In today’s challenging economic environment, innovative use of new information technologies can result in improved operational efficiency and reduced costs. The combination of cost savings coupled with improved productivity and innovation is defined as “the New Efficiency.”

 Elop also announced the release of Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server, which helps Exchange Server customers further safeguard business information.

 “Exchange Server 2010 customers are already reporting cost savings of up to 70 percent thanks to a simplified high-availability model and support for lower-cost storage. Customers are also seeing productivity gains of more than 20 percent with a universal inbox that delivers e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and text messaging consistently across virtually any device,” Elop said. “Together with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the combined cost savings and improved productivity helps customers generate long-term business success.”

 According to a commissioned study of technology early adopters conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft Corp., a customer can see a payback period of less than six months when upgrading to either Exchange Server 2010* or Windows Server 2008 R2.**

 Customers such as Bank of America Corp., Carnival Cruise Line, Global Crossing, Lifetime Products, Morgan Keegan & Co. Inc., NEC Philips, Subaru Canada Inc. and Telekom Austria Group are deploying Exchange Server 2010 and report impressive results with the new server.

 “We have increased storage eightfold at 25 percent of the cost with Exchange Server 2010 and our employees are seeing a reduction of unwanted e-mail by more than 70 percent, freeing us up to focus on more important client issues,” said Steve Derbyshire, operations director, NEC Philips.

 Organizations including Automatic Data Processing Inc., BMW, Baker Tilly, the City of Miami, Energizer, Getronics and Pella Corp. are deploying Windows 7 and report gains in efficiency for both business users and IT. Customers report improved user productivity and easier information access, reduced costs with streamlined management, and reduced risk through better security and increased desktop control. Supporting detail is available in recent total cost of ownership studies and analyst survey reports at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/default.aspx.

 Businesses are seeing equally significant results from Windows Server 2008 R2, with customers including Continental Airlines Inc. (U.S.), Chester Zoo (U.K.), Combell Group NV (Belgium), FinPro (Finland), Wacom Europe GmbH (Germany) and Wortell (Netherlands) noting cost savings through server consolidation, reduced power consumption and improved service levels.

 “With Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve been able to dramatically reduce costs in our IT infrastructure while simplifying management,” said Phil Morris, IT manager, North England Zoological Society/Chester Zoo. “By virtualizing our environment with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, we have reduced the number of servers in our environment by 80 percent while maintaining the high availability our retail staff, researchers and management team need.”

 “Windows Server 2008 R2 brings many efficiencies to our customers, including enabling new virtualization scenarios,” said Bill Laing, corporate vice president for the Windows Server and Solutions Division at Microsoft. “We’ve added the next generation of hypervisor and the new ability to perform Live Migration of virtual machines. Many customers are already seeing tangible results since deploying Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.”

 Elop said more than 45,000 partners are trained on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010, with several partners announcing new services and solutions today, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Avanade, Dell Inc., EMC Corp., Kaspersky Lab, Symantec Corp. and Unisys Corp.

 Exchange Server 2010 and Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange are available now for trial at http://www.thenewefficiency.com, along with more information about Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and partner solutions.

Yesterday we had a kickoff for an Early Adopter Windows 7 Community @ Microsoft in the Netherlands.
One of the presentations was about Federated Search and how this nice option will make our work much easier.

Some people were wondering howto deploy a Federated Search Connector in an Enterprise Environment, but nobody seems to know the answer. Reason for me to find out how to do this.

As for most solutions, it is not the only or the best solution, but because I like Group Policy Preferences (GPP) so much I developed a way to deploy a search connector using GPP.

In this example I will deploy the Youtube connector.
(Look for more connectors on : http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/742-windows-7-search-federation-providers.html)

On an admin PC just doubleclick on the downloade file, this will install the Search Connector on your PC, in fact it will install it in your user profile.

Now we need 2 files from your profile, first look up C:\USERS\<YOUR USERNAME>\LINKS\YOUTUBE.LNK
Before you copy this file right click it, choose properties and change the targetlocation to : C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Searches\Youtube.searchConnector-ms

Now copy this file to for example your NETLOGON share.

After that copy the file C:\USERS\<YOUR USERNAME>\SEARCHES\Youtube.searchConnector-ms to the NETLOGON share.

We’ve got the files that we need to deploy it to our users.

Logon to your domain controller (or the machine that you use to manage Group Policy) and open the Group Policy Management Console.
N.B. To manage Group Policy Preferences you need a Windows Server 2008 (R2), Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine.

Open your User policy and expand the User Configuration node.
Now go to Preferences -> Windows Settings -> Files.

