RunAs Radio

Richard chats with Eric Shupps about search in SharePoint. The conversation starts with a state of the union conversation about SharePoint on-premise and cloud. Eric talks about how even folks not using public cloud technology are using the architecture to implement their on-premise systems. He sees the opportunity space for SharePoint professionals expanding. The discussion turns to the on-premis...

Richard talks to Alan Burchill about the security aspects of Group Policy Preferences - good and bad! Alan reminds us all about where Group Policy Preferences came from, as an acquisition by Microsoft, and opened the door to reduce or eliminate login scripts, but only when it has sufficient privileges. And how do you do that? By embedding passwords! We all know that's a bad thing, so Alan walks th...

Richard talks to Paul Cunningham about configuring high-availability features in Exchange 2013. The conversation starts out talking a bit about how Exchange 2013 has evolved, including a mention of the amazing Microsoft Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. If you're planning a role out of Exchange, you want to use this tool! From there, Paul digs into the range of features you need to look at to...

Richard talks to Alan Sugano about his experience building out a private cloud for his customers. The conversation starts out focused on why you would want to build a private cloud, especially for someone else to use - Alan talks about his customers not wanting to go to the public cloud, but also not wanting to upgrade their own hardware. Once committed, Alan got to do the fun part (for a hardware...

So where did Small Business Server go? Susan Bradley knows! After entirely too long, Richard chats with Susan Bradley about the state of affairs for Small Business Server folks. The last version of SBS came out in 2011, and now piece of the bundle have gone to the Cloud, and other bits have morphed into Window Server 2012 R2 Essentials. But just to make things even more interesting, Essentials is...

Here comes Windows 10! Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the technical preview of Windows 10, but first Mark reels off some humorous reasons why the name "Windows 9" has been skipped. After mocking Apple's iOS 8 for a bit, Mark dives into some of the cool features seen in Windows 10 beyond the return of the Start Menu (with fancy new features). And don't forget about server! There is...

Richard chats with Brent Ozar about the amazing new hardware coming out for SQL Server. Yeah, it's time to geek out on hardware. Brent discusses some of the amazing small form factor machines coming from Dell and Hewlett-Packard, including the Dell PowerEdge 13G R730xd. What's new there? 24 RAM slots permits up to 1.5TB of RAM! And that's not all, Brent talks about the power of having three stage...

Richard chats with deployment master and control freak Johan Arwidmark about the latest on Configuration Manager 2012 R2 and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2013. Johan discusses MDT first, talking about how much power actually exists in this free tool from Microsoft - you can start with light-touch deployment, but it's equally capable of doing zero-touch when you really want to scale. And MDT wo...

Richard talks to Aidan Finn about Software Defined Storage. Picking up he left off in April talking about Microsoft's Scale-Out File Server, the whole concept of Software Defined Storage is abstracting the details of the storage hardware away from the actual storage process. Aidan digs into how mixtures of SSD and spinning drives to optimize performance using Windows 2012 R2 Storage Spaces reduces...

Richard chats with Venkat Kalyanasundaram and David Apolinar about Azure Active Directory. The conversation starts out with a focus on the whole idea of claims-based security and what it takes to make single sign on work, especially with heterogeneous clients (like mobile phones and tablets) and cloud-based applications. David digs into the use and limitations of Active Directory Federation Servic...

Richard catches up with Jeffrey Snover, father of PowerShell and one of the moving forces behind Desired State Configuration (DSC). After just over a year since the original version of DSC came out, Windows 2012 R2 has shipped and DSC has gone through a number of revisions. Jeff refers to a Window Powershell Blog post on DSC Resource Wave 6! Not bad for one year. DSC is also part of Windows Manage...

Richard chats with Troy Hunt about some of the crazy things being said in the same of security these days. Troy's first story involves a UK cell phone company that decided that short passwords made their customer experience better - insanity! This event a number of others inspired Troy to start @infosecinsanity. Follow to see some amazing bad security statements by companies that really ought to k...

