Month: June 2007

Eircom Confesses!

ROFL!

I just got a call from a Veronica Brown in Eircom’s escalated customer care department.  Don’t bother trying to try talk to them … they talk to you and it’s 1-way only.  You’ll have to make do with some person, fresh off of a Ryanair flight, on minimum wages, who doesn’t speak English and who does not give a flying f^$%.

Eircom has admitted that they made a mistake when they took my broadband account.  A neighbour of mine had applied for broadband and a clerical error was made with the UAN.  My UAN was 1 digit different and was entered in Eircom’s paperwork.

It took 5 months to get this sorted out.  Veronica admitted that this should have taken only a few days to sort out.  Instead, not a single person in Eircom wanted to listen to me.  Heck, Veronica herself gave me attitude over the phone after Comreg opened the case.  She said “Eircom doesn’t do this sort of thing”.  Well, Eircom does.

I’ve told her I want a letter from Eircom to explain the situation in case any more of its organs come chasing after me.  I’ll be ready to ^$&* them up if they do J

Aidan Finn 1 : Eircom 0.

TechNet Virtual Labs

One of the things I like about IT Forum (TechNet for IT infrastructure types in Europe), aside from the seminars, is that you can get your hands on lots of labs and walkthroughs on the latest technology.  Well, MS has been hosting these labs on TechNet Virtual Labs for quite some time.  I’ve never had a look at them before today … I’ve been doing some research for work and wanted to get some hands-on with a few products.

Here are my thoughts on the service:

  • It’s free so that’s good.
  • Each lab is limited to 90 minutes.  Some labs require only 30 minutes but some require the full allotment.  That can be a pain in the @$$ if you get interrupted by phone calls, workmates asking questions, etc.
  • The labs vary in difficulty and complexity from easy installations to complex configurations.
  • They are very structured so you’ll still need your own virtual labs and evaluation/TechNet editions of software to play around with your customised configurations.
  • For me at least, the labs were slow and I’m working at an ISP at the moment so bandwidth was not an issue … I suspect that latency was the problem.  We’ll have to wait on astrophysicists to invent “wormhole networking” to get over that issue.
  • It’s pretty handy to get an idea of the look and feel of the products.

The conference labs (in conjunction with seminars and my own labs) played a major role in me getting interested in SMS 2003 and MOM 2005 a few years ago.  Without them, I would have (a) known what SMS could do for me and (b) wouldn’t have been interested in MOM as an enterprise monitoring solution.

So, if you are interested in some solution from MS, forget wading through brochures and endless marketing babble.  Fire up the free virtual labs, download the lab manuals and work through step-by-steps to see what you are facing.  You should then have a read of the product documentation in the TechNet Library to see what your planning and design issues will be.

Webcast: Document Workflow Using SharePoint 2007

I was googling about last week to understand how I could build a workflow using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  All I could find was a development library for Visual Studio … that’s not much use for the majority of people who would be interested in doing this.  I just stumbled upon a blog post that mentions an upcoming webcast that will describe how developers and NON-developers can create a document workflow.  Maybe it will shed some light on the process.

Credit: Robert Shelton.

OM 2007: SharePoint 2007 Management Pack

Microsoft has released a new management pack for SharePoint Server 2007 on OM 2007.  It monitors the following:

• Shared Services Provider (SSP) provisioning failed
• Site Directory scan job failed
• Enabling features failed on some sites
• Administration site for the SSP is missing
• Enabling features on existing sites failed
• The Office SharePoint Server Search service is not running
• The Microsoft Single Sign-On service is not running
• The Office Document Conversions Launcher service is not running
• Failed to connect to parent server farm
• SSP synchronization failed
• The Office Document Conversions Load Balancer service is not running
• Failures in content deployment jobs
• Poor cache performance
• Error during document copy or move operations
• Errors with the Information Rights Management (IRM) features
• Failures in the Document Conversion feature
• Out of Memory exceptions coming from form business logic
• Denial of Service scenarios
• Failures during form processing or while loading business logic assemblies

Operations Manager 2007 Design Guide

A new OM 2007 Design Guide will appear on Microsoft’s website in the next 24-48 hours.  This same page has a number of deployment guides for OM 2007 and related management packs.  The principles in the design guide (yet to be uploaded by the author) will feed into the existing deployment guide.

EDIT: This design guide is included in this downloadable bundle of documents.

