Theres this great site our client team has been working on. Its called Talking About Windows and features a number of people from the engineering and product management teams talking about the Windows 7 development process and associated products that tie into it.
I did my bit for it nearly 6 months ago now, shortly after we had RTM'd Advanced Group Policy Management 4.0. In it I talk about GP, the stuff we consider in GP and AGPM. I also talk what mechanisms we are now using to hear from customers.
Check it out!
Just thought Id make a little announcement for those of you interested. As many of you knew I was a Program Manager in the Group Policy team at Microsoft and was working with a great team on products like Advanced Group Policy Management 4.0 and Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset 6.5 which shipped in MDOP 2009 R2.
Late last year I accepted a new role as a Senior Technical Product Manager for VDI and Remote Desktop Services (previously Terminal Services) starting January 18th 2010. That means I will be focused on providing content and demos and attending/presenting conferences related to both those two things - consequently you can expect me to be blogging more again and highlighting how to do VDI with Microsoft (and partner) solutions. It will probably also mean a refresh of some of my older content on Terminal Services (now Remote Desktop Services) and improving and updating step-by-step guides to help you understand how to implement these solutions.
As usual, Im always open to ideas! If any of you have suggestions on anything else you'd like to see or know more about in this area please just let me know! :)
Way to go Alan. Another top Australian launching some great content ona GP focused site at http://www.grouppolicy.biz/
Theres plenty of great articles with lots of pictures :) Also includes handy links to common GP tools.
Enjoy!
From the desk of Martin McClean, (author of the Active Directory Jigsaw, Windows Server 2008 Component Poster etc):
This new poster provides a visual reference for understanding key technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2. It focuses on Active Directory Domain Services, Hyper-V, Internet Information Services, Remote Desktop Services (including Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)), BranchCache, and DirectAccess technologies. In addition, updates to core file services and server management are illustrated.
You can use this poster in conjunction with the previously published Windows Server 2008 Component Posters.
Download and Enjoy! Its best printed on A2/A1 size :)
Last week I got to fly in British Airways’ (BA) Premium Economy from Seattle to Berlin for TechEd. It was always going to be an interesting flight as I was keen to see if BA’s premium economy was how I remembered it several years ago. At the time I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread and was motivated enough by it to write a letter to Qantas to suggest the business opportunity for this class – a hybrid of business and economy. It was probably a bit arrogant and ridiculous to think I could effect change with Qantas…ahem…and unfortunately it took them several years to realize this idea was a good one :)
In my previous review of Qantas Premium Economy I waxed lyrical about how good it was. It was modern, spacious and had the trimmings of Business Class. The value is definitely there – for that price in between the cost of business and the budget of economy.
Trip to Berlin - the seat, service and the food
The seat experience was the same roomy seat I remembered with the right amount of legroom which is perfect for tall people like me. The food quality however was appalling. Dinner was ok, though much like economy and not what I expected. Breakfast however was horribly inadequate and was akin to a boxed lunch. Certainly not up to the “premium” experience.
Service was ok, staff were friendly and pleasant. I never used the call button on this trip so I cant comment on that as I ended up sleeping most of the time.
Heathrow Airport
BA likes to talk about how great Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. It looks pretty and modern. Once you get into it, its nice. Though honestly…what a mess this place still is. I would advise you to avoid that place like the plague if you hate waiting around in lengthy and pointless queues between connects. Before I get going on my assessment of Heathrow let me make it clear that this is a bit of a whinge…ok…it’s a lot of a whinge….
<rant>
So here’s how it works when you’re on your way to Heathrow (not):
1. You check in for your flight at your origin and get all your boarding passes, including your connecting flights
2. They security screen you and all your carry-on baggage before you get on the flight from Seattle
3. You fly a long way and land in Heathrow
4. You have to walk down old style stairs and into the cold because the terminal is inadequate and doesn’t have enough skybridges
5. You catch a little bus and they deliver you in groups because the terminal is inadequate and doesn’t have enough skybridges
6. You then enter Terminal 5 on the security restricted side of the fence (non-public side)
7. You go through ticketing (again)
8. The lines for the mysterious next step are massive and so they have a Fast Lane for premium (airline status holding) passengers.
