One IT Pro's travels in the world of Pre-Beta...
I am LIKING Windows 8 - everything I love about using Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, except all bright, shiny and new-like.
I'm also liking that the skillz are instantly transferrable, even with the pre-beta. So, I've been tooling around with a couple of IT Pro-related tasks, specifically deployment and virtualisation, and here are my shameless cross-posts to what I've found so far:
Sysprep/OOBE experience in Windows 8 Server
Deploy Windows 8 with SCCM 2012
As ever, there's more to come :-)
...
TechEd is imminent. Make sure you lock in my SCCM sessions!
It's a shameless cross-promotion, of course (like all good cross-promotions!) but here's a blog post outlining my sessions at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia.
I'm speaking on User Device Affinity (UDA) in SCCM 2012, and how to migrate from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012.
UDA is going to revolutionise user, workstation and application management in SCCM, and the architectural changes in SCCM 2012 will make you want to jump ship from SCCM 2007 as fast as possible (awesome product though it is).
So check out my sessions and say Hi at TechEd :-)
...
Want to know how long it takes all of your users to log on to your domain systems? With some PowerShell you'll be able to get all that information so that your users (and management) will love you, love you, love you...
Bit of a cross-post from my own blog here. I recently had to come up with a method of accurately measuring the time it takes each user to logon, from the time they enter their credentials to the time the desktop actually becomes usable (which is the user-centric true metric of when a logon has completed).
My approach uses a combination of BAT, PowerShell and GPO to create and measure the appropriate metrics, and then writes all the data back to a central SQL database for easy data collection and reporting.
Full details right here.
...
Like tech? Like food? Like tech and food? Then read on....
The Microsoft DPE Evangelism Academy (of which I am a member, woo!) are presenting a TechEd Australia 2011 Preview morning on Friday 29th July from 8:00am to 9:30am.
This event (which is catered!) will give you a preview of 7 official TechEd Australia 2011 sessions. I will be presenting on SCCM 2012, specifically all the fun and joy you can have with User Device Affinity :-)
Places are limited and registration is important, so head over here for more information, and I hope to see you there.
...
Turn SCCM 2012 into the AV/malware hub for your entire environment with Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012.
Yay! Back to blogging, now that the Microsoft Schools Roadshow is all over, and the mayhem of moving house has been taken care of :-)
I'm doing more and more work with SCCM 2012 right now, for various reasons, not least of which is that I will be presenting a couple of sessions on SCCM 2012 at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia. Very exciting - more news on that to come.
I'm also doing a bit more writing for other sites. It's great to have my own blog, of course, but given that the whole point is to try and share as much information as possible, it makes sense to align with sites with a much broader reach.
Hence my latest piece - Part One of installation Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2012 on System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012 over at 4sysops.
Turning SCCM into the central hub to control and monitor the AV/malware health of your entire organisation is an extremely powerful way to enhance the product's already impressive feature set. Microsoft made the ...
Show those non-Windows mobile devices who's boss with SCCM 2012 :-)
Yes, it's totally true - with SCCM 2012 you can now reign in those pesky consumer mobile devices running rampant in your precious organisation, and stamp your mighty will upon them from on high. Yea, they shalt tremble and quake at thy new policy sets :-)
But first, you've got to actually get them into SCCM first. Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward, so read on to see how it's done.
...
Android on Hyper-V? Geek joy.... :-)
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm doing some work with SCCM 2012 at the moment, and one of the things I'm interested in looking at is how SCCM 2012 handled non-Windows-based mobile devices (ie: iOS and Android).
I have an iPod Touch which I don't mind tooling around with (given that I don't actually use it for anything related to its primary function), but I don't have any Android devices to hand.
Fortunately, there's an x86 port of Android called, unsurprisingly, Android-x86 which works quite well in a virtual environment. And despite the fact that Hyper-V's capacity to support Linux is, quite frankly, pretty limited, Android-x86 installs and plays quite nicely on a Hyper-V host.
