So I was really pleased to read about a great new feature today which will let you collect together load of pages or whole sections that you want to read through later, or perhaps share with your colleagues to save them trying to find the same information.

Browser bookmarks could very quickly get tedious, so this way means you can create your own contents page inside TechNet, which will be remembered for you between sessions. You can also output your collection as a web page to host locally or as a PDF file which means you can read the content on a wide rage of platforms, including e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle.

Read a step by step guide to building your own book of TechNet articles on the Office IT Pro Blog.

The Microsoft Office blog has an article about Producer for PowerPoint, as well as links to the download page, and importantly to the Office Animation Runtime which you will need if you have PowerPoint 2010 (previous versions installed this along with the application, whereas 2010 does not). What is strange here is that the download page describes this as version 2 with a release date of 29th April 2011, yet the actual download page and file is identical to the version released and announced at the beginning of May last year.

The previous release was really a bug fix version which sorted out compatibility for Office 2007 and 2010, and there were vague claims that there would be new features in some later release, although as always according to policy there were no specifics about software in development.

Producer is a great way to turn a presentation file into a polished multimedia show which anyone can view using their browser. This is great for e-learning, tutorials, or any situation where you want to take something which would normally be delivered in person and make it available to a wider audience.

Oddly enough the download page refers to this as version 2, but the program itself claims (through help > about) that it is build 3.0.3012.0, but the MD5 hash for this file is identical to the year-old one. I’ve had a couple of problems with it – for example if you delete a load of slides from the timeline it expands the last one to fill up the space, and when you try to shrink it back down it takes while for no obvious reason, in my case chewing up one of my four processor cores flat out for a couple of minutes (tip: only add slides when you know you need them rather than all at once to avoid this problem).

I did as advised by Microsoft and did this as a clean install every time, rather than doing a hack to allow me to run an in-place upgrade. Thanks to James O’Neill’s blog article I did this from a bootable USB drive, and this was lightning fast since I also recently upgraded my hard drive to a 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD.

Applications, applications, applications

A bit of a pain re-installing applications again each time round, but it does mean I have a nice shortlist of the apps and utilities that I actually need and use regularly enough to merit an install. Without being an exhaustive list, the apps that made the grade every time, in approximately the order they got installed are:

• Office 2007 + sp2 and Office 2003 (for feature comparison when writing training courses), and 2010 Technical Preview on the last time round too. Because I am installing multiple Office versions I can only use 32 bit across the board for these, so no experience with 64 bit version of Office 2010 yet. All of these 32 bit apps run just fine (a common misconception seems to be that if your favourite apps only come in 32 bit flavours you can’t choose 64 bit Windows, but a feature called Windows on Windows takes care of this quite happily, just as it did for previous editions of Windows since 2000)
• Firefox (3.5.2 this time round)
• Foxit PDF Reader, as I have mentioned before, I much prefer the responsiveness of this over Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. I do wish it would stop nagging me about paid-for upgrades under the disguise of it’s auto-update feature. Oh well, musn’t grumble too much about free software I guess. FoxitPDF Preview handler from Tim Heuer makes PDF previews available directly in Outlook without opening the attachment.
• FastStone Image Viewer – FREE image viewing, editing, organising, browsing, screen capturing software. Brilliant piece of software which I use all the time for my digital photo library, really quick and easy to use for browsing thumbnails, organising, and editing tasks such as cropping and resizing, including doing this in batches. Highly configurable, easily replaced Office Photo Editor and Paint Shop Pro browser which I used to use for these sorts of jobs. (I still use Jasc PSP for actual image creation and editing, eg creating banners and icons)
• Visio 2007 and 2010 TP
• Notepad++ FREE text editing software. Simple to use tabbed interface, supports loads of different coding languages (eg colouring keywords, matching braces and tags, creating expand/collapse sections). I find it a great way to edit javascript for CRM customisations, HTML and CSS for my website, and XML for hacking around in Office documents, templates and themes.
• Zoomit utility to zoom in on portions of the screen while presenting, demoing or projecting for any reason. Version 4 now allows you to actually use the machine at the same time on Windows Vista and 7 (previous versions worked like a kind of screen capture you could move around, but you could not click anything, which meant it was really hard to show things like menus, or URL’s as you typed them). Using “live” mode means you can’t also draw on the screen – the mouse is either the real live mouse or it is used for drawing, you can’t mix and match.
• Windows Live Writer – essential for writing the blog, so much more efficient than the web interface (no offence to WordPress, the interface is OK but WLW blows it to bits, especially for someone like me who uses loadsof keyboard shortcuts to get things done). Only annoying thing is there is no separate offline install for this, you have to download the launcher for the Live Essentials collection, then do a custom install and choose the bits you want (just Writer, in my case, no toolbars, no photo editing software – why would I want SQL to be running on my laptop just to organise my photo library?)
• Microsoft Expression Web. Although I hand code most of the things for my website, it’s convenient to have tools like global search and replace, and a built-in FTP tool to upload changes (although I’ve been using FireFTP a lot recently while I did not have Expression Web re-installed)

