Bing - The Decision Maker

Yesterday Microsoft announced "Bing", a new Internet search engine. The press release mentions how Bing is attempting to revolutionize search by changing the rules of being a "Search Engine" to being a "Decision Engine".

Clearly great search results are at the top of the list, but embedded within those results is organization to help you sift through the data faster, and more efficiently with computer assisted insight. Check out this virtual tour for more details:



On June 3rd, make sure you head over to Bing! for your first chance to try out the search engine.

Bing-it baby!

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Windows 7 has “Network Aware” Default Printers

Being a 75% mobile worker, I’m constantly on the move.  This means that I live and breath on my laptop.  Windows 7 has helped me be more productive and efficient. With faster boot times, more reliable sleep/hibernation modes, and improved security and access (such as Direct Access).  My mobile computing has never been easier. 

To make it one step easier, I discovered a particularly nifty feature that I found over at Life Hacker. Windows 7 has a new printer manager feature that allows you to set your default printer dependant on which network you are connected to, perfect for a mobile worker such as myself.

Before we get into details on how to configure this, we should all working hard to reduce our carbon foot print and work on going green in the office.  With new technologies and plenty of access, printing should be one of those last resort things.

Having said that, Windows 7 can switch your default printer depending on which network you’re connected to.  For example, at my home I want the default to be my HP Laser Jet 2506dn printer.  At work I want it to be the crazy Xerox copy center behind the kitchen.

To set this up simply do the following:

1. Launch into the Control Panel/Devices and Printers dialog
2. Select one of your printers
3. Select Manage default printers from the blue-bar under the address window
4. Now simply choose your network, and the installed printer of preference for that network, and click Update.

From this point forward, when you are connected to that network, you’re default printer will always be what you expect.  If you do a lot of printing, might save you some time.  Or if you have users that take laptop to and from work, might save you some support time in the evenings as they go home and try to print from there.

If you’re interested in the Life Hacker post, you can read it here.  Thanks Life Hacker!

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Thanks for Attending my Tech-Ed Presentation

This past Friday, I was in Los Angeles at Microsoft Tech Ed as I mentioned before. I didn’t have a slot targeted for high attendance: 9am Friday morning, after a big party.  But wow! 45-55 people joined to learn about Small Business Server 2008!

I just wanted to send out a thanks for rolling out of bed to those that made it.  I also wanted to make sure my power point deck was available to all.  Of course, if you weren’t there in person, you lost out on:

1. Seeing the demo’s in person
2. Having the ability to ask me or Susan any question in person
3. Seeing Susan Bradley, our “booth babe” as she called herself.
4. Having a chance to win a copy of Windows Small Business Server 2008 Unleashed, written by Eriq Neale, co-authored by Susan Bradley.
5. Obtaining a resource card on SBS resources.

I hope you enjoyed Tech-Ed, I know I did.

Check out Susan’s Blog for a roll-up, a discussion on backup, and our follow-up discussion on migration at the WESS booth.

Additionally, thanks to Susan for her help during the presentation and at the booth with Oliver.

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Adding Items to the “Send To” Menu

 

One of the lesser used features of Windows is the “Send To” menu.  This menu enables you to copy any file to any other location within the “Send To” menu. 

I’m often on out on corporate shares and such and I want to copy files and folders down to my local PC for faster access, or I might just want to move things around my hard drive to get things organized.  Instead of opening up two Windows Explorer Windows, you can use the one, right-click the file you want and go to the “Send To” menu, and then choose to copy it to any location you choose.  But how do you update the “Send To” menu?

WinHelpOnline.com has a simple solution:

1. Click Start and then Run
2. In the window that opens type shell:sendto, and Windows Explorer will open directly to the “Send To” menu location.
3. Simply create a short cut to the location you want to add to your menu, and close explorer

Now when you right-click and choose that “Send To” menu, you get the additional locations you need to make your life more efficient!

(More Details at WinHelpOnline.com, this also applies to Vista)

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Microsoft Tech-Ed is Next Week!

Next week I’ll be in Los Angeles to attend Tech-Ed 2009, North America Edition.  Come and join me in room 409 on Friday May 15th from 9am to 10:15am for the session:

Windows Small Business Server 2008: Up and Running in Under an Hour

During the session I will go over all of the core concepts of Windows Small Business Server 2008, and how you can finish setup in just under an hour using a pre-installed server. The MVP community has already started to pick up the excitement.

See you there!

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How to get Live Messenger back in the System Tray on Windows 7

Ok, so Windows 7 has a fancy new task bar, and Windows Live Messenger shows up on the task bar even when it’s closed.  It definitely looks fancy, and it will help folks like my parents and grandparents find messenger on their computer.  I love that I don’t have to explain “that tiny little chess piece in the right hand corner of the screen, no further down, no all the way down, near the clock, no to the left of the clock”.  Yes, I do this often.

