Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The definition, business value, and technology benefits of the “the cloud” have been hotly debated in recent months. Most agree that cloud computing can accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and increase business agility in the market. In 2012, cloud computing will transition from hype and discussion, to part of every enterprise’s reality, and IT is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation and help business reap the benefits of cloud computing.

Join us for a virtual event designed to help you explore your cloud options. It’s your chance to interact with Microsoft experts and with IT leaders like yourself, who have been putting cloud technology to work in their own organizations. You’ll be among the first to hear the latest private cloud news from Microsoft.

• Welcome remarks by tech-expert and journalist, Christine Chen
  8:30AM PST/4:30PM GMT
• Private Cloud thought leadership panel and Live Q&A with Microsoft senior executives
  8:40AM PST/4:40PM GMT
• Envisioning Your Private Cloud; Scenario-based demonstration of Microsoft’s Private Cloud computing solutions
  9:40AM PST/5:40PM GMT
• Closing remarks and next steps
  10:25AM PST/6:25PM GMT

Microsoft Executive Panelists:

Satya Nadella
President, Server
and Tools Business, Microsoft

Brad Anderson
Corporate Vice President, Management and Security Division, Microsoft

Jacky Wright
Vice President, IT Strategic Services, Microsoft IT

DATE/TIME:
Tuesday, January 17th
8:30 AM PST | 4:30 PM GMT

REGISTRATION:
http://www.microsoft.com/business/events/en-us/PrivateCloudExec/#fbid=uZYzH12-8yp

Our IT organization likes to say that they’re Microsoft’s first & best customer, because we deploy our products internally within Microsoft before they’re ever available to our customers.

As part of that effort, they document their work and summarize it in case studies and whitepapers which are often very useful for folks implementing the same products.

Here’s a listing of their most recent content:

New or updated content

• Microsoft IT Implementation of Disaster Recovery in the Datacenter
  Article
• Active Directory Rights Management Services at Microsoft
  Technical White Paper
• Using Windows Azure to Build and Expand Microsoft.com Social Media Capabilities
  Technical Case Study
• Microsoft IT Leverages Risk and Health Assessment Programs r
  Technical Case Study
• AppLocker Deployment at Microsoft
  Technical Case Study
• Using Excel Services to Improve Financial Data Retrieval Performance
  Technical Case Study
• Enabling Self Service BI from EDW using SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2
  Technical White Paper
• Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring
  Technical Case Study
• Public Key Infrastructure at Microsoft
  Technical White Paper
• Optimizing Branch Office Servers by Using Windows Server® 2008 R2 with Hyper-V
  Technical Case Study
• Developing a Strategy to Simplify Planning and Improve Performance and Reliability
  Article
• Implementing Support and Monitoring For a Business-Critical Application Migrated to Windows Azure
  Technical Case Study
• Architecting and Redeploying a Business Critical Application to Windows Azure
  Technical Case Study
• How Microsoft IT Deployed a Customer Facing Application to Windows Azure in Six Weeks
  Technical Case Study
• Microsoft Adopts the Private Cloud
  Technical Case Study
• Forecasting Process for Worldwide Sales Provides Transparency, Consistency, and Efficiency
  Business Case Study

New Readiness & Delivery Content

• IT Showcase on: Server Virtualization
  Quick Reference Guide
• IT Showcase on: Consumerization of IT
  Quick Reference Guide

New Webcasts & Audiocasts

• Integrating Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 with SAP for Expense Management
  IT Pro Webcast, January 17, 2012 9:30 AM Pacific Time
• Microsoft Risk and Health Assessment Programs for Premier Customers
  IT Pro Webcast
• Consolidating and Sharing Business Intelligence Reports for Finance
  TechNet Radio
• System Center Configuration Manager 2012
  IT Pro Webcast
• Measuring and Driving Microsoft IT Using Microsoft BI Solutions
  TDM Webcast
• Microsoft Adopts the Private Cloud
  IT Pro Webcast
• How Microsoft IT Deployed Internet Explorer 9 at Microsoft
  TechNet Radio
• Managing Client Data Backup, Storage and Management at Microsoft
  TechNet Radio
• How Microsoft IT is Moving to the Cloud to Meet and Exceed the Needs of the Business
  TechNet Radio
• Microsoft IT Uses File Classification Infrastructure to Help Secure Personally Identifiable Information
  TechNet Radio
• How Microsoft Deployed Windows Phone 7 in the Enterprise
  TechNet Radio
• Maintaining High Availability for Microsoft.com
  TechNet Radio

A customer asked the question:  Doesn’t the elimination of Single Instance Storage in Exchange Server 2010 mean that our Exchange stores are going to balloon in size?

