Written by Gerald Ramich , Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. This article is for folks who are trying to troubleshoot Microsoft Outlook Connectivity issues to Exchange servers. I’ll look at a wide number of troubleshooting items, including...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. In System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (ConfigMgr), you can install the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 and it has a task sequence template that you can use to automate the OS...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Premier Field Engineer. Most companies today have some form of monitoring mechanism implemented to monitor different components of their IT system. There are various monitoring solutions out there. Some are more sophisticated...

Written by boB Taylor , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Many Microsoft SQL Server DBAs automate as many of their day to day processes as possible, freeing them to attend to higher impact activities. To do so, many DBAs leveraged two undocumented...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. O ne of the most annoying things when we have a problem with OSD (Operating System Deployment) Task Sequences in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 ( ConfigMgr ) is that you...

Written by Gerald Ramich , Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. This article is for folks who are trying to troubleshoot Outlook Connectivity issues. In my experience, many people confuse profile creation with connectivity to the server, so in this...

Written by Neil Harrison , Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Have you ever wondered how to create your own dashboard views based off of System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 R2 data but weren't quite sure how? It turns out that there is a Visio...

Written by Cheng Pei Koay, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. A Windows Server 2008 failover cluster is known to provide high availability for various types of back-end applications and services (note that failover clustering is designed for stateful applications...

Written by Kip Ng , Principal Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Most companies that I come across run System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) 2007 mixed mode especially when they do not have any Internet-based clients. Of course, there are some...

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...

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...

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 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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...