Supporting Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2

Well another good news for customers and partners. Microsoft has demonstrated and proved they are indeed listening to customer and partner feedback. Exchange 2007 product team has taken a decision to support Windows 2008R2 platform. Most of the customers are running Exchange 2007 and they will not have quick plan to move to Exchange 2010 but they will still prefer to have their operating system to have latest version for improved manageability.

More information about this decision has been blogged over here.

Bring your Own Computer (BYOC) to work

Well this has been once debatable question or rather I would say adoptable method carried out by some companies. Microsoft,Intel & Citrix are some companies who adopt this and they have already carried it out in several region offices. Recent economic situation has given most employees green light for this. In a way I see this as a good thing and I started adopting this almost before big companies decide about it. Actually in year 2007 :)

We as technical persons cannot be locked down for 8 –5 usual office work hours, sometimes we work from home and until late night. Apart from that companies prefer to get maximum benefits out of the employees apart from that HR keeps on trying making the life comfortable for the work force. (Weather they success or not is a different question) My point is everyone want to be happy and still not compromise the rules right? Well in that case BYOC is a good method for several reasons,

1. Employees will have their personal laptop and can work from anywhere, which I call freedom and flexibility

2. Employer cannot afford all the latest hardware to be given to employees all the time to carry out their work and replacing the hardware annually. But they can lend some money to employees to have their own machine with certain legal condition, and this will be fraction of the cost of their annual IT budget.

3. Employees have the flexibility to work and same time have break and use it more meaningfully to interact with friends and colleagues via MSN, other IM’s and social networks. (Eg: Face Book) I know some companies will see FB as a bad thing but again fundamental rules work out over here, trust between employee and the employer. I also agree not wasting time on FB doing farming or playing games in office working hours. Keep that for OOOH (Out Of Office hours)

So on even you’ll can figure out various benefits which is good for both parties. With every new concepts comes some raised concerns and same goes over here.

1. Security – Well this is something for the IT department to come up with. Do you really think BYOC is the only major issue? think about the other methods your network can compromise. What we should really care about is how to make sure company main servers and confidential data can be secured properly. I have seen many times it comes to the boiling point of servers not been secured with the recommendation security patches and security policies. Now it’s time to go and have  a second look at the security aspects more deeply.

2. Cost – As I mention this will be lot less if you plan if carefully. Since you’re not going to spend so much money but lend some money for the employee to buy his/her own machine with relevant terms and condition. But please remember this option is not applicable for all the companies and this has to be evaluated even department level as well.

3. Security Policy – Well companies can have that hefty security policy guideline books with them still :) Well my point is you can still apply some general rules and terms and evaluate your security polices and try to balance everything. If you’re so much concern about the desktop environments then this is the time you can even evaluate the VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) Microsoft and Citrix is offering pretty cool solutions for this. I think the way we moving forward with year 2010 VDI will be a good option for companies to consider.

So in a nutshell those are my opinions about BYOC and I agree with this trend and the question is do you? Share your thoughts about it and see if we can change the working environment for more friendly flexible and sexy!!!! I mean with cool laptop models people :)

Windows 7 deployment using image capturing

With introduction of the Windows Vista Microsoft introduce the image capturing method. Earlier we used to reply on Symantec ghost, Acronis…etc. Now Microsoft has given complete free tool set to do image capturing and deployment. One advantage I see in this method is the images going to be captured using the Microsoft given tools are,

• One image for many hardware configurations
• Multiple images in one file
• Offline servicing of the image file
• Installation on partitions of any size
• Bootable image support for Windows PE
• Modification of image files using APIs

Of course if you do further search you’ll find many more options and advantages. In this article I’ll guide you how to capture Windows 7 installed PC using Imagex command and then deploy it to different PC. Of course this can be customize and make it Zero touch deployment with advance tools like SCCM, but that will be another article :)

Ok to start first you’ll need following items,

• Active Directory environment (DC with DHCP, DNS roles enabled)
• Windows 7 PC installed with Windows 7 AIK (Automated Installation Kit)
• Windows 7 Pc with all the necessary software preinstalled to be captured as reference image.
• Another PC ready ready without any OS. Network card need to support PXE.

In my article the above mention lab has been carried out on HYPER-V environment. All of them are virtual PC’s. The power of virtualization really shines over here :)

Now I assume you’ve already setup the Domain Controller with functioning DNS and DHCP and also one Windows 7 PC installed with downloaded Windows AIK. (since that part is easy)

Now back to work. First I took a virtual PC with windows 7 and MS office 2007 preinstalled. In your case you can install all the application you normally use in your production environment.

Once all the applications has been installed go ahead and remove the static IP settings and configure to get an IP from the DHCP server. Since we plan to do a image capturing we don’t want the same IP to be duplicated to all the PC, right?

After that go ahead and launch the sysprep command. This command will make sure all the unique data and settings will be removed from that reference PC.

once the PC has been generalized go ahead and start it from the Windows PE CD. How to create a Windows PE cd can be found over here. Since I’m doing everything in Virtual environment these pics will show how to assign the iso image and also how configure a legacy network adapter for that image. In HYPER-V only legacy network adapter will support getting IP from DHCP when booting.

now once booted from the PE cd we’ll go ahead and map a network drive to export the capturing image. After that run the imagex command to capture the image.

Once the image capture is completed (how long will it take to capture the image will depend on the amount of data you have in the reference PC) Take the same Windows PE CD and boot the machine which is not having any operating system. One you boot to the command prompt again map the network drive by using net use command and then import the captured image using the imagex command.

Well once that completed you can restart the PC and start the PC with OOBE (Out of the Box Experience) In that scenario you can provide a computer name, user name..etc. So as you can see the entire process is that that difficult and compared with the benefits you can get out of image based deployments. Microsoft MDT 2010 is a good tool to use to automate this process if you have a requirement to deploy Windows XP, windows 7 or Windows 2008 for few hundred computers. Apart from that have a look into the following TechNet articles as well,

DISM , MDT2010 , SCCM

Enjoy with these tools and doing your own experiments.

My new class for Windows 7

I started my new batch on Windows 7 Client configuration. This is the first batch in NetAssist training institute of the particular module. Microsoft has greatly enhance their books and training material this time more focusing on practical side. Students has been given enough reading information be referring to the TechNet links. This is a good adoption due to the TechNet will be regularly updating with latest technical updates.

My first two weeks has been spend on deploying Windows 7 via image creation and distribution via various methods available in Microsoft. One key advantage is students will be experiencing HYPER-V interface since all the virtual pc’s has been configured in HYPER-V!!

Since virtualization has been my favorite area I had good time explain the features and features behind HYPER-V as well :)