Things I still need to get round to installing and trying include Camtasia Studio so I can start to record and edit training videos (and maybe upload some shorter ones as tips), Dynamics CRM client for Outlook (might need to wait for the updated release expected later this year for this to work with 2010, but I’m going to try the current client first), and Paint Shop Pro (didn’t get round to it on RTM yet; it was fine on RC1).

Offline folders and the CSC cache

The biggest pain for me was actually rebuilding my offline files every time, although of course this is true of any bare-metal install, nothing to do with Windows 7 or 64 bit. I use this extensively so I hardly ever have to think whether I have a file with me from my server or not, pretty much everything I need is there all the time, and kept in synch silently and invisibly – offline files and folders were massively improved from XP to Vista, and Windows 7 continues to perform well on this feature. When I am offline it shows the available space of my network drives which have synched files as the same as the space on my local drive, which makes sense, as this is the most stuff I could put in any one of them. No change there, but something I had never noticed in Vista and believe to be new to Windows 7 is that the file system for these drives is shown as “CSC-Cache” to indicate this is where those items are actually going to get saved, and it has no information about the file system of the offline fileserver at the moment.

A word of warning incidentally – if you do install a later release of Windows from bootable media without formatting your drive, it will prompt you to point out that it has detected a previous version (eg RC rather than RTM) and this will not work after you install. Great, go ahead, yes please. But, although that old version won’t be bootable it is still on your hard disk, shoved into a directory called windows.old. Well, actually, that’s not just your old windows directory, it’s the whole of the contents of the hard drive.

In a way this is good – it means you have access to things like your old documents (including draft blog posts!), program settings (especially useful for things like Firefox where you can just copy your old profile straight across). However, it also means you have a whole bloated load of stuff like all those installed applications in programs and programs(x86), which in my case is about 3.2 GB of stuff just in those two directories (on a machine I only ran as RC1 for a few months – 3 concurrent versions of MS Office are responsible for nearly half of that). The other thing to watch out for is that inside the windows.old\windows folder is the old CSC cache (unless you moved the CSC folder to another drive or location). So, if you are like me and use offline files a lot, this could be pretty big and you will want to nuke it sooner rather than later. You may need to take ownership of this in order to delete it since it is a system folder, so I’m pretty sure even your local admin account does not have the rights out of the box.

One thing I did notice about the CSC cache folder in Windows 7 though, is that the contents have proper filenames and are now arranged in a way that reflects the source folder structure, rather than the horrible flat, anonymous renamed mess that previous versions had. If you are doing recovery of a failed machine, this might come in handy to find files which have been edited offline and have at least some hope of getting them back into the main file store.

What about running 64 bit Windows on an older machine?

Also got RTM installed on my old Sony Vaio after XP died for no good reason (and a rebuild was overdue after about four years). This was not 64 bit capable, so I went 32 bit and everything fine but the drivers for the old video card have not been detected so it’s running at 1024 x 768 on a 1280 x 768 widescreen at the moment. Annoying, and the laptop predates Vista release, so there’s nothing on Sony’s site. I need to try to figure out exactly what the chipset is and get an OEM driver for it, assuming there is a Vista driver out there somewhere, otherwise I may get very stuck.

Next one I want to try is a really old Toshiba I have kicking around. ‘Hackerman’ reports getting Windows 7 to run on a Pentium II 266 with only 96MB RAM so maybe there is some hope. I don’t expect much out of it, but maybe it will be one for my pre-school kids to play around on.

Can I run 64 bit on my PC?

SecurAble from GRC is a very nice simple utility you can use to find out if your PC or laptop is capable of running 64 bit editions, as well as checking for hardware DEP and virtualisation. It simply runs with no install (so you can do this from a USB drive, for example). Needs admin rights, but behaves properly with UAC on Vista and Windows 7 so you can just give it credentials when it ask for them. Run it and see the very simply presented results – three boxes with yes or no in them).

If 64 bit is an option for you, my advice would be “go for it”, forget the gripes people had for 64 bit XP. If you have really old peripherals you might want to check for drivers first  before going through the install twice, of course.

