General availability for Exchange 2010 announced!

At TechEd today Microsoft eventually announced that Exchange Server 2010 is now available for general availability. It doesn’t show in the download list at TechNet yet but I guess it will be out during the day or evening.

SharePoint 2010 brings many new features!

First session at TechEd is completed! It was a really interesting session about SharePoint 2010 which seems to be a huge improvement over previous versions of SharePoint and WSS. Everything is made easier and more user friendly but there also seems to improvements on patching SharePoint 2010.

Some of the improvements and changes:

•  Better browser support (Firefox & IE of course)
•  Ribbon interface (AJAX) with live formatting of text etc.
•  Groove is renamed to SharePoint workspace
•  WSS 4.0 is renamed to SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Editing of Office documents within the SharePoint interface.
•  Many many more improvements :)

Installing Windows 7 on HP nc4400, “completing installation”…

When installing Windows 7 on the HP nc4400 range of laptops it will likely hang at “completing installation”. Microsoft says it is a known compatibility issue with this particular model and HP are working on getting a BIOS upgrade out the door. Stay tuned!

Berlin here I come!

So in one week from now I will be in Berlin participating in TechEd Europe 2009. I’m really looking forward to it and I am convinced it will be a blast!

Manage the scheduled defrag job centrally

Starting with Windows Vista the defragmentation utility is scheduled to run on all drives once per week. The defrag is done in the middle of the night but if the machine is not on at that time, the defrag will start after next power on.

Anyway, you can disable, change the schedule or in other ways modify the task centrally by for instance deploying a script file by using GPO:s. The following command line disables the scheduled defrag task from running.

schtasks /change /tn "microsoft\windows\defrag\ScheduledDefrag" /disable

MCITP, Enterprise Administrator. Worth it?

Last Friday I passed the last exam in the MCITP certification for becoming Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Administrator. Cause for celebration! But that was not why I started writing this. Today I met with a client of mine and he asked if it was worth taking a certification. My answer is definitely “yes”!

Why? Many reasons. You get a broader perspective of things which certainly helps you make better decisions in your daily work. You also get a broader set of technical skills and by that I mean that you gain (at least) basic knowledge of the available features of the specific product which in the future might prove to be very valuable. Taking these exams are if nothing else very good for keeping up with new technology.

Want to become certified? Look for appropriate certifications at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-overview.aspx and then register at https://www.register.prometric.com.

Prepare for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

So Windows 7 RTM is really close now and Microsoft has just released the new Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 4.0 beta. The new MAP toolkit has some really nice features and besides from doing an inventory of your entire environment to prepare your clients and servers for upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 respectively  you can now get an inventory of VMware Server hosts and guests as well as virtualization candidates for Hyper-V Server R2. Download MAP 4.0 beta from Microsoft Connect and see some great reports on if and how the hardware will be able to run Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

User group for Swedish Windows users

It has existed for a couple of months but now all the pieces are starting to come together and therefore I am now officially announcing the Swedish Windows User Group. If you work with Windows client (or server) operating system and is interested in learning more and have glimpses at new technology and get some tips & tricks this user group is for you! Virtual Office Live Meetings are held regularly and starting this fall there will be physical gatherings with demos and presentations. You are more than welcome to join and do so at www.swewinug.se.

Windows XP mode for Windows 7!

So it seams it isn’t a secret anymore that Windoyws 7 will get a feature (separate download) that using the latest Virtual PC technologies will make it possible to run applications in Windows XP directly integreated into the Windows 7  operating system. The feature is almost the same as MED-V which accomplishes basically the same thing, but The “Windows XP mode” has advantages like it is available for anyone running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate SKUs.

With this Microsoft can guarantee compatilibty in a way no one could ever expect. This also makes the step from Windows XP to Windows 7 much easier and now there cannot be any apps holiding anyone back from upgrading the clients to Windows 7.

More information: Winsupersite

Mysterious error/warning in SBS 2008 BPA

When running the Best Practice Analyzer on a Small Business Server 2008 some time ago I received a critical error:

DNS A resource record points to incorrect IP address
The host (A) resource record points to the incorrect IP address 192.168.0.10192.168.0.17. The record should point to 192.168.0.10.

As we can see the two IP addresses have mysteriously become one. The first being the IP address of the SBS 2008 server and the second one being the RAS IP address. The BPA team gave the following answer:

That is an issue we are looking into, and it appears to be a possible issue with how the object processor is doing the DNS check.  At this point, a possible workaround (if you are having this show up in the Other Alerts of the SBS Console) would be to schedule a task to run at say 2:04am to do a “net stop remoteaccess ” then another task that runs at say 2:07 am to do a net start remoteaccess.  The SBS 2008 BPA by default should be scheduled to run at 2:05am when it is integrating in with the SBS console. If the second IP address listed is the IP address of the dial-in interface of RRAS then you should be able to ignore that error.