Microsoft has been talking about their upcoming Windows 8 tablet, called Surface, for some time now.
Here’s a video ad posted on YouTube.
The retail prices for the 10.6” Surface has not yet been posted, but several sites today (CNET, for example) has said the price will be in the $499 to $699 range
I’m sure everyone has their own personal “go to” list. I’d be interested in what others have found to be indispensable in their arsenal of malware-fighting utilities.I’m only focusing on SOHO and very small businesses or residential workstations.
For day-to-day protection, for residential sites (family and friends), I will suggest they install, at a minimum, these three FREE utilities:
For Small businesses (less than 10 workstations), I use the same three tools. MSE is now licensed for use in small businesses. MalwareBytes and CCleaner can be purchased for use in a business environment, and provide additional features over their free version counterpart.
For workstations that need further cleaning up, I will use one or more of the following tools:
There have been several reports about recent updates taking an extremely long time (4-6 hours) to completely install on SBS 2008 servers. For example, some report that after rebooting the server and it starts to apply updates, it may sit at 0% for more than an hour.
The reaction is to think that something is wrong and to force a reboot.
These issues are being investigated, but the best advice is that if you have already started updating your server, just let it run and do not force a reboot. And expect that it may be down for several hours.
If you have not yet started applying updates, my typical procedure is as follows:
Reboot the server BEFORE installing any updates
Install updates in groups – all security patches first, then .Net patches, then each rollup or service pack individually
After the updates have been applied, some things may still not work, such as some services not starting or Companyweb not available. In these cases, first try rebooting the server again, and checking things out. for companyweb, please remember that you generally need to manually run the psconfig command after installing SharePoint updates.
finally, it is always advisable to make sure you have a full, validated backup of your server before installing any patches, rollups or service packs,
Most businesses, large or small, use alias emails, such at sales@contoso.com or support@contoso.com. If some cases, the alias is only managed by a single person (e.g. sally@contoso.com).
But what if you want to assign the alias email address to a group of users, that is, a distribution group?
The simple answer is ‘Yes, it can be done’. However, there is no wizard to do this from the Office 365 Admin portal page. So, you will be required to define the shared mailbox using PowerShell commands.
There are three basic steps required:
Rather than describing each of these steps, Microsoft provides a very clear, step by step, set of instructional videos for each of these steps:
Create a public email alias in Office 365
Today Windows Server 2012 Essentials has been released to manufacturing (RTM).
A trial copy of Windows Server 2012 Essentials is immediately available for download:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2012/10/09/windows-server-2012-essentials-released-to-manufacturing-available-for-evaluation-today.aspx
Windows Server 2012 Essentials will be available for purchase on November 1, 2012.
It was just a few months ago (July) that the beta version of this product was announced. Then just a month ago we had the announcement of the Release Candidate (RC) version of 2012 Essentials.
The news that caught everyone’s attention (both good and bad) was that the name “Small Business Server” (SBS) would not be used by Microsoft as it moved forward with the 2012 era of Microsoft servers.
However, that does not mean that Windows Server 2012 Essentials isn’t jammed packed with features for the small or medium sized business. Here are just a few of those features:
So, what’s changed? I’ll list what I consider are three two of the more important changes:
Hyper-V is a great environment, for both testing and production purposes. I run my SBS 2011 production server as a virtual (guest) to my windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V physical environment.
I may be wrong, but it sure seems as if SBS 2011 starts up faster virtually rather than if it was installed normally, on a physic platform.
One often-asked question with Hyper-V and SBS is “how do I access a USB external drive to run my daily SBS backups?”
The solution comes from KernelPro and their USB over Ethernet solution. This allows you to either connect to a USB drive on a different computer in the network, or in the case of Hyper-V, allows a guest partition to access the USB drive on the parent partition. But don’t be confused by the name “USB over Ethernet’ – this is exactly what you want. The program has both a Server (Full) and a Client module program that will be used.
From the Parent partition:
From the Guest partition:
Configure and schedule your SBS Backup, and you are all done!
One of the hidden gems of the Microsoft Server family is MultiPoint.
Think of it as a Term Server with wizards and a console dashboard (similar to SBS or WHS) that makes implementation and management of the server a breeze. But it’s so much more. It’s perfect for classroom scenarios, or for a training room, or as a solution in a business environment.
So, the question is: how does one join a MultiPoint server to an SBS 2011 domain?
Fortunately, Marina Roos (SBS MVP ) has written an excellent set of instructions (click here) with screenshots on exactly what to do .
Her article addresses three primary steps:
Be sure to check out Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 on Microsoft’s website.
I’ve had three iPhones over the years, and somewhere along the line upgrading iTunes on my Windows PC became an event that I never looked forward to. Why? Because invariably, during the upgrade I would get an installation error of some sort. Rather that trying to figure it out, I would just uninstall iTunes completely, and reinstall it.
So, here I am ready to upgrade to iTunes 10.7 and sure enough, I click to upgrade iTunes and I encounter a “iPod Service could not be installed” warning box, with choices to Abort, Retry, Ignore.
Fixing this turns out to be fairly easy process, but not intuitive.
So let’s go step by step:
Notes:
Standard suggestions: Always be sure to make a backup of your iTunes catalogs (just in case) before upgrading iTunes. I would also recommend rebooting your computer BEFORE downloading and installing any software.
I keep running into SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 installations and being asked how to disable the SBS console from starting up automatically when logging into the server. It’s quite simple, but it’s not under Start –> All Programs –> Startup, as you would expect.
There you go — all done!
P.S. If you are having issues where the SBS 2008 Console is crashing or taking a long time to display alerts and statuses, check out this blog post from the Official Windows Small Business Server blog web site.
SBS 2008 Screenshots:
SBS 2011 Screenshot:
If you run the SBS 2011 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA), you may see the following warning:
No DNS name server records.
Source: 74
Issue: There are no DNS name server (NS) resource records for the delegated _msdcs forward lookup zone.
Well, that’s nice. But you may ask yourself: What does this mean? Why did it happen? and Do I need to fix it?
The short answer is that this often occurs as a result of doing a migration to SBS 2011. If your SBS 2011 server is a standalone server (not in a multi DC environment), then it’s not a big concern. You could probably just click on “Exclude this Result” to hide/ignore the warning from appearing when you run future BPA reports.
But if you’re like me, you want to resolve the issue, if possible, instead of just ignoring it.
The warning is caused by the fact that BPA is looking for a _msdcs sub zone under your domain.local zone in DNS. Here’s an example where it is missing:
An excellent tutorial on resolving this issue in detail is available on the Official Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog site. It also covers the situation where the _msdcs.domain.local zone is missing.
In my case, I already have a separate _msdcs.domain.local zone. So all that I need to do is to manually create the _msdcs zone and restart the Netlogon service. So, let’s get to work:
Rerun the BPA and you will see that this warning message no longer appears!
Hope this helps you!