Anyone had any good or bad experience with Windows 7 you want to share? How about 64 bit (including previous versions)?

Styles in Excel are one of those things that sound good in theory, but are significantly worse than useless in reality. In an isolated world they may work but as soon as you start copying a pasting between workbooks…then you get a right royal style mess.

Cell styles as a concept seem pretty weak to me. The built-in ones are hopeless; I know hardly anyone (actually no-one that I could name right now) that uses them.

I have recently done some extensive work for a client on a set of templates, themes, etc for the whole Office suite. For the Excel templates I included some cell styles to make it quick to format things in “corporate” colours for headings and so on (as well as default table styles for the same reason). This provides user convenience and helps them create more consistent documents with more of a “branded” feel to them.

As to imposing a regime of “pink means bad” and “orange double underline means linked” (linked to what?), no chance.

Why styles don’t address the real need for good formatting

I teach students on my Excel training courses that formatting of spreadsheets should be used for three purposes:

• to highlight (data outliers; estimates as opposed to actuals)
• to group or associate data together (months in the same quarter or year having a light shaded background say, next group no background; using matching colour for axes and lines in a two-series chart with two different scales)
• to separate data by category or type (line above the first month of a new year; making the title row bold)

These principles of using formats to help interpret the data, rather than help it look pretty tend to get people focussed on the task rather than the appearance. The built-in cell styles only seem to address the concept of highlighting, rather than being useful for grouping or separating. The highlighting they provide seems arbitrary at best, and quite likely to cause headaches with some of the colours involved.

They also apply too aggressively for my liking. For example, if I apply a format to a cell to show that it is an estimate, and someone else wants to style it to say it should be checked (or updated or whatever), my original formatting is irrecoverably lost. Resetting the cell style to “normal” simply applies this instead. By using precise formatting I could control this better – for example my estimates might be indicated by use of italics and a different font colour. I could then highlight this cell to be checked by adding a border or background fill, which can be separately removed later once done, leaving my original font format in place. Or I can change the format to represent an actual rather than estimate figure, but still leave the border to make sure it gets checked.

Cell styles are all-or-nothing, and that does not work for me.

Surely styles help people apply formatting more quickly?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for people formatting everything by hand, one property at a time. Paragraph styles are a great way to format Word documents (the only sensible way for a consistent approach to layout and formatting). How a document is structured and how it looks are closely tied together, and providing users with an easy way to show heading hierarchies, properly legal-numbered lists and so on is really valuable, and saves a ton of time versus bold, italic, indent-a-bit, font size 24 etc. Re-using the hierarchical structure this gives for things like table of contents or an outline make good sense too. Marketing departments typically like templates as a convenient way to give end users some built-in branding and good design, making it easier for everyone to create documents which look similar, and meet the guidelines they have chosen for colours, layouts, even choice of bullet points. I just can’t see how this sort of model translates to Excel.

Colour schemes do make sense to help “brand” Excel documents with corporate colours for headings and the like, and to make sure that visual elements such as charts or diagrams have a sensible and consistent palette (not necessarily in corporate colours, which may be too saturated or distinctive in many cases).

Cell styles don’t seem to meet any actual need that is not just as well addressed for the majority of users by the format painter tool, and learning to use it properly – I have lost count of the people I see on intermediate or advanced courses who have never double clicked this to lock it on and apply a format to multiple targets, whether in Excel, Word or PowerPoint

Workbooks that have lived for a while in 2003 and been reformatted over time seem to generate loads of horrid pointless cell styles when converted to 2007 (equally PowerPoint files create large numbers of colour schemes so that existing slides can retain their colours while still pretending to be theme-aware). Copying sheets between workbooks seems to compound this (although because I hardly even look at the styles gallery it is hard to know exactly how bad this gets). The style gallery quickly becomes useless, and as Simon highlights, it is tedious beyond belief to sort out. Some kind of proper style manager interface might redeem this. I tend to crack open the zip file and reach for Notepad++ for some XML-hacking – not what I would expect most users to do, or even many power users.

