Care of our friends over at Run As Radio , Jeff Stokes talks with Richard Campbell about Xperf, which is part of a suite of tools called the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit (WPT). WPT digs into Windows where PerfMon leaves off by using Event Tracing...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE), one of our primarily roles is to perform risk assessments on client IT environments. Of course, we always have very well defined scope as in which...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer For my follow up article to How to use Windows 7 to lock down removable media and keep your computer safe , I would like to discuss another feature within Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate...

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...

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...

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...

Written by Mark Farrugia, a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada. I was once told that the best system administrators are usually the laziest people. I didn’t take that statement seriously until I gave it some thought and started taking...

Written by Neil Harrison , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Recently, I was working with a customer and one of the questions they asked was how to create a new report in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr 2007) based on a combination...

Care of our friends over at Run As Radio , Clint Huffman talks to Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes about Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) 2.0 ,  a tool that saves you time by automating the analysis of Windows performance monitor (perfmon) logs...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer . Most computer end-users thinks that if they’re running antivirus software then their safe from all the malicious users out on the internet. People feel their antivirus software is the...

Written by Kip Ng, Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. O ne of the key factors for successful operations is monitoring. The most common questions I get when helping customers plan their monitoring needs are: "How do I know what to monitor...

Written by Neil Harrison, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Many IT departments are faced with the reality of having to manage multiple images whether it be for desktops or servers. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could add your hardware to a collection...

Written by Cheng Pei Koay, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Microsoft Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) has been available since September 2010 and this new release helps IT Professionals to achieve new levels of reliability with greater flexibility...

Written by Neil Harrison , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. T he other day, a customer asked me for some information on how to get started with capturing user state within System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) 2007 as they have an upcoming...

Written by Dan Erelis , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. As a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft, I find myself in many different customer environments in just about every major industry sector in Canada. Although every customer is different, the same...

Written by Dan Erelis , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. W ith Exchange 2010 comes the new Client access layer, a true middle tier approach in this version of Exchange. No longer do your clients connect to the backend mailbox server but typically through...

Written by Samuel Drey , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer.   I n this article, I’ll provide a quick reference guide and an Excel-based tool that allows you to build monitoring consoles using HTML without being a scripting star.  I call it the...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Recently I was asked an interesting question from one of my customers: “What is Microsoft’s recommended practice around using Logon Scripts versus using Group Policy ?” To my knowledge, Microsoft...

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...

Summary: Tamer Maher El-Sharkawy , a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer , catches up with Lisa Guthrie (Microsoft Technology Architect and Program Manager) to discuss the exciting capabilities of Microsoft’s new SharePoint RAP as a Service...

Veteran Lync Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Frank White shares his top 5 most common Lync 2013 (and Lync 2010) performance and configuration issues that he’s run into during his many engagements with numerous customers, along with sound...

Josh Gavant is a Senior PFE in the Central US PFE team. has recently shared some awesome details on how SharePoint uses Windows Server AppFabric caching services to achieve better performance and scalability. In Part 1 of the series Josh starts by explaining...

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...

Doug Deitterick has put together a rundown on the various scenarios for which you can use LyncServerUpdateInstaller.exe to install Lync server updates : Just like previous versions of OCS/Lync, there are two methods to update the servers with OCS/Lync...

Summary:  Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, walks us through a real-life scenario of how he managed to reduce Windows client boot times by about 100 seconds with a few simple tweaks.  Enjoy! As a Premier Field...