RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Kevin Kline from Quest Software about SQL Server 2008 R2, the challenges of Business Intelligence, even a discussion around the No SQL Movement.

Richard and Greg talk to Laura Hunter about where Active Directory is at with Windows Server 2008 R2. This is the version of Active Directory called "Wave 10" and adds features like Recycle Bin, Managed Service Accounts, deep support for Powershell and more! The conversation progresses into Active Directory Federated Services v2. Check out more info at http://www.microsoft.com/activedirectory/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/card/.

Richard and Greg talk to Mitch Garvis about the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. MDT 2010 helps you manage your installs of operating systems, drivers, applications and more. You can create deployment kits for machines quickly and easily. And as Mitch says, as soon as you have more than one computer, the effort to set up MDT 2010 is worth it. MDT 2010 is a freely downloadable toolkit here.

Richard and Greg talk to Rhonda Layfield about deployment technologies made by Microsoft. There's a variety of them, and Rhonda goes over the collage of acronyms including WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit), MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit), WDS (Windows Deployment Service), DDPS (Desktop Deployment Planning Services) and SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager). Check out Rhonda's Deployment Doctor web site at http://www.deploymentdr.com/ and her upcoming book on deployment, published by Sybex should be out the June/July 2010 timeframe.

Bhargav is back! Richard and Greg talk to Bhargav Shukla about the High Availability features of Exchange 2010. Bhargav digs into the substantial changes in the high availability and "mailbox resiliency" capabilities in Exchange, including the idea that you can today build a web-farm-like Exchange architecture with inexpensive hardware.

Richard and Greg talk to Sumeet Bansal and Chris Featherstone about using solid state drives in the enterprise. SSDs have penetrated deeply into the workstation and laptop market, but are they robust enough to handle enterprise class workloads? Sumeet and Chris also focus on whether the traditional hard drive interfaces of SAS and SATA make sense for the ultra-low latency performance of SSDs.

Richard and Greg talk to Bhargav Shukla of Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering. Bhargav digs into the features of the newly released Exchange 2010 and why businesses still running Exchange 2003 should jump right to the latest version and skip 2007 entirely. For more info on Exchange 2010, check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/default.aspx and http://msexchangeteam.com/.

Richard and Greg talk to Clint Huffman from Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering (PFE) about the new version of Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL). PAL is available on CodePlex at http://pal.codeplex.com. It's job is to help you analyze performance monitor logs for various Microsoft applications and identify out-of-normal values. PAL solves the key problem of Performance Monitor - identifying what numbers are good, what numbers are bad, and what numbers are ugly. Check out Clint's blog at http://blogs.technet.com/clinth.

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley, the SBS Diva, about her other life - patching servers. Susan digs into Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), including what it updates and what it doesn't (check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894199 for more info), as well as some third party tools for patching. WSUS lets administrators centralize patching of servers and workstations, so that your machines don't all go fetching the same patches. It also provides means to control what patches get installed and what don't. Susan also points us to http://www.patchmanagement.org/ for access to listservs about WSUS and patch management in general.

Richard and Greg talk to Andy Malone about the challenges of social networking for the enterprise. It's not enough just to cut your users off from social networking at the company - you need to protect the organization from impersonation. Andy digs into what the logical balance of exposure on social networking looks like.