April, 2010 | Aidan Finn, IT Pro

SharePoint 2010 Information

Two downloads appeared on Microsoft’s site over the weekend for you BI freaks to get started into SharePoint 2010:

SharePoint 2010 Planning Guide Beta: This book covers information about the fundamentals of planning guide for SharePoint Server 2010 Beta
Operations guide for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta: This book covers information about the basic fundamentals of Operations guide for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta

MS Ireland Event: Best of MMS 2010

Microsoft Ireland are hosting a “best of” event with content and some speakers from the Microsoft Management Summit that is on this week. Registration is open now. The two sessions I’m most looking forward to are the ConfigMgr V.Next one by Jeff Wettlaufer and the Opalis session by Greg Charman.

It sounds like something similar is being done in the UK so you folks should watch the local blogs, events pages and emails. Considering all the volcano ash disruptions, very few people from Europe who were even registered will get to go.

Technorati Tags: ConfigMgr,Hyper-V,System Center,Events

Microsoft Intune

You’ve probably seen bits hear and there about a new Microsoft cloud light version of Configuration Manager. Details of the newly launched Windows Intune service just appeared.

It gives some auditing, policy management and malware/update management. You can what this is like below.

Here is what it does:

Manage PCs through web-based console: Windows Intune provides a web-based console for IT to administrate their PCs. Administrators can manage PCs from anywhere.
Manage updates: Administrators can centrally manage the deployment of Microsoft updates and service packs to all PCs.
Protection from malware: Windows Intune helps protect PCs from the latest threats with malware protection built on the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine that you can manage through the Web-based console.
Proactively monitor PCs: Receive alerts on updates and threats so that you can proactively identify and resolve problems with your PCs—before it impacts end users and your business.
Provide remote assistance: Resolve PC issues, regardless of where you or your users are located, with remote assistance.
Track hardware and software inventory: Track hardware and software assets used in your business to efficiently manage your assets, licenses, and compliance.
Set security policies: Centrally manage update, firewall, and malware protection policies, even on remote machines outside the corporate network

The service is being released to 1,000 customers and MS partners today in the USA, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Customers of this Intune service will be elligible to upgrade to Windows 7 (and future versions) Enterprise (useful for the last above bullet point if you can manage BitLocker and BitLocker-to-go).

The target customers are “businesses that need a cost-effective, simple way to manage and secure their PCs. For businesses with a highly mobile and distributed workforce, the Windows Intune cloud service can help you manage and secure PCs in the office or on the road—so end users can remain productive and better protected”.

Technorati Tags: Windows 7

SCE 2010 and DPM 2010 RTM

Data Protection Manager 2010 and System Center Essentials 2010 were both announced as being released to manufacturing today.

DPM is MS’s backup solution and is the one that has the ability to backup a Hyper-V CSV. The catch is that it puts the CSV into redirected IO mode. Thus the preference is to use a storage provider with a supported VSS provider. That allows you to safely backup running VM’s and maintain database consistency when recovered -> VSS runs all the way through the stack. You can even recover single files!

SCE 2010 is the all-in-one package that has the best of ConfigMgr, OpsMgr and now with VMM so you can manage W2008 R2 Hyper-V. This makes it the ideal systems management solution for small-medium companies.

I’m Famous – In Poland

Monika Pyszczek, from Poland, was a colleague of mine in a past job. Monika saw me being quoted in a training material for Hyper-V. She’s posted a blog post – there’s also a funny photo that shows what happens to engineers who misbehave 🙂

That Time of Year Again

I got the dreaded email this week. Contained in it was the attachment. Every potential MVP or MVP up for annual renewal in the UK/Ireland is sent a spreadsheet that asks for your last year of activity. My renewal (or not) is July so the review process for me started this week. The spreadsheet can take a couple of hours to complete if you have done a good bit of work. Luckily I keep records of the activity so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting. After this it is wait until July 1st and then refresh the MVP profile site to see if my name is still up there. A mail is sent later that day either congratulating you or expressing the bad news.

