UPDATE!!! The Windows 7 Resource Kit is now available from Microsoft Press. This 1700 page book and CD is the book for administrators who will be deploying, maintaining and troubleshooting Windows 7 in their organizations. The book was authored by three MVPs Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup and Jerry Honeycutt, and also by Ed Wilson who is commonly known as The Scripting Guy on Microsoft TechNet. The lead author Mitch Tulloch also maintains an Unofficial Support Site for the Windows 7 Resource Kit at

Hi Everyone, My name is Simran Chaudhry and I am the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Lead for Developer & IT Pro MVP’s in Canada. Along with Sasha Krsmanovic & Ljupco Grmaskoski , we run the Microsoft MVP Award Program in Canada. I thought it would be a good idea to let you know who MVP’s are, what they do, and let you know a bit more about how you can submit a nomination for yourself or someone else that you think deserves the award. MVP’s are exceptional technical community leaders from

And so it came to happen.   An event that was born from brilliance came to life.  Techdays.  A conference for Canadians, By Canadians, done ACROSS Canada to bring technology and training to those who needed it most.  It was only last year I remember waking up a 4:00am for the First Techdays held in Toronto.  Excited!  Ready to launch into the great pools of knowledge.  I and so MANY others.  And this year it continued.  And after an amazing 48 hours,

I got an email from a friend of mine who is a prof at Algonquin College – Richard Hagemeyer. I met him a while back on one of my visits to the college to talk to students and we became friends both online and in person. He’s one of those guys who’s been around the industry a long time and has a very diverse background with a very long memory. He’s kept a running tab of his experiences using the RTM code for Windows 7 on one of this machines. He sent me this email update documenting his thoughts on

Graham Jones (Chair 2009-2010 Culminis Global Board) Back in April 2008 I wrote a blog here entitled “ Professionalizing the Profession ”. I was inspired to write this following a presentation made by Stephen Ibaraki [blogger extraordinaire and regular contributor here] on what is happening with respect to Professional Status in the ICT sector, specifically the formation of the IP3 [International Professional Practice Partnership] and the IITP designation. Since the article was written it has been

  Adam Cole (B. Math, I.S.P., ITCP, PMP)     My wife and two young daughters recently took a last minute trip to visit friends in North Carolina. They flew via Southwest Airlines. Southwest was the first (successful) discount airline ,  and continues to operate a no-frills operation to this day. What is taken for granted on other airlines is lacking on Southwest including reserved/assigned seating (yup, seating is a free for all; better show up earlier), meals (pack your own lunch),

Adam Cole (B. Math, I.S.P., ITCP, PMP) Think of these tips as insurance. They'll help you transition to your ideal job when the time comes. As I start my job search and start cranking up the networking, many of the messages from my good friend Nick Corcodilos come in to play. [For those of you who do not know, Nick is the author of a widely acclaimed book, Ask The Headhunter , and blog of the same name.] Based on my recent personal experience I encourage you to undertake the following: Establish

Adam Cole (B. Math, I.S.P., ITCP, PMP) Be decent to other people – always. This cannot be understated. You may have a secure job today but do you know where you will be tomorrow? If you are good to others you will be rewarded when you need it. I was downsized recently. Regardless of the circumstances there is a certain amount of depression and self doubt; however, a strong network of family, friends, and loyal business associates have helped to make this an uplifting experience. I had the most pleasant

Adam Cole (B. Math, I.S.P., ITCP, PMP) My previous employer and I recently parted ways. After six plus years with the same company, my personal identify had become grossly comingled with my work identify. My friends, family, and professional colleagues only knew how to contact me at my work number or my work email address. Even my mobile number was owned by the company. My first day apart was quite an awakening - I had lost my personal identity. Like an executive without their Blackberry, I was exposed

  Sasha Krsmanovic from the MVP team is back with another guest blog post on Microsoft Fix It.  I saw this on a KB article a while ago and gave it a whirl and loved the fact that I could run a verified MSI to fix the problem I had rather than editing the registry or making other system changes. ------------------------- Do your family, neighbors or friends consider you their unofficial IT department? I bet you just love to receive those calls, especially now that the summer has finally

