RunAs Radio

Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Heath Graves about the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). MOF is Microsoft's guidance document for IT, covering every day practices and activities, as well as digging into governance, risk and compliance. Heath discusses how his experiences in the Air Force taught him to value clear documentation and procedure to not only get things working right, but to pass that information along to other reliably. Take a look at the Microsoft Operations Framework.

Richard talks to Robert Cain about getting started with business intelligence. The conversation starts out talking about the role of SQL Server, Analysis Service and various tools needed to get business intelligence up and running. Robert discusses using tools like Excel PowerPivot to do rapid prototyping for potential business intelligence solutions versus the big bang approach of building a data warehouse. Thinking about getting your company using business intelligence? Here's a place to start!

While at the MVP Summit, Richard chats with Tony Redmond about his experiences with Exchange 2013 so far. Exchange 2013 shipped in October of 2012, but as of mid-February, could only be deployed in greenfield scenarios - to get to co-existence with Exchange 2007 and 2010, you need current service packs as well as a yet-to-be-released cumulative update to Exchange 2013. Tony talks about how the interplay between Exchange 2013, Sharepoint 2013, Office 2013 and Lync offer awesome features, but at the expense of some additional deployment and configuration challenges. And don't forget about the cloud! Exchange 2013 is being rolled out to Office 365 as well, which has an impact on the on-premise features also. Awesome discussion about where Exchange is going!

Richard chats with Robert Smith about his experiences tuning Windows to operate with Virtualized Desktops. Robert starts out with dealing with boot times with Windows 7 - some customers were waiting up to ten minutes to boot! Careful boot log analysis finds answers. The conversation also digs into the whole cycle of patching, WSUS, service packs, hot fixes - every time a base image has to change, it impacts users. If you're even thinking about VDI, there's some great tips here!

Richard talks to Dana Epp about his on-going battles with password security. The conversation digs into various security issues, including public WiFi exploits, rainbow and hash tablets and more. Dana also talks about the rash of account hijacking in 2012 that made a mess of online identities - and the danger of single sign on when that happens. While he's still looking for the perfect solution to not having a password, Dana has a bunch of tips for doing a better job with yours, and your company's security.

Richard talks to Chris Conte about his experiences deploying SharePoint into the military. Chris talks about his early days in the Navy as a yeoman, first learning the potential of personal computers to make the work of handling the huge amount of data the military produces easier. The conversation digs into how SharePoint governance is as much a challenge for the military as industry, and how strong metadata infrastructure has made data more findable, understandable and useable. Chris also talks about the concept of 'Responsibility to Share' as opposed to 'Need to Know' - a deep change for the military, but also a huge one to apply to the enterprise. Are you sharing the data you need to share with the people who need to know it? Can SharePoint help?

Richard chats with Benny Lakunishok about storage performance in Exchange 2010. The new storage systems in Exchange 2010 substantially changed the way Exchange works with storage systems. Benny talks about the surprise of having performance problems with Exchange on SANs because of these changes - Exchange 2010 tends to write much larger blocks of data than older versions. Benny mentions JetStress, a free tool from Microsoft for testing the storage system of an Exchange server before Exchange is deployed on it. It can also be used to test how the system behaves under various failure modes, such as a missing LUN, failed disk or array recovery. Lots to think about for the future of your Exchange infrastructure!

Richard chats with Steven Murawski about his work at StackExchange. The conversation starts out digging into how StackExchange avoided hurricane Sandy by failing the site over from New York to Oregon. Steven also talks about the DevOps attitude at StackExchange, how the developers work closely with operations to test new features, keeping performance and reliability at peak. With his primary responsibility at StackExchange being SQL Server, Steven also discusses the benefits he's gotten from moving SQL Server 2012 over to Server 2012 from Server 2008 R2. Check out the blog posts on ServerFault about Moving to SQL 2012, Working towards failure and Failing over for Sandy.

Hey, it's show 300! For the 300th show, Richard chats with Mark Minasi about a variety of topics, including the good and bad of Windows 8. And somehow the metric system creeps in also. Stick around for the next 300 shows!

Richard talks to Alan Burchill about some of the improvements to Group Policy in Server 2012. The conversation starts out with the new reporting features, including the infrastructure status report that will actually show you when policies have been synchronized between AD servers as well as improve group policy reports to help you understand what policies are (and are NOT) being applied to a given account. Alan then digs into local group policy features in Windows RT (yes, the ARM edition) - you can't join a domain, but you can push local policies onto tablets! For more information around group policy in Server 2012, check out Alan's blog.