I heard this week that we got 3 new MVP’s in Ireland this month, one in OpsMgr, one in UC and one in CRM … there’s a lot of privacy stuff wrapped up in it so we think those were the specialties. Well done folks! We did lose one MVP late last year … but only because he became a MS employee. We think our numbers here are around 13-14, still quite a rare species, and still only half of what it should be.

Discussions were held this week to also re-launch the Windows user group. Attendances were dropping off. We think it’s because asking people to come to a venue every month on a Friday morning was tough – people are losing jobs all over the place and there are exactly zero legitimate IT pro job openings (I hear there are plenty of fake ads for CV/resume harvesting). We also know that evening events and very-early morning events are non-starters.

Another MVP, John McCabe (Unified Communications) has expressed interest in helping out which is more than welcome. We’re looking now at doing bigger, multi-track, day long events about 3 times a year, with a keynote speaker, maybe from Redmond (any Redmond folks fancy a trip to Dublin? If so, I’ll put you in contact with the right person in the Irish sub). Most of the product expert speakers will be from the community, mainly from Ireland but some invitees from abroad. The provisional date for the first one is in September. I think it could be a pretty fantastic event with a nice mix of content covering different aspects of the business that IT Pro’s in Ireland work with and care about. More details on that later. Oh you can safely bet I’ll be talking about something in the virtualization world.

Technorati Tags: Windows User Group,Events

MS Ireland Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 Road Show Webcast

Microsoft Ireland has sent out a link to a website hosting a recorded stream of the launch events in Dublin earlier this week.

Technorati Tags: Office,SharePoint

Office 2010 Information

Microsoft released some information to go with the 2010 RTM of tonight:

Getting Started with Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 Products: Use this guide to in match the features and capabilities of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products to your organization’s enterprise search requirements.
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Evaluation Guide: Describes the enterprise search features provided by Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
Office 2010: Product Guides: The Office 2010 product guides provide an overview of what’s new in your favourite Microsoft Office programs and a deeper look at benefits across all Office 2010 programs, as well as Office Web Apps and Office Mobile 2010.
SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide: Describes the enterprise search features provided by Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Deployment guide for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta: Provides information about how to deploy Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta.
Volume Activation of Microsoft Office 2010: Describes and illustrates how to manage Office 2010 Volume Activation methods: Multiple Activation Key (MAK) and Key Management System (KMS).

Technorati Tags: Office,SharePoint

Office 2010 RTM

I just saw on the Office blog that Office 2010 products have been released to manufacturing. The released products are Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.

Volume license customers with Software Assurance can start downloading on May 1st. The official launch will be on on May 12th with a virtual event featuring Stephen Elop. Retail will be available in June with pre-order available now. News on MSDN and TechNet releases is being kept suspiciously quiet. I suspect MS might be trying to avoid what happened with Windows 7 – everyone hitting refresh until it eventually appeared and then they all got slow downloads and moaned on Twitter.

I’ll be sticking with Office 2007 for a while – I’m kinda constrained by the support for the custom ribbon that my publisher uses for formatting. I’ll probably upgrade the work machine when the partner pack is updated. I’ve been on the CTP for quite a while now.

KB2022557: Selecting RedHat in VMM Fails

Microsoft has posted a fix to enable you to select RedHat as the OS of a VM in VMM 2008 R2, 2008 and 2007. Without the fix you get this error:

Error (10637)

The virtualization software on host <server> does not support the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system.

The problem is that the VMM database needs a tiny adjustment. You can do this easily enough using SQL Management Studio or SQL Management Studio Express. First, you should back up the database (don’t come crying to me if you didn’t!). You then need to create a new query with the following:

update tbl_IL_OS

set OSFlags=0x14

where Name like ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5%’

Run the query and you should be sorted.

Technorati Tags: VMM,System Center,Hyper-V,Linux