Styles gallery is a waste of space – literally

My biggest gripe with cell styles is that for a feature which is very rarely used it gets given a lot of space. Right now my ribbon is maxed out on my 1920×1200 widescreen. The Home ribbon is 47cm wide, and the styles gallery is showing 10 items in 5 columns taking up 15 cm – nearly a third of the ribbon. The same space could show various groups which many people might find more useful, any of these pairs would fit in the same space or less:

• names and formula auditing
• page setup and scale to fit
• changes (protection) and workbook views

I know some things have been made more prominent on the ribbon to get people to consider features they did not even know were there – conditional formatting and defined names being two of the most underused in my opinion, and I’m very glad to see them given a useful amount of space. But getting people to use cell styles simply won’t set the world on fire, or make spreadsheets more efficient, or easier to maintain, or less prone to user errors. If anything, they distract from good practice and promote eye-candy – will “death by PowerPoint” spread to “death by spreadsheet”?

Texty: The Simplest CMS

The principle here is that you put a script on your page which pulls the information from Texty’s database. You edit the content in that database through a simple online user interface, much like editing a blog post, for example. This is great for small organisations who may be prepared to pay a small amount to a web design firm for a basic site (or an off-the-shelf template) but do not have the skills to maintain well-written HTML themselves. So clubs, societies, and small (or even large) not-for-profits could all benefit from a simple system to help them manage the content of pages which change frequently, such as news or upcoming events listings. Some commercial firms might also welcome the convenience, although I suspect that many smaller businesses simply don’t feel the need to change their website content all that often. The other benefit may be that it is easy to allow multiple people to produce content without fear that they can cause problems for one another.

Why not get a blog instead?

For many people a blog is a handy way to post short pieces of news or information without having to write underlying code. However, the popular free offerings only give limited control over the appearance of the site from a selection of templates.

So a separate site without your own ‘branding’ may not be appropriate to give an integrated public web presence. There may also be a feeling that a blog will not be seen as the “official” face of an organisation, as some still treat them as purely personal spaces – not helped by the number of people who seem intent on telling the world every detail of their cat’s daily menu and habits.

I have not used Texty for my site, so I have yet to see how it handles the look and feel aspects to integrate it within a website. I would hope it simply generates code using standard tags (H1,2,3…, P, A, IMG, UL/LI etc) and relies on the site’s own stylesheets to provide formatting (or leave it to a browser’s default). Even using classes or IDs would be an acceptable middle-ground, except this would presume some changes to the site to use these specific styles.

Why have I not tried it yet?

I’m writing this post because I think Texty is an interesting proposition, but personally my company website is hand-written by me using a combination of Notepad (for quick changes to text or things like the CSS) and Expression Web (when I’m feeling lazy or want to do global find/replace for example).

I don’t use a graphical or “design” view in an editor because I have yet to find one which gives an accurate representation of how a page will render in any browser, yet alone any particular one. Instead I simply host the site on an internal server so I can quickly test how pages look in Firefox and Internet Explorer (version 8 most of the time, but I double check with 7 now and again). Most other standards-based browsers should do at least a similar job because I use CSS and XHTML 1.1 (which is pretty much the same as strict 1.0). There’s nothing which is too dependant on exact positioning, as long as things are in approximately the right places it’s more about the content. For me accessibility is key, so I test in various screen sizes (resolutions) to see that the important items are visible even on smaller screens, as well as getting the order and flow right so someone can use the site based on text alone or using screen reading software, for example.

Let me know if you have used Texty

So, if you have used Texty or a similar service, let me know how it went. Was it easy to get working with your site? How did you integrate the content to maintain an overall consistent look and feel for your pages? Do you use it for all your pages, or just the most frequently changed?

In a recent blog post, Mark explains in great detail the file copy process in Vista, why it changed radically from XP and how this impacted real and perceived performance of this basic function. He goes on to explain how some of this has been changed and remedied in Vista Service Pack 1. He makes it clear that some of the code design choices have to be compromises between making things faster in different situations, and that in most cases Vista <> Server 2008 filecopying will be faster using the chosen algorithms than they would be with different choices, or using XP or server 2003 for example.

Copying a file seems like a relatively straightforward operation: open the source file, create the destination, and then read from the source and write to the destination. In reality, however, the performance of copying files is measured along the dimensions of accurate progress indication, CPU usage, memory usage, and throughput. In general, optimizing one area causes degradation in others. Further, there is semantic information not available to copy engines that could help them make better tradeoffs. For example, if they knew that you weren’t planning on accessing the target of the copy operation they could avoid caching the file’s data in memory, but if it knew that the file was going to be immediately consumed by another application, or in the case of a file server, client systems sharing the files, it would aggressively cache the data on the destination system.

The article is also a useful working example of how Process Monitor can help you to see what your machine is really up to. On the same subject, Mark gave a great Tech Ed presentation in Barcelona with some real-world demonstrations of how to use a variety of Sysinternals tools and utilities to detect, find and fix all sorts of system issues. A video of that talk entitled “The Case of the Unexplained…Live!” can be viewed here (it’s just over an hour long).

