RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Jose Barreto from the File Server Team at Microsoft. Jose talks about File Replication Services, Distributed File System and other technologies for file servers.

Richard catches Alan Burchill while at Tech Ed New Zealand. Alan digs into the new Group Policy Preferences features introduced with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 but available for XP, Vista, even Server 2000 and up! The conversation explores how group policy can now be used to map drives, printers and other features, leading to the virtual elimination of login scripts. Check out Alan's web site at http://www.grouppolicy.biz/ for videos and information on this and other group policy techniques.

Richard talks to Rhonda Layfield during Tech Ed Australia about her work with Microsoft Deployment Tools (MDT). Rhonda goes over the relationship between MDT and Windows Deployment Service (WDS) as well as the Windows Automation Installation Kit (WAIK). All these tools are free and make image-based deployment tools look wasteful and inefficient. The conversation tears off into deployment in virtualization just for fun. Rhonda mentions AppDeploy.com as a key resource for the MDT user, helping with all the details around configuration applications for deployment in MDT.

While at Tech Ed Australia, Richard caught up with Chris Jackson to talk about the latest problem in application compatibility - web applications dependent on IE6. When released ten years ago, IE6 was a paragon of web standards, but the world has moved on and now IE6 is a pariah. Chris talks about how web applications dependent on IE6 are actually blocking XP to Windows 7 upgrades, but that ultimately the reason to move your applications off IE6 is a web standards issue.

Richard flies solo to talk to Stephen Rose from Microsoft about the latest around Windows 7. The discussion roams around Service Pack 1, the new Microsoft Intune Beta (http://www.microsoft.com/online/windows-intune.aspx) and his experiences on the Get on the Bus tour down the eastern seaboard in spring 2010.

Richard and Greg talk to Adam Gent about Office Communications Server (OCS). OCS brings the PBX into the PC, so that email, instant messaging and telephone are integrated together. Adam digs into the details of what it takes to get going with OCS, where to find effective cost savings, and the overall plan of being successful with the product. Check out Adam's blog at http://blog.misthos.com.

Richard and Greg talk to Doug Finke about the OData PowerShell Explorer. The OData PowerShell Explorer makes it easy to make OData part of your PowerShell scripts. And with OData providing access to all sorts of data, the combination opens huge possibilities. Check out the OData PowerShell Explorer at http://psodata.codeplex.com/.

Richard talks to Adam Machanic about parallelism in SQL Server. Executing queries in parallel has been in SQL Server since version 7, but with the number of cores in servers rising dramatically, parallelism is more and more important. Adam digs into the details of how to make parallelism in SQL Server work effectively. Check out Adam's blog at http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/.

Richard and Greg talk to Isaac Roybal, late of Microsoft, now with Cisco, about the Unified Computing System. The Unified Computing System (UCS) is Cisco's hardware designed for virtualization, using blade-based hardware to create SAN-driven servers that can move seamlessly from machine-to-machine.

Richard and Greg talk to Dana Epp about finding and fixing a security vulnerability. Dana tells the story of how a customer found a bug in one of Scorpion Software's products that surfaced a weakness in a Microsoft security API. Ultimately Dana describes how they altered their application to protect their application from a whole class of exploits.