RunAs Radio

While hanging at TechEd US in New Orleans, Richard chatted with Paula Januszkiewicz about her talks and experience working the 'black hat' side of security. Paula describes some of the amazing tools that hackers have today to break into servers and desktops - including an amazing discussion on how to break into a PC using the recovery options in Windows! This is a discussion that will get you thinking hard about your policies around patching, security-in-depth and auditing!

While at TechEd US in New Orleans, Richard sat down with Stephen Rose to talk about the new features in Windows 8.1. Don't call it a service pack! Stephen runs down all the cool features in Windows 8.1, including the return of the Start button (sort of), being able to boot directly to desktop and Mirrorcast - a wireless way to connect to external displays. Digging deeper into enterprise related features, the conversation also digs into new workplace join and the open mobile device management support. You're gonna want this update!

While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard sat down with Ed Musters to talk about document management in SharePoint. The conversation starts out exploring why SharePoint is used for document management - resisting sending files in email, better security, document control and actually knowing where everything is. Ed describes the challenges of setting up a coherent taxonomy of documents, how everything needs to be tagged and organized in a way that makes it discoverable and controlled. And the same rules apply to outward facing web sites - great taxonomies make sure the right data is shown to the right people! Ultimately, everything is a document.

While at DevTeach, Richard chatted with Richard Baumet about his experiences at the 2012 PASS conference, including the sneak peeks at the upcoming version of SQL Server. The conversation largely focuses on how changes in hardware, including faster and more CPU cores, faster and larger memory and storage, ultimately shape how SQL Server works. An exciting time to be a DBA!

While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard talks to Craig Utley about his experiences building business intelligence systems. The discussion starts out with the concepts of data warehousing, OLAP and business intelligence, and how many business owners get fooled into focusing only on the results of the business intelligence effort without acknowledging the huge body of work that goes into it with ETL, data cleansing and coherency. Craig talks about the right ways to get into a business intelligence project (it's about the business) so that you can avoid the pitfalls that lead to a failed project.

While at TechDays in San Francisco, Richard sat down with Steve Evans to talk about the new virtual networking features in Server 2012 Hyper-V. The conversation starts with a focus on the challenges of networking in a virtualized world - problems around assigning NICs to individual VMs, dealing with failover, etc. But as Steve describes, once you get to 2012, physical NICs are entirely about bandwidth - teaming as necessary. And the virtual side creates a separate NIC for each role, assigned to VLANs and moving across the collective physical hardware. It takes a lot of planning, but networking has never been more flexible!

While at TechDays SF, Richard moderated a panel on Women in IT. The panelists include Jennelle Crothers, Jessica DeVita, Christa Anderson and CA Callahan. The panel discussed the role of community in engaging more women into IT, finding peer support, and dealing with the various challenges of being a part of a still male-dominated industry. There are a number of questions posed by the audience and the conversation ultimately ends up focusing on getting kids involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at an earlier age.

While in San Francisco at TechDays, Richard runs into Mark and ends up with a recording about their favorite science topics. Not exactly an IT show, but good fun!

Richard talks to Dana Epp about using cloud technology for disaster recovery. Dana digs into Microsoft Azure first, talking about how the new Azure Storage Services and secure connectivity make it much easier to maintain replicas of your virtual machines in Azure, synchronizing only the changes on a regular basis. The conversation also covers some of the Amazon EC2 features available for disaster recovery, as well as focusing on not giving up your responsibilities and an IT Pro - it's still your data and needs protecting, the cloud won't do everything for you! Dana also refers to Scott Guthrie's Blog Post on the new IaaS features of Azure, including even better pricing!

Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about his experiences doing deployment with Windows, using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Configuration Manager and more!