RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Stephen Rose about how businesses are installing Windows 7. Stephen references the case studies on Windows 7 installations that started even before the product had shipped. The conversation digs into the ROI calculators that shows how an organization can save time, effort and money with Windows 7. Application compatibility is also an important story - Windows 7 offers buil...

Richard and Greg talk to Kevin Kline from Quest Software about SQL Server 2008 R2, the challenges of Business Intelligence, even a discussion around the No SQL Movement.

Richard and Greg talk to Laura Hunter about where Active Directory is at with Windows Server 2008 R2. This is the version of Active Directory called "Wave 10" and adds features like Recycle Bin, Managed Service Accounts, deep support for Powershell and more! The conversation progresses into Active Directory Federated Services v2. Check out more info at http://www.microsoft.com/activedire...

Richard and Greg talk to Mitch Garvis about the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. MDT 2010 helps you manage your installs of operating systems, drivers, applications and more. You can create deployment kits for machines quickly and easily. And as Mitch says, as soon as you have more than one computer, the effort to set up MDT 2010 is worth it. MDT 2010 is a freely downloadable toolkit here.

Richard and Greg talk to Rhonda Layfield about deployment technologies made by Microsoft. There's a variety of them, and Rhonda goes over the collage of acronyms including WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit), MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit), WDS (Windows Deployment Service), DDPS (Desktop Deployment Planning Services) and SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager). Check out Rhonda's Depl...

Bhargav is back! Richard and Greg talk to Bhargav Shukla about the High Availability features of Exchange 2010. Bhargav digs into the substantial changes in the high availability and "mailbox resiliency" capabilities in Exchange, including the idea that you can today build a web-farm-like Exchange architecture with inexpensive hardware.

Richard and Greg talk to Sumeet Bansal and Chris Featherstone about using solid state drives in the enterprise. SSDs have penetrated deeply into the workstation and laptop market, but are they robust enough to handle enterprise class workloads? Sumeet and Chris also focus on whether the traditional hard drive interfaces of SAS and SATA make sense for the ultra-low latency performance of SSDs.

Richard and Greg talk to Bhargav Shukla of Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering. Bhargav digs into the features of the newly released Exchange 2010 and why businesses still running Exchange 2003 should jump right to the latest version and skip 2007 entirely. For more info on Exchange 2010, check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/default.aspx and http://msexchangeteam.com/.

Richard and Greg talk to Clint Huffman from Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering (PFE) about the new version of Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL). PAL is available on CodePlex at http://pal.codeplex.com. It's job is to help you analyze performance monitor logs for various Microsoft applications and identify out-of-normal values. PAL solves the key problem of Performance Monitor - identifying wha...

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley, the SBS Diva, about her other life - patching servers. Susan digs into Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), including what it updates and what it doesn't (check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894199 for more info), as well as some third party tools for patching. WSUS lets administrators centralize patching of servers and workstations, so that your mac...

Richard and Greg talk to Andy Malone about the challenges of social networking for the enterprise. It's not enough just to cut your users off from social networking at the company - you need to protect the organization from impersonation. Andy digs into what the logical balance of exposure on social networking looks like.

Richard and Greg talk to Sahil Malik on what's coming in Sharepoint 2010. Sahil has been working with Sharepoint 2010 for more than a year, and the NDAs have finally been lifted, letting him talk about the cool new features of 2010 that will help the IT Pro.

Simon Goldstein comes back to the show to talk to Richard and Greg about what IT professionals need to know when being audited. Whether you're dealing with SOX, HIPAA, PCI or any other kind of IT audit, Simon digs into what you should be doing before, during and after an audit.

Richard and Greg talk to Lara Rubbelke about the Enterprise Policy Management Framework (EPM). EPM is a freely downloadable framework for managing detailed policies around SQL Server 2008, 2005 and 2000. You can get EPM at http://www.codeplex.com/EPMFramework

Richard and Greg talk to Dana Epp about DirectAccess. DirectAccess is Microsoft's new technology using Windows 7 (Enterprise or Ultimate) and Server 2008 R2 together to create remote connectivity that acts in all respects like you're still inside the corporate network. DirectAccess has the potential to put client-initiated VPN connection out to pasture. The conversation also dives into IPv6, which...

Richard and Greg talk to Isaac Roybal about Microsoft's efforts in creating private cloud technologies. Private cloud focuses on using cloud technologies - within the organization's firewall. Isaac talks about how Microsoft has been using its own cloud technology internally for PSS and digs into the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit (http://www.microsoft.com/hosting/dynamicdatacenter/Home.html). Also ta...

Richard and Greg talk to Buck Woody about SQL CMS, a tool he's contributed to codeplex at http://sqlcms.codeplex.com. SQL CMS is actually a collection of tools that together provide content management of SQL Server and other servers in your network, allowing you to identify different servers, who's responsible for managing them, their current status and details of their configuration. It's a great...

Richard and Greg talk to Dana Epp about the free tools he uses to manage his networks. The list of tools include nmap (http://www.nmap.org), Microsoft's Baseline Security Analyzer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc184923.aspx), Windows Server Update Services (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/default.aspx), the Application Compatibility Toolkit (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/l...

Richard and Greg talk to the one-and-only Steve Riley, formerly of Microsoft and now working with the Amazon Cloud Computing group. Steve is focused on helping enterprise customers understand how to take advantage of Amazon's cloud computing services. As always, Steve has his eye on the security elements of cloud computing as well. There's also a great discussion about virtualization on the deskto...

Richard and Greg talk to Jessica Moss about SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSRS can replace typical reporting products like Crystal Reports, but also provides a tool for having users build their own reports. The conversation also moves into the Business Intelligence side of reporting, looking at how SSRS works with Analysis Services to provide a deeper level of reporting.

Richard and Greg talk to Sahil Malik about managing Sharepoint 2007. With the new version of Sharepoint just around the corner, it's time to dig into what the current version of Sharepoint does well and what is challenging. Sahil talks about solutions for challenges in Sharepoint 2007, including dealing with keeping profiles in separate farms. He points to his tool on codeplex, MOSS Profile Import...

Richard and Greg talk to Andy Malone about security in cloud computing. Once an application is moved to the cloud, where is the data itself? It could be distributed across multiple countries. Who is responsible for protecting it, for maintaining legal compliance, etc. Service level agreements are key, but how do you enforce them?

Richard and Greg talk to Daniel Nerenberg about Microsoft Online Services. Microsoft Online Services include Exchange, Sharepoint, Office Communicator and more. These are cloud services - you buy them by the user and month. Daniel digs into the advantages of using online services as well as the integration and migration challenges.

Richard and Greg talk to Andrew Hayter from ICSA Labs. ICSA Labs is the independent third party for validating security products such as anti-virus, malware, SSL security, etc. Andy digs into the state of the world around malware.

Richard and Greg talk to Phil Peery from Premier Field Engineering at Microsoft about the state of Active Directory out in the world. Phil works with a large variety of customers in the New York area in his PFE role, and explores some of the problems that his customers have had with Active Directory.