This article says "only 6.7 percent of owners recovered their stolen handheld computers, laptops or smart phones, according to a 2004 study by Brigadoon Software, which makes programs that help track and recover stolen devices. FBI statistics indicate that only 3 percent of stolen laptops are recovered.

If a gadget is lost, or stolen and then discarded, services exist to help find the owner should a good Samaritan come upon it and seek to return it. Companies like StuffBak, Trackitback and SmartProtec register the electronic items and tag them with labels and serial numbers to help people return them and to deter thieves, who might think that indelibly labeled items will be hard to resell. These services vary in the reward offered and the costs to the owner. "

This article says " In a survey of 300 American adults published Thursday, security company Symantec found that 73 percent of smart phones users knew about viruses and other attacks that target the devices, which marry PC-like features such as e-mail and Internet access to a mobile handset. In addition, more than 70 percent of respondents expressed some concern over the possibility of hackers stealing or corrupting confidential information stored on their smart phones.

Is your IT organization taking this into account in the overall IT risk assessment?

Do you manage these devices with a full understanding of the value of the device, the attractiveness of these items to thieves (easily fenced)? Do you know and control what goes on them? If one of your execs pulls a Paris Hilton - do you know the potential damage to your company?

The SMS 2003 Device Management Feature Pack allows SMS 2003 to manage mobile devices running Windows CE (3.0 or later) and Windows Mobile software for Pocket PCs (2002 or later).

Those questioned in the survey, he said, listed retaining customers and streamlining operations as their top objectives, and technology as the means to achieve them.

According to the survey, small-business owners spend an average of 27 percent of their time outside the office. That leads them to buy equipment like laptops and BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices that give them the freedom to roam. In the survey, 32 percent considered notebook computers a critical part of their business, and 36 percent ranked them as their highest priority in technology spending. "

To me, it seems clear that both the small business IT Pro and MidMarket IT Pro need technical information on mobile devices as much as, if not more than, desktop OS.

They can find some info in the DDC about deplying desktops without the aid of enterprise tools like SMS. But where is the content on deploying/securing/managing the mobile device?

We have to work on that.

In the meantime here is the RSS feed for the small business site on microsoft.com

There is info around, like in the new TechNet Magazine, that applies to smaller IT shops, like this article on using NTBackup.

According to this story, qualifications include:

• ability to keep a cool head in crisis
• ability to work well with others in teams
• know-how in :
  • Microsoft .Net Web-services framework
  • SQL database systems 
  • computer languages such as C and Perl.

Our own Microsoft IT organization adds a few more attributes:

• trustworthiness
• leadership/strategic thinking skills
• training and certification
• background in
  • network engineering
  • software testing
  • help desk technician
• love of learning and quick-study abilities

What else should be on the list?

What makes a good Technical blog post?

Here are some things I'm thinking I should include on every blog post (if possible) to help you find the info you need:

1. links to specific bits of content on TechNet on the topic
2. links to community blogs on the topic (blog finder)
3. links to RSS feed on KB articles on the topic (KB finder)
4. links to events, webcasts, on the topic (events and webcasts finder)
5. links to RSS feeds that will let you know about upcoming technical Chats (chat finder)
6. links to columns on the topic (TechNet column finder)
7. links to TechNet Radio, blogcasts and other media presos (TN radio finder)
8. links to online training and virtual labs

What else?

Pictures. Words. 1:1000.

Check out Michael's blogcast on adding some scripts to the Windows Server Reskit tools to imporve your network security. If you're not on Windows Server 2003 SP1 - which includes the RQS Agent in Add/Remove Programs - there's a more recent version of the tools on the Download Center here than was featured in the Reskit (install the Resource Kit Tools version first), and an ISA 2004 set of additional utilities here.

The Secguide blog has a ton of great security content links.

These sites, in addition to the resources on MSM, contain guidance and tools to help you improve your enterprise IT management:

Service Monitoring and Control
This Solution Accelerator provides the knowledge, tools, and services to monitor services running on the Microsoft platform using MOM.