9. BA doesn’t seem honor OneWorld tier status anymore like they used to for these lines and so Qantas Gold and Platinum cards (OneWorld Emerald and Sapphire) DON’T COUNT for Fast Lane access!!
10. Are you kidding me BA??!!
11. Then they want to security screen you all over again despite the fact you haven’t ever left the screened security zone AAARGGHH!!!!! Wasted time for no good reason...
12. You now stay in the same terminal 5 you arrived in to board your next flight, having wasted an hour in this mess
13. Stupid….
Isn’t that the most insane system you have ever heard of?
For those of you that hold OneWorld Emerald and Sapphire status with other airlines there are several other lounge areas that other airlines like Qantas allow BA Silver and Gold card holders to access that BA doesn’t seem to extend the same treatment in return. The first class areas being one of them – with a separate place for “their” First class. It really appears like BA doesn’t want to play equitably with OneWorld status holders anymore. Maybe Qantas should do the same to BA card status holders?
Back to scheduled programming….
</rant>
In Flight Entertainment
The in-flight entertainment, while awesome several years ago, is antiquated by today’s standards. On the way over to London there was no video on demand and little choice. Tiny little screens and hardly any new releases in the “new releases” menu made it appear old. On the way back it wasn’t much better. Sure there was video on demand, but it was the same old and tired content. A couple of 2009 release movies with a lot of “on DVD” 2008 content. Singapore Air, Emirates and Qantas do this tons better.
Return trip to Seattle – Seat and Food
Though here as I sit typing on the plane, the return flight is much better. Got the bulkhead in Premium Economy which has much more room than the other seats. That was tons better! The food was much better too with an acceptable but very dry, Tikka Marsala. Which begs the question, what’s with the food on the flights out of America? Why does it suck so bad?
Got another boxed lunch meal about an hour before we landed though it was way more edible than the breakfast on the way there.
Service was mixed. Standard meal service was friendly and ok. I used the call button this time as I was starving. The response wasn’t great but to be fair, they were getting ready for a meal service and I didn’t know. A grumpy guy finally came and grunted to me that they were coming around with some food. Thankfully he’s not the usual standard.
Overall
So aside from the food, for me it’s the room, it’s always been the room and Premium Economy provides that. I would definitely fly BA again for this room (and hopefully just avoid Heathrow). The service is usually ok and the staff are by and large quite pleasant and helpful.
Overall though you may be wondering, is Qantas’ Premium Economy really better than BA’s?
Abso-freakin-lutely.
Here’s my assessment:
Qantas Premium Economy positives. The seats are roomy, better recline with great leg room and nice and modern. The service is streets ahead of BA. The in-flight entertainment wins awards for a reason…its fabulous and has “in cinema” content. The food quality is excellent and on par with business class.
BA Premium Economy positives. The seats are roomy, better recline with great leg room. Can’t think of anything else.
So it appears that Qantas has taken BA’s offering and soundly whipped them at it. BA’s offering appears tired, old and lacking value in comparison.
If you have a comparable price choice between Qantas and BA, choose Qantas.
I notice online that there's a broken link to the Group Policy Settings Spreadsheet changes. What happened was that the content for this area got consolidated and unfortunately in the process the old links were broken.
So if you are looking for settings changes in Group Policy for:
- Windows 7
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Windows Vista SP1 and SP2
- Windows Server 2008
- Windows XP SP1, SP2 and SP3
- Windows Server 2003
- Any associated Service Packs
then the new link is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=18c90c80-8b0a-4906-a4f5-ff24cc2030fb
I was checking out my search link referrals today on a previous post announcing the availability of MDOP 2009 R2. I noticed an interesting search query that I think warrants clarification.
While we are producing new versions of DaRT, the successive versions arent backwards compatible. So lets make this one clear so everyone knows and understands why.