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was recently announced and it works really well. That is to say, it “does what it says in the tin”. Writing well-formed blog posts is really simple, it even downloads styles directly from my WordPress blog and allows to me to do proper previews to see exactly what I will get before I publish a post, even when working offline.

There’s even more rich functionality and interoperability with third-party platforms than you might expect from a Microsoft product. For example, WordPress.com supports hierarchical categories. I find this especially useful as I show my categories as a drop-down list rather than take up loads of the sidebar with lots of choices. Windows Live Writer (WLW) provides me the ability to categorise posts, and to add new categories if I need them, including specifying a parent category so they fit into the multi-level hierarchy. Oh, and it does all this offline as well. This is great, and it’s the sort of attention to detail which I appreciate being in a product I use several times a week.

And now the Bad News: WLW does not support the new WordPress Tags by default

WordPress.com have announced a change to the way they use categories and tags. Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was released before this change and does not know what to do with them, so it does not create any, and removes any that already exist if you edit a previous post. However, there is a way to fix this with a registry change, but I found it caused some instability.

What is the point of Tags?

Basically lots of people would create categories to use just once, in the way that they might use tags or keywords on other platforms in order to provide good search engine terms and attract traffic. However, this has a couple of problems. Firstly because categories are universal throughout WordPress (if I happen to create a category with a name matching one that someone else used it shows a really low Category ID number, a uniquely named one would get a new, high number).

It also makes a real mess of people’s category lists as they end up really long and to some extent pointless – as a blog reader, I expect the idea of a category to mean a container which will have more than one post in. “Hey, they have a whole category of posts for Live Writer! Oh, just the one post” is always a disappointment. The category list can also give me an idea of the overall angle of the site – is this a web copywriter writing about a useful tool for editing blogs, or a developer who happens to use this tool and maybe writes extensions for it?

So, the new definitions on WordPress.com now line up with most other blogs – categories are permanent things you create to organise your posts into groups, tags are just transient things you use to describe what is in a particular post in such a way that people can search for them more easily, and over time they may form a sort of grouping by serendipity as you use the same tags over and over when writing about similar subjects.

Tag cloud widget for finding posts by tags

There is even a new widget to show a “Tag cloud” in the sidebar of some themes, as you will have seen on many other platforms before. This shows frequent tags in a larger, bolder format to indicate their repetition (on that particular blog) so one-offs appear much smaller and less obtrusively. There is also a limit of 45 tags shown at once, according to a thread in the support forums, which prevents it from getting too huge. I assume this means only the 45 most frequent tags will appear, not the first 45 used. When you hover over a tag name it shows in a tooltip how many posts are associated with that tag, which is useful.

Tag cloud issues

This “Tag cloud” widget does not work properly yet. Firstly, it seems to take an absolute age for it to update after publishing posts with new tags. I’ve been waiting over an hour now for a bunch of words to show up and they have not yet done so. This might be because of some system issues as loads of regular bloggers are probably updating loads of previous posts (as I am), but it remains to be seen whether this improves with time.

Secondly, the widget simply does not link properly to the related posts. The FAQ about the difference between tags and categories says this:

A post into the category ‘food’ and with the tag ‘rice’ will look like this:

http://faq.wordpress.com/category/food/

http://faq.wordpress.com/tag/rice/

Hovering over a link in the Tag cloud shows the URL correctly formed to use the tags such as http://veroblog.wordpress.com/tag/windows-live-writer/. However, when clicked this redirects to http://veroblog.wordpress.com/category/windows-live-writer/ which in this case does not exist.

What about Windows Live Writer and WordPress Tags?

Problem 1: There is nowhere in the GUI of WLW Beta 3 to add tags in.

Categories still work as expected, but there’s no way to actually add a tag in WLW as installed. Hopefully they will add this functionality by default to the live release. This is supposed to be the last Beta before the final code, unless this WordPress issue changes things and they decide a Beta 4 is needed to push this out.

Problem 2: WARNING! If you use WLW to edit an existing post which has tags, they are dropped when you re-publish

Let’s walk through this:

You write a new post in Windows Live Writer (or the web editing tool).
You then use the web interface to edit the post and add some tags.
You later edit it in WLW (which will download the post from your blog if you have edited it in the web interface since last touching it in WLW).
You make a change and republish.