Platform Manageability Operations Assessment

Part of the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) approach, the Operations Assessment enables an operations staff to accelerate the deployment of their management solution

Security Patch Management
This Solution Accelerator provides prescriptive guidance for efficiently deploying security patches within organizations using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) or Software Update Services (SUS).

Management Architecture Guide
This document provides guidance on designing architecture for Microsoft management technologies and products and offers both conceptual information and best practices required for successfully designing and implementing management architecture.

Account Management for Windows Server 2003
This integrated Solution Accelerator provides guidance for streamlining user account administration and office location changes.

Windows Server Deployment
This Solution Accelerator provides guidance for efficient deployment of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and Microsoft SMS.

Business Desktop Deployment
This Solution Accelerator provides guidance for efficient deployment of Microsoft Windows XP Professional, as well as Microsoft Office XP Professional or Office Professional Edition 2003.

MidMarket IT (I hereby dub this group with the MIT TLA) will be happy to hear that Dell is offering Microsoft Operation Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition for as little as $50 per server. Available directly from Dell, MOM for Dell PowerEdge brings simplified, consolidated monitoring capabilities to customers that have been deterred by the price or complexity of other systems-management solutions, said Linda York, VP of global alliances in Dell's Product Group, in a statement.

Announced Day 2 of MMS, System Center Reporting Manager 2005 consolidates your change and configuration information from SMS 2003 and your event and performance information from MOM 2005 to give you easy access to the reports you need to manage your enterprise.

If you are already using both SMS 2003 and MOM 2005, you can further benefit from the System Center Reporting Manager 2005 "better together" reports to understand how changes in your environment affect your system and service availability. System Center Reporting Manager 2005 can help you run reports that:

• Locate underutilized servers and target them for elimination by comparing performance data in a server platform consolidation scenario.
• Support load balancing decisions by providing information on server performance across specific workloads and identifying any excess capacity.
• Determine if hardware changes or software updates are responsible for causing an increased volume of server alerts.
• Compare server performance statistics over time in the context of specific software changes.
  

Even if you use only one of our management tools, SMS 2003 or MOM 2005, System Center Reporting Manager 2005 can deliver an enhanced and simplified query and report authoring experience.
 
TechNet Webcast: Introduction to System Center Reporting Manager 2005 (Level 200)

Have you seen the Windows Server System Reference Architecture content?
Windows Server System Reference Architecture empowers systems integrators and IT professionals with validated architectural guidance that establishes the Microsoft platform as the most trustworthy platform for business computing. The reference architecture enables best practice-based design of an IT infrastructure, which drives standardization across the platform to ensure a consistent approach to the definition of IT services.

Take a look at how they have laid out their documentation with a map that shows you how all the content pieces relate: ops guides, build guides, planning guides, blue prints.

Want to see more content presented this way on TechNet? Let us know by leaving comments on this post.

Grab all the updated WSSRA content in the download center.

And speaking of the future of TechNet - Encarta is piloting a wiki-style approach to content update management - let the readers help out. Why would this NOT work for IT Pro information on Technet??

Let us know.

Notification Workflow is a SQL Server Notification Services application that can be used as an add-on to extend MOM 2005. Notification Workflow allows the user to subscribe to application or service alerts. Whenever a match occurs for the alert for which the user has subscribed, the notification is sent in the form of an e-mail. The notifications are sent to the user based on schedule, schedule override, and extended MOM alert properties that the user provides when subscribing. These alert properties include computer name, alert source, alert severity, device, Management Pack name, computer group name, and alert description. This solution accelerator was recetnly updated.

The Technology Advancement Program is available to customers who purchased the 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 with x64 hardware and would now like to exchange their software for the x64 version of Windows instead.To participate in this program, you must have both of the following:

• Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition or Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition
• A server with an x64 processor (for example, AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel 64-Bit Xeon, Intel Pentium with EM64T)

In order to be eligible for the Technology Advancement Program, your products must have been acquired between March 31, 2003 and June 30, 2005.
Orders for the Technology Advancement Program must be placed by July 31, 2005.

TechNet Magazine on the web - 'nuff said. Issue #1 is chock full of security content goodness.

