The Industry Insiders : Articles

A Look into data privacy in the cloud computing world

Viral Tarpara — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:59:22 GMT

Leonard Chung, CEO of Syncplicity.com, discusses issues around web privacy and data protection laws his company deals with in the world of online storage. Leonard and I dive deep into legal world of privacy statements what these types of documents actually mean for the industry.

Leonard Chung, President & CEO

Leonard is an experienced entrepreneur with a particular emphasis on developing and delivering version one products and ideas. Notable past projects include SETI@home, Windows PowerShell, and internet storage company Scale Eight. Past collaborators include RISC/RAID inventor Dr. David Patterson and ACM Turing Award Winner Jim Gray.

Leonard received a B.A. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

read the article

Business Intelligence and the importance of users

Andrew_Fryer — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:28:00 GMT

It's about time there were a few business intelligence posts on Industry Insiders so I am pleased to get an article about the Microsoft BI and the importance of users in form Jennifer Stirrup from Aspective - a Vodafone company. Jennifer has over ten years experience in working with SQL Server, and has specialised in BI and reporting for the last 6 years. Jennifer is currently working towards her Microsoft BI certification.

Introduction to SCORM and SharePoint Learning Kit

Viral Tarpara — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:05:00 GMT

SharePoint has been a phenominal success as a product for Microsoft. It has successfully penetrated almost every industry as collaboration & portal platform. SharePoint's role in the enrichment of secondary education has been particularly strong. Read this article titled, "Introduction to SCORM and SharePoint Learning Kit" from Alex Pearce, Network Manager of Hillcrest School in Birmingham. Thank you Alex!

Windows 2008 protection from Accidental deletion

jamesone — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:18:00 GMT

Many thanks to Richard Siddaway for his article on protecting AD objects from Accidental Deletion. Well worth a read if you've ever deleted the wrong thing from AD.

The Scoop on OCS and Live Meeting Features

Viral Tarpara — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:08:00 GMT

Thanks to Chris Dalby of Yellow Park for this contributing piece breaking down the great new enhancements made to OCS and Live Meeting! The article can be found here.

Certificate Server Enterprise Edition and Smart Cards

Steve Lamb — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 12:08:00 GMT

Adrian Beasley wrote a wonderful article on Certificate Server Enterprise Edition and Smartcards - I particularly like it as he explains WHY each component is required rather than just diving into the detail - which he makes an excellent job of too.

I have edited this post as the original one had the article itself here rather than this introduction - this meant that those of you who scroll through the blog expressed frustration that the screen was somewhat cluttered.

Adrian's original post was one of the most popular on the entire site - in my view that's due to the practical way he tackled a complex subject. By all means hit the "comment" button and share your views.

Duplicating Virtual Machines using SysPrep

Steve Lamb — Wed, 10 May 2006 10:30:00 GMT

This article was written by Mark Wilson.

One of the joys of virtualisation is the flexibility afforded by the ability to copy virtual machine files around the network for backup purposes or just to create a new machine (especially with Microsoft's new Virtual Server licensing arrangements). Unfortunately, just as for "real" computers, simple file copies of Windows-based virtual machines can cause problems and are not supported (see Microsoft knowledge base article 162001).

All is not lost though, as Microsoft does support the duplication of virtual hard disks using the system preparation tool (SysPrep) and Megan Davis has written about sysprepping virtual machines on her blog. I tested it today and it works really well - basically a 3 step process of:

Install and configure a source virtual machine as required (i.e. operating system installed, virtual machine additions installed, service packs and other updates applied), making sure it is in a workgroup (i.e. not a domain member).
Locate the appropriate version of the Windows deployment tools (I used the ones from the \support\tools\deploy.cab file on a Windows Server 2003 CD) and create an answer file (C:\sysprep\sysprep.inf). Then copy the sysprep.exe and setupcl.exe deployment tools to C:\sysprep.
Run SysPrep to reseal and shut down the guest operating system, then copy the virtualmachinename.vhd file to a secure location (make it read-only to prevent accidental overwrites, but also apply appropriate NTFS permissions). This file can then be duplicated at will to quickly create new virtual machines with a fully-configured operating system.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with SysPrep, check out Killan's guide to SysPrep (which, despite claiming not to be written for corporate administrators or OEM system builders, seems like a pretty good reference to me).

Incidentally, there are major performance gains to be had by moving virtual machines onto another disk (spindle - not just partition). Unfortunately my repurposed laptop hard disks were too slow (especially on a USB 1.1 connection), so I had to go out this afternoon and buy a USB 2.0 PCI adapter along with a decent external hard disk (a Toshiba 320GB 7200 RPM external USB 2.0 hard drive with 8MB data buffer) - that speeded things up nicely.