We addressed this back in February. 
We HAD to change our storage architecture to provide dramatically better IO performance, huge increases in scalability, and more flexible.

One of our main goals for Exchange 2010 was to provide very large mailboxes at a low cost. Disk capacity is no longer a premium; disk space is very inexpensive and IT shops can take advantage of larger, cheaper disks to reduce their overall cost. In order to leverage those larger capacity disks, you also need to increase mailbox sizes (and remove PSTs and leverage the personal archive and records management capabilities) so that you can ensure that you are designing your storage to be both IO efficient and capacity efficient.

During the development of Exchange 2010, we realized that having a table structure optimized for SIS was holding us back from making the storage innovations that were necessary to achieve our goals. In order to improve the store and ESE, to change our IO profile (from many, small, random IOs to larger, fewer, more sequential IOs), and to resolve our inefficiencies around item count, we had to change the store schema. Specifically, we moved away from a per-database table structure to a per-mailbox table structure.

This architecture, along with other changes to the ESE and store engines (lazy view updates, space hints, page size increase, b+ tree defrag, etc.), netted us not only a 70% reduction in IO over Exchange 2007, but also substantially increased our ability to store more items in critical path folders.

The outcome was a bit of Exchange database growth.  To compensate for this we effectively implemented compression which eliminated the growth side effect.

As a result of the new architecture and the other changes to the store and ESE, we had to deal with an unintended side effect. While these changes greatly improved our IO efficiency, they made our space efficiency worse. In fact, on average they increased the size of the Exchange database by about 20% over Exchange 2007. To overcome this bloating effect, we implemented a targeted compression mechanism (using either 7-bit or XPRESS, which is the Microsoft implementation of the LZ77 algorithm) that specifically compresses message headers and bodies that are either text or HTML-based (attachments are not compressed as typically they exist in their most compressed state already). The result of this work is that we see database sizes on par with Exchange 2007.

Here’s the articles from the Exchange Team Blog that talk about why SIS’s removal from Exchange 2010 ends up being a really good thing!

• Dude, Where’s My Single Instance? (February 2011)
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2010/02/22/dude-where-s-my-single-instance.aspx
• Top 10 Exchange Storage Myths (March 2011)
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2010/03/29/3409629.aspx

One of my TAMs sent a mail out to our customers and I thought this part was exceptionally important for people to understand:

Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 will no longer be supported from April 8, 2014 onwards. After this date, Microsoft will not provide any public support for these products, including security patches, non-security hotfixes or incident support.

Running Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 in your environment after their end of support date may expose your company to potential risks, such as: 

• Security & Compliance Risks – Unsupported and unpatched environments are vulnerable to security risks. This may result in an officially recognized control failure by an internal or external audit body, leading to suspension of certifications, and/or public notification of the organization’s inability to maintain its systems and customer information.
• Lack of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) & Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Support – A recent industry report from Gartner Research suggests "many independent software vendors (ISVs) are unlikely to support new versions of applications on Windows XP in 2011; in 2012, it will become common". And it may stifle access to hardware innovation: Gartner Research further notes that in 2012, most PC hardware OEMs will stop supporting Windows XP on the majority of their new PC models. See Creating a Timeline for Deploying Windows 7 and Eliminating Windows XP SP3, June 2011.

Do the math:

• If your company has 10,000 desktops, assuming you start right now, you will need to deploy 370 Windows 7 desktop images every month, or 75 desktops a week in order to make the April 2014 deadline.
• If your company has 3,000 desktops, you need to be able to deploy 111 Windows 7 desktop images each month.

Ask yourself:  Could you do this?  Do you have the time & the manpower?

We have a massive in-person training coming up in April for Lync 2010 that will touch architecture, voice integration, administration, support, etc.  We are funding the entire thing and spaces are filling up FAST so if you’re interested (assuming you’re a managed customer of mine), ping me and I’ll hook you up.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Ignite
April 16 – April 20, 2012
Seating is limited – Register to save your spot today!

As a valued member of the Microsoft community, we would like to extend to you an official invitation to the 5 day Lync Server Ignite training event.

Course Description: This 5 day Lync Server 2010 Ignite training event includes deep technical content that covers a variety of workloads such as deployment, management, voice, conferencing high availability, and monitoring. This content is aimed at IT Pros and Partners who are responsible for deploying the various workloads of Lync Server 2010 and managing the deployments.

