Eric N. Bu sh, a Software Development Lead in the Engineering Excellence group at Microsoft, has advice for the frazzled in the January Field Notes column. He presents tips that can help you organize your work—and your life. The most important?...

Windows PowerShell is, by default, quite secure.  However, by changing the Execution Policy , you can make Windows PowerShell much more vulnerable to malicious code.  In fact, the lowest level Execution Policy is Unrestricted, which permits...

Have regular expressions always seemed too arcane to delve into? If so, you’ll want to delve into the January column from The Microsoft Scripting Guys, which makes understanding regular expressions lots easier. The Guys poke at Microsoft Bob a bit...

Software asset management has become essential for every business—not only to manage a significant financial investment, but also because growing legal, security, and policy issues demand increasing attention. But the amount of software that businesses...

You know that USB key you picked up at the last trade show you went to? It just might be the backdoor to your entire network. The concept of island hopping has been around for years.  This is the technique in which a malicious user accesses a network...

Microsoft Exchange support was the number-one feature request of users of DPM 2006—and Microsoft listened. As Calvin Keaton describes in our January issue, the new version of Data Protection Manager introduces support for both Exchange Server 2003...

A company called DesktopStandard created a very useful tool, named GPOVault, for managing Group Policy Objects.  GPOVault is so useful, in fact, that it's fair to say that most any enterprise using Active Directory should have this tool. Well, Microsoft...

The January 2008 issue of TechNet Magazine is now available online at www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2008/01/ .  In this first issue of 2008, we take a close look at System Center and how it can simplify many aspects of your job. Whether...

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, distributed database that contains mappings of DNS d omain names to various types of data, such as IP addresses. Microsoft has included a DNS Server service in versions of Windows Server since Windows NT...

Virtualization is becoming an ever-hotter topic as companies look to consolidate resources and cut costs. Check out our January feature [ to see how System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 brings great new features and capabilities to your virtual...

What’s the biggest chore when migrating your users from their old Windows XP computers to ne w Windows Vista machines? Reinstalling your users' applications on their new PCs—and making sure those apps work! Now, a free tool from Microsoft...

We live in a world in which the only constant is change, and nothing rivals the changes in consumer technology over the past few years—or the changes in people’s relationship with technology. That means it’s time to take down the walls...

Tune in to the next episode of scripting WinRM—the intriguing new technology that promises to make remote management of your computers much easier. As Part 2 proves, working with the raw XML data returned by WinRM is not nearly as daunting as you...

What do you do when your machine can't communicate with other machines, everyone else on the network seems to be doing fine, and you j ust don't know what’s going on. Where would you look first? Christopher Stoneff takes you through the steps that...

Virtualization is an important technology that most every infrastructure should be taking advantage of. It reduces hardware dependence by essentially creating a hardware abstraction layer. But while the deployment of virtual systems doesn't have to be...

Happy New Year everyone! For something a little different to ease you back into the daily grind, I wanted to draw your attention to the recent appearance of one of our authors, Dave Ohara, on TechNet Radio . Dave talks with Eric Ostrowski about defining...

Getting ready to run Exchange on Windows Server 2008 ? The Microsoft Exchange Development team has been preparing for this for some time now, and Paul Bowden shares some advice and lessons they've learned to help you get ready. You’ll also find...