shah, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft India, who specializes in tuning Windows Server performance. Common questions I hear from my customers are: “ My desktops and laptops are taking long time to boot, can we...

This article was contributed by Ryan Doon , a PFE working at Microsoft Canada. Clustering in Windows 2008 R2 has been greatly simplified, and one of those areas of simplification includes choosing which quorum model to use. Based on the cluster...

Written by Frank Pawetzki, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer The Issue: This happened to me today on my Windows 7 machine: the installation of Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection ( Release Candidate ) failed with error code 0x80070643 . The...

You're using Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 (a.k.a. TMG 2010) as a proxy server and want users to be prompted for credentials in order to access the Internet, but discover the default behavior is to have the browser display a "Denied Access...

How long do your enterprise desktops take to boot up to a usable state? 2 minutes? 3? 5? 10? Does this impact business productivity? Has your organization had a WDRAP (if not, then why not)? Is it all about boot times and logon times, or does it go beyond...

This post was contributed by Rhoderick Milne , everyone’s favourite Canadian-Scottish Premier Field Engineer. Microsoft Exchange Server is the leading messaging platform in the world today, and can be found in SMBs, large enterprises and also behind cloud...

Summary: Craig Forster , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, runs us through how he deals with a performance issues for a file server that has plenty of RAM but, for some reason, no available memory. Hi, this is Craig Forster here. I’m...

Monsieur Holman brings word of a Base OS MP Update . Lets talk for a minute about Windows Server 2012.  This new server OS has hit RTM already.  However – initially this OS version was only going to be supported as an agent monitored system...

Lalita Jat is a Premier Field Engineer from India who works on Exchange Server technologies. In this post she talks about Site Mailboxes, an exciting new collaboration feature. This is the first post in a two part series in which we will discuss...

Windows 8 replaces the older Virtual PC technology with Hyper-V , for a full-featured virtual machine manager, and this allows for some really interesting new networking scenarios. Over at AskPFEPlat , Mike Leary posted a quick guide to setting up...

Summary: Still running Windows Server 2003? Besides making the well-advised recommendation of moving to Windows Server 2012, Frank Plawetzki , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, runs us through how to monitor servers remotely...

In a follow-up to his popular post on How To Create Video Games Using PowerShell , Jeff Adkin, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada, gets back to business and shows us how to use PowerShell to graphically represent information gathered over...

Lalita Jat is a Premier Field Engineer from India who works on Exchange Server technologies. In this post she talks about Site Mailboxes, an exciting new collaboration feature. This is the concluding post in the series on Site Mailboxes in Exchange 2013...

If you are attending this year’s Microsoft Management Summit ( MMS 2013 ), you can’t miss these sessions.  Created by industry experts from Microsoft Services Premier Field Engineering, these sessions promise to deliver some of the best notes from...

Perf PFE Jeff Stokes provides some simple steps that should produce a good boot trace for a Windows 7 machine. You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from.  A good trace.  One that you know other people will be able to decipher...

Summary: Jaroslav Zikmund, one of our Czech Republic-based Microsoft Premier Field Engineers who focuses on Messaging, provides us with some insights and details on enhancements in Exchange 2013 for protecting email via Active Directory Rights Management...

A Very Happy New Year 2013 from the Microsoft Premier Field Engineering team! Back to work now! Nilesh Patel , our PFE in the US East region, has created some very detailed guides on deploying PKI solutions: In the first article , he walks us through...

Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, gives Login scripts a lashing and encourages us to move on to using Group Policy Preferences. Enjoy! When I’m delivering Microsoft Premier Support Workshops like...

Written by Ryan Doon , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Lately there is a question that I always seem to receive and it always starts with “What is the Microsoft Best Practice when it comes to ___________”. That blank represents a wide range of questions...

Written by Joe Lefort, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Better late than never. I finally got a bit of free time to try to explain part two of the ICE NAT and media stuff I began a while back – that being STUN and TURN. First off, not all NATs...