Oops! Because you have no means to add tags, it now has none. It does not keep this metadata somewhere, untouched by your edit. It does not try to do a clever merge, it just replaces the post and all its metadata, categories etc wholesale. (Except it keeps the original posting date/time stamp). If you don’t make a change to WLW (see below) and you are adding tags in the web interface, expect to see thm disappear when you edit with WLW.

How to add a tags field to WLW to solve these problems

Actually, you can add a field for putting in tags (or keywords, as WLW calls them).

<edit:
Joe Cheng has published a tool to do this to save you from editing the registry directly. You can read about it and download from here.
Also, Joseph Scott has updated the manifest at WordPress.com to make it automatic so if you start WLW, close it again and restart you should get the new settings and the keyword field will be available to you without doing anything else.
Thanks to both guys for their contributions via the comments. The rest of the post remains for anyone that still wants to see it, although you should not need it given both options above. /edit>

You need to make a change to the registry, so make sure to close WLW, check that you have backups, permission from your parents, and you are not too drunk to do this safely. Don’t edit the registry if you are not sure what you are doing. This information is provided “as is”, I can’t help you if you break things by following this advice.

If you have a version before Beta 3, Windows Live Writer was a separate application, and the reg key you need will be here:

HKCU\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\{blog-id}\UserOptionOverrides

Beta 3 became part of the Windows Live Suite, so the path changes to:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\Weblogs\{blog-id}\UserOptionOverrides

If you use WLW for editing multiple blogs, then go to each {blog-id} in turn and check the BlogName value for the one you want. Now you have the right one, under UserOptionOverrides you need to add a String “supportsKeywords” with a value of “yes”. Restart WLW.

To the right of the publish date at the bottom right hand corner is a double up-arrow. Click it and a box expands which gives you access to all the metadata for your post, and now the keywords tag is available for you to put a comma-separated list of tags into before you publish. This does solve the problems above, but I have found it makes WLW unstable in certain ways, such as trying to edit a draft which did not have tags associated with it, and even downloading a published post to make changes has been causing me some crashes in an otherwise very stable product. More testing required for me to pin down what combination causes a problem.

<edit2: I can now only reproduce the instability on one particular post (this one, as it happens), all others seem fine. /edit>

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AcctInfo is a dll file which is part of the free tools for the Windows 2003 resource kit, but can be used on 2003 or 2000 machines. It enables extended properties for the Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) MMC snapin.

This is one of those tools which is really useful, if only you knew it was available. Then of course you have to get round to installing it on all the machines where you might need to use it. However, once you have started using it you will be very pleased that you bothered.

The extra AD information simply appears as an additional tab in a user’s properties (see screenshot, click to enlarge it).

These properties include information such as:

• when the password was last changed and when it expires (date and time plus how far away that is to save calculating)
• a button to see the policies in force relating to passwords
• the user account SID and GUID, and a button to see SID history (if the account has been migrated in from another domain)
• when they last logged on and off, or had a failed logon attempt (at the DC you are using to look at the information)
• Their total logon count as well as the current bad password count (relevant only if you have a password lockout policy)

There is also a button which enables you to reset the user’s password on a DC in the site where the user is currently working (more about this later).

Where do I get it? How do I install it?

First download the free tools for the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (12Mb exe file) and install them. By installing the resource kit so that other tools are already there when you need them, and you may find something useful which you did not even know existed. Serendipity can often be the best way to find which tools work for you and which are unnecessary.

Now you have downloaded it you need to register the DLL, so you need to know where it is. After installing the Resource Kit tools it will be here by default: C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\Acctinfo.dll

You can choose to copy the DLL file to somewhere else such as c:\windows\system32 but you don’t need to (you can also copy the single file to a memory stick ready to put onto other machines without the hassle of installing the whole resource kit).

Either way, you need to use regsvr32 to register the dll file using the following as an example:

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\Acctinfo.dll”

The quotes deal with the spaces in the path. To unregister it you would use regsvr32 /u acctinfo.dll – no need for the full path.

You should see something like the screenshot on the right.

Now when you use ADUC and go to a user account properties (right click > properties or however you prefer) you will have the extra tab, labelled “Additional Account Info” (as shown above).

Note that this does not work if you are using Small Business Server’s built-in all-in-one server management tool, but it works just as it should when you run ADUC as a normal MMC snap-in on SBS. It seems really odd that this should be the case, but there it is.

Similarly, it won’t show the extra tab if you get to the user using the “find” function in ADUC and opening the properties from a user listed in the results, because this goes via dsquery.dll. It does show up if you double click a user listed in the “members” of a group, though, which does not. Inconsistent? (Thanks to Windude in this thread at SecurityForums.com for pointing out that it fails from a Find results list.)