The capacity planning tool formerly known as Indy now has a product name and release schedule. Announced at MMS during the opening keynote, System Center Capacity Manager 2006 Express Edition  was developed by Microsoft Research. IT Pros can use it to model a server deployment based on service-based forecasts, such as the number of offices, users and network linkspeeds. A simulation of user workload can be run to determine system capacity, letting users experiment with different hardware, software configurations and user behavior before deploying anything on a live network.

But here is the kicker - the data sheet says that the tool will recommend a topology using pre-defined knowledge and dynamic performance modeling. This knowledge is packaged with the tool and can be updated via the hardware vendor with server-specific metrics.

This is best practice bootstrapping in the box. In addition to saving tons of money and time, this will go a long ways to easing SOX-type governance issues for IT Pros. Anytime you can show that you are modeling and testing things beforehand, and following industry best practices, you are showing good IT governance. 

Customers who have already deployed can do "what-ifs" on their current topology, or planned changes, to optimize their environment. Think of it this way - this will have about the same impact on IT that spreadsheets did on finance.

Microsoft CIO Ron Markezich was the keynote speaker this morning at MMS. He talked to the crowd of IT Management gurus about the challenges and solutions in use at Microsoft. IT Ops Manger Calvin Keaton did one of the demos, showing end user recovery using Data Protection Manager beta. Microsoft IT has been running beta versions of DPM for almost a year, getting 24 hour turnaround on about 150 restore requests per month. Backing up ~130 WW branch offices was taking about 11% of all his backup data costs, and about 20% of his total budget, including all the DLT gear. Moving to DPM means that he can save an estimated US $2.8M over the next two years. And he plans to do it with just 14 DPM servers. All the tapes and DLT gear? History.

To enable end user recovery (EUR) of their deleted files you must enable the end-user recovery feature on the DPM server and install the DPM shadow copy client on the client computers. To enable the end-user recovery feature, a member of the Schema Admins group on the domain must configure Active Directory.

DPM Beta supports end-user recovery on computers running Windows XP with SP2. For more information about the shadow copy client software for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 895536.

The shadow copy client software is available for download from the Microsoft Beta Web site.

For more information on end-user recovery, see DPM Help. For detailed instructions, see the "Configuring Data Protection Manager" chapter in the DPM Planning and Deployment Guide.

Now, you might be thinking this EUR capability would be a big selling point to the mid-market IT Pro - but DPM (1.0 anyway) is definately enterprise-level. The requirements docs state "Data Protection Manager (DPM) is designed to run on a dedicated,single-purpose server. The server must not be a domain controller or application server, and must not double as the host for the DPM MOM Management Pack. The DPM server must have at least two disks installed: one that is dedicated to the system and DPM installation files, and one that is dedicated to the storage pool. The DPM server must be running Windows Server 2003 (Standard r Enterprise Edition) with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later installed." Not likely that many SMB IT Pros are going to get a stand-alone server for this. Particularly if they can't double-dip and co-host it on a second DC, for example.

Watch an animated demo.

Read the FAQ

Search the newsgroups to see what your colleagues are saying

Join the DPM Community

Virtual Server SP1 Beta is out. Barnaby has the sign-up instructions here.
Yesterday Steveb told the MMS crowd that going forward VS will support other OS, and demo’d RedHat running in a VS. You will be able to manage your VS environment with MOM, including support for tasks across all of them. Consider how useful it would be for example to make all your VS instances “save current state and shutdown” with the push of one button?
RSS Feed for VS KBs

More stuff here in yesterday's post.

Safe bet - as time goes on the chinese walls between IT Pros and devs will continue to break down. MONAD is the next-gen WSH, and IT Admins will be using it, a lot. Example, in the keynote today there was a demo of using script to remotely turn on the drive indicator light on a remote server. Consider, I am remotely tshooting the machine, I determine it needs a new drive, I call the local tech, he goes to the server and knows instantly to replace the "one with the blinking orange light". Multiply the time savings times the number of incidents like this and the savings potential is, well, really big.

There is a Channel 9 MONAD video here

And everything MONAD blog post here

To get MONAD
You’ll need a passport account.
Go to http://beta.microsoft.com
Logon using guest ID: mshPDC
Select Microsoft Command Shell
Select Survey in the left column and complete
Access granted within 48 hours

Bill Anderson did his “Wall of Fire” demo this morning during Steveb’s keynote, live, without backup or backstage elves - His words “10 feet from termination”.

