Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The latest version has a number of cool new features, not to mention some bug fixes.  Here are a few of the new features available:

• Process Tracking enables identification of applications on your machine that generate network traffic.
• Re-designed capture engine improves data capture on high-speed networks.
• Find conversations feature allows you to isolate data in the same network conversation.
• Parsers for over 300 protocols.
• Much more!

The first big feature for this release is easily Process Tracking.  Now you can identify rogue applications sending network data.  View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID).  Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.

The second big feature is Conversation filtering/finding.  To quote the NetMon team: 
“Many of our users found conversation tracking to be difficult to use as the view grew hard to manage, and it was difficult to correlate the frames they were seeing with the conversation nodes in the tree. Now, you can quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation.  Just right-click on a frame and select a conversation to track, and you will see all the frames in that conversation. View TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.”

Check out more at the Netmon Blog.

DOWNLOAD:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f4db40af-1e08-4a21-a26b-ec2f4dc4190d&DisplayLang=en

Ah.  The future of desktop administration and technology:  MDOP 2008 R2 is here.  If you’re a desktop tech that hasn’t gotten up to speed on MDOP, you’re already behind the eight-ball:  I suggest you start doing your research around MDOP because this is a major component of Microsoft’s strategy over the next few years.

MDOP 2008 R2’s newly revised released components include:

• Application Virtualization 4.5
• Asset Inventory Service 1.5
  You can now directly compare/contrast your actual licensing data with your collected software inventory.
• Advanced Group Policy Management 3.0 (AGPM)
  AGPM administrators now have the ability to customize the permissions that are set on production GPOs controlled by AGPM. AGPM also has Enhanced Tracking which allows customers to use AGPM for compliance with branch specific regulations.  AGPM 3.0 is now compatible with Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista SP1 and 64-bit machines.

Additionally, most components of MDOP 2008 R2 (App-V, AGPM, DEM, & DaRT) will be available in 10 different languages including Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Dutch (App-V only), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Russian.

It’ll be available sometime this week for customers with volume licensing agreements with Microsoft off of http://licensing.microsoft.com. (App-V is already available)

Are you using Microsoft Office Project Standard to its full potential?

Are there advanced functions and features you wish you knew better?

Microsoft and Project Solutions Group (PSG) are offering a Project Learning Series. In this series, our Microsoft Project instructor will share the application best practices and give you hands-on advice for getting the most out of your project standard investment including tips on tracking resource utilization, linking multiple projects, calculating project costs and an entire section on creating the best reports.

In addition,  you will enjoy a session to discuss how the world’s best run companies enhance resource planning and demand management using Microsoft Project Server and Portfolio Server.  See effective demand vs. capacity planning, enterprise resource utilization and resource management dashboards.

Come for one session or spend the entire morning and see all 3 sessions.

This learning series is designed for intermediate to expert Microsoft Project Users, Managers, Project Managers, Resource Managers, IT Managers, Technology Executives, IT Directors, and all Business and Technical Decision Makers.

Date:
Thursday, Oct 23rd

Location:
Microsoft
3 Park Plaza
16th floor
Irvine, CA 92614

Schedule:

• 9:30AM – Registration & Networking
• 10:00AM – 11:30AM Microsoft Project Professional Tips & Tricks
• 11:30AM – 1:00PM Luncheon Session:  Strategic Resource Planning & Demand Management
• 1:00PM – 2:00PM Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services & Project Server 2007 Integration

Registration:
http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=131552

Hey!  New beta!  And this time we finally added a font toolbar!  Yay!  Now if we could just get table copying correct…

Here’s what you can expect to find in this beta:

Image and video publishing enhancements

• Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
• Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
• Image cropping and tilting
• Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
• Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
• Support for centering images

Blog authoring enhancements

• Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
• Auto Linking
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count

Experience improvements

DOWNLOAD:
http://download.live.com/writer/

BLOG:  Windows Live Writer Beta: Now Available for Download
http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!1533.entry

Join our two-part Desktop Deployment: Planning, Deploying, and Managing Office 2007 Labcast to learn about new tools and technologies to deploy the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. 

