James Moody: Geek in Paradise

As I posted earlier, Honolulu happened to be graced with a TS2 seminar 2 days ago. It’s about time!

Woody Walton was the presenter for the topics that included Managed Services, System Center Essentials, Exchange 2007/Communicator/etc. and Forefront line of products. He did an excellent job of getting the pertinent information out to the attendees.

He demo’d System Center Essential 2007 for us, and although I have it in my Action Pack, I haven’t had the chance to install it and play with it yet. The demo got me drooling however, so that may be on the list to do once I finish an office move for one of my clients.

The majority of the Forefront presentation was on the Client Security offering. Since I’ve been using it in the home office, I had a good working knowledge of it already, and managed to net me a SBS 2003 neoprene CD holder for answering the only question presented to us. I r smart. He did let us know that the next line of Forefront products being developed are under the code name "Stirling", for those fascinated by code names.

He also gave us a live demo of the automated voice attendant used to access his e-mail, calendar, voicemail, etc. back in Redmond. I had only read about the feature so seeing it in action was pretty impressive. He did run into some problems with it recognizing his voice input since he was using speaker phone, but I got the gist of the usefulness of the offering. He also ran a video of a "Devil wears Prada" spoof demonstrating the power of the complete offering. Great display of the possible uses of the technology, and funny to boot. The Roundtable hardware looked very cool for those that teleconference with multiple people present in 1 room. Availability is very limited for the Roundtable device though.

Also covered were various VOIP phones, including the Catalina USB Phone and a phone with Communicator embedded, which traverses firewalls. He stated he has a co-worker that’s taken the phone overseas, plugged it into the hotel internet, and was then able to access his information back at the office. Very cool technology.

During our 1 break, I made it down to introduce myself and see if he recognized the Blue Monster, which I use on my business card. He hadn’t, so I explained to him the basics and gave him the info to find more on it. He was very intrigued, to say the least and said he’d definitely get more info on the little guy. I also made him aware that "Centro" had been given a name that morning, which he wasn’t aware of at the time. He probably wished I hadn’t told him, as he referred to it by the full name the rest of the seminar instead of "Centro" (luckily, he had covered what he needed of "Centro" before the break, so it wasn’t much). Sorry!

All in all, a great experience start to finish. Some of the attendees (Microsoft Partners) were making snide remarks and chuckles as he covered some of the material, so I can see now where Vlad gets his "riff-raff" from. A minor annoyance, but nothing that detracted from the entire experience.

On the way out, I talked with one of the guys that sat at the table (didn’t get the name as they were packing it up) and he said TS2 had plans to make it out at least twice a year now. Good news considering they hadn’t been out since I became a Partner over a year ago.

Here’s to seeing more events in Hawaii!

I have another post coming soon covering something I found very interesting in the IT market here in Hawaii. Surprised the hell out of me, for sure.

Tags: Microsoft TS2 Exchange 2007 Communications Server Communicator Forefront Managed Services Action Pack Stirling SBS 2003 VOIP RoundTable Catalina Centro Business Essentials Server Blue Monster Honolulu Hawaii System Center Essential

I finally decided to load up Server 2008 this morning in Virtual PC to spend some time playing with the new Server OS of choice (not counting Cougar) in the next 6 months. Installation was painless, although I was disappointed I couldn’t load up the x64 version in Virtual PC. I had wanted to see how Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 interacted, but alas, not to be for now.

I do love the interface changes for adding the various roles and features associated in Server 2008. It just looks and feels better overall.

As I was flipping through the roles, I got the crazy idea to see how it would integrate into my existing SBS2003 environment. Surely it would break things and give me something to wrap my brain around on a lazy Sunday. I hadn’t had anything break in awhile, this could be fun.

The join to the Domain was flawless as expected and I was greeted shortly thereafter with an update being pushed down by WSUS for Forefront Client Security, which I have running on the SBS2003 box. I had bigger fish to fry however and ignored it for the time being.

I checked off Active Directory Domain Services in the Add Roles wizard and after some thinking on it’s end, was prompted to run the various adprep’s on the SBS box. I flipped the 2008 CD over to the SBS box and ran forestprep, domainprep, gpprep and rodcprep. The schema was updated to v44 fyi.

I popped back over to the 2008 VPC and the wizard continued onwards, adding the 2008 Server as a domain controller into my existing domain. Nifty. No griping or moaning, it just did it’s thing and let me know when it was done. Replication of AD was painless as well, taking maybe a minute or 2 to replicate from the SBS box.

I also set up DNS on the 2008 VPC and delegated/transferred the zone over without any hitches. Very painless process from start to finish.

Once I was happy that AD and DNS were doing their thing, I returned to the WSUS update. Forefront Client Security installed with no problems. A quick trip over to the SBS box and approving the manual agent install in MOM 2005, had the 2008 VPC showing up in the FCS management window with an outdated policy. No problemo, a quick deploy of the policy and all was as it should be.

Event logs were extremely noisy during the process, but haven’t popped up anything of note in the last few hours. 1 recurring error for PerfNet (which I need to look into), and a warning on security related events for anonymous logins in AD.

Way easier than I had expected to be honest and very happy with the results.

Tags: Microsoft Server 2008 Forefront AD DNS Virtual PC WSUS MOM 2005 SBS 2003

Official Press Release

Microsoft jumps into the Server/Desktop Security market with what looks to be an outstanding product. I received my Trial software through the mail last week, but due to the move, have been unable to install it and run it through its paces.

One thing that did stand out to me was how Microsoft compared Forefront to other security solutions on the Market. There was no “This product does this better than the other company’s product” spin. Each Company’s product was listed with its strong points, selling points, pricing and support options. Not quite what I expected to be honest and testament to Microsoft’s respect for the established Security solutions, a market it’s trying to break into and establish a foothold.

The Forefront software uses 9 different scanning engines to protect Servers and Workstations alike. Forefront also protects your Exchange and Sharepoint Servers as well, which some of the other products from competing companies do not. According to the literature, you can choose up to 5 of the scan engines to protect your network, giving you more complete coverage overall. Automatic Updates will ensure your Forefront is kept up to date against the latest threats as fast as possible. Everything is controlled via the Systems Management Console, instead of having to go to each individual machine, making an IT professional’s job much easier.

System Center Essentials 2007 is targeted towards mid-sized companies to help manage their IT infrastructure. Proactive monitoring is good! SCE gives a single console from where IT staff can manage and monitor Servers, Workstations, Hardware and Software. An IT Professional’s dream (not that we don’t already have the image of sitting around doing nothing~)

I’m hoping to have Forefront in place by sometime next week, time willing. I’ve never ran an anti-virus/spyware solution on my systems and have yet to be hit with anything, but it’ll be nice to know I’m protected with how crafty the virus/spyware writers are becoming. Smart computing has served me well so far, but I don’t know how long that will be enough.