Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Whoa.  Check this out.  A video that goes through all the stuff folks can anticipate with System Center Configuration Manager 2012.  Top to bottom.

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Overview and Infrastructure: Module 1: Technical Overview

Explore the major changes coming in System Center Configuration Manager 2012 in this video. This video provides an overview of the product, showing how it empowers users, unifies infrastructure and simplifies administration.

This video is part of the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). The MVA is a free program delivering structured learning paths for IT Professionals on various Microsoft products and solutions.

After watching this video, visit www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com, enroll in this course and take the self-assessment. For every module you take and every self-assessment you complete, you will be awarded points. These points build up to levels and the higher the level you achieve, the more opportunities you have to participate in MVA offers.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/system-center-configuration-manager-2012-overview-and-infrastructure-module-1-technical-overview

Nice.  Outlook 2010 integration & Web Password Reset credential mgmt.

Microsoft is pleased to announce the availability of Forefront Identity Manager 2012 R2 beta. Some of the key areas we’re enhancing with this release include:

• Credential management with web based password reset
• Historical reporting using integration to the System Center Service Manager data warehouse
• Greater ease of use through enhanced initial load performance, improved diagnostics and and enhanced load and scale performance
• Additional support for Microsoft Outlook 2010, and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

To join the beta program and download the software, click here.

We are also pleased to announce that the Forefront Identity Manager Community Evaluation Program will commence on the 2nd of August with our first session. Community members are encouraged to attend and new members are certainly welcome. Community Evaluation Programs are a great technical resource for deeper understanding of Microsoft products and to connect with other users. With over 2000 people engaged in various CEP programs, you’re able to not only connect directly with key engineering resources from Microsoft, but also a broad community of like-minded users. Further details on the Community Evaluation Program for the R2 release of Forefront Identity Manager 2010 can be found here.

• Read more at:  Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 beta now available
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/forefront/archive/2011/08/01/key-improvements-in-forefront-identity-manager-r2.aspx

I bought an Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 – Network adapter (Mini PCI-E). Why’d I do that? Because the adapter in the Samsung Series 9 is a little questionable:  The Bluetooth was unreliable and the range on the adapter wasn’t great, despite having replaced the original with another Broadcom adapter twice.

If you’re interested in doing the same thing, here’s the instructions on how to accomplish this:

1. Purchase a Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6230 – Network adapter (Mini PCI-E) for $19 each.  This is the cheapest that I was able to find the adapter at.  Other places sell it for as high as $60… the hell?
   http://www.macmall.com/p/Intel-Wireless-Networking/product~dpno~8355777~pdp.gdicdec
2. Replace the Broadcom WiFi Bluetooth adapter on your device. Be extra careful reattaching the antenna as it’s fragile and not easily replaceable… if at all.  TechRepublic has a photo of the adapter location on the unit here:
   http://www.techrepublic.com/photos/cracking-open-the-samsung-series-9-ultraportable-notebook/6235888?seq=50&tag=thumbnail-view-selector;get-photo-roto
3. Download & install the latest driver for the Intel® PROSet/Wireless WiFi Connection Utility (for Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6200 series):
   http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3227&DwnldID=19856
   (Note: You won’t need Bluetooth drivers as the existing Bluetooth drivers on your system should work just fine.)

EXTRA CREDIT: SETTING UP INTEL WIDI

Incidentally, if you want to enable your computer for Intel WiDi (Wireless Display technology that allows you to send your display to your home big screen/LCD television), here’s the web site on how to do this once you have the Intel Centrino 6230 installed on your computer. It’s similar to Apple’s Airplay.
http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wtech/iwd/sb/CS-031109.htm

The above will work for normal, non-protected content like YouTube, Hulu, or locally stored videos.  For playback of DVDs, Bluray, or rights protected streams like Netflix, you’ll need to enable WiDi protection by following these steps.
http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wtech/iwd/sb/CS-032474.htm

Like most companies today, you rely on your IT infrastructure to keep your business running. You need to find out about and fix IT problems before they lead to any downtime or loss of productivity and revenue. This becomes even more challenging when you depend on a combination of physical, virtual, and cloud resources to run a diverse mix of operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Unix) that support any number of critical business applications. Microsoft understands these challenges and is dedicated to helping customers address these issues.