You may have heard about Bing , a new search decision engine, that was recently released. Miguel Carrasco , an MVP from my hometown of Winnipeg, got early access to Bing and wrote up this post on Bing, what it is, how it is different and I hope you give it a try. As always we appreciate your feedback so send us an email or leave a comment! ------------------------- I’ve been following the search war for some time now and have been pretty much disappointed every time a company has come around and

Sean Kearney has been doing some work with PowerShell as of late and sent in this little write up about searching with PowerShell! Enjoy, and remember if you have any tips you want to share email us! ------------------------------ A post I threw onto "Energized about Technology" and "Energized Tech". A simpler intro to a small script that can be a function in PowerShell. Today I had to search for something in a Text file. In PowerShell there's a simple command GET-CONTENT Which lets me simply enough,

I got an email from Raphael from PCWhizKid.com the other day letting me know about some Windows 7 videos he posted. He does a great job showing off a slew of new features and functionality in Windows 7. Take a look and pass them on! ";" galleryimg="no" mce_src="http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/canitpro/WindowsLiveWriter/Windows7AReviewfromtheField_A5B5/videod90dc53c7037.jpg"> ";" galleryimg="no" mce_src="http://blogs.technet.com/blogfiles/canitpro/WindowsLiveWriter/Windows7AReviewfromtheField_A5B5/video7172ff2a2268.jpg">

Hello Canadian IT Manager blog readers! My name is Sasha Krsmanovic. I am the MVP Lead in Canada; you may recall my posts on the Canadian IT Pro blog about the MVP program ( Part 1 , Part 2 ). Since email is perhaps the one application that user can’t live without and IT is tasked with ensuring is always working properly, Damir has asked me to write a guest blog about a useful tool our team developed to help your IT Pros diagnose issues with connecting clients to Exchange – the Exchange Server Remote

Hello CanITPro readers! My name is Sasha Krsmanovic. I am the MVP Lead in Canada; you may recall my posts on this blog about the MVP program ( Part 1 , Part 2 ). Rodney has asked me to write a guest blog about a useful tool our team developed for IT Pros – the Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer . The Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a web site for IT Administrators to validate and diagnose end-to-end Exchange scenarios. The site simulates multiple Exchange client access and

I managed to find a spot for myself on the DirectAccess dogfood going on now at Microsoft.  This is by far the single best technology that Microsoft has produced that I can remember.  Remember back to when you first got Outlook Anywhere back with Exchange 2003 SP2 and then think about expanding that to the entire corpnet.  I tweeted my excitement and Sean Kearney did some investigating and has some information to share and be sure to add his blog to your RSS reader, he has a tendency

A while back Ruth did an interview with Cameron McKay about an upcoming infrastructure project he was in the planning stages on.  While the planning is done and the implementation also complete, I thought it was time to revisit with Cameron and talk about how things went.  Turns out Cam was one step ahead and posted an entry on his blog which we are cross posting here. ------------------------- And here we are.... it's March 15th, I'm now 25 Years old, and the largest infrastructure project

I met Jonathan Cusson in Montreal a couple of months ago while I was there with the IT Manager “AlignIT” tour. We got to talking about virtualization and he offered to write a couple of posts on things he’s doing at Alpha Mosaik and in his spare time. Not long after getting his hands on Windows 7 he had it up and running on multiple hardware and virtualization platforms to see what the install experience was like as well as general usability. I get asked “the hardware question” all the time – what

Hi, I am an IT Professional from Montreal and I’ve been working in IT for 7 years now, specializing in Microsoft solutions and virtualization. I currently work as IT infrastructure consultant at AlphaMosaik, a company that specializes in Microsoft solutions and products. AlphaMosaik is always working with the newest Microsoft technologies which gives me the opportunity to be among the first to build expertise on new and upcoming products. I mainly work on Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008

Typically the things we chat about on this blog are aimed at the more experienced PC user and most IT Pros know a thing or two about computers. I came across this blog recently and have added it to my RSS feed as it is a great mix of hardware, software, Windows and Linux tips, tricks, reviews and more. The videos are very well done, the articles are easy to follow and the reviews are unbiased and best of all PCWhizKid is Canadian! As an example here is a video PCWhizKid has posted… Windows Performance