This is how I put it all together - read on.
...
In which our intrepid hero leaps into the murky deep...fathomless depths inhabited only by other beta testers...
On Microsoft Connect, no-one can hear you scream (unless you file a big report).
System Center Configuration Manager is a seriously powerful, and seriously complex piece of management kit. Setting it up and getting it to run well involves much hair-pulling, uncontrollable swearing and frantic searching of online forums (it's like owning a Linux machine...). But, once it's playing ball it's a brilliant investment and you wonder how you ever managed.
SCCM 2012 is shaping up to be a major leap forward, with support for OS X, iOS and Android, just for tantalising starters.
I'm doing some presentations throughout May which leverage strongly of SCCM demos, so I've had to get labs up and operational in my home Hyper-V environment. SCCM 2007 is running fine, but I'd not encountered SCCM 2012 before now, and given that it's still in beta (Beta 2, to be exact) there's a dearth of documentation and available information on what to do.
After some frustration and backtracking ...
Welcome to the first video in the Talking IT with James Bannan series, where I catch up with various movers and shakers in the IT industry and talk about geek stuff for a while.
This video is with John Pritchard, Optimised Desktop Specialist with Microsoft Australia. John ran the Perth and Adelaide sessions of Microsoft latest round of free workshops for IT professionals. The first round occurred earlier this year and revolved around Microsoft's virtualisation technologies - specifically Hyper-V and SCVMM. The latest round is all about Application Compatibility.
Microsoft are seeing customers expressing plenty of reservations about their existing suite of applications which need to be supported on Windows 7, and are looking for as many resources and as much guidance as possible to overcome and lingering issues and migrate to Windows 7.
There are two sessions left - one in Melbourne and the other in Canberra. Jeff Alexander has blogged about the details, and you use the details on his site to register. For any IT professional involved in deploying Windows 7, these workshops are a great resource and well worth the time (especially as they don't cost anything!).
Personal devices like the iPad are pushing their way into enterprise, but what are the implications?
I recently wrote a piece on the influx of consumer technology into enterprise IT, and some of the hidden problems which (from my experience so far) most businesses are failing to address.
The original piece was more general in tone, looking at ALL personal devices rather than just those products sold by Apple. However, the editor thought (and I agreed) that as the current conversation tends to be much more tightly focused around iPads and iPhones, we should narrow the article's scope.
But my original thoughts still stand, and the criticisms I raised are valid against all personal devices, whether they're running some flavour of Windows, Android or something we've yet to see go mainstream.
Ultimately, consumer devices and consumer device vendors don't subscribe to concepts like lifecycle management or ROI. Users look ahead to the next cool product but, for the most part, businesses can't afford to. Or at least, not without some serious overhauling of their intern ...
Episode 15 of the Coalface Tech podcast is now online!
Episode 15 of the Coalface Tech podcast is now online!
In this episode, Steve and I caught up with Johann Kruse, Unified Communications guru with Microsoft Australia, to discuss the Release Candidate of Lync Server, the latest in Microsoft's UC platform.
Lync Server received a huge amount of attention at TechEd 2010, so make sure that you download the slide decks and presentations.
Unified Communications is one of those areas of technology which is rapidly changing business models. The need for office and in-house server infrastructure is diminishing, especially in smaller businesses with mobile, tech-savvy users. Solutions like BPOS take this even further, offering businesses a complete productivity and collaboration platform, which is highly-available and accessible anywhere.
Of course, the cloud is the great enabler, and we all threw our ideas out about what the cloud means to each of us (not in a group therapy sense, of course), but in drawing ...
Two lucky AuTechHeads members have already won TechNet Professional subscriptions - will you be next?
Thanks to the guys at Microsoft, we've already given away two TechNet Professional subscriptions to a couple of lucky AuTechHeads members!
