Here is an interesting case study around how BitLocker is providing businesses a reliable way to protect sensitive data on Windows Servers. Ufone Ufone, a leading mobile phone service provider in Pakistan, wanted to offer greater mailbox capacity to employees...

Recently I received an interesting question around BitLocker & Application Compatibility. In other words will an application, which works on a machine without BitLocker also work on a machine with BitLocker enabled? I believe it sounds as simple a...

RMS is one of the new Windows Server workload I'm playing around these days. As I dive into this technology quite a few interesting scenarios are coming my way every day. In an effort to consolidate the useful know-hows into something like an RMS FAQ...

With the public Beta release of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 there have been some significant announcements around RemoteFX. I want to use this post to aggregate some of these announcements and call out some specifics regarding RemoteFX...

The following are a list of commands that I demonstrated at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans. Actually I should say that I intended to demo these commands, but wasn’t able to complete the entire list due to a conference wide network outage. :-( Many of...

For those that have investigated, or deployed 802.1x port authentication on either a wireless or a wired network understand the benefits and additional security that such a solution offers. The ability to stop traffic at layer 2, at the port is a powerful...

Top 10 Reasons for Deploying BitLocker on Branch Office Servers 1. Information Loss is Costly Information is the key asset of IT industry. Losing this asset or getting it in wrong hands can be equally damaging for all businesses small, medium or large...

Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft started reporting on potential performance issues with the client operating system (Vista and Windows 7) by alerting on drivers, services, or applications that experience resource contention or take too long to respond...

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 - Free eBook Fantastic new book hot off of Microsoft Press covering Windows Server 2008 R2. Excerpt from the book: “This book is targeted primarily at Windows server administrators who are responsible for hands-on deployment...

I have been to a lot of sessions and attended two keynote sessions this is my third VMworld and this year was really more about the Cloud message. Really while the term Private Cloud is new the concepts are the same thing customers wanted 5-7 years ago...

This week, we've been in the Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) doing our scale testing on a project to help build the world's largest PKI. When fully implemented over the next couple of years, this PKI will be the world's largest, issuing 100s of millions...

Security events are different than other Windows events because they require a special level of authentication/credentials in order to read or forward these events. Different configurations are required depending on which Windows platform is the client...

We recently released the DirectAccess Step by Step Guide and many customers are using it to start understanding and testing DirectAccess in their labs, which is great. However, if you're planning to virtualize your lab environment on Hyper-V, you should...

In my last post I talked extensively about the use of 802.1x for network authentication (wired or wireless) and talked about the benefits of the 2 common approaches to controlling machine access (VLAN vs. Port ACL). While 802.1x remains a very popular...

One of the technologies that I've been working on is DirectAccess , a new feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that provides seamless connectivity to your enterprise network from wherever you are. I've been dogfooding DirectAccess for months...

With the introduction of IIS 7.0 in Windows Server 2008 the game has changed. IIS 7.0 is built using a modular architecture from the ground up. This means two very important things. The first is you only have to install/enable the core set of features...

Given that the NAC (Network Access Control) market is one of the hottest segments in the industry (I think virtualization has that distinction at the moment) it is fitting to take a look at the variety of options available from Microsoft's Network Access...

One of the most compelling capabilities being added in IAG SP2 (which will also be available in UAG) is the 'virtual appliance' installation option. A virtual appliance is a preconfigured, ready to use Virtual Machine that already has Windows Server and...

One of the least known yet most powerful management features to ship with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 is built-in Event Forwarding which enables large scale health and state monitoring of a Windows environment (assuming health and state can...

My name is Allen Stewart Team Lead of the Windows Server Customer Advisory Team in the Windows Server Division. We are a team of Program Managers that are experts in specific workloads/technologies. We work in the Windows Server Engineering organization...

One of the many enhancements in Active Directory Certificate Services in Windows Server 2008 is support for 2 node active / passive clustering. We have a great whitepaper, Configuring and Troubleshooting Certification Authority Clustering in Windows Server...

In most if not all enterprise customers most technology areas are driven by various teams responsible for a technology area. Some enterprise customers have more integrated technology teams then others. So how does this affect the common approach today...

Hopefully you get better presents than this, but if not, here are a couple of web casts I just did that you might be interested in: Certificate Services Updates Amesh Mansukhani, Senior Product Manager, speaks with John Morello, Program Manager, Windows...

Because CRL validity is so important to the functionality of your PKI, it's important to have proactive monitoring of the validity of your CRLs. Particularly in situations where you're using smart cards for logon, having a CRL go stale can be a very disruptive...

Pete Rivera is the Windows Team Lead on one of our DoD support teams and we've been working together on a NAP project. In addition to being a master of style and male fashion, Pete also puts together some great guidance for his customers. Recently, he...