Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) Tool v2.0 releases 16 March, 2005

Announcing the second version of the highly popular Exchange Server Best Practices Analyser tool (BPA).  To date over 200,000 customers have downloaded and run the tool.  Exchange Server Best Practices Analyser automatically examines an Exchange Server 2000 or 2003 deployment and determines if the configuration is set according to Microsoft best practices.

New in the Exchange BPA V 2.0 release:

• Support for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005
• Available in all server languages:  French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Korean
• And much more…DNS collector, new export capabilities, improved scanning scope, command line flexibility, group expansion collector, last backup times collector, permission checking infrastructure, perf sampling, scheduling capabilities

Maintaining the health and optimal performance of a Microsoft Exchange Server deployment just got easier. You might think of this tool as a “Microsoft engineer in-a-box”. By pairing our infrastructure expertise and Microsoft’s tool, we will analyze the configuration and health of your entire deployment, or even a specific server, and offer step-by-step guidance to help resolve issues.

DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=dbab201f-4bee-4943-ac22-e2ddbd258df3&displaylang=en

…or http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003/default.mspx

The Live Meeting Intranet Portal makes it easier to deploy and manage Live Meeting. If your company has deployed Microsoft Active Directory directory services, you can use the Live Meeting Portal for Active Directory to:

• Automatically create Live Meeting accounts for users once they are authenticated on your corporate network.
• Allow authenticated Windows users to log in to Live Meeting without entering a Live Meeting user ID and password.
• Permit users to change their Live Meeting passwords when authenticated by your Active Directory service.
• Automatically synchronize a user’s Live Meeting account settings with the user’s Active Directory settings each time the user logs in through the Portal.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=429bb528-fd1b-45b7-af2b-cbbf4a8e65ff&displaylang=en

This will interest you if you are planning/testing to deploy Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2:

Application Compatibility Toolkit 4.0 will RTW (Release To Web) on Monday March 14th. 
Check this URL on Monday – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/appcompatibility/act4.mspx.

If you are not already familiar with ACT 4.0 (or at least 3.0), I strongly recommend learning about it ASAP from the web site.  The toolkit has been in beta for over a year and makes it possible to adjust Windows XP Professional installations/images so that customer business applications can work on them seamlessly, in the event there is a compatibility issue.

For example, applications that misbehave and expect to be able to write to areas of the <system root> directory will typically fail on Windows XP SP2 images, since this area is considered sacred by WXP compared to other OSs.  The toolkit can have Windows XP reroute these read/write requests to safer locations on the hard drive, seamlessly without the application knowing enabling it to work.

I have a great Powerpoint that goes over the details of ACT4.0 if any of you, my customers, are interested in it.

If you’d like to give LiveMeeting 2005 a try for 30 days, follow the following instructions:

1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/lmtrial
2. Use this activation code:  2639
3. Follow the rest of the instructions.

If you have questions, email:  meetlive@microsoft.com

Microsoft has released the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Server Performance Advisor — a tool that troubleshoots Microsoft Windows 2003 performance problems. Neither Microsoft Windows XP nor Microsoft Windows 2000 platform supports this tool. The tool is available here. After you download the tool, execute the .msi file and follow the onscreen prompts to perform the following steps:

1. Click Next to go to the Welcome to the Server Performance Advisor Setup Wizard introduction screen.
 
2. Click I accept on the license page, then click Next.
 
3. Accept the default installation location and select whether the tool will be used by just the person installing the tool or by all administrators, as the figure shows.
 
4. Click Next.
 
5. The wizard prompts you for a location for the temporary storage of performance log files. Accept the default (C:perflogsdata location), then click Next.
 
6. The wizard then prompts you for a reports folder location. Again, accept the default location (C:perfLogs), then click Next.
 
7. Click Next to begin the installation.
 
8. When the installation is finished, click Finish.

You’ll now have a new item on the Start menu, Server Performance Advisor, which you can use to start the advisor process.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/abouttn/subscriptions/flash/tips/tips_021605.mspx