• Module 1: Lync 2010 – What is New?
• Module 2: Microsoft Lync Server 2010 – What is New?
• Module 3: The Voice Story
• Module 4: Setup and Deployment
• Module 5: Management and Admin Experience
• Module 6: Migration and Coexistence
• Module 7: Instant Messaging and Presence Experience
• Module 8: Meeting and Collaboration Experience
• Module 9: Voice Experience
• Module 10: Enhanced 9-1-1 and Location Services
• Module 11: What is New in Devices?
• Module 12: High Availability and Resiliency
• Module 13: Voice Quality Considerations
• Module 14: Network Assessment
• Module 15: Bandwidth Management & Call Admission Control
• Module 16: Edge Server / Remote Access
• Module 17: Voice Applications
• Module 18: The Unified Communications Developer Platform
• Module 19: Monitoring and Troubleshooting
• Module 20: Hybrid Scenarios

We look forward to having you participate in this exciting training event!

RSVP: This special, no charge training event will fill quickly and space is limited, so be sure to register as soon as possible to reserve your seat.  Please contact me if you are a managed customer of mine for registration details.

Who Should Attend:
This course is intended for the experienced IT Professional…

Prerequisites:
The following prerequisites are recommended:

• Experience with Microsoft Networking
• Experience with Windows Server 2008
• Experience with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007
• Knowledge of telephony suggested

Sprint weathered the challenges and reaped the rewards of killing off PBX systems and moving to a unified communications suite with Microsoft Lync.  The cost savings they’ve calculated are nothing less than spectacular, and they reflect the same sort of cost savings that Microsoft has seen in moving to a Lync-based Unified Communications solution for voice, video, and data communications/conferencing.

NET NET:  Sprint displaced their Nortel PBX for 40,000 users & are now evaluating Office 365’s Lync Online for Cloud-based access to Lync services. 

Taken from the article:

• Moving from TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing) circuits to a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) architecture to enable VoIP for 450 Sprint sites: $6.7 million in savings.
• Eliminating bi-annual PBX upgrade costs: $2.5 million in savings.
• Web conferencing costs _ Moved from a third-party conferencing provider to Lync Live Meeting: $300,000 a month.
• "Green" savings from eliminating the need to power and cool legacy PBX equipment: $700,000 annually.
• Real estate savings from the reduction in rented square footage (1.5 million square feet and counting): $30 million annually.

Read the entire article at CIO magazine:

• CIO.COM: Sprint Calls on Microsoft Lync, Saves Big with UC
  http://www.cio.com/article/696002/
  Sprint_Calls_on_Microsoft_Lync_Saves_Big_with_UC

Unfortunately, there are no “freely available” eBooks on PowerShell 2.0 from Microsoft.  The two current books that we have available on version 2.0 are below.

• Windows PowerShell™ 2.0 Best Practices
  http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735626461.do
• Windows PowerShell™ 2.0 Administrators Pocket Consultant
  http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735625952.do

We do have an OLDER PowerShell eBook available (1.0) for download here, which includes demo files and code:

• Windows PowerShell eBook (Microsoft Switzerland)
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/9/4/a94270c7-ed16-4c72-8280-658c66315719/Windows%20Powershell%20-%20EN.zip
• Associated Demo files for Windows PowerShell eBook
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/9/4/a94270c7-ed16-4c72-8280-658c66315719/PowerShell-Demofiles.zip

In the meantime, you may want to review the following FREE eBooks on PowerShell v2.0:

• The Windows PowerShell Owner’s Manual: Version 2.0
• Mastering PowerShell
• PowerShell 2.0 One Cmdlet at a Time
• The Administrator Crash Course: Windows PowerShell v2
• Layman’s Guide to PowerShell 2.0 Remoting
• Administrator’s Guide to Windows PowerShell Remoting
• WMI Query Language via PowerShell
• Effective Windows PowerShell

Also DZone created this quick reference chart for PowerShell users:

• Refcardz: Windows PowerShell
  http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/windows-powershell

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop and server migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides private and public cloud planning assessments, and server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments, including ROI analysis for server consolidation with Hyper-V. Other significant new features in MAP 6.5 include the discovery of active Windows devices, Software Usage Tracking for Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP), and the discovery of Oracle instances on Itanium-based servers with HP-UX to assist in the planning of migration to SQL Server. Learn more.

MAP is one of the tools provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Security Compliance Manager provide tested guidance and automated tools to help organizations plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies—easier, faster, and at less cost. All are freely available, and fully-supported by Microsoft. Learn more.