What additional account information is now available?

Password expiry and policies

The first cluster of details are about the users’ password – when they last changed it and when it expires, and very helpfully how far into the future this is to save having to calculate – “will my password expire while I am away on holiday for two weeks?”. There is also a button labelled “Domain PW info” which brings up a message box with information about the password policy currently in force on the domain, as shown below.

There are a couple of anomalies to watch for here, highlighted in the image below (click to enlarge).

If you set a password lockout policy and then change your mind later, it still remembers the lockout duration and time to reset the bad password count to zero if not exceeded. They don’t do anything but may confuse you if you don’t spot the “Cannot be locked out”. Incidentally, it handles multiple policies applied at domain level correctly, taking link order into account correctly (as you would hope and expect).

There also seems to be a delay sometimes for password policy changes to show up correctly here (I’m using a domain with a single domain controller for this, so there should be no replication latency). Updating policies on the box you are running ADUC on or against seems to make no difference. This is not a major issue as things are only changed very infrequently, just be aware of it. To check your policies, use GPMC, only rely on this tool to give you a quick way to check if you are fairly sure they will not have been touched for while.

Don’t forget, password policies may be different between domains, so be sure you are connecting to a DC in the right domain of the forest (I have not confirmed what happens if you use the tool on one DC in domain a.z.com to look at a user in domain b.z.com – it ought to check the domain the user object is in, but you need to verify for yourself that is the case or make sure you change the focus of ADUC first (right click the root where it says “Active Directory Users and Computers” and choose connect to domain / domain controller.

SID information

The user’s SID and GUID are shown, which may be useful for some troubleshooting tasks, or if you need to use them in a script in preference to an FQDN (perhaps if you are worried the user object may get moved later or their OU renamed).

The SIDHistory attribute will only be populated for accounts which have been brought into the domain as part of a migration using a utility such as the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT). This is used to provide access to resources in the source domain, including legacy systems such as Exchange 5.5.

Details about previous logons

The next area gives information about when the user last logged on and off, or had a failed logon attempt. It also shows the current bad logon count so you can see if that means their next attempt would cause a lockout (or already has done), if you are using this as a policy.

Note: these times are no different from what you get any other way in AD (such as DSQuery) – in other words it gives the last logon or logoff which took place using that particular domain controller. It does not aggregate these across the domain, so it may seem that the user has not logged on for some time if they have been successfully authenticating against another DC. Do not rely on this information alone to decide whether an account should be disabled as being out of use.

Set Password on Site DC

Rather than have to change the focus of ADUC (which collapses the tree view of the domain structure), you can use this feature to reset a user’s password directly against a domain controller on the user’s site.

You enter the computer name of the machine they are sat in front of – they can see the computer name in the dropdown box for the domain in the logon box if you don’t have physical labels on machines. Give it a password and confirm a second time, force the user to change after the next logon (if you so choose) and unlock the account at the same time (if it is locked, otherwise this is understandably greyed out).

You can choose to just identify the site and tell you which DC it would use without actually setting the password by using the “Just find site” button. Be careful here – if you click “OK” instead and the password fields are empty, this will immediately reset the password to be blank, if that is allowed by your policy. If the password you give is not compliant with your domain policies it will not be permitted, you get an error and another chance.

What are you waiting for?

It’s simple, it plugs in to your existing MMC tools and adds some very useful features. You won’t use this every day (unless you man a very busy helpdesk) but when you do need to get this information in a hurry or want to unlock a user and reset their password in one go, this just gets the job done.

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This is supposedly to be the last of the Beta versions of WLW before a final one is released. There are a few changes over Beta 2, most notably where the program gets installed.

More information about switching dictionaries

If you already followed my post about changing the dictionary to a UK English version you may be interested in this article in which the author has done what I wish I had found time for – a follow up on Graham’s work to find those other language files and perhaps a clue as to the engine being used here.

I’ll do a follow up post about the UK dictionary switch once I have Beta 3 installed.

Spread the word :

• Everyone and his dog seems to have blogged about the release dates for Vista service pack 1 and separately XP service pack 3 -both in 2008
• Microsoft seem to have requested that the popular patching utility “AutoPatcher” be taken down and no longer distributed.

