I recently came across NetWrix, a software company that specializes in system administration tools and utilities. They seem to really have hit a niche that has been a pain point for many administrators over the years. Whats even better is that NetWrix offers free versions of several of their products and not just limited evaluations either.
There are any number of reasons that you might need to transfer the logins between instances of SQL Server. One of the most common times this is necessary is when performing a SQL Server consolidation or migration. The good news is that its a fairly easy task to perform for several generations of SQL Server.
A colleague of mine recently pointed me to this great article on the scalability of office productivity suites on terminal services. The tests reviewed OpenOffice 2.1, Microsoft Office 2003, and Microsoft Office 2007.
In Exchange 2007, Microsoft has all but removed the ability to use ExMerge in working with Exchange mailboxes. They now encourage you to use the Export-Mailbox cmdlet which sounds like a great idea… until you actually try to use it.
In order to get Citrix clients prior to version 11 to function with Citrix XenApp running on Windows Server 2008 you will need to install a hotfix from Microsoft.
Since there is no graphical interface to enter the product key or activate a copy of the Windows Server 2008 Server Core, there are two simple commands to get the job done.
Microsoft has recently released version of the Exchange System Manager for Windows Vista. This is the Exchange 2003 version of ESM so for all of those Exchange administrators out there, you can now sit back and administer your routing groups and send connectors right from your Windows Aero enabled desktop!
The witty Microsoft Exchange team has released their first single and its all about the new Autodiscover feature found in Exchange Server 2007. You can view the lyrics and grab a copy of the song in WMA format over at the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog.
For some unknown reason, Microsoft removed the ability to apply transform files to the Office 2007 suite when installing via MSI. On the flip side they made it much easier to deploy patches in MSP format to Office 2007 when installing via the traditional setup.exe. Give and take I suppose. Why is this a problem? Well if you want to deploy any or all of the Office 2007 suite via Active Directory Group Policy you will need to get a little creative.
There are a ton of things that the Exchange team did to improve manageability in Exchange Server 2007. This is evident in the number of new rule based wizards that appear throughout the Exchange Management Console. However there are still quite a few things that an administrator needs to handle via the trusty Exchange Management Shell. One of those is the creation of custom E-mail address policies.