RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Sean Deuby about issues around identity in the cloud. The conversation explores both the consumer and enterprise aspects of identity in the cloud. Where Facebook and Google are helping things for consumers, the needs of the enterprise are more complex. The acronyms come out - oAuth, OpenID, ADFS and more!

Richard talks to Jeff Stokes about xPerf. xPerf is part of a suite of tools called the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit (WPT). WPT digs into Windows where PerfMon leaves off, utilizing Event Tracing for Windows to see exactly how applications are behaving, even during bootup and shutdown. Get more information on WPT at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx. Also, check out Jeff's blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/.

Richard and Greg talk to Don Jones about PowerShell. The conversation starts off with a discussion on the fundamentals of PowerShell, but then dives into specific techniques and tools to make folks more productive with PowerShell. The show wraps up with exploring some favorite PowerShell projects. There's a ton of great information about PowerShell at Don's web site shellhub.com.

Richard and Greg talk to Adam Hall about Opalis, the latest product addition to System Center. Opalis provides automation and integration for IT tasks between the various products in System Center (Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, etc) and third party management tools like OpenView, Tivoli and the like.

Richard and Greg talk to Jose Barreto from the File Server Team at Microsoft. Jose talks about File Replication Services, Distributed File System and other technologies for file servers.

Richard catches Alan Burchill while at Tech Ed New Zealand. Alan digs into the new Group Policy Preferences features introduced with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 but available for XP, Vista, even Server 2000 and up! The conversation explores how group policy can now be used to map drives, printers and other features, leading to the virtual elimination of login scripts. Check out Alan's web site at http://www.grouppolicy.biz/ for videos and information on this and other group policy techniques.

Richard talks to Rhonda Layfield during Tech Ed Australia about her work with Microsoft Deployment Tools (MDT). Rhonda goes over the relationship between MDT and Windows Deployment Service (WDS) as well as the Windows Automation Installation Kit (WAIK). All these tools are free and make image-based deployment tools look wasteful and inefficient. The conversation tears off into deployment in virtualization just for fun. Rhonda mentions AppDeploy.com as a key resource for the MDT user, helping with all the details around configuration applications for deployment in MDT.

While at Tech Ed Australia, Richard caught up with Chris Jackson to talk about the latest problem in application compatibility - web applications dependent on IE6. When released ten years ago, IE6 was a paragon of web standards, but the world has moved on and now IE6 is a pariah. Chris talks about how web applications dependent on IE6 are actually blocking XP to Windows 7 upgrades, but that ultimately the reason to move your applications off IE6 is a web standards issue.

Richard flies solo to talk to Stephen Rose from Microsoft about the latest around Windows 7. The discussion roams around Service Pack 1, the new Microsoft Intune Beta (http://www.microsoft.com/online/windows-intune.aspx) and his experiences on the Get on the Bus tour down the eastern seaboard in spring 2010.

Richard and Greg talk to Adam Gent about Office Communications Server (OCS). OCS brings the PBX into the PC, so that email, instant messaging and telephone are integrated together. Adam digs into the details of what it takes to get going with OCS, where to find effective cost savings, and the overall plan of being successful with the product. Check out Adam's blog at http://blog.misthos.com.