During these sessions, you will receive practical technical information and proven techniques to help simply your 2007 Office deployment.  Click here for more information about the 2007 Office labcast series.

Part 1 of 2 – Topics covered include:

• Deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system with the Deployment Workbench
• Add the 2007 Office system to the Deployment Workbench
• Perform multi-language integration
• Learn about the Office Customization Tool (OCT)
• Use SMS 2003 for 2007 Office system deployment

Part 2 of 2 – Topics covered include:

• 2007 Microsoft Office system Planning and Migration Tools: Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM)
• Install and configure OMPM
• Perform a scan on a user system
• Convert documents with no issues to the new file formats
• Managing the 2007 Microsoft Office system with Group Policy
• Import the new Group Policy Administrative Templates for the 2007 Office release
• Use Group Policy to configure the Default File Save options in the 2007 Office release
• Use Group Policy to configure the Default File Save options for Office 2003 (to support a mixed Office environment)

REGISTRATION:
Register soon – capacity is limited because of the usage of virtual machines.

Part 1 – Click a date and time to register

• October 21, 2008 at 9:00 A.M. (Pacific Time Zone)
• October 21, 2008 at 1 P.M. (Pacific Time Zone)
• October 14, 2008 at 9 A.M. (Central Time Zone)
• October 14, 2008 at 1 P.M. (Central Time Zone)

Part 2 – Click a date and time to register

• October 23, 2008 at 8:30 A.M. (Pacific Time Zone)
• October 23, 2008 at 1 P.M. (Pacific Time Zone)
• October 16, 2008 at 8:30 A.M. (Central Time Zone)
• October 16, 2008 at 1 P.M. (Central Time Zone)

Put virtualization in your hands, and your plans.

Attend this FREE event that lets you touch, talk about, and experience Microsoft® virtualization solutions in a setting that’s focused on you.

Find out all about virtualization.
You will get a day of intensive experience with a well-designed virtualization strategy—one that can help you control costs, improve service levels, and drive agility. You’ll see solutions built on:

• the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ technology
• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007,
• Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization

And you’ll learn how you can run multiple operating systems on a single machine for benefits from the data center to the desktop.

Start with Microsoft virtualization experts.
Begin your day with 300-level technical seminars:

• Session I: Server Virtualization and Management
• Session II: How Microsoft Builds Dynamic Data Centers
• Session III: Understanding Virtualization at the Desktop Level

Then dive into hands-on labs and learning opportunities.
Spend the afternoon with experts and technology partners in our Solutions Pavilion. See an end-to-end virtualization solution built from start to finish.

Take virtualization home with:

• A free* one-year evaluation software copy of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
• A free* copy of Understand Microsoft Virtualization from the Desktop to the Data Center by Mitch Tulloch
• Vouchers for certification courses and exams
• And of course a  free* T-shirt

For information on other hands-on virtualization events around the United States, visit www.getvirtualnow.com/usevents.

Date/Time/Location:
Oct 10, 2008
Hyatt Orange County
11999 Harbor Blvd.
Garden Grove, CA

Doors open at 8:00 A.M.
Seminars start at 9:00 A.M.
Solutions Pavilion open until 3:45 P.M.

Registration:
http://www.getvirtualnow.com/usevents

Damn.  This is a cool, geeky post.  Once again, I’m breaking my rule of cross-posting to another blog… partially because this post is a really good one and the result of a lot of effort and partially because Robert is a good guy – despite all his recent rant-filled hysterics. 

(Robert – Lighten up buddy.  We all love you but there’s been a few posts where your ranting is beginning to sound impatient, irrational and just downright grouchy… kinda like like Steven Smith’s (a.k.a. the Zune Tattoo Guy) final “Farewell” video, which by the way was a shame too because I thought that dude’s heart was in the right place… he just lacked sufficient patience to get to the goal line of v3.0.  And based on your previous posts, that’s just not ‘you’.)

Robert wanted to install the new Windows Live beta software releases on Windows Server 2008.  The only problem is, we have a lame installer filter that bounces any attempt to install Windows Live on anything other than Desktop client operating systems.