All they had to do was turn up to the most excellent 1st birthday party on the Gold Coast, enjoy some drinks and walk away with the prizes, but to win the next two subscriptions, you have to do a little bit more work :-)
As September is Windows 7 Deployment month for Microsoft Australia, the TechNet Professional subscriptions will be awarded to the IT professionals who provide us with the best short posts about their Windows 7 deployment efforts so far. You can write about your current plans to deploy Windows 7, experiences if you have already deployed it, tips and tricks based on real-life scenarios, feedback from customers, anything you like. All the entries will be judged and the best two will win!
Of course, there are rules, but not too many:
Please submit your entry as a response to this blog ...
Episode 14 of Coalface Tech is online! Windows 7 deployment, mobility and cloud (and prizes!)
Episode 14 of the Coalface Tech podcast is now online at AuTechHeads.
In this episode, I caught up with Jeff Alexander, IT Pro Evangelist with Microsoft Australia at TechEd 2010 to discuss what's going on in September 2010, which is Deployment Month. Windows 7 has been out for a year now, and many businesses have their deployment plans underway. Microsoft are keen to make sure that everyone has a smooth upgrade path, and in addition to the range of free tools and online resources, will be running Deployment labs (like the free Virtualisation labs run earlier this year).
There's also a mention of more TechNet Professional subscriptions to be won!
I also had a chat with Roger Lawrence, previously head of the Developer Platform Evangelist group at Microsoft Australia, and now Product Marketing Manager with Readify. We had a wide-ranging discussion covering the business impact of mobility and how it is influencing infrastructure specialists, how the cloud is making ...
What can philosophy teach IT Professionals about the art of Systems Administration? According to author and Microsoft Security MVP Orin Thomas, lots.
Note - this is a cross-post from my blog, Demonic Talking Skull
Systems administration is both an art and a science. Philosophy by its very nature, seeks to examine and understand human methodologies – why we think the way we do, why we do things the way we do. Following the guiding principle of enquiry and investigation, philosophy is in essence the mother of science and the scientific process – something which all IT professionals engage in at some level, whether consciously or not. How? Because as administrators we have to regularly assess and troubleshoot complex problems – problems which require a broad-ranging understanding of technology, business workflow and most importantly, context. These are skills which have little to do with technical training or certification, and everything to do with how we deal with information and evidence.
Most sysadmins like to think that they take a logical, measured approach to ...
Michael Kordahi (aka The Delicate Genius) delivered the keynote at REMIX10 back in June and will be opening the proceedings at TechEd Australia 2010. We caught up for a wide-ranging conversation, touching on trends in application and web development, online security and privacy, social media and innovation, cloud technology and why devs and IT pros just can't do without each other.
Note: This is a cross-post from my blog, Demonic Talking Skull.
JB: In the IT Pro community, whenever there’s a new management tool introduced which contains a lot of backend smarts, there’s often a feeling that technical knowledge has somehow been lost. With the latest release of the Expression Suite, is this also true for designers and developers?
MK: From the days of Assembler, every generation abstracted away from its predecessor, which meant that every new generation could solve bigger, more complex problems. Controls are a great example of this – instead of working out how to capture text in a box, it became far simpler to create a control which handled all the necessary logic. Scenarios based around capturing and manipulating data are the same. We don’t want our developers to have to worry about writing their own algorithms to move objects around a screen or play videos; we want them to think ...
Calculate folder and subfolder sizes with PowerShell
This is a cross-post from my blog, Demonic Talking Skull. This is something I put together for a client who wanted to know how much disk space their users' home directories were taking up on the file server before the admins went through and applied space quotas. The file server was running Windows Server 2008 R2.
#Query Folders
$dirpath = Read-Host "Enter path"
$subfolders = Get-ChildItem $dirpath | Where-Object {$_.PsIsContainer}
#Calculate sizes
foreach ($subfolder in $subfolders) {
$folder = $dirpath + "\" + $subfolder.Name
$colItems = (Get-ChildItem $folder -Recurse | Measure-Object -property length -sum)
$colItemsSum = ("{0:N2}" -f ($colItems.sum / 1MB) + " MB")
Write-Output $folder $colItemsSum | Out-File export.txt -Append
}
The script asks for a root folder (eg: ...