Add these 2 files :

If you close the file screens, the preference screen will look like this (except for my domain name )

Now the only thing you have to do is wait until the user policy is refreshed ( a user does not have to take any action and will see the search provider automaticly)
And if you cant wait, just use the good old GPUPDATE.

Thats it for now, please enjoy.

Regards,

Erik

Today I noticed on my transcript that I’ve passed the exam. Nice timing from Microsoft, cause last 2 weeks I’ve passed every Server 2008 exam for my MCITP Admin and MCITP Enterprise Admin.

Today I took the Windows 7 beta exam TS: Windows 7, Configuring and had to let you know my findings.

I have more then a year experience working with Windows 7 as my employer is a TAP participant in the Windows 7 TAP, currently we have more then 300 Windows 7 machines deployed in our environment. So I tought ‘why not try the exam’

The exam lenght is 180 minutes, but I only needed 45 minutes for the 75 questions. This is not cause of the exam, but somehow I allways manages to do an exam within the hour.

I wont give you any questions and/or answers cause the exam is under NDA, but I can give you the subjects that I’ve got in my exam.

The Windows 7 exam is a real ‘new technolgy’ exam, maybe there are 5 questions that I could ansfer from my experience with XP and Vista the other question are all about new technology. If you need to take this exam or if you are planning for 070-680 (the number after this exam goes live) be prepared to answer questions on the following technology :

* BranchCache
* Direct Access
* IPv6 (only a couple of questions)
* Imaging
* USMT
* System Restore
* Windows Update (couple of questions)

Also know how to make a bootable USB Windows 7 installation stick and try to study on how Windows 7 works in a HomeGroup (not all questions are Enterprise related but also home-use related)

The exam is currently in beta so no score report, after 8 weeks I will know if I passed or failed the exam.

If you take this exam, ‘Good Luck’

Regards,

Erik

Yesterday TechED EMEA 2008 started with the keynote by Brad Anderson (general manager of the Management and Solutions Division at Microsoft Corp.) Unfortunatly this is the last TechED in Barcelona, but next year we will be in Berlin, so bye Tapas and Hello Bratwurst

The keynote was all about Dynamic IT, this was also the topic @ MMS 2008, so it is something Microsoft is realy into these days. Microsoft started with some trends/priorities they see in the current market:
Virtualization
Green IT
Anywhere Access
Business Intelligence
Compliance
Cloud Computing

For your convienience I’ve put the slidedeck on our fotolog, so you can have a look.
Keynote slidedeck

During the keynote the following announcements were made:
Windows Server 2008R2 M3 is ready and will support Live Migration in Hyper-V
Microsoft Hyper-V is RTW and can be downloaded for free (this was allready announced last month)
SC Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is RTM
APP-V 4.5 (formaly known as Softgrid) is RTM and available for MDOP customers.
Microsoft Assesment & Planning toolkit 3.2 is RTM
SC Opperations Manager 2007R2 beta is available and will support SLA dashboards (see the great screenshot in the slidedeck)
Identity Lifecycle Manager 2 is RC
Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 SP2 is available.

Besides the announcements Microsoft also gave a demo of Server 2008R2 branche caching, witch was realy impressive. Using Branch Caching it is possible to have a great user experience using files and sites at HQ while working at a branche office. The first user that opens a file will have to download that file from HQ to the branche office, but the 2nd user that opens that file will open it from the cache that resides in the branche office.

Well it’s time now to have some other great sessions, so TTYL

Erik Luppes

So now that I’m a few weeks back home I finaly had some time to play with it on my Demo Domain that I setup last week using CoreConfigurator. To use Group Policy Preferences you must have a few things in place:

• A Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 machine (only needed for managing Group Policy Preferences)
• RSAT Installed on the management machine
• Deployed the Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions to your Desktops/Servers (XP SP2 or higher)
• Active Directory

Note : You don’t need a 2008 DC or Windows Vista SP1 client to use Group Policy Preferences !!

On the left screenshot you can see all the different options that can be managed using Group Policy Preferences. There ar too much settings to show them all on this blog, but I realy like to show you some nice things. I made some screenshots of some common things you normaly do in loginscripts or kix scripts, but that are now possible in Group Policy. (click on the images to see it full size)

With Group Policy Preferences it is easy to map networkdrives. Not only you can map a drive for all users in a generic user policy, but it is also  possible to target this mapping to no more then 27 targeting rules. (Image on the right)

Most common is to map a network share based on group membership or IP subnet. This way way it is possible to map a share witf for example application data to a server that is on the same geographical location as the user without the need of using DFS or site loginscripts.

An other example is setting up how users (or administrators) see their files in Windows Explorer. In this screenshot I set it up so that the user will see the file extentions for known files and also shows hidden & system files, this is a setting that most admins will set if they logon to a new machine. This is also the power of Group Policy Preferences, the most settings an administrator will have to manualy do if he is building a new image for deployment can be managed by Group Policy Preferences.

