RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Brad McGehee about the challenges of working remotely. The conversation ranges over getting your home office set up right, negotiating with the family over work time and convincing your boss that you're actually working.

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley, the SBS Diva! Susan digs into the new features of Small Business Server 2011. Check out the Microsoft SBS site at http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/products/servers/Pages/sbs_overview.aspx. Susan also talks about the balance between SBS "on-premise" and the cloud offerings of Azure, BPOS and Office 365. Check out the SBS forums at http://social.techn...

Richard and Greg talk to Joel Oleson from Quest Software about Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft's cloud based offering for Office, Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync.

Richard talks to Amit Agarwal from Quest Software about Project Lucy. Projecy Lucy is a free Azure-based utility that analyzes SQL Traces to find performance bottlenecks and other problems. Check out Project Lucy at http://www.projectlucy.com/.

Richard talks to Ned Pyle from Microsoft Directory Services support. Ned, with his associate Ted Stephens, developed FRS2DFSR, a utility for assisting administrations migrating from File Replication Services (FRS) to Distributed File System Replication (DFSR). Check out Ned's blog post on the subject, with links to the white paper, the tool and operations guides on the subject at http://blogs.tech...

Richard flies solo in a discussion with Kevin Kline about PASS and all things SQL Server. The conversation ranges over business intelligence, OLTP, SSDs, you name it! Check out the upcoming PASS SQLRally at http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2011/.

Richard and Greg talk to Alan Sugano about migrating from VMWare ESX to ESXi. VMWare announced that the next version of ESX is the last one, only ESXi will be developed further. ESXi is a far lighter weight version of ESX, lowering the security risk, memory consumption and a host of other advantages, but in exchange you give up a lot of the tools you're used to working with in ESX. Regardless, thi...

Another Connections conference show, Richard talks to the one-and-only Mark Minasi about his keynote at the conference. Mark aims his sights at cloud computing, asking the important questions about pricing, reliability and implementation challenges.

While at DevConnections, Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about what every IT person needs to know about troubleshooting group policy.

Richard and Greg talk to David Mills about System Center Essentials (SCE). SCE is the core parts of the System Center suite aimed at the small to medium businesses. David digs into how SCE fits into your organization, how it works with existing infrastructure and the path to grow beyond it.

Richard and Greg talk to Clint Huffman about Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) 2.0. PAL makes the performance counters in perfmon far more manageable - by providing a breakdown of important counters and reasonable values. With PAL you turn on perfmon, collect a log and use the tool to find important numbers. Check out PAL at http://pal.codeplex.com. You can find Clint's blog at http://blogs.techn...

Richard and Greg talk to Sean Deuby about issues around identity in the cloud. The conversation explores both the consumer and enterprise aspects of identity in the cloud. Where Facebook and Google are helping things for consumers, the needs of the enterprise are more complex. The acronyms come out - oAuth, OpenID, ADFS and more!

Richard talks to Jeff Stokes about xPerf. xPerf is part of a suite of tools called the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit (WPT). WPT digs into Windows where PerfMon leaves off, utilizing Event Tracing for Windows to see exactly how applications are behaving, even during bootup and shutdown. Get more information on WPT at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx. Also, check out...

Richard and Greg talk to Don Jones about PowerShell. The conversation starts off with a discussion on the fundamentals of PowerShell, but then dives into specific techniques and tools to make folks more productive with PowerShell. The show wraps up with exploring some favorite PowerShell projects. There's a ton of great information about PowerShell at Don's web site shellhub.com.

Richard and Greg talk to Adam Hall about Opalis, the latest product addition to System Center. Opalis provides automation and integration for IT tasks between the various products in System Center (Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, etc) and third party management tools like OpenView, Tivoli and the like.

Richard and Greg talk to Jose Barreto from the File Server Team at Microsoft. Jose talks about File Replication Services, Distributed File System and other technologies for file servers.

Richard catches Alan Burchill while at Tech Ed New Zealand. Alan digs into the new Group Policy Preferences features introduced with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 but available for XP, Vista, even Server 2000 and up! The conversation explores how group policy can now be used to map drives, printers and other features, leading to the virtual elimination of login scripts. Check out Alan's web...

Richard talks to Rhonda Layfield during Tech Ed Australia about her work with Microsoft Deployment Tools (MDT). Rhonda goes over the relationship between MDT and Windows Deployment Service (WDS) as well as the Windows Automation Installation Kit (WAIK). All these tools are free and make image-based deployment tools look wasteful and inefficient. The conversation tears off into deployment in virtua...

While at Tech Ed Australia, Richard caught up with Chris Jackson to talk about the latest problem in application compatibility - web applications dependent on IE6. When released ten years ago, IE6 was a paragon of web standards, but the world has moved on and now IE6 is a pariah. Chris talks about how web applications dependent on IE6 are actually blocking XP to Windows 7 upgrades, but that ultima...

Richard flies solo to talk to Stephen Rose from Microsoft about the latest around Windows 7. The discussion roams around Service Pack 1, the new Microsoft Intune Beta (http://www.microsoft.com/online/windows-intune.aspx) and his experiences on the Get on the Bus tour down the eastern seaboard in spring 2010.

Richard and Greg talk to Adam Gent about Office Communications Server (OCS). OCS brings the PBX into the PC, so that email, instant messaging and telephone are integrated together. Adam digs into the details of what it takes to get going with OCS, where to find effective cost savings, and the overall plan of being successful with the product. Check out Adam's blog at http://blog.misthos.com.

Richard and Greg talk to Doug Finke about the OData PowerShell Explorer. The OData PowerShell Explorer makes it easy to make OData part of your PowerShell scripts. And with OData providing access to all sorts of data, the combination opens huge possibilities. Check out the OData PowerShell Explorer at http://psodata.codeplex.com/.

Richard talks to Adam Machanic about parallelism in SQL Server. Executing queries in parallel has been in SQL Server since version 7, but with the number of cores in servers rising dramatically, parallelism is more and more important. Adam digs into the details of how to make parallelism in SQL Server work effectively. Check out Adam's blog at http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/.

Richard and Greg talk to Isaac Roybal, late of Microsoft, now with Cisco, about the Unified Computing System. The Unified Computing System (UCS) is Cisco's hardware designed for virtualization, using blade-based hardware to create SAN-driven servers that can move seamlessly from machine-to-machine.

Richard and Greg talk to Dana Epp about finding and fixing a security vulnerability. Dana tells the story of how a customer found a bug in one of Scorpion Software's products that surfaced a weakness in a Microsoft security API. Ultimately Dana describes how they altered their application to protect their application from a whole class of exploits.