Ironically, I started reading an excellent post on Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen blog about his favourite Windows tools and utilities for developers and power users, updated for 2007. He posted this on 23rd August. I started to follow and download several of the applications he linked, in some cases to do something new, in others to see how they stacked up against tools I already used. I was still downloading today, when I found that one of his links, to AutoPatcher, showed me this page

So, just under a week after that list was published, someone in MS legal sat up and took notice of a tool that had been used by loads of people over the preceding years to be able to carry an offline copy of all MS patches and apply them to systems which could not be patched in the normal way for some reason such as:

• slow connection – a 56kbps dialup simply is not enough to patch XP
• paranoia of connecting a machine to the internet before it is patched
• firewall issues
• the time it takes, during which you are paying someone by the hour

I notice that Susan Bradley has also posted about this seemingly over-zealous act by Microsoft. Finger on the pulse as always, Susan!

So, what did I do? I looked for (and found) a mirror which still hosted the tool. I don’t want to disclose the name of that site but I’m sure it should show up in my browsing history if I went and looked at the time right after I visited the AutoPatcher site.

I also went and checked on the status of another well-known hotfix rollup packager which seems to still be going strong. I made sure I got their latest updates as well. I first came across this one when a client asked me to find a way to do a slipstream of the XP install which was up to date to the previous month end so they could use it as a base for their third-party distribution software tool. I won’t mention it here for fear this may lead to it getting closed down…

Until we get another service pack for XP, these sorts of tools are invaluable for taking the pain out of getting a fresh sp2 install patched up to date before you risk getting infected (or lynched by an impatient user who just wants to get on with some work). I can understand the principle of wanting to control how people distribute or use your intellectual property which is not freely available, but surely this is simply taking something their customers can already get for nothing but packaging it in a way that is much easier to manage.

If someone sets up a stall outside an art gallery offering free gift wrapping to all customers as they walk out, should the artist act to get them closed down because the end “gift” is actually one of their pieces in a more attractive wrapper?

So, what about the official service packs?

Microsoft announce XP service pack 3

It should be going into Beta soon, then the usual round of different build versions, then a Release Candidate (RC1) build on wider release (but effectively still not officially supported or legally liable for anything), then eventually a release of the actual, final service pack “sometime in H1 2008″. So that could be 10 months away (or only 4 if it gets delivered by a flying pig).

Maybe they simply hope that many people will opt for Vista as an alternative to waiting for XP sp3.

Vista service pack 1 also planned for 2008

A similar story for Vista sp1 – a round of closed Betas to around 10,000 people, then a wider RC1 release to Technet and MSDN subscribers, then in Q1 2008 a final release to Joe Public.

In relation to the topic at hand (providing tools to apply patch rollups to machines which are not so well-connected) the announcement about Vista service pack 1 beta says (amongst lots of other things you would be better off reading there than here):

Windows Vista SP1 will support the following delivery methods:

• Express. Requires an Internet connection but minimizes the size of the download by sending only the changes needed for a specific computer (approximately 50 MB for x86-based operating systems).
• Stand-alone. Recommended for computers with limited Internet connectivity and for applying the service pack to multiple computers. The download size is larger than the express package, but customers can apply a single package to any Windows Vista version and language combination (within a platform). Distribution tools like System Center Configuration Manager 2007 use stand-alone packages to deploy Windows Vista SP1.
• Slipstream. The slipstream version of Windows Vista SP1 is media that already contains the service pack, which companies can use to deploy the operating system to new computers or to upgrade existing computers. Availability will be limited. Microsoft will update Windows Vista retail media with Windows Vista SP1 slipstream media in the future. Slipstream media will also be available to Volume Licensing customers.

This is a move in the right direction – a stand-alone package that you can carry around with you and use to patch machine that would otherwise be left vulnerable.

The article goes on to say:

For express and stand-alone deployment methods, Microsoft recommends the following:

• Laptops must be plugged in to an AC power source.
• A minimum of 7 GB free disk space on the system partition for x86-based operating systems and a minimum of 12 GB free disk space for x64-based operating systems.
• The stand-alone deployment method requires administrative credentials.

Yes, 7GB of free disk space just to install a service pack! I’ve already noted in another post that my old standard of 20GB for the system partition which has served me very well on XP and 2003 installs was simply not enough for Vista (on older Windows versions I didn’t commit even that much space to the OS). I used the built-in repartitioning tool to move it up to 25GB and I currently have less than 5Gb left. So I need to add at least 3 more before I can think about running the service pack in a stand-alone mode. I just can’t see how they get the jump from 50MB for a typical system in Express mode to 7GB? Can you spell “bloatware”?

There’s still no indication of a mechanism to address the ever-increasing list of patches to be applied to machines in between the service pack releases, other than to use technologies such as WSUS. This is fine for most corporate environments, but it does not help the huge number of home users who are likely to have fewer additional security measures in place to begin with.