RunAs Radio

Richard chats with Microsoft's Stephen Rose about Windows 8 in the enterprise. Does it make sense? Stephen talks about the specific features available in the enterprise edition of Windows 8. It's not just about tablets!

Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Kamal Abburi about his experiences putting together hybrid implementations of Exchange and Office 365. The conversation starts out focusing on why Exchange in the Cloud at all, and the challenges of making a full migration to Office 365. Kamal mentions some of the regulatory hurdles that some countries put in place requiring some mailboxes to remain in the country of origin. He then digs into the challenge of hybrid implementations, covering the role of ADFS in creating a single sign-on experience, challenges with security and how to do seamless migrations of mailboxes. In the end it appears that hybrid deployment is going to be the most common model used, especially going forward into the next version of Exchange! Check out Office 365 and the Office 365 Deployment Guide.

Richard talks to Victor Mushkatin from the System Center team at Microsoft about Operations Manager 2012. Victor is the former CTO of AVICode, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2010. AVICode's technology has been added to OpsMan to provide detailed instrumentation of .NET applications. The conversation explores how OpsMan 2012 can instrument web and client-based applications end to end to detect reliability and performance issues. Victor also digs into how OpsMan 2012 is a key part of Microsoft's DevOps tool chain strategy.

Richard chats with Justin Morris about the recently announced Lync 2013 Preview. The preview is available for download now, but the product itself is still several months away. Justin talks about how quickly Lync has evolved as an enterprise SIP phone technology into the concepts of presence, integrating email, instant messaging, voice/video calling and desktop sharing together.

Richard chats with Jeffrey Snover about DevOps at Microsoft. The concept of DevOps goes back to a talk that John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did at Velocity called 10 Deploys Per Day. DevOps focuses on having developers and operations working closely together to make rapid deployments possible. Jeff discusses his blog post on the subject of Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps. DevOps is coming to the Microsoft world, are you ready?

Richard talks with Bhargav Shukla about some of the issues he encounters with Exchange 2010 out in the field. The conversation starts out with a long discussion about the impact of mobile device, especially the tendancy today to bring your own device to work. Most users have several devices now syncing with Exchange, not just one or two. This leads to a great knowledge base article on issues with Exchange Active Sync and third party devices. Bhargav then moves onto issues around mailbox size, the impact of active directory performance and load balancing. So many challenges, but only so much time - this show is chocked full of ideas on how to make Exchange perform better!

Richard chats with Jeff Stokes about Microsoft's Windows Assessment Toolkit. Download the ADK here. Another amazing free tool from Microsoft, the Assessment Toolkit gives detailed evaluations on performance, reliability, compatibility and functionality across multiple operating systems, software, low level and application level behavior. Jeff talks about testing new hardware with existing software, with new versions of software, any combination you like. Also mentioned is Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL), which should be in your toolkit also. The Windows Assessment Toolkit is a tool you need to have sitting right beside Microsoft Deployment Toolkit - test every change, every time!

Richard talks to Steve Goodman about mobile mail solutions. Steve starts out talking about getting iPhone to work well with Exchange. Turns out that much of what makes iPhone work well applies to other smart phone devices like Android as well. The conversation also explores the role of the cloud, tablets and where the market is headed. Who knew so much innovation is still coming around email?

Mark Minasi is back! Mark and Richard get into a debate about the role of ARM-based and Intel-based tablets. Mark references a couple of articles he authored. The first discusses how ARM tablets cannot join domains. The second digs into the idea domain joining isn't that big a deal. From there, the conversation turns to the hardware differences, how Intel is making moves to be more competitive with ARM from a power and performance perspective, perhaps eliminating the need for ARM in the enterprise at all. Expect lots of history lessons along the way, these guys are getting old!

Richard chats with Steve Murawski about how Server 2012 affects file sharing. Server 2012 includes SMB3, which allows NIC teaming to allow commodity 1GB NICs to work together to create awesome file transfer rates. But how far can we go with that? Steve talks about how clustering and other services in Server 2012 create a world where you may never need a SAN at all - everything can be a file share!