Over the past 8 months or so I have been doing a bit of work with Microsoft Online’s Business Productivity Online Services or BPOS offering.  For those not familiar with it, it is essentially a hosted Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Live Meeting solution that customers can buy on a per user basis for either $10usd or $16.95AUD per month.

For small businesses, this means that all the normal maintenance and support tasks like backup and patching are taken care of, and all they need to worry about is setting up user accounts, managing passwords and keeping their internet connection up.

The piece that is overlooked though is the basic need for file and print sharing that most offices have. Sure, hosted sharepoint provides some great collaboration features, but doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to things like roaming user profiles, home folders, or even redirected folders.

To leverage that, what you ide ...

Office 2010 recently hit the RTM milestone and is now available for download via a couple of different channels.  For admins looking at deploying it, one of the biggest changes they will see relates to license keys & activation.  For previous office deployments, enterprises would establish a volume license agreement with Microsoft and then they would receive a volume license key (VLK).  They would then download a volume license (VL) edition of office, create a custom answer file, using the custom installation wizard or the Office customization tool depending on the version, run the setup with the answer file and be done.

For Office 2010 the process changes a little. The good news is that if you have deployed Vista or Windows 7, your pretty much set as Office now uses Volume Activation 2.0.  For those who haven’t though, a little time will need to be spent preparing your environments for Volume Activation.

The first question that needs to be answe ...

This post may seem a little backward to some, given the newer alternatives such as Powershell or even vbscript, but the past couple of weeks have seen me playing a with script that has turned out to be pretty useful and I figured I would share.

The origins of this story then, I have a small customer who runs SBS 2003 premium in the office. Occasionally they would give me a call and complain that they couldn’t access the internet and that the server was offline.  They would then look at the console and it would be alive and they would be able to login without issue. I would get them to have a look at the services and they would report that the firewall service was not running.  They would then start it manually, then it would run like a champ and they would be happy.

The logs weren’t showing any major errors and the fact that once the service was started it all ran fine, we went with the easy option of creating a script that would check to see if the service was runni ...