DaRT 5.0 only supports Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (no x64 support and no plans to add it either)
DaRT 6.0 only supports Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (and x64 versions too)
DaRT 6.5 only supports Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (and x64 versions too)
Something thats also very important to mention here is that while the DaRT 6.0 version will allow you to insert a Windows 7 DVD and indicate it can prepare the image, it actually cant and will not work as you expect. We make sure to prompt and warn you when you try to run DaRT 6.0 on Windows 7.
So the question in your mind probably is why?
The reason is the underlying servicing model and NTFS structures. Windows XP's servicing stack is old school. Windows Vista changed all that with a new component based model, if you want to look around your machine for manifest files (and then look up MSDN) youll get the idea how it works. Also look up a component servicing tool called DISM.exe if youre keen to understand more.
Windows 7 built on Windows Vista's component model but again the servicing stack changed incrementally. Other changes between Windows 7 and Windows Vista included some changes to BitLocker servicing that we had to support.
All this meant we needed to keep the versions very separate.
Any questions? :)
We have heard some customer issues around one of the underpinning areas of Group Policy Preferences – namely the History Folder.
Issue
On Windows Server 2003 Terminal Servers with a large number of users, the history folder grows so large it causes increasing slow logons for the users.
What does the History folder do anyway??
The history folder is there to maintain actions such as “Remove this item when it is no longer applied”. If we don’t do this then we can’t roll back correctly. So the short of it is that we expect the folder size to grow. What we don’t want occurring is that it slows down logons. The reason this issue is occurring is because of history management that is occurring at logon.
What are you gonna do about it?
The CSE update in KB974266 fixes this issue and removes the core customer impact issue of slow logon.
The second issue is the folder size itself growing. If you are finding it is growing excessively, the correct action to take on Terminal Servers is to periodically execute a script, say every six months, to purge out entries older than six months to keep the file size down – which really shouldn’t be getting that big anyway.
Hope this helps
Got this in my mail from John Hathaway, who like me, laments the inability of hardware vendors to re-release/update their driver installers to work with Windows 7. I blogged about this some time ago but John has updated it further.
Here's his feedback:
“…Anyway, I put together a small instruction pack similar to yours, but will update Windows 7 to use the CM1312 as a network-only printer. HP CM1312 64bit Windows 7 Retail install.
1) Download: CM1312series_full_solution_v5.0_AM-EMEA.exe (306 MB)
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=3558902&prodNameId=3562006&swEnvOID=2100&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ma-61238-3
or
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?prodNameId=3562006&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=135&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=3558902
2) Use the full download from the website and it self extracts to your root directory.To run the self extracting file, first set the compatibility mode to Vista sp2 and run as admin.
3) The files remain and you can find them here:
C:\HP_CM1312_series_full_solution_v5.0_AM-EMEA\
4) Set the compatibility mode to Vista sp2 and run as admin on the Setup.exe.
5) Run the full install. Works for both usb or network.
6) Enjoy! =^_^=…”
The ever irrepressible Mike Stephens has done an awesome blog post on slow link detection in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This mechanism changed in these versions from using ICMP Ping to NLA.
Mike speaks about it on the AskDS blog. Over to you Mike…
Wahoo!
Its finally out and announced on the MDOP blog. MDOP 2009 R2 is now available at the MVLS site.
This means you get two of the products my teams worked on which were Advanced Group Policy Management 4.0 and Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset 6.5, both of which support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
The documentation for AGPM 4.0 and DaRT 6.5 is also live
Yeah baby yeah!
Im seeing tons of people on forums trying to find the Group Policy Changes in XP SP3 and Windows 7. It seems that both Google and Bing dont return the results if you search for “Group Policy Changes XP SP3” because of all the noise of people asking where they are…
So for your enjoyment they are all here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=18c90c80-8b0a-4906-a4f5-ff24cc2030fb
Enjoy!
We are excited to offer an exclusive opportunity for customers to participate in an upcoming Microsoft beta program. In the coming months, a new Microsoft desktop management service will be made available to a limited number of customers to obtain their feedback and input. We are seeking customers primarily in the core midmarket space, but are also interested in recruiting customers from the enterprise space as well. Prospective candidates must be based in the US, Canada, Mexico, or Puerto Rico.