OM 2007: Exchange 2007 Management Pack

A new management pack for Exchange 2007 on OM 2007 has been released.

The Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack includes rules and scripts to monitor and report on performance, availability, and reliability of all Exchange 2007 server roles including Mailbox, Client Access, Hub Transport, Edge Transport and Unified Messaging.
The Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for MOM 2005 topics explain how to monitor and maintain messaging resources.

Forefront Codename “Stirling”

Microsoft has published some material about a new product under the security brand of Forefront called “Stirling”.  Stirling aims to provide an integrated suite of security solutions for the network.  The material is still pretty fluffy (marketing muck) but it gives you an idea of where MS is going with their security product set.  There will be a CTP (customer technology preview) in H2 2007, a public beta in H1 2008 and a release in mid 2009.  Here’s how MS are describing it:

Comprehensive Protection

By providing integrated protection technologies across clients, server applications, and the network edge, and dynamic responses to emerging threats, IT pros will be able to proactively protect their organization from emerging threats.

  • “Stirling” integrates comprehensive protection technologies, including anti-malware, anti-spam, content filtering, host firewall, multi-engine protection for messaging and collaboration systems, network edge protection, and other technologies to be announced at a later date.
  • Stirling” technologies will act as a distributed system, sharing information with each other, allowing for correlation of security information to identify complex threats. Protection technologies included in “Stirling” can be set to dynamically respond to these threats, making it easier for the IT administrator to address new threats.
  • Integration with Network Access Protection ensures administrators can control network access based on user and machine authorization as well as adherence to the company’s security policy for endpoint protection.

Unified Management

“Stirling” provides a single management console across client, server, and network edge security.

  • IT professionals can easily define their corporate security policy and “Stirling” will automatically configure the relevant protection technologies and ensure compliance to those policies.
  • “Stirling” deploys configuration settings to existing groups of machines or users in Active Directory.
  • IT professionals can use existing Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) infrastructure to deploy updates for “Stirling.”

Critical Visibility

Critical visibility into the security state, including insights into threats and vulnerabilities through one central console that easily communicates where action is required.

  • “Stirling” collects security information from client, server, and network edge devices and provides both comprehensive reports as well as the ability to drill down and perform investigations on specific security incidents, all in one place.
  • “Stirling” allows IT professionals to obtain real-time security state or identify emerging trends based on historical data.

 

 

Microsoft Software Assurance Benefits

Though Software Assurance is not for everyone, there are benefits associated with it that I like.  Unfortunately, some of those such as the ability to buy the Desktop Optimization Pack are not available without SA.  It seems that most people who do have SA either don’t know of or take advantage of free benefits such as free PSS support and training.  MS has released a list of benefits that are available under there licensing programs.

Microsoft Forefront Client Security RTM

I hadn’t seen any headlines but Microsoft released Forefront Client Security to manufacturing early last month.  I only discovered it when I check on the status of the beta program on Connect J  Have a read of my documentation (based on the first public beta release) to see what it looks like, how to deploy it, etc. 

I’m of mixed opinions on the product.  I don’t believe it is a player for the smaller organisation.  It’ll be a bit too complex and the hardware requirements will be too much for them.  But for medium (multiple sites) to large organisations I think FCS will solve a lot of problems in the anti malware field.  The architecture is excellent for them because it is centralised and uses a pre-existing deployment solution for updates, i.e. it uses Windows automatic updates solutions such as WSUS.  That simplifies things right there.  It is built upon the MOM architecture so you’ve got alerting and a scalable architecture.  It is simple to configure because there is only one dialog box.  Configuration deployment is via Group Policy and we should all know the benefits of that!  Then there is the reporting.  The first thing you see when you open the console is a summary of network health.  The reports can get quite detailed too.  It’s all based on SQL Reporting so it’s easy to use.

Compared to other corporate solutions, FCS kicks their butts in terms of architecture and manageability.  You can certainly forget about Sinmantec.  I like Trend Micro but it got a bit crazy in terms on configuration because things were scattered all over.  It will remain to be seen how FCS performs on the AV front.  The AV engine is based on one bought in by Microsoft back in 2003 via the acquisition of GeCad.  They apparently had a good reputation.  The anti-spyware solution is Defender which can be centrally managed.  It’s possibly not the best on the market from what I’ve read but it does quite a good job.  I’ve been happy with it since the initial public beta release.