Michel Audet , a Premier Field Engineer from Microsoft Canada, tackles the very important issue of ‘alert storms’ by prioritizing certain workloads over others. He shows how this is done by using the ‘Distributed Applications’ feature in Microsoft Operations...

Summary: Because inquiring minds want to know, Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, provides us some insight into what it’s like to be a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Enjoy! Those who follow my blog posts...

Written by Neil Harrison , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer In a previous post , we looked at ways of importing our drivers into Microsoft System Center ConfigMgr so that we can use them for our various Operating System Deployments (OSD). We also touched...

I highly recommend giving this a read so you are ready for Windows Server 2012.  The dude had a hand in proofing the book and even has a sidebar on page 25 on performance monitoring.  Give it a read, rumor has it there may be some floating around...( read more ) ...read more

Tobias Hertkorn , one of our Microsoft Premier Field Engineers from Germany would like to share with you his tips on installing Windows 2012 Essentials, using a neat little trick and help from Hyper-V.   The trick Headless installation can be cumbersome...

Written by Rhoderick Milne , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. The venerable Personal Storage Table (PST) file has been present in Microsoft Exchange environments for many years.  In some ways its success has lead to its downfall.  With the...

Sachin Shah , a PFE from the eastern United States has an interesting walkthrough on migrating Exchange 2007 Managed Folders to Exchange 2010 'Retention Policies’. His blog post is very detailed and has numerous screenshots to explain the process. Check...

More than once, I have made the mistake of installing Windows 2008 R2 with a full GUI, when I really just needed the Windows Core flavor. Now the only supported way to fix that was a complete rebuild. Argh Worry not anymore! With Windows Server 2012 there...

Our colleagues in Korea are always at the leading edge of technology. My friend Ji Yong Seong from the PFE Korea team has created a wonderful blog post on a new feature in SQL 2012 SP1 CU2 which enables backup / restore of databases to and from Windows...

David Hail over at the PFE Virtualization Blog notes a correlation between BIOS power state settings (c-states) and Hyper-V performance during live migrations: How long does it take for you to do a live migration between hosts? I ask that of...

Written by Joe Lefort, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Microsoft Lync and OCS are fairly easy to set up if all you want to do is have internal IM/presence and conferencing. The moment you decide to open your SIP domain up to the outside world...

Summary : Bryan Zink , one of our esteemed Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineers based in the US, dives into the details of what you need to do to get ready for RAP as a Service for Active Directory in order to optimize your experience with this exciting...

Written by Chandrasekar Natarajan , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. In a Microsoft SharePoint 2007 site, when we take the mouse pointer on the top link bar we get the drop down menu for that particular site. The drop down that shows up after placing...

Written by Chris Tao, Premier Field Engineer. Windows 7 is an excellent desktop OS, but what if you’re a Microsoft SharePoint developer and want to set up a SharePoint development environment on a Windows 7 client machine? Luckily, it’s doable. Compared...

Pedro Azevedo Lopes shares his prescription for a better-looking SQL Server in his post About Maintenance Plans – grooming SQL Server : I admit I’m not a big fan of Maintenance Plans (the feature that goes by that name) mainly because of its “do or die...

Written by Milad Aslaner, Premier Field Engineer. From Germany. How do I actually add a driver to the DriverStore? Hey everyone, this is Milad from Germany. Today I wanted to quickly write about how you can add additional drivers to the DriverStore. All...

Krishna Golla has a grab-bag of SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn FAQs suitable for DBAs and Infrastructure types, covering everything from the hotfixes recommended for AlwaysOn, to whether Availability Groups can be defined outside a domain boundary. For example...

Not any more, they’re not! As long as you take Ashley McGlone’s advice in Freaky neat Active Directory site links with PowerShell : Today's post will help you clean up site link descriptions and give you some nice reporting capability. For a quick overview...

Summary:  Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (still) based in Germany, shares some customer questions around Windows Store app deployment. Recently I was onsite at one of our customers, to discuss Windows Modern Apps. The customer...

Well, I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And I like it when the boots are short and punchy! Jeff continues to tell you everything we know: This time, it’s what the goal state of any boot optimization process should look...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer You stop in at your local coffee shop that offers free Wi-Fi access. Sure enough you have someone hanging around with their laptop. They step away and leave their machine unattended; they...

Written by Chandrasekar Natarajan , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. When the User Profile service application is configured in Microsoft SharePoint 2010, by default NT Authority\Authenticated Users and All Authenticated Users are granted permissions...

Written by Matt Abraham, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. When working with customers, everyone who is new to Windows PowerShell finds it to be an amazing idea, but very daunting. Once you start using it, you will quickly pick up the syntax and how to...

Bruce Adamczak continues to dig into the Server Core installation mode of Windows Server 2012, with some bite-sized nuggets of goodness in his Core Survival Guide. The list of Core topics he’s planning to cover is extensive, but he’s blazing through them...

Awesome tip on how you can search for something (for example, searching for System Center docs within Technet ), with more precision than the usual site:technet.microsoft.com ! This feature allows to use Bing to directly search against the meta...