So, he medieval on the installer and went about figuring out how to get the .MSIs to download on a client OS temp directory, then moved the .MSIs over to his server install and… walla!  It installed just fine.

And yeah, I agree with you Robert on this one:  This sort of maniacal control over where software gets installed is weak sauce… kinda like what Apple does with, well, everything in their products.  The Live group obviously does this because because, hey, we don’t test on those OS’s and they want to minimize the support call/mail volume.  But the least they could do is provide a documented way of accomplishing the same thing you did, without all the ProcMon B.S..

In any case, nice job Robert. 
(Robert McLaws is the creator of Windows-Now.com)

LINK: 
http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert/installing-windows-live-wave-3-betas-on-windows-server.aspx

Yes.  It’s free.  100% free.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 provides a simplified, reliable, and optimized virtualization solution, enabling improved server utilization and reduced costs. Since Hyper-V Server is a dedicated stand-alone product, which contains only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components, it provides a small footprint and minimal overhead. It easily plugs into customers’ existing IT environments, leveraging their existing patching, provisioning, management, support tools, processes, and skills.

Key Benefits

• Improved server utilization
• Small footprint
• Minimal overhead

IT Pros can easily to leverage their existing knowledge and skills with Microsoft virtualization products, as well as the collective knowledge of the community, minimizing any learning curve. In addition, with Microsoft providing comprehensive support for Microsoft applications and heterogeneous guest operating systems, customers can virtualize with confidence and peace of mind.

When to Use Hyper-V Server 2008

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is a great choice for customers who want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments. Hyper-V Server 2008 only offers the most basic of virtualization features, making it ideal for:

• Test and Development
• Basic Server Consolidation
• Branch Office Consolidation
• Hosted Desktop Virtualization (VDI)

Customers who require richer and more robust virtualization features, such as Quick Migration, multi-site clustering, large memory support (greater than 32 GB of RAM), and more than four processers on the host server, should use Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 provides business continuity, disaster recovery, greater scalability for consolidating large workloads, and flexible and cost-effective virtualization rights (one free virtual instance for Standard Edition, four free virtual instances for Enterprise Editions, and unlimited virtual instances for Datacenter Edition with the purchase of a license of Windows Server 2008).

—————————–

COMPARISON TABLE BETWEEN HYPER-V SERVER & WINDOWS SERVER 2008 w/ HYPER-V: 
http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx

FULL HYPER-V SERVER DOWNLOAD:
http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/how-to-get.mspx

Wanna get credit for the searches you do?

There’s a new program we released this week called “SearchPerks” that essentially allows you to get credit for the searches you do… and most importantly, collect on that credit.

The way it works is:

1. You sign up using your Windows Live ID at http://www.getsearchperks.com.
2. You install the SearchPerks! Perk Counter which is a simple .MSI that installs into Internet Explorer 6.0+.
3. Every time you search for something using http://search.live.com, you get a “ticket” which is essentially credit toward some benefit in the future.  (There is a maximum of 25 tickets per day per user)
4. The Perk Counter sits in your toolbar and counts the number of times you search on Live.com – and reports that number to Microsoft so that you get the right amount of credit.
5. You can later cash out those “tickets” at the SearchPerk’s Prize site at http://www.getsearchperks.com/Prizes.aspx?campaignid=perks.

That’s it.

(I’m a little annoyed that the Music Downloads are from PureTracks.com and not from Zune Marketplace or anything like that.  Ooh.  Imagine if this gave your Xbox Marketplace points that you could use for Xbox Live Arcade games?)

Announcing:  Encarta on MSN Mobile!
MSN Mobile 2.0 has launched and with it, an Encarta channel! 

If you have a smart phone, you can check it out by going to MSN.com and in the channel menu, select “All”, then “Encarta”.  You can see our Quote of the Day, peruse three editorially-programmed articles of the day, take a quiz, guess the Mystery Picture of the day, and do an Encarta article search.   

If you don’t have a smart phone, you can view it here.