Managing Vista with Group Policy webinar

January 31, 2007 Leave a Comment

Over at GPanswers.com, Jeremy Moskowitz has added another webinar to the collection of webcasts by him and other experts on Group Policy, Active Directory and other windows management topics.

Page of links for GPanswers.com webinars.

This one is entitled “Managing your XP and Vista machines”.

Are you still running around to each machine to do a little tweak here or manage a little setting there? Wouldn’t it be better to be more efficient and run around less to get more done? That’s the power of Active Directory (AD) and Group Policy (GP). In this session, the GP Guru, Jeremy Moskowitz will introduce you to what’s possible with GP and introduce you to some new features that come with Vista.

Filed under Group Policy

Technet webcasts for Exchange 2007

January 19, 2007 Leave a Comment

Exchange 2007 Technet Webcasts

(first one is today, 19th Jan at 11:30 am Pacific Time)

Filed under Events, Exchange

Business Desktop Deployment 2007 released by MS

January 18, 2007 Leave a Comment

Microsoft’s BDD 2007 Workbench claims a host of features to help you create an inventory, create and manage system images and deploy these to your machine in a highly managed environment (“Zero Touch” using SMS) or less managed (“Lite Touch”, no SMS) manner.

The workbench includes all the tools you need for this in a single edition (so you get all the same features and guidance, you just choose whether to buy and use SMS) and one download, which also has self-updating features so you don’t miss out on future goodness.

You can create images for Windows XP and Vista, as well as Office 2003 and 2007
Read more on the MS desktop deployment homepage or go straight to the download for BDD 2007.

Filed under Utilities + Tools, Windows Vista

Exchange 2007 address policies behave as expected (unlike 2003)

January 16, 2007 Leave a Comment

This article over at the Exchange Team Blog describes how Exchange 2007 Email Address Policies (EAP) work. This is the replacement for Exchange 2000/2003 Recipient Policies and the way that the Recipient Update Service worked (or rather, did not).

Essentially, when you make policy changes in 2007, they get applied. This is what you would want out of a policy, hence the name. If accounts fall in or out of scope, their address list changes. If you change the primary address for a policy, it gets updated. You can still exempt accounts individually from being affected through ADUC (or use a script), but basically, it now does what it says on the tin.

Filed under Exchange

Sophos SBE: anti-virus and anti-spam for small businesses

January 14, 2007 1 Comment

Sophos Small Business Suite – Engineered for small businesses

  • Includes Sophos Anti-Virus Small Business Edition and Sophos Pure Message Small Business Edition
  • Detects and disinfects viruses at every potential access point, ensuring networks are fully protected
  • Blocks up to 98% of spam, keeping inboxes free of unsolicited bulk emails
  • Updates automatically, providing a complete defence against the latest virus and spam threats

Review

This product is squarely aimed at the small business IT administrator who wants a neat, simple solution to address their concerns about viruses, and the issues caused by the ever-increasing volume of spam email.

Read more of this post

Filed under Reviews, Security and Malware Tagged with , , ,

Shareware just means “free software”, right?

January 13, 2007 1 Comment

Myth: “Shareware is free software – if I can download it without having to pay I can use it at no cost.”

Debunking the myth – one in a series of several.

This is very rarely true in a business context. Ultimately, all software is subject to copyright, and the author can decide what rights they are prepared to give up in allowing you to use their product. These rights are usually described in a license, which may limit how you can use the software, conditions you must fulfil if you use it, and what costs you will have to pay. Smaller, independent publishers are more likely to provide their product for free or a very low price to encourage people to use it. However, many of these do so only for private use, and if you want to use the same product at work, they may want some payment from you. Read more of this post

Filed under IT myths debunked, Licensing

Passed Microsoft Exchange 70-284 exam

January 12, 2007 1 Comment

Today I passed 70-284 Exchange Admin exam after a judicious bit of self study (and several years of looking after Exchange 2000 and 2003).

I found one particularly useful site worthy of being given the credit for some great Microsoft exam cramming notes – all for free and completely altruistic. That in itself makes me feel there is still some good in the world, the fact that it helped me to pass is just a bonus.

Filed under Exchange, Training + certification

How Opera’s Desktop Team deal with security vulnerabilities

January 11, 2007 Leave a Comment

In an article entitled “Handling Security”, Claudio Santambrogio of the Opera Desktop Team discusses how they handle vulnerability reports, disclosure, patching and upgrades.

Recently, some of our users have asked why we chose to disclose a potential security issue only after the release of Opera 9.10. Let me try to give a short overview on how security issues get reported and disclosed – and not only at Opera, but in most applications: it might help some people to understand how this works.

Filed under Patching + hotfixes, Security and Malware

Slashdot clarifies(?) its position

January 10, 2007 Leave a Comment

In an article in PCPro magazine issue 148 titled “Democratic News” Rob Malda, the site editor of Slashdot gave his opinion about the differences between totally open, user-driven news sites (such as www.digg.com) and those where submitted material is still subject to quality control and editorial decisions. He is quoted as saying:

I think Slashdot’s uniqueness is largely determined by the people who make the final selection of content for the index. That’s not to say there aren’t ways we couldn’t get help from readers

(emphasis mine) It’s great to think that having editors helps to ensure that content is much clearer and less ambiguous for the reader! I couldn’t fail to disagree with him less.

Don’t misunderstand me; I have no issue with the content on Slashdot, I just think this kind of linguistic abuse is why peer review is useful to weed out this sort of gobbledegook.

