Happy Holiday's & a Wonderful New Year from the SBS Product Team!

This is a note to all of our OEMs, Partners, customers, Value Adding folk, business owners, information workers, and pretty much anyone who touches SBS or walks, talks and balks in the SBS communities.

Here at Microsoft, the Small Business Server product team want to wish you the warmest of holiday's and a very happy new year!

All the Best!

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Live Meeting for Support?

Trump knows where it's at. Two weeks ago, "The Donald" aired the episode of The Apprentice which showed Live Meeting as a great place to save time on travel, and have virtual meetings in which to collaborate and work together on digital documents.

What they didn't tell you is what you can use it for! Every techy should have an account with Live Meeting. Just the other day, my father was having issues with his XP client. Apparently some pop-up was happening saying that he should pay for the use of some videos. My father didn't know what they were talking about, and couldn't find the "I didn't watch any videos" button. Lucky for him, he didn't have his credit card handy. :)

For some reason, I could not get TS or Remote Assistance to work on his PC to help him clear up his spyware. Instead, I started a live meeting session, invited him into it, made him the presenter and then took asked for control of his desktop. With just the two of us in the meeting, I was able to control his PC through Live Meeting. I of course, removed the spyware, and installed the handy-dandy Microsoft AntiSpyware application to prevent this sort of thing happening in the future.

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File Synchronization Technologies...

So a friend of mine would define this technology as "hot". Microsoft just aquired the FolderShare company. I just installed the trial version of Foldershare. You should read up on the features. It's pretty impressive.

The highlights are you can synch file changes between computers while they are running, over the Internet. Then you can go to this webpage and search all your computers from a single webpage! A nice side effect is that you can go to the website, login and browse the file structures on your computers. As long as they are running.

Might want to choose a strong password for this one, but it's a great service!!

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Where are you?

Having trouble finding out where to go? Check out Local.live.com. It's pretty cool, once you find where you're headed to, switch it into "Birds Eye View". Once you switch to that view, you get the 3/4 satellite view. It's great for seeing where you're headed before you get there!

Check out the Seahawks Sadium!

Never be lost again...

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Finding what's open

Yesterday I was deleting WSUS, not uninstalling it, but rather deleting it. I know this is bad practice, but on the particular machine, the drive that the WSUS version of MSDE was on was lost and was not replaceable. I'll probably post that here sometime soon too.

Anyways, as part of the instruction, I needed to delete a directory, but for one single file, it was apparently in use. GRRR I hate that! You never know which process is using a particular file.

Well, yes you can, you just need the tools!

Windows has a command line tool called "TaskList". Simply running the command TaskList /M {exe/dll} you can see what processes are using certain files.

In addition, if you're more of a GUI guy or gal, you can check out the handy tool called Process Explorer from SysInternals.

Just becareful what you kill. :)

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