RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley and Kevin Royalty about the latest edition of servers from Hewlett Packard specifically made for Small Business Server. Susan and Kevin talk about the ultra-small form factor of the HP ProLiant MicroServer, priced with Small Business Server Essentials for under a thousand dollars. You can see more about MicroServers and SBS at the SMB MVP Community Roadshow at http://mvptour2011.sbsmigration.com/.

Richard and Greg talk to Tim Barrett about Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server. Originally for the academic market only, MultiPoint Server is now available for small businesses, allowing up to 20 users to share a single computer simultaneously via Remote Desktop. Tim talks about using MultiPoint to provide access to applications for iPads and other third party devices, as well as extending the life of older PCs. You can learn more about MultiPoint at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/multipoint/. Tim's blog is at http://www.nogeekleftbehind.com/ and he also mentioned a tour where you can see MultiPoint in action at http://mvptour2011.sbsmigration.com/.

Richard and Greg talk to the one-and-only Rhonda Layfield about the beta 1 of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012. MDT 2012 is a free tool for doing operating system, driver and software deployments. Rhonda talks about how MDT is becoming more closely integrated with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), to the point that you need to use MDT with SCCM to do zero touch deployment. The conversation digresses into a series of discussions around fundamentals of IT, talking a bit about networking, user profiles, disk performance and more - a good chat with a good friend about what matters in IT!

While at the Build conference in Anaheim, California, Richard sat down with Mark Minasi to get his first impressions of Windows Server 8. What happens next is almost an hour of high speed brain dumping, so hold on to your hats. For even more information about Windows Server 8, check out Mark's newsletter (which you should be subscribing to anyway).

Richard flies solo to talk to Barry Dorrans, now at Microsoft, about the recent spate of security breaches at Certificate Authorities like Comodo and DigiNotar. What can you as an IT Pro do about this recent set of hacks? Other than replacing your potentially exploited certificate, not a lot. Barry talks about how these exploits have happened, what Microsoft, Google and others are doing about it and some possible long term solutions to the problems. Check out Barry's blog at idunno.org. Barry also mentions an alternative solution to Certificate Authorities called Convergence and why Chrome won't be implementing it.

Richard and Greg talk to Donald Farmer about his new role over at QlikView. Don spent ten years working on Business Intelligence technologies at Microsoft and now has taken his experiences into QlikView and their business analytic products. Don also digs into how business analytics has evolved, reducing the cost of systems and making BI 'disposable' - low cost, agile and easily replaceable. Towards the end of the show, Don tells some great BI stories of different companies taking advantage of their BI systems.

Richard talks to Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis about the newly released Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. SysInternals is a vital part of any IT administrator's toolkit, but has never been well documented. The administrator's reference is that documentation, including details on every SysInternals tool as well as troubleshooting examples and a detailed overview of core Windows concepts. If you're using SysInternals (and who isn't), you need this book!

Richard flies solo to talk to Laura Hunter, now working at Microsoft IT about the identity infrastructure at Microsoft. Laura talks about the scale of the identity problem at Microsoft, the challenges of using smart cards instead of passwords (the passwords won). The conversation moves on to talking about identification in general, talking about different ways of recognizing users, the shared authentication via twitter, facebook, etc. Ultimately Richard and Laura end up back at ADFS and how cloud technology is facilitating the adoption of ADFS and claims-based security.

Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about his latest version of PolicyPak. PolicyPak provides Group Policy templates for third party applications. This is one of those products that once you understand what it does, you can't live without it. There's a free community edition as well as a paid version that is ten bucks per PC! Check it out at www.policypak.com.

Richard and Greg to talk Yong Rhee from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering. Yong talks about optimization and health checks for Windows clients. He focuses on using the Windows Performance Analysis Tools (WPAT) which includes three tools: xperf, xperfview and xbootmgr. WPAT works with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), available for Windows Vista and 7.