However, for me, and probably a lot of power users that take advantage of the fact that Windows can task-switch and have plenty of windows open, you really don’t want Live Messenger to take up a section of that, when you’re used to it sitting right in the corner out of the way.  You can get that back to the way it was in Vista/XP simply by running it in compatibility mode. 

If you want to get Live Messenger back into the System Tray, you can customize that by following these steps:

1. Simply close Live Messenger by clicking on it and closing it.  Make sure it’s not minimized, but actually closed, so it doesn’t even appear in your Task Manager as a running program
2. Then browse to c:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Messenger (this could be c:\program files, without the (x86) if you’re running a 32-bit operating system)
3. Right-click on msnmsgr.exe and choose properties.
4. Under the Compatibility tab, choose to run this under Windows Vista (SP2) compatibility mode:
5. Click OK, and then run messenger again

Now Live Messenger is sitting back in the system tray.  Don’t forget to customize the hiding feature, so it doesn’t hide on you for not using it!!

So, it’s easy to get Live Messenger back in the system tray.

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Migrate from SBS 2000 to SBS 2008

Announced this morning over on the SBS User Assistance Blog, was a newly added whitepaper to the MVP Corner on Technet. The paper written by an SBS support engineer from India, Edwin Joseph.  His whitepaper covers the how-to steps on migrating from SBS 2000 to SBS 2008. So if you’ve been itching to upgrade this old piece of software, now you can!

If you want to read more from Edwin, he maintains his own blog.

In the meantime, you can directly download the SBS 2000 to SBS 2008 Whitepaper.

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SBS 2008 Updated Roll-up 2 (KB960911) Released

The Official SBS Blog has a new blog post on SBS 2008 Update Rollup 2.  This update fixes a few known issues discovered by our test team, as well as the general SBS community.  These issues are:

Issue 1

• After you configure Windows Small Business Server 2008, you manually change the Favorites and Links setting for Internet Explorer in the default domain group policy by using the Group Policy Management console. When you run the Internet Address Management Wizard, the wizard exits unexpectedly.

Issue 2

• You may receive the "HTTP ERROR 401.1" error when you visit the following Web site from Windows Small Business Server 2008: http://companyweb

Issue 3

• In the Add a New User Account Wizard, the order of the Last Name field and the First Name field is reversed. This problem occurs in the following language versions of Windows Small Business Server 2008:
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Japanese
  • Korean

Issue 4

• In the Italian versions of Windows Small Business Server 2008, when you click Connect to a Computer in the Remote Web Workplace, you navigate to an invalid Web page.

Issue 5

• The Windows SBS Console may stops responding if duplicate entries of Anti-Virus programs were reported in client WMI database.

Issue 6

• The Windows SBS Console may report "unknown" for some firewall applications that are installed on client computers.

You can read and download the update manual by going to KB960911 directly.  This update also includes Update Roll-up 1 (KB958715).

UPDATE: The SBS Official Blog has posted what they know about the failure to date.

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Connect to the Internet Wizard Won't Finish in SBS 2008

I got forwarded an issue the other day where in Windows Small Business Server 2008, the Connect to the Internet Wizard will take longer than 5 minutes to finish.  5 minutes is about the maximum this wizard should take (although there are rare cases when it takes longer), but this customer had waited 20 or 30 minutes for the wizard to finish.  The wizard just sits at this page:

If it is taking a long time, and you kill the wizard and check out the log file at c:\program files\windows small business server\logs\ctiw.log, and see the following:

[6208] 090421.222228.6798: CoreNet: New random IPv6 Address is fe80::51db:7007:45d6:ada1
[6208] 090421.222228.6798: CoreNet: Checking the IP conflicts for new address.
[6208] 090421.222233.6803: CoreNet: New random IPv6 Address is fe80::8e85:4dd0:e65d:e1d6
[6208] 090421.222233.6803: CoreNet: Checking the IP conflicts for new address.

The IPv6 network discovery on your network is not working.  This could be a number of items, including networking components you have on your network.  A nice work around is to choose one of the IPv6 addresses recommended in the log file, and ping it to verify it’s not in use, then if it’s not in use, simply set it as a static IP address and re-run the Connect to the Internet Wizard.

Don’t disable IPv6, there are definitely issues with that as well.

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Using OpenDNS with Windows Home Server

 

 

I recently started using OpenDNS on my networks, because I like to track DNS stats, and prevent bad sites from resolving.  OpenDNS has cataloged over 5 million sites into buckets, and you can either block a specific site, like limeware.com, or block a group of sites, like “P2P file sharing” sites.  I also love that you can add and customize multiple networks, so I can have my grandfather’s network more locked down than my site.