System Center Operations Manager 2012 provides the solution to the challenges mentioned above by:

• Delivering flexible and cost effective enterprise-class monitoring and diagnostics while reducing the total cost of ownership by leveraging commodity hardware with standard configurations to monitor heterogeneous environments.
• Helping to ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services through market-leading .NET application performance monitoring and diagnostics plus JEE application health monitoring.
• Providing a comprehensive view of datacenters, and private and public clouds.

Here’s what’s new

• Rich application performance monitoring and diagnostics for .NET applications plus JEE application health monitoring
• Support for monitoring heterogeneous environments
• Integrated network device monitoring and alerts
• Simplified management infrastructure
• Common console across datacenter and clouds with customizable dashboards

Download the beta here.

For more information, visit the new Operations Manager 2012 beta page.

[taken from the SCOM blog]

Download the Lunch & Learn SharePoint Adoption Kit.
The Lunch & Learn kit contains all the materials you need to promote SharePoint within your organization. The kit includes instructions, templates, videos, quick reference cards and more to help you deploy an internal SharePoint resource site – a place to access SharePoint information and tools, and connect around the best part of the day: lunch.

•  SharePoint Webisodes
•  Show Me How Videos
•  Quick Reference Cards
•  Tips & Tricks PDF
•  Table Tent Template
•  Poster Template
•  Email Template
•  Best Practices PDF

Download this kit to show your team how SharePoint makes life, and lunch, a little better.

• DOWNLOAD: Lunch & Learn SharePoint Adoption Kit
  http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/iusesharepoint/pages/get-the-kit.aspx

Just noticed that they posted the session list on the SharePoint Conference web site.
http://www.mssharepointconference.com
/pages/sessions.aspx

There are 210 sessions to attend during the week long event.  This is a gonna be a whopper of an event.  Here are the pivots around the different sessions going on.

• Audience:
  Developer (36) IT Professional (33) Other (141)
• Level:
  100 (4) 200 (84) 300 (108) 400 (14)
• Capability:
  Communities/Sites (24) Composites (9) Content (47) Insights (25) Search (24)
• Tags:
  Access (3) Administration (45) Adoption (8) Architecture (7) Best Practices (88) BI (26) Claims Authentication (3) Cloud (17) Communities/Sites (15) Composites (9) Content (22) Customization (47) Data Services (2) Deployment (52) Developer (33) Development (35) Duet Enterprise (2) Enterprise Content Management (23) Excel (7) Governance (22) High Availability (10) InfoPath (7) Insights (25) Internet Business (25) IT Pro (31) Line of Business (7) Office 365 (11) Office Client (29) Office Web apps (4) PerformancePoint (12) Planning, Deployment and Adoption (8) Project (7) Scalability (25) Search (32) Security (10) SharePoint (185) SharePoint Designer (18) Social (16) Strategy (2) Tools (26) Upgrade (7) Virtualization (2) Visio (8) Web Content Management (24) Windows (1) Windows Phone (5) Workflow (7)

This is a repost – in it’s entirety – of a post from the GetThePoint blog.  I’m doing this because it’s THAT important to SharePoint Search Admins.

Please take the time to investigate this.  It’s a got a TON of fantastic info.

Have you been scratching your head about how to approach People Search for your SharePoint site or how to try enabling it again? You know you need to do this because a good Search tool is the mesh that helps connect all the disparate parties who contribute to your sites. But, how to proceed?

You might find this detailed and well-illustrated post interesting. It discusses how one might enable SharePoint Search, avoid pitfalls, and work around possible snags:  Troubleshooting SharePoint Search

Paul, the author, provides basic deployment steps for less-experienced administrators, presents a brief explanation for more advanced admins, and dives deep to suggest ways to work around difficulties, both known and more obscure. Suggested work-arounds cover the following topics, among others:

• The loopback issue where search crawling fails and results in an Access Denied error. The post gives two ways to fix this via a registry update: a quick way and a right way.
• Search problems with HTTPS sites. The post presents a simple solution, involving a one-line configuration update.
• Problems associated with Active Directory policies, namely those involved with enforcing proxy server and security settings (like those affecting trusted sites lists). The post presents several options for dealing with this.