This is a cross-post from my blog
I recently had a catch-up with Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft Australia, who is out and about throwing his weight into Microsoft’s message encouraging users and businesses to ditch IE6 as soon as possible.
Personal computers running IE6 still make up a significant share of online systems, which is quite a scary prospect given that its ability to handle security modern security threats is negligible. Engaging with customers is goi ...
This is a cross-post from my blog
I recently had a catch-up with Stuart Strathdee, Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft Australia, who is out and about throwing his weight into Microsoft’s message encouraging users and businesses to ditch IE6 as soon as possible.
Personal computers running IE6 still make up a significant share of online systems, which is quite a scary prospect given that its ability to handle security modern security threats is negligible. Engaging with customers is going to be an ongoing challenge for Microsoft - it can be extremely difficult to persuade users to make any sort of change to their systems if there’s no obvious reason to do so. Unfortunately most home users wouldn’t know if their machines were compromised or not, so as long as malware can sit quietly without causing obvious problems like crashes or popups, infections can go for a long time without detection or resolution.
Continued business us ...
Want to force-empty domain user Recycle Bins (sounds like a Jedi power)? Can be done with PowerShell and GPO.
Note - this is a cross-post from Demonic Talking Skull (my blog)
In our Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 environment, we’ve noticed that users with roaming profiles and folder redirection have an interesting problem where the Recycle Bin is redirecting to the user profile folder (not to the home folder) AND reporting back rather strange file sizes. Unfortunately this is having an impact on the file server, with quite staggering amounts of space being chewed up.
There are a few aspect to this to be investigated ongoing, but the first problem to tackle was Recycle Bins which weren’t being emptied. I don’t like stuff in my Recycle Bin, but then I’m quite fastidious about such things – can’t expect everyone else to be the same, especially when it isn’t their computer or system.
So, the challenge is to force the Recycle Bin to be emptied. There isn’t a GPO to handle th ...
As an App-V administrator, one of the tasks you may find yourself performing is moving the system database to another SQL server. This process has a number of gotchas because the database is referenced in a number of places which can prevent the App-V management service from starting, so here is a list of tasks to perform which will ensure a successful database move.
Note - this is a cross-post from 4sysops
Microsoft Application Virtualization is generating a lot of interest throughout the IT community. It allows IT professionals to abstract application management away from SOE maintenance, and offers a highly flexible environment in which to manage and deploy applications.
As an App-V administrator, one of the tasks you may find yourself performing is moving the system database to another SQL server. This process has a number of gotchas because the database is referenced in a number of places which can prevent the App-V management service from starting, so here is a list of tasks to perform which will ensure a successful database move.
In our live scenario, we migrated the App-V database from a SQL 2008 SP1 server running a named instance under the Network Service account, to a SQL 2008 SP1 server running a default instance under a domain account.
Backup and move the database
1.&n ...
Welcome to your new career in IT! Ready for a fulfilling role massaging fragile egos, never getting frustrated and always being the bad guy? Excellent!
I don't know anyone in the IT industry whose driver for career in IT stemmed from a passion for customer service. In general, I find that most IT pros started up in IT because, well, they like IT. It's interesting. The hitherto-unknown industry expectation for unparalleled customer service came as a rude shock to most:
"But, I work with computers...why do I have to be nice to people as well?"
Of course, it's not so black and white, and as we progress throughout our careers customer service skills are acquired along with the ability to fudge figures, lie to, um I mean "creatively inform" management, deliver presentations, put together business cases and tender for work. Sometimes we even work with computers too.
But back to customer service. Sometimes, just sometimes mind you, it feels like we're banging our heads against the proverbial brick wall. How many different ways can you explain copy-and-paste to a user bef ...