Once I made this adjustment on my network, I noticed that my Home Server stopped responding to the home server client when I wanted to connect to the server.  It showed the error:

This computer cannot connect to your home server. Check your network connection and make sure your home server is powered on. If your home server has recently restarted, try again in a few minutes.

The problem is that the router is passing every name resolution to the DNS servers.  With normal DNS servers, they ignore single hosts such as “SERVER”.  With Open DNS, they go ahead and slap the ISPs domain name on it and resolve it for you (e.g. SERVER.comcast.net), and of course your console wouldn’t connect to that.

You can simply work around this issue by making your internal LAN a “VPN” network.  The OpenDNS community asked the question, which pointed me OpenDNS KB Article.  The steps are simple:

1. On your client computer, run ipconfig /all, and copy down the domain name
2. Sign in to your Open DNS account.
3. Add a network, if you haven't already.
4. Go to the Settings tab.
5. Click Advanced Settings.
6. Click Manage under Manage VPN Exceptions in the Domain Typos section.
7. Add your internal domain(s) to this list, which was copied down in the first step
8. Wait 3 minutes (worst case) and all should be well.

That’s all there is to it.  Home Server starts acting like a Home Server again.

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Customize the Win7 Logon Page

Windows 7 Beta is out, and the Windows 7 Release Candidate is just around the corner.  I’ve been running Windows 7 for quite a while now, in production on all of my computers.  It’s been pretty rock solid, with no blue-screens, and all of my devices found save for a few, until recently it’s all of them! 

As I move from build to build, things just keep getting better, and I’m once again inspired to start customizing Windows like I used to have time for in College with Windows 98!  One of the new features of Windows 7 for OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) is to change the backdrop on the logon page.  That means, unlike with Vista, you’re not stuck with the same graphic, because it’s easy to change!  LifeHacker.com has the original steps I copied mine from.

You can easily turn this:

Into this:

(Pictures courtesy of LifeHacker.com) 

In order to do this, you simply find a JPEG file that you like, ensure that it’s less than 256kb (this part is important, and snagged me at first). Copy it to the appropriate location and flip a registry key.  Here is what I do:

1. Create the folder c:\windows\system32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds
2. Copy your file in there and call it “backgroundDefault.jpg
3. Add a DWORD called OEMBackground to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

That’s it!  If the picture doesn’t match the current resolution, the PC will stretch it to match your primary monitor resolution.  The LifeHacker post extends this to ensure each resolution is crisp.

Now you can be the cool kid on the block, right from the start.  Thanks Life Hacker!

Update: LifeHacker.com has come through again with another post on Customizing the Logon Button Set, in case you have a light or dark background, you can make sure your buttons are visible!

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“Quick Parts” for re-using text

Using Microsoft Office 2007, Outlook 2007 has a new feature called “Quick Parts”.  Quick Parts allow you to save text you type a lot, allowing you to easily dump that text into a new email without having to re-type it.  I discovered this over at LifeHacker’s Blog on Saving Time with Outlook 2007’s Quick Parts.

Once you save text to the gallery, you can simply go to the Insert tab and drop that text in anywhere in an email.  Use it for signatures, or templates, or any type of repetitive text.

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ISA 2006 with SBS 2008 Whitepaper Available

If you enjoyed your SBS 2003 with ISA 2004, and you’re hesitant to upgrade to SBS 2008 because ISA 2006 is not included with the product, then there is good news for you. (whoa, that sounds like the welcome email from SBS 2003!) 

Available today is the white paper on how to Deploy Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006 with Windows Small Business Server 2008.

The whitepaper will appear in the SBS documentation library sometime tonight, specifically in the MVP corner.  This particular whitepaper was written by Eriq Neale, a long standing SBS MVP.  Today you can get the whitepaper directly from the download center.

The whitepaper covers how to install, configure and deploy ISA 2006 on a Windows Server 2003 server as the edge outside of the SBS network.  You can (currently) downgrade the additional server you obtain with SBS 2008 Premium edition, to Windows Server 2003 and use it as your ISA server, all that’s needed is a copy of ISA 2006. 

While writing the paper, Eriq worked very closely with both the SBS team (myself included) and the ISA team.  This paper is sanctioned by both of these teams and is very well written.  I’m sure we’ll see more papers from the MVPs as time goes on.  Thanks to Eriq for his hard work bringing this paper to the MVP Corner!

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Windows Server 2008 Foundation Help Documentation

With the release of Windows Server 2008 Foundation edition, so comes the help documentation for said release.  Oddly enough, you can find this documentation next to the Small Business Server documentation up on Technet, just point your browser here.  Currently the documentation is focused on introducing the new server sku.

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