Check it out! It’s a bit lengthy but worth the read if SharePoint Search is in your path

[taken from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2011/07/19/new-book-windows-sysinternals-administrator-s-reference.aspx]

I usually don’t hype books too much, but damn, if this isn’t a long time coming.  These are the kind of tools that you really want to have a paper reference for.

Here’s a sample from the blog announcement:

“Aaron Margosis and I are thrilled to announce that the long awaited, and some say long overdue, official guide to the Sysinternals tools is now available! I’ve always had the idea of writing a book on the tools in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that Dave Solomon, my coauthor on Windows Internals, convinced me to pursue it. After a few false starts, I decided that a coauthor would help get the book done more quickly, and turned to Aaron, a good friend of mine who’s also a long-time user and expert on the tools at his day job in the Federal Division of Microsoft Consulting Services. It was a great choice and I’m proud to put the Sysinternals brand on the book.

Whether you’re new to the tools or have been using them since Bryce Cogswell (my Sysinternals and Winternals Software cofounder, now retired) and I released NTFSDOS in 1996, you’re sure to take away new insights that will give you the edge when tackling tough problems and managing your Windows systems.

The book covers all 70+ tools, with chapters dedicated to the major tools like Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and Autoruns. For each we provide a thorough tour of all of the tool’s features, how to use the tool, and include our favorite tips and techniques. There’s no better way to learn than by example, though. The last section of the book will be familiar to anyone that’s read this blog or watched my Case of the Unexplained conference sessions, because it presents 17 real-world cases that show how Windows power users and administrators like you solved otherwise impossible-to-solve problems by using the tools.

…

The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com and available from O’Reilly in 4 ebook formats, or you can read it online through Safari.

Microsoft owns 4 of the top 10 largest datacenters worldwide which house the Microsoft Cloud presence.

This video (posted Jul 24, 2011) will provide a deeper look at how Microsoft uses secure, reliable, scalable and efficient best practices to deliver over 200 cloud services to more than a billion customers and 20 million businesses in over 70 countries.It provides an understanding at how we view our end-to-end cloud strategy from an infrastructure perspective.

I’m an avid Bing user.  On rare occasion, I find myself wanting to check another search engine other than Bing for search results. 

The problem is:  If I check Google, I don’t want my identity, PC, or search details or search activity tracked back to me, and I certainly don’t want Google collecting information about what I do from my PC.  (Something they do actively monitor because your unique behavior is valuable to advertisers for targeting)  Between the details they attempt to collect from all the people using AdSense & sites leveraging Google Analytics, it’s hard enough trying to stay away from their tracking.

I’ve written about this before, but just to reiterate, to configure your machine to alternatively search Google without:

• getting your search stored on the Internet in logs for longer than 24 hours
• having your Internet search terms & usage behavior tied to your identity
• revealing what you click on in the search results and having it captured

WHAT TO DO
Follow the following steps in Internet Explorer (7/8/9):

1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx
2. Enter https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=TEST in the field labeled:  “Paste the URL of the Search results page”
3. Enter “Scroogle SSL” in the field labeled: “Specify a name for the search provider”
4. Press ENTER button.  A dialog box called “Add Search Provider” will appear.
5. Press “Add” button.

From this point on, anytime you want to alternatively search Google, simply type your search query into the URL field in Internet Explorer and select the Scroogle SSL search icon – which should look like a G with a circle & slash through it:

WHAT THIS DOES
This leverages Scroogle, a 3rd party entity that exists to help protect your identity from Google and prevent your preferences, choices, and Internet behavior from being tracked by Google.  This will accomplish the following:

• Act as a go-between between you and Google to prevent them from tying your search query to your personal computer, browser, identity, and of course tracking tags like cookies – Scroogle replaces all your identifying information with that of Scroogle.
• Clear your search from the face of the earth in 48 hours by wiping their logs nightly – as opposed to being archived for months if not permanently
• Securely transmit & receive your search query & results to & from Scroogle over SSL to prevent traffic scanners like WebSense and other tools from inspecting & recording your activities
• Filter out Google advertising except for paid-placement in Google’s search results

WHO IS SCROOGLE?
Good question.  A good deal about Scroogle and what they do and why they do it is written up in the following two links:

• https://ssl.scroogle.org/sslnote.html
• http://www.scroogle.org/doctorow.html