Month: February 2009

Body: Via Facebook this morning, I received an email from someone I did not know… "Frank had a massive heart attack last Wednesday and passed away this morning at 1:50." My first thought was “who is this person sending me an email about someone called Frank…” I checked their friends and it showed one person. Frank McCallister. No – I thought it can’t be so. I checked with the other SBS MVPs and found that yes – sadly it was.  Frank McCallister passed away last night after a heart attack earlier in the week. For those that knew him, they … Continue reading Frank McCallister – Rest In Peace

Body: Last Wednesday was the last SMB iT Professional meeting that Nick King and I had the chance to do last week.  Sydney finished off a whirlwind 3 day tour of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Nick’s visit to Australia was something he personally asked to do as he wanted to get a good feel on what we as Aussies needed from Microsoft.  Being a Kiwi, Nick knows all too well how us Aussies can be so very direct in our feedback.  That attitude and understanding meant that the people that attended these meetings were able to be very open as … Continue reading He came… He saw… He listened – Thanks Nick!

Body: Funny you know – SBS 2008 was released in November last year, and we all know that it’s based on Windows Server 2008 which was released in February 2008.  Given that many people have still not made the move to SBS 2008 nor understand it’s features and configuration properly, I find it amusing to hear that people are wanting SBS 2008 R2.  Microsoft have not even announced if there will be an SBS 2008 R2 or when it will be available and yet people are assuming that it will be and that it will contain everything in Windows Server … Continue reading SBS 2008 R2 – I want it now!

Body: Next week, Microsoft Technical Product Manager, Nicholas King will make a visit through the Eastern capitals of Australia.  Nick is actually a Kiwi (but we won’t hold that against him) normally based in Microsoft Redmond campus and he’s responsible for all the technical training / information that the SBS and EBS teams produce.  As part of his visit here in Australia, we’ve managed to get him to visit Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney and conduct an open session for the SBSC and SMB IT Professional community and an hour or so of training – I picked migration as the topic … Continue reading Nicholas King hits town.

Body: Microsoft has been investigating an issue that affects all Windows Server 2008 products, but is shown up more so by things like Trend WFBS 5.1 and other antivirus software.  The issue is that anything that uses the common firewall driver in 2008 will be affected.  SBS2008 servers may start to have Active Directory errors, issues accessing the server via RDP and a variety of other errors.  All this will start after 5 to 7 days.  The only workaround so far has been to schedule a reboot of the affected server every 5 to 7 days. It’s important to note … Continue reading Trend WFBS 5.1 on SBS 2008

Body: SBS2008 is designed to allow the end user to easily connect computers to the SBS 2008 network.  It does this via the Connect computer wizard where all the user needs to do is to type in http://connect into their Internet Explorer on their new PC and it will walk them through the rest of the process doing all the hard work.  Microsoft have tested this and support it with Windows XP Pro, and Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions.  Many people are now using Windows 7 beta to see how it performs vs. Vista.  Bearing in mind that the … Continue reading Windows 7 Beta and SBS 2008

Body: Tonight we had the first meeting of the SMB IT Professionals group in Sydney for the year.  We had some really good presentations from HP, StorageCraft and LogMeIn.  The big thing of the night was the announcement by local HP Server Product manager, Ari Palandjian that following huge community feedback HP Australia will be bringing back the HP ConfigureAider program that we all love so much.  It’s estimated that the new release will be out next Monday (all going well).  The slide below shows more info.  The other thing I want to applaud HP for is for trying hard … Continue reading HP Australia – listening to the SMB IT Professional community

Body: I’ll be travelling the country side later this month working with Microsoft to deliver some sessions on Licensing and Hyper-V.  My session will be focused just on Hyper-V with SBS and EBS.  The outline is below.  You can register for the event here Hyper-V with SBS and EBS Want to know more about how to run SBS and EBS in a Hyper-V environment? Wayne Small will share his real world experiences on how Hyper-V with SBS environments. You will learn everything from the 101 basics through to advanced migration techniques using Hyper-V. Built using real world scenarios and real … Continue reading Hyper-V and SBS/EBS coming soon