1060

As you know,documentation is imperative, and slapping a huge and complicated Visioon the wall of your office (to impress your boss) has it’s advantages to… 🙂 Take a look at:Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer Overview With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can read your Active Directory structure through Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO). The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool automates Microsoft Office Visio to draw a diagram of the Active Directory Domain topology, your Active Directory Site topology, your OU structure or your current Exchange 200X Server Organization. With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can also draw partial Information … Continue reading Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

A post about the interoperability of these two systems has been published on the Exchange teamblog. The highlights are: Exchange 2007 (RTM) can not be installed on Windows 2008. Exchange 2007 SP1 (when released) will be supported on Windows 2008. Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 (SP2) are supported with Windows 2008 domains. Management tools for Exchange 2007 (RTM) and 2003 are not supported on Vista or/and Windows 2008. Management tools for Exchange 2007 SP1 (when released) will be supported on Vista or/and Windows 2008. For the additional (somewhat confusing) details,take a look at the post: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/08/16/446709.aspx

With the advent of Windows 2008 (Beta),and basically everyone getting their hands on a copy andtrying to learn how to use it, the Windows 2008 Technical Library can be a great resource.The library describes what’s new and provides step by step guides to explore the features: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/bab0f1a1-54aa-4cef-9164-139e8bcc44751033.mspx?mfr=true

These two posters, originally published in the July 2007 issue of TechNet Magazine, provide astrong visual tool to aide in the understanding of various features and components of WindowsServer 2008. One poster focuses exclusively on powerful new Active Directory technologies,while the other provides a technical look at a variety of new features available in Windows Server2008 (such as Server Core, Network Access Protection, and more).   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c2b9e44e-0bbd-47cb-bc09-b3d48be7f867&displaylang=en

This tool (from Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell) is basically ADSI Edit on steroids.It allows you to connect to your AD environment directly thus providing you a “raw” viewof your directory and in turn the ability to change the directory directly(which might cause a lotof pain since you are working without the net provided by the traditional AD tools). A feature of this tool that seems extremely useful to me is it’s ability to take a snapshotof a directory (and then another snapshot) and eventually to compare the two snapshotsproviding you with a list of what has changed.The tools ability … Continue reading Active Directory Explorer

A major yet not so known change. From 60 days we are going to 180 dayson new Active Directory(SP1) implementations and upgrades that have slipstreamed copy. In other words your backups should be valid for 180 days and deleted objectsare saved for 180 days…  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q216993/

ADModify is a tool that will enable an AD/Exchange admin to make bulkchanges in user properties. One of the special treats of this tool is the fact that it provides a simple GUI forconfiguring the accepted MAPI level for clients.You can download the tool at:http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=f5cbbfa9-e46b-4a7a-8ed8-3e44523f32e2

I happened to stumble upon this one by chance-and I do admit I am really happy since I am very familiar with the situation. It seems that a patch intended for the information storechanges the behavior of permissions thus causing lose of functionality of the aforementioned services. For additional information on this topic please visit: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912918/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895949/ And the post on the Exchange team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2006/01/13/417440.aspx

Ok,I know what you are thinking-is he serious?!?! Actually I am serious and as someone that has taught AD classes I have to saythat GPO is the heart of AD. It is the most flexible tool to be used to harness thepower of AD. On the other hand I have seen it become a curse when it is overusedor used incorrectly.In this post I would like to outline the overuse of GPOs. When a large number ofGPOs is created management becomes complicated and in some cases it may becomevery complicated.GPO settings accumulate when several GPOs apply to an object if none of … Continue reading GPO-Curse or Blessing?

When you work at a multinational/multilingual company the OWA interface’s language might becomeimportant. Currently (Exchange 2003) provides the language of the interface based on the settingsconfigured on the IE used to access OWA. The problem is that at times your users might be logging on to OWA from different locationssuch as airports or Internet cafes which may block the IE settings. In that case your usersmight get the interface in a different language then the one they are used to see. To prevent this from happening you might want to hard code the language used by the OWA interface.The following … Continue reading Setting the language of the OWA interface