As you can imagine there are hundreds or maybe thousends of possibilities that you use in solving those anoying problems you usely have to solve using scripts or other tools.

Next thing I have to do is migrating my loginscript at home to Group Policy Preferences.

Have fun with it.

Erik Luppes

Now that WordPress has a complete new engine using AJAX and other Web 2.0 technology it was needed that we upgraded the ‘skin’ of Buit.org so we can use those new technologies. One of the biggest improvements for me as the site admin is that we now finaly kan use capcha in the comments forms. This is used for unregistred users that want to leave comments. If they want to leave a comment they have to read an image that is hard (but not impossible) to read by a spambot.

It looks that this works well, cause yesterday we had 120 spam comments within the hour and after enabling captcha (18 hours ago) we did’nt receive a single spam message

An other great thing is that we have better stats so we can track our favorite articles and anticipate on this by writing more articles on the subjects you like.

Please leave your toughts on this new look in our comments and if you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click visit our site to see what we have accomplished.

Grtz,

Erik

As you should know by now in Server Core there is no GUI (well there are exeptions like notepad and time settings) so Administrators have to know the CLI commands to setup their servers. The last 2 years I have worked on my Linux skills and can say that finaly I can remember the commands that I use on a daily/weekly basis. But how many times a day or week do you setup a new Domain Controller ? I say not offtenly enough to remember the commands without mistakes.

Last week I was looking on the web for the commandlines to setup a DC but found a tool that was called “CoreConfigurator”

As you can see you can do the basic tasks that you normaly would do if you setup a new server, but still using a GUI. For example if you want to setup the Windows Firewall (only the basic stuff) you normaly have to use the netsh command and that command alone has hundreds of options that you have to know.

Using this tool I was able to setup my Demo domain within 5 minutes with only one CLI Command : C:\Program Files\CoreConfigurator\CoreConfigurator.exe

So the rest of the evening I have spend on drinking beer and eating some chips while watching the 5th season of 24 (the terrorists have stolen some Sentox-nervegas, but I think that Jack Bauer will save the day within 24 hours )

To download CoreConfigurator Click Here

This keynote was all about Dynamic IT, the 10 year vision of Microsoft in how to operate dynamic datacenters. Currently Microsoft is in year 5 of this vision and realy showed some cool stuff in the keynote compared to how we managed our environments 5 years ago. I realy like the vision Microsoft is having on a Dynamic Datacenter using virtualisation, not only on the OS layer but also on the application layer.

In a Dynamic Datacenter all services are devided in 4 layers:

• Hardware
• Hardware Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Models

The hardware layer can be managed with System Center Configuration Manager, during the keynote Microsoft did a demo on how Dynamic IT is working for server deployment. Just by using Server 2008 Server Roles en Features, a Configuration Manager Task Sequencer and a special plugin from Dell in this sequencer Microsoft was able to install a domain controller unattende on a Dell server. During this unattende installation it was possible to do the RAID settings, BIOS settings and other hardware based setting needed to roll-out the server to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. This way there is no need for an administrator to be present in a datacenter and still you will be able to roll out servers.

On the Hardware Virtualisation Layer, Microsoft did a demo of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta that was anounced during the keynote. A cool feature of VMM2008 is that it is able to manage VMware ESX servers, so in the near future it will be possible to manage your Virtual environment from 1 tool. This tool also supports Live migration of VMware machines. Like other Microsoft tooling VMM2008 also gives the output of the tasks you perform as an PowerShell script, so administrators that do not master PowerShell still have the abbility to automate repeating tasks.

Microsoft also announced the beta of SCOM Cross Platform Monitoring, that Walter described in last post.

So if you are interested in the slides of the Keynote on day 1 you can watch the here :

Slidedeck Keynote Day 1

Just want to let you know that last friday my Chumby finaly arrived.
After seeing Jeroen’s Chumby I realy needed to have one too.

But the difference between Jeroen & me is that I can be realy freaky.

Like I love to host websites (also this one) so why not turn my Chumby into a webserver.
To do this I had to login with SSH on my Chumby and had to compile the webserver on this little Linux machine. The fun thing about that is you had to enable the SSH Daemon. To enable it I had to go to the about screen of the Chumby, on this screen there is al little PI symbol, what reminded me of a movie with Sandra Bullock “The Net”

After having the Chumby serving webpages I also had to hook it up to the Internet on a safely manner, so I configured my ISA 2006 server to publish my Chumby. I wonder if there are things you buy in the store that you cant publish with an ISA server

If you like to pay my Chumby a visit please go to :

My Chumby

My Chumby is pleased to serve you