Microsoft System Center Online Desktop Manager is a hosted IT management solution based on Microsoft System Center management technologies that provides the capability to secure, update, monitor, configure, troubleshoot and collect inventory from a single, Web-based console.
This new IT management service is designed for customers who want an integrated desktop management solution without the overhead associated with installing and maintaining an on-premises management infrastructure.
Features for this initial beta include:
· Anti-malware protection
· Microsoft updates management
· Desktop configuration
· IT asset inventory and software license management
Additional features and capabilities will be introduced in later beta releases. More information about System Center Online Desktop Manager can be found here (http://www.microsoft.com/online/system-center.mspx).
Participation Criteria:
If you are interested in applying for this opportunity and reside in North America, complete the following survey no later than October 26th, 2009: https://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=2418&InvitationID=SCO-DMYG-BYB6&SiteID=310
Customers selected to participate you will be notified via email no later than November 1, 2009. Selected participants should be prepared to deploy the SCODM client to a number of test machines, participate in newsgroup discussions, and provide feedback. We are accepting a limited number of participants, and an invitation into the program is not guaranteed. We want to ensure we get good coverage across our target market segments, geographically across NA, and are looking for people who are prepared to actively participate.
I mentioned previously that I might be attending TechEd Europe this year to present on Windows Server 2008 R2 Group Policy changes. Well its confirmed. I am definitely coming! (Yeah!!)
So I started to think about what you might like to see from my sessions....and rather than me guess about what you want to see, Im going to turn it over to you to make the call. I want to hear from you!! If youre planning on attending TechEd Europe and youre interested in this session how about you just comment on this blog entry with what you want.
If your content idea makes it into my session, I promise to give you kudos for your idea and may even bring gifts along if I can get the marketing guys to give me stuff (no promises there as they are a pretty cheap bunch :) )
My current core ideas are:
- A brief recap on the work done in Vista/WS08 (as many customers didnt deploy that and dont know about all the cool stuff we did in it)
- Some GPP changes
- The new GP Powershell work
- Coverage of some of the new GP extensions
- Any known impacts in moving from XP/2003 to W7/WS08R2
The details of each of these areas and any extra ideas I will leave up to you! (BTW - If I dont get any feedback I will just do what I had planned with my own ideas :) )
Let the feedback roll in!
Michael Kleef, Program Manager
A customer reported an issue to me recently where the customer reported that when using AGPM 3.0, each time they deployed out to production, their GPLinks were being destroyed.
Why is this occurring?
What’s probably relevant here is to outline what’s happening and why.
When AGPM manages GPO’s it performs all its editing offline. When you have finished editing your GPOs and “Deploy to Production”, what you're essentially doing is overwriting the GPO with the new information. It does this operation with everything that AGPM knows about including:
- GPO settings
- Access Control Lists (security filtering and management)
- GPLinks
Anything that you do in the Production object before this occurs will be overwritten with AGPM deploys its new object information. This means if you make a GPLink change in production and then don't tell AGPM about it, the object AGPM has will overwrite those changes next time around and you will wonder what happened.
This problem is compounded by the fact that AGPM doesn’t offer any ability to manage GPLinks (or Security Filtering) within AGPM itself – this is all done with GPMC and Imported into AGPM later.
So how do you make sure AGPM knows about GPLink and Security Filter changes?
There are actually two ways to do this though the best way is to make the GPLink and Security Filtering changes to the Production object and then do an “Import from Production” operation. This essentially takes a copy of everything in production and pulls it into AGPM. Note that in this case the reverse can occur where changes in AGPM are overwritten by the production object. Heres a good way to make sure you capture everything you want:
- Make your GPO changes (if necessary) in AGPM
- Deploy to production
- Make any necessary changes to GPLinks and Security Filtering
- Import from Production
This ensures that the settings stay the way you want and the GPLinks and Security Filtering are preserved and known by AGPM for that particular object. From then on you can make all the settings changes you want and AGPM will continue to push out the correct GPLinks and Filtering (unless of course you want to change it again)
Hope this helps
Michael Kleef, Program Manager
