Today I learned about a resource available for administrators of many of Microsoft's most popular products. For those who are tasked with day-to-day management of such products as Active Directory or Exchange, it's sometimes difficult to know what needs...

As I start this blog entry, it's been nearly 8 months since I created my last self-study guide. For those of you following this blog, I apologize for the long gap. All I can say is that the requirements of work and life, coupled with a mountain of good...

I have received numerous requests for a self-study guide focused on Lync, so in this post I've decided to turn to that technology (and since preview information on Lync 2013 is also coming out, I'll include a bit of that at the end as well). Before I...

Though it's taken a while for me to get to it, as promised I am focusing this post on self-study material for Project 2010. For those of you who might be wondering what Project 2010 is all about, the following brief definition may be useful. "Select...

I had not initially planned on this being my next self-study guide, but a request from my someone on my team recently has led me to this topic. With so much work going on for customers to get off Windows XP due to the coming "end of support" date for...

As promised, now that I've finished producing the 7-part series on self-study items for the System Center 2012 suite of products, I am circling back and consolidating these separate parts into a single study guide. This post is for those who prefer to...

Finally, after much time and many installments, we finally come to the last two components that make up System Center 2012! In this post, I'll cover Unified Installer and Virtual Machine Manager. As usual, I will focus on the self-study material that...

In this post, we're turning to two more components of System Center 2012, Orchestrator and Service Manager. For those of you who need a brief summary of these System Center components, I've provided brief definitions below: Orchestrator - "Orchestrator...

In part 5 of this series, we finally arrive at Operations Manager. Operations Manager got its start under the name Microsoft Operations Manager or MOM, after which it evolved to be known as System Center Operations Manager. Now, with System Center 2012...

In part 4 of this series, I turn to Data Protection Manager and I revisit Endpoint Protection. For those of you who might have seen earlier one of my earlier study guides, you will see that I have already put out a study guide for Forefront Endpoint Protection...

With part-3 of this series, I finally turn to one of the most important products of the System Center suite. This is System Center Configuration Manger, or SCCM. SCCM has been around since the 90s in one form or another (remember Systems Management Server...

In part one of this series, I began by listing some study material for System Center 2012 in general. Beginning with this post, I'll begin identifying training available for each of the specific components that make up System Center 2012. In this post...

I have received multiple requests for a study guide related to the newest versions of System Center Configuration Manager and/or System Center Operations Manager. After doing a bit of research, I learned that it's no longer appropriate to think of these...

This study guide is for those who wish to become familiar with Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) and System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP). As always, these resources are available online and free of charge. Forefront Endpoint Protection...

This time, I've put together a list of resources for those interested in Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language. While this training guide focuses primarily on Windows PowerShell 2.0, I have provided a brief list of PowerShell v3 resources at the end...

Recently, I started creating some self-study guides to help my customers who are interested in learning different technologies. It was suggested that I put these guides on my blog for easier access. Today's entry is on SharePoint 2010, but check back...

Several months ago, one of my customers came to me with a concern. It seems that certain of his users were receiving their Group Policies correctly while another group was only receiving a subset of the policies. He wasn't sure why this would be. The...

So now that we've investigated the structure of a GPO and looked at how clients know which GPOs to apply, it's time to look at how they apply them. For a client to know which GPOs are assigned to it, and in which order it should apply them, the client...

In the previous post, I talked about the structure of a GPO. Now, I'll turn to the question of what a client does in order to apply the settings that we've configured in our GPOs. The processing of GPOs is initiated from the client side rather than being...

As a Windows administrator, you almost certainly have used Group Policies to control the settings deployed to the clients of your Active Directory infrastructure. But with Group Policies getting such heavy use, not as many administrators fully understand...

In my earlier post, I showed how to add an attribute to the Partial Attribute Set in Active Directory. But how can you tell which attributes are already part of the Partial Attribute Set in the first place? You can certainly check each one manually, but...

Recently, while working with a customer who was trying to understand why a Global Catalog query might be taking longer than expected, the question of the Partial Attribute Set came up. Because not everyone understood this concept, I thought I'd write...