Picture 100 Monitors in an array about 20x5 hooked to 100 W2K/XP PCs. The “user state” on these machines is a custom bitmap that together displays a Winlogo across the array. In 9 mins, using SMS, he backs up the user state (the bitmap) and deploys a new OS , (SP2).  He kicked off all the re-images at once because Osdeploy.exe was executing, waiting for a custom action.  Press a button, put your career at risk. Guess no one blinked because this is Vegas, but it was a pretty gutsy demo IMHO.

Worked like a charm, about 9 mins into Steve’s speech we see the loverly Security Center window pop up on every screen, and everyone in the room could see the Winlogo (representing user state) behind them. Bravo.

The link to watch it should be live later today. JMike's blog has pics.

Folks have had trouble finding the downloadable job aids for Windows Server 2003 deployment. These are really useful for any SIP you want to kick off, or structuring service management reports. Check them out.

The pieces are:

Several important announcements this morning during Steveb's keynote.

• NAP in LH client will support trusted computing group standards
• other guests OS - can you say Linux?
• Microsoft is investing in increased virtualization in LH to reduce customer total cost of operations
  • .vhd will be extensible
  • System Center will include ability to manage virtual servers - including other OS, like Linux
  • Microsoft and TAP customers has seen a 50% drop in CPU cycles on the same workloads hosted in 64 bit Virtual Server beta on 64 bit hardware

You can read the details at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/Apr05/04-20VirtualizationInvestmentsPR.asp. To view an on-demand Web cast (including Jeff Woolsey's demonstration of Virtual Server 2005 SP1), go to http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mgmtsummit/keynotes.asp. 

Check out John Howard’s Virtual Server webcast on 29th April at 2PM GMT. Here's the registration link.

Donwload SP1 on the Virtual Server 2005 home page. 

RSS Feed for VS KBs

Left rainy Seattle 5 am yesterday morning, and haven't seen the sunny LV desert skies since. This venue is so huge that there are birds (the chirpy, tweet-tweet kind) flying around inside it.

Great preso at MMS: Improving Operational Efficiency with MOF

"Running your IT systems the most effectively you can is often overlooked when concentrating on designing and deploying solutions, yet most of us appreciate that only 20% of IT failures are typically related to technology. Addressing people and process as well as technology is vital to ensure success in light of today's IT pressures with respect to reducing cost, increasing service levels, and delivering business value. Adopting best practices based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) will help you increase operational efficiency. In this session, case studies were presented to demonstrate how Microsoft and some of our customers have used MOF to achieve their required levels of operational efficiency. "

One case study was the USAF. The service improvement numbers they achieved are huge. For example, 46% reduction in the number of major incidents.

Another case study is Microsoft. Yes, the Microsoft internal IT department improved operations using MOF. You can read a white paper on one implementation here. Microsoft IT has a group that documents and shares best practices and other technical information - my old group IT Showcase. You can find all that info here.

Have you met SAM? This site has a nifty set of tools to walk you through some critical steps you need to take to get to a “better managed state”. Whether that is driven by IT Governance issues, budget planning, security or whatever, you can probably use these tools today.
SAM Step 1: Perform a Software Inventory Find out what software titles your company is currently using.
SAM Step 2: Match Software with Licenses Locate the license documentation for each software title installed.
SAM Step 3: Review Policies and Procedures Review or write policies and procedures to assure good software asset management practices.
SAM Step 4: Develop a SAM Plan Create an ongoing SAM plan to use moving forward.
Oh, and it has a cool partner finder and tool finder. Wish we had the same on TechNet for server-side enterprise products. Do you? Leave feedback for me so I can help make the case to the PTB.

You Talked We Listened

As of the May 2005 shipment TechNet started adding ISO images to the Evaluation DVDs. Nifty, now you can easily create bootable CDs for Windows evaluation products. The English DVD has been updated and we will continue to add ISO images for the remaining languages as the DVDs get revised.

Got feedback? Like this feature? Got another? Leave comments.