RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Goodwin about Microsoft Unified Communications. Jeff lays out the relationship between Exchange, Office Communicator and Unified Messaging Server to combine email, telephone and instant messaging. Check out Jeff's TechNet articles at http://www.shrinkster.com/11mj and http://www.shrinkster.com/11mk.

Richard and Greg talk to Paul Randal about the involuntary DBA - those folks that end up being the DBA without previous training or expectations. Kim Tripp (Paul's wife) pops in here and there to support her husband's ideas. Check out Paul's blog at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/

Richard and Greg talk to Laura Hunter about all things Active Directory. Laura digs into the key aspects of Active Directory, breaking down the differences between simple single domain installations and complex environments. Laura also shares her favorite resources, including the Ask the Directory Services Team (blogs.technet.com/askds).

Richard and Greg bring Erin Welker back to talk about Performance Point Planning. Performance Point Planning is part of the Office Server suite that ties SQL Server, Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services together to provide budget and forecasting services. You can read Erin's blog at www.sqlblog.com/blogs/erin_welker.

Richard and Greg talk to Brian Randell about what the IT Pro needs to know around virtualization for developers. The topics range from automating (and limiting) the creation of virtual machines for developers, licensing issues, testing, using virtualization to control IP and work the remote developers.

Richard and Greg talk to Keith Mayer about Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization initiative. The conversation ranges across the optimization of the data center, productivity applications and custom development. More information on Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization can be found at http://www.microsoftio.com/ and http://www.microsoft.com/optimization.

Richard and Greg bring back Simon Goldstein to tackle another challenging IT Management topic: IT Risk Management. Simon outlines a plan for getting started with Risk Management, including how to "manage up" to get budget for risk management solutions.

Richard and Greg talk to Daniel Nerenberg, the Lazy Admin (www.thelazyadmin.com)! Daniel talks about the great free tools Microsoft provides for facilitating the migration and updating of Windows XP, Vista, 2003 Server and 2008 Server. Tools include Microsoft Deployment Tools (www.shrinkster.com/zq8), USMT (www.shrinkster.com/zq6) and the Application Compatibility Toolkit (www.shrinkster.com/zq9).

Richard and Greg talk to Mark Minasi of the Mastering Windows Server series (and more)! While the conversation ranges around a lot, listen for a serious dig into the networking stack of Server 2008 (and Vista).

At Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 in Orlando Florida, Richard and Greg talk to Hal Rottenberg and Carter Shanklin about VMWare's support for Powershell. VMWare has added an extensive Powershell accessible interface to VMWare to simplify the automation of virtual machine related tasks.