Filed under Industry News

Bill Gates’ keynote at CES, Vegas

January 9, 2007 Leave a Comment

Watch the 1 hour, 11 minute show with Bill and his friends showing how much fun Vista is, and how cool it is that you can do all this really great fantastic wonderful stuff with a PC and an XBox controller. No real information for the business user, but I guess that would not have gone down well at this event. The whole thing can be streamed here:

Consumer Electronics Show 2007 keynote address

One of the interesting things they demonstrated was Microsoft Group Shot software – more on that here.

Filed under Events

GroupShot photo editing tool from MS

January 9, 2007 1 Comment

This is awesome. I do quite a lot of digital photography, and never quite find the time to go and re-touch those photos to get the perfect image, or to carefully cut, layer, alpha-channel and merge images to get stunning panoramas or remove that annoying tourist in the background.

Now I can get the power of the machine to do it all for me using the brilliant bit of software that is Microsoft’s GroupShot. This is being touted by MS as a free download to make Vista Ultimate even better (what’s better than Ulitmate?). However, I thought I’d give it a try and it seems to install and run just fine on my Windows XP sp2 system. Read more of this post

Filed under Utilities + Tools

January MS update highlights

January 9, 2007 Leave a Comment

Security updates from Microsoft from January include four for Office and one for Windows. The Windows update has a version for Vista listed, for all you folk who are already running this in live or test environments. The Windows security update is here:

KB929969

And the four for Office are: 924085 925525 921585 925257

There are the usual updates for junk mail filtering and the Malicious Software Removal Toolkit as well.

Filed under Patching + hotfixes

Appropriate cartoon

January 8, 2007 Leave a Comment

After a week of writing things in this blog, I stumbled upon this cartoon and realised how appropriate it was:

Bored with the Internet

Bored with the Internet cartoon

Filed under Trivia and fun stuff

January patch Tuesday slimmed down

January 8, 2007 Leave a Comment

Microsoft have announced that there will be only four updates delivered on “Patch Tuesday” this month, rather than the eight which some people were anticipating. These four security updates comprise one for Windows and three for Office – it seems likely these will all be classed as critical. It is not clear whether these will be delivered via Windows Update (as well as Microsoft Update) and SUS (in addition to WSUS). The two High Priority non-security updates for Windows will only be made available through MU and WSUS.

There will also be the usual update to the Malicious Software Removal Tool which can be directly retrieved from the download centre or via WU, MU or WSUS. All of these should be available from around 6pm GMT on Tuesday 9th January

See also: SUS is end of life, upgrade to WSUS

Read the full Microsoft Security Bulletin advance notification.

Filed under Patching + hotfixes

Change local admin passwords with PwdMan

January 8, 2007 1 Comment

PwdMan is a free tool which allows you to easily change the password on the local administrator (or other local user) account on one or many Windows machines in one go. You need to have admin rights already of course (eg through a domain admin account) and have network access to the machine, but this is still a useful tool – especially if a system administrator leaves your organisation.

Read more about it in this Redmond Mag article or go straight to the download page.

Filed under Utilities + Tools

Microsoft Technet Roadshow

January 7, 2007 Leave a Comment

The Technet Roadshow is returning to Harrogate on 12th March 2007.
Other UK cities on the tour between 2oth February and 20th March include Nottingham, Bristol, Glasgow and London. It’s good to see some of these Microsoft “evangelists” get away from Reading and the South-east for a change, it’s just a shame it seems to happen so rarely.

To find out about other UK events, go to the Microsoft UK events search page. Most events listed are free to attend, and there are online as well as onsite events taking place.

Filed under Events

Securing Windows Vista

January 7, 2007 Leave a Comment

Following on from previous security guides with information about best practice, Microsoft have made the Windows Vista Security Guide download available.

The Windows Vista Security Guide provides guidance and tools to further protect Windows Vista against real-live threats such as malware and information theft. This solution accelerator recommends the Enterprise Client (EC) configuration for organizations of all types. Only in extreme security situations does the guide recommend the Specialized Security – Limited Functionality (SSLF) configuration, which considerably limits client computer functionality. The Solution Accelerator includes recommendations about how to use new and enhanced security technologies in Windows Vista to better defend the client computers in your organization against malware. The guide also provides recommendations and best practices on how to use encryption and access control technologies in Windows Vista to protect corporate data.

Filed under Windows Vista

Burning an ISO image to CD or DVD

January 6, 2007 Leave a Comment

I’ve never had a problem doing this as I have been lucky enough to have third-party tools which do a perfectly good job of it. However, if you do not, you will be pleased to find out that the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (which is free and can be installed on XP) has two command-line tools to help with this – cdburn and dvdburn. Read more about this in Steve Lamb’s blog here.

Filed under Utilities + Tools

Pay as you throw? WEEE regs finally here

January 4, 2007 Leave a Comment

The European directive on the disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) finally became part of UK law on January 2nd, although originally it was hoped it would be adopted by all member states more than two years ago. Some of the provisions will not come into full force until 1st July 2007, but all firms need to start planning for this now.

The full text can be found on the DTI website – Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2006 (pdf).

Read more of this post

Filed under IT legal matters

Mandatory company info in emails and websites

January 3, 2007 Leave a Comment

From January 1st 2007 you need to ensure your company emails and websites have sufficient information to comply with the existing E-Commerce regulations and the Companies Act, and clarification brought about by the adoption of the EU First Company Law Amendment directive. Of course, much of this information is useful to your website visitors and business correspondents in any case, regardless of the fact that it is now mandatory.

Read more of this post

Filed under IT legal matters

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