Richard talks to Alan Sharp-Paul about the challenges of building a DevOps culture in your organization. Alan talks about the problem just defining DevOps - it's approaching the abused word state with so many organizations piling onto the term. The discussion digs into the early stages of DevOps culture, focusing first on discovery: Do you really know how your infrastructure is set up and configur...

Richard chats with Microsoft Evangelist Scott Klein about the Microsoft Azure Management Libraries (MAML). MAML wraps up the REST calls to Azure to allow you to do a huge host of cloud tasks, such as provisioning new instances, monitoring, configuration, maintenance and more. Yeah, it's a dev library, but it can build things that the operations people want! Scott discusses three pretty powerful sc...

Richard chats with David Tesar about DevOps for the Microsoft-oriented IT Pro. DevOps has been a big thing in the Linux/Open Source community for the past few years, and it's starting to really resonate in the Microsoft world also. David focuses on the core ideals of DevOps - that it is first and foremost of culture of building better systems faster. Resist the tools and focus on the people! Not t...

Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Clint Huffman about his book the Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide. Clint is also the genius behind the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool on CodePlex. See a theme here? Clint is focused on understand why things in Windows (and elsewhere) go fast or slow. And he's willing to share his insight! The book focuses primarily on Windows cha...

Richard chats with Stephen Rose about how Windows has continued evolving with some thoughts on what future versions might look like. Windows 8 brought the tablet to the Microsoft space, and with it a chance to explore how different form factors fit into the enterprise. Stephen talks about the cool kinds of retail projects he's working with that are taking advantage of these form factors. This natu...

Richard chats with Steven Murawski on the day he is leaving Stack Exchange to join the Chef team as a Community Manager. So naturally, the conversation turns to Chef. Chef is a configuration management system that comes from the Linux world - it's scripting language is Ruby. But in the past year, Chef has added Windows to it's repertoire with support from Microsoft and Desired State Configuration....

Richard talks to Jeff Stokes about the role of User Access Control (UAC) in making Windows client machines safer. Safer? Actually, the conversation starts out with the reality of UAC as it first arrived on the scene in the Vista days - an annoyance that was immediately turned off. But Jeff digs into how UAC is a part of the compatibility features of Windows. The discussion then turns to a broader...

Richard chats with Steve Thomas about Microsoft User Experience Virtualization (UE-V). The conversation starts out with a focus on Application and Desktop Virtualization - while server virtualization has become the norm, App-V is catching on more slowly. Steve talks about how the back end of desktop virtualization has become more like the cloud, being very elastic and flexible to better utilize re...

Richard chats with Chris Jackson about his experiences working with large organizations migrating off of XP. Once you've done the hard work of taking an inventory of all your organization's applications and platform requirements, how do you use that information to benefit the company? Chris talks about moving over to a more template-driven approach to software delivery using System Center Configur...

Richard chats with Dana Epp about multi-factor authentication. The conversation starts out with some definition around multi-factor authentication - something you know and something you have. Most of the time, the thing you know is your user name and password. Dana digs into authenticating using the most common thing you have, the smartphone. Tools like Twilio can help you bring text messaging to...

While at Tech Ed US in Houston, Richard chatted with Paula Januszkiewicz about the current state of system security. Paula talks about a new wave of exploits aimed at administrators, taking advantage of their elevated privileges to spread malware into systems. The conversation also digs into more subtle exploits, and the ability of black hats to cover their tracks by modifying logs to hide their a...

While at Tech Ed 2014, Richard chat with John Craddock about the latest incarnation of Active Directory Federation Services - don't call it version three, it's the Windows Server 2012 R2 version! John discusses some of the new features of ADFS, including it's integration with oAuth2 to allow a more lightweight approach to authentication, authorization and federation. Lots of great thinking from on...

While at Tech Ed 2014 in Houston, Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about group policy in Windows 8. Jeremy talks about his session at Tech Ed called Group Policy Notes from the Field which focuses on how group policy is often unfairly blamed for performance problems. Check out the video and watch for a link at the end of it to get access to the performance tools that Jeremy uses! The conversati...