For home users and users with a few computers to migrate, use the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to understand the readiness of your computer for Windows 7.
The MAP Toolkit includes the following components:

• Microsoft_Assessment_and_Planning_Toolkit_Setup.exe. Installation package containing the tool, release notes, Getting Started Guide and toolkit help (chm file).
• readme_en.htm. Available as a separate download. Provides information to read before installing the MAP Toolkit, including installation prerequisites and known issues.
• Getting_Started_Guide.en.doc. Provides information about toolkit installation, environment preparation, and assessment scenarios supported by toolkit wizards and the UI.
• MAP_Training_Kit.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample databases and training materials.
• MAP_Sample_Documents.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample reports and proposals.

DOWNLOAD: Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 6.5
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=7826

A former customer came up with this one.  They’re just discovered one of the drawbacks of deploying Office Standard 2010 instead of licensing Office Professional Plus 2010.

WHEN USING OFFICE 2010…
If you want users to be able to easily use the “Managed E-Mail Folders & Retention Policy” features of Exchange 2010 & you want the user to be able to view the Online Archive/Managed Folders within the user interface of the Outlook 2010 client software – you must have Outlook Professional 2010.  As I understand it, the Managed folders aren’t even supposed to visually appear in Outlook Standard 2010, much less Outlook 2007. 

Please note that this software is above and beyond Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise CALs.  The “Managed E-Mail Folders & Retention Policy” features are described as such:

• Provide a secondary location for users to store their email messages and manage their mailbox quota with new online managed folders.
• Take advantage of new Retention Policy so IT admins and records managers can provide users with policies stipulated how long items should be retailed.

WHAT ELSE IS MISSING IN OUTLOOK STANDARD 2010?
Additionally, the following features are also missing in Outlook Standard 2010, and require Outlook Professional 2010 to take advantage:

• Create IRM-protected documents and email messages.  Grant access & editing permissions and apply policy templates to protected content
• Apply policy statements to email messages before sending.
• See Meeting Schedules & SharePoint MySite activities (new document postings, status updates) through Outlook 2010’s Social Connector
• Complete InfoPath 2010 email forms in Outlook 2010.
• Initiate IM & voice direction from Office application through integration with OCS.

DOCUMENT: “Office 2010 Suite Version Comparison Guide”
http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/A/8/EA8E6423-3DFE-4FEF-8482-D48B016A7C03/Office2010SuiteandVersionComparisonGuide.pdf

LICENSING: License requirements for Personal Archive and retention policies
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/license-requirements-for-personal-archive-and-retention-policies-HA102576659.aspx

Windows Server 2008 R2 provides a productive server platform because it offers cost-effective virtualization, power saving capabilities, and a superior experience for end users.

In this Hands-on Lab we will focus on the enhancements made to PowerShell, the new Scripting Language for the Windows Platform, will help you automate management tasks in local and remote computers. You also learn how to configure IIS 7.5 on Server Core in order to run ASP.NET applications. Finally you will learn how you can use PowerShell and the new AD administrative Center to Manage Active Directory.

During this lab, we will cover:

• Server Management and PowerShell V2: This command-line shell and scripting language helps IT professionals achieve greater productivity when managing their systems. We will review some of the 240 CmdLets available and how the new PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment will make it easier to run cmdlets both locally and remotely.
• Deploying and Managing ASP.NET Using IIS 7.5 on Server Core: You will learn how to install and configure IIS 7.5 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 – Server Core instance in order to run ASP.NET applications.
• Active Directory and Server Manager Remoting: In this lab you will leverage the AD Administrative Center to make changes to user accounts. You will also learn how to use PowerShell to make changes to AD. Finally we will show you how you can simplify the management of the servers on your network with the new remoting capability found in Server Manager.

Date: Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Time: 9:00am – 1:00pm Pacific Time

Location: Virtual Hands On Lab Classroom.

Target Audience: IT Pro, IT Manager

Registration: To register, please contact me for more information if you are a customer of mine.  This special, no charge training series will fill quickly and space is limited, so be sure to register as soon as possible to reserve your seat.

What is a virtual hands-on-lab:
This isn’t your typical IT class. A hands-on lab online is an invite only event that combines LiveMeeting with a virtual lab. Attendees and presenters login from anywhere. Attendees watch a brief LiveMeeting presentation, then spend most of the time getting hands-on experience working through all, or just self-selected modules of the entire lab – at their own pace, and receive real-time, personal, one-on-one attention from the presenter. In addition, there’s a proctor available for technical support and to answer more attendee questions.

Before the Event:

• Check virtual lab for your computer http://test.vlabcenter.com/hv/default.aspx
• Install the ActiveX control. The Microsoft "Virtual Machine Remote Control" ActiveX control is required to start the virtual lab.
• Review system requirements.
• If you have any issues, please contact support.