Do you remember the tale of the Windows Server 2008 “Lone Server” ? Maybe it was read to you as a bedtime story as a change from “Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?” There he was, this poor Windows Server 2003 server, all alone in a server farm of Windows Server 2008 machines. Out-of-date. Out...

Very recently, we announced the availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) in Beta. If you remember, this is a tool that allows you to obtain and install Web server components, development tools and database technologies to implement an integrated Web platform for your development...

Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) solution was cited as a leader (the top category) in a recent independent report, “The Forrester Wave: Network Access Control, Q3 2008.” Microsoft was one of the many network access control (NAC) vendors invited to participate in the report. Forrester placed...

Excerpt from the post on the SBS blog by group program manager Dean Paron: On behalf of the SBS team, I am extremely pleased to announce that Windows Small Business Server 2008 software has been finalized! Today both SBS Standard and Premium are being released to manufacturing, which means we begin...

Lots of activities around the upcoming Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 here in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. On top of the many keynotes, sessions and demonstrations to help partners prepare for the Essential Server Solutions, we're announcing November...

Microsoft published a Security Advisory today providing information for developers and Web administrators on ways in which they can mitigate and prevent SQL injection attacks . As you might have seen, there was a spate of such attacks in late April and it caused quite a few headaches for administrators...

There are new demonstration videos of the upcoming Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 on TechNet Edge. Program manager Bjorn Levidow provides an overview of EBS management , including remote administration, add-in management and license tracking. Becky Ochs, program manager...

Good news. Today we opened up the Public Preview for Windows Essential Server Solutions - Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 . Visit here to find out how to download and evaluate the Release Candidate 0 versions of both. EBS is available now, SBS will be up within a few weeks...

We announced the new Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 , and the MOF 4.0 online community . Check out Jeff's blog post over on the System Center team blog. Here's an excerpt: So what’s new? First, where the old MOF talked mainly about operations, the new MOF 4.0 describes the entire IT life cycle...

What a Launch Wave it has been! I've just returned from celebrating Windows Server 2008 with many of you all over the world. It was great to hear your stories and see how Windows Server 2008 will fit into many of your organizations. For those of you who were not able to attend a launch event, check out...

Do you want to use the server core installation option of Windows Server 2008, but are put off by the command-line interface? Well, Guy Teverovsky may have what you need. He created a GUI for the GUI-less server core of WS08. Check it out here . Patrick

I’m really pleased to say that the release candidate of Hyper-V is available for download today. You can read the announcement and Jeff’s more detailed post . This milestone is important to the hundreds of customers and partners in the early adopter programs, and those of you trialing Hyper-V on your...

Lots happening in Orlando at Convergence 2008 - the Microsoft Dynamics users' conference. Steve Ballmer and vice president Kirill Tatarinov are speaking and the Dynamics team is making a number of announcements , including a partnership with EDS to extend Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployments, a preview...

The team behind Windows Essential Business Server 2008 for midsized companies (part of the newly announced Windows Essential Server Solutions family and formerly known as "Centro") has launched a team blog here . Group Program Manager Eric Watson provides the introduction: In this Blog, key people...

In the course of talking to many Microsoft partners and customers, the Windows Small Business Server team has learned that there are sometimes misperceptions about the product, in many cases based on experiences with the earlier versions of SBS. In hopes of dispelling some of these "myths," the team...

As I write this, I’m in the room where it all happens - in building 26, better known as the ship room. Ten minutes ago Windows Server 2008 officially RTM’d. Also in here with me are my colleagues who have been working on Windows Vista SP1, also RTM’ing today. We’ve all been working towards this day for...

Mid-market IT professionals interested in learning more about the upcoming Essential Business Server solution should tune into this show on BlogTalkRadio . Microsoft's Steve VanRoekel and Arlin Sorensen of Heartland Technology Solutions talk about the product, how it will help IT pros, and what it will...

We all know that what we do is way cooler than having a real job! Do you think those guys in accounting have their own Comic Series? – HECK NO! The HHH Comic series launches today: Signup for the RSS feed and hang on for the ride!

Hey everybody – it’s me again, Lone Server . Thanks for watching my video and sending all of your words of encouragement this past week. I even got an offer to retire at someone’s “beautiful server farm upstate.” Not happening. I’m not giving in and joining your server petting zoo just yet. Upgrade is...

Hyper-V is a cluster-aware feature within Windows Server 2008, offering native support for VM high availability. And now that beta 1 is available, you can check it out yourself. So what are the 10 steps you have to go through to build a host cluster using iSCSI shared storage? Read Robert Larson's post...

Every now and again we'll use this blog to correct errors in the public domain, mainly by journalists or analyst trying to do a good job but who come up short on fact checking due to time constraints. Of course some of these errors are more obvious than others. The latest form of error pertains to Hyper...

With a tip of the cap to Francis Church’s famous 1897 editorial , I’m very proud that the team has come through just like St. Nick. Today we announced the public availability of a beta of Hyper-V , the hypervisor-based virtualization feature in Windows Server 2008. You can download it today with Windows...

In just a couple of weeks, we will have another webcast on Server Manager. One of the key points that will be presented during the webcast is Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). RSAT is the new version of the Win2k3 Admin Pack and will be available as a web download so you can install the Win2k8...

Before heading off for a few days of turkey, college football and family, a post from Mauricio Freitas caught my eye this evening. Mauricio is an admin for Geekzone , which he describes as such: Geekzone publishes news, reviews and articles on technology topics. We also have some busy forums ....

Arrived back to Redmond late yesterday from Reno where I was attending Supercomputing 2007 conference . I suspect SC07 will be best remembered for the power outage that hit the convention center and most of downtown Reno, and Ashlee's stellar headline . While I was in Reno, there were lots of colleagues...