While at TechEd US in New Orleans, Richard sat down with Stephen Rose to talk about the new features in Windows 8.1. Don't call it a service pack! Stephen runs down all the cool features in Windows 8.1, including the return of the Start button (sort of), being able to boot directly to desktop and Mirrorcast - a wireless way to connect to external displays. Digging deeper into enterprise related features, the conversation also digs into new workplace join and the open mobile device management sup...
Jun 26, 2013•32 min•Ep. 322
While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard sat down with Ed Musters to talk about document management in SharePoint. The conversation starts out exploring why SharePoint is used for document management - resisting sending files in email, better security, document control and actually knowing where everything is. Ed describes the challenges of setting up a coherent taxonomy of documents, how everything needs to be tagged and organized in a way that makes it discoverable and controlled. And the same ru...
Jun 19, 2013•31 min•Ep. 321
While at DevTeach, Richard chatted with Richard Baumet about his experiences at the 2012 PASS conference, including the sneak peeks at the upcoming version of SQL Server. The conversation largely focuses on how changes in hardware, including faster and more CPU cores, faster and larger memory and storage, ultimately shape how SQL Server works. An exciting time to be a DBA!
Jun 12, 2013•33 min•Ep. 320
While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard talks to Craig Utley about his experiences building business intelligence systems. The discussion starts out with the concepts of data warehousing, OLAP and business intelligence, and how many business owners get fooled into focusing only on the results of the business intelligence effort without acknowledging the huge body of work that goes into it with ETL, data cleansing and coherency. Craig talks about the right ways to get into a business intelligence p...
Jun 05, 2013•34 min•Ep. 319
While at TechDays in San Francisco, Richard sat down with Steve Evans to talk about the new virtual networking features in Server 2012 Hyper-V. The conversation starts with a focus on the challenges of networking in a virtualized world - problems around assigning NICs to individual VMs, dealing with failover, etc. But as Steve describes, once you get to 2012, physical NICs are entirely about bandwidth - teaming as necessary. And the virtual side creates a separate NIC for each role, assigned to ...
May 29, 2013•32 min•Ep. 318
While at TechDays SF, Richard moderated a panel on Women in IT. The panelists include Jennelle Crothers, Jessica DeVita, Christa Anderson and CA Callahan. The panel discussed the role of community in engaging more women into IT, finding peer support, and dealing with the various challenges of being a part of a still male-dominated industry. There are a number of questions posed by the audience and the conversation ultimately ends up focusing on getting kids involved in STEM (Science, Technology,...
May 22, 2013•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 317
While in San Francisco at TechDays, Richard runs into Mark and ends up with a recording about their favorite science topics. Not exactly an IT show, but good fun!
May 15, 2013•35 min•Ep. 316
Richard talks to Dana Epp about using cloud technology for disaster recovery. Dana digs into Microsoft Azure first, talking about how the new Azure Storage Services and secure connectivity make it much easier to maintain replicas of your virtual machines in Azure, synchronizing only the changes on a regular basis. The conversation also covers some of the Amazon EC2 features available for disaster recovery, as well as focusing on not giving up your responsibilities and an IT Pro - it's still your...
May 08, 2013•35 min•Ep. 315
Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about his experiences doing deployment with Windows, using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Configuration Manager and more!
May 01, 2013•30 min•Ep. 314
Richard chats with Aidan Finn about Windows 8 Hyper-V Client. With Windows 8, Microsoft brings Hyper-V support to the desktop. Aidan discusses a variety of use cases for Hyper-V on the client, including presentations, testing, security and that darn XP/IE6 app you just can't seem to get rid of. The conversation also digs into the licensing requirements for using Hyper-V on the desktop as well as the differences between Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V on Server 2012.
Apr 24, 2013•34 min•Ep. 313
Richard chats with Ed Horley about something other than IPv6 - building private cloud infrastructure. Ed talks about the innovations happening in the cloud space at the biggest level (large enterprise) and smallest (start ups)... but relatively little in between. The conversation digs into some of the standards emerging such as OpenStack to make utility computing even simpler. Also check out Microsoft's Private Cloud offering which explores the tooling and techniques for getting your own infrast...
Apr 17, 2013•39 min•Ep. 312
Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his experiences deploying SQL Server 2012. The conversation digs into the challenges of running SQL 2012 on Windows 2008R2 - and why you'd want to upgrade to SQL 2012 in the first place. For Brent's projects, it came down to utilizing Always On technology, which depends on advanced clustering features that 2008R2 struggles with - so SQL 2012 is best on Server 2012! From there, Brent talks about the impact of the cloud on on-premise servers, the need for better...
Apr 10, 2013•36 min•Ep. 311
Richard talks to PFE Jeff Stokes about the Microsoft Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). The ADK is a web installer that pulls together a bunch of free tools from Microsoft that can help you understand how PCs are performing. Jeff talks about the Assessment Toolkit, which is a small app that can run on a PC and determine problems with drivers such as memory leaks, as well as whether or not a better video card would improve browser performance. Also mentioned in the show is KB 2775511, which is ...
Apr 03, 2013•35 min•Ep. 310
Richard chat with PFE Nibin PM from Microsoft Gulf in Kuwait about his work deploying Active Directory domain controllers in virtualized environments. Nibin digs into the history of virtualized domain controllers first, with the biggest caution of all: don't do snapshots of domain controllers! At least, not until Server 2012. The conversation digs into the challenges of Active Directory maintaining synchronization between different domain controllers, how virtualization influences that and ultim...
Mar 27, 2013•33 min•Ep. 309
Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Heath Graves about the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). MOF is Microsoft's guidance document for IT, covering every day practices and activities, as well as digging into governance, risk and compliance. Heath discusses how his experiences in the Air Force taught him to value clear documentation and procedure to not only get things working right, but to pass that information along to other reliably. Take a look at the Microsoft Operations Fra...
Mar 20, 2013•30 min•Ep. 308
Richard talks to Robert Cain about getting started with business intelligence. The conversation starts out talking about the role of SQL Server, Analysis Service and various tools needed to get business intelligence up and running. Robert discusses using tools like Excel PowerPivot to do rapid prototyping for potential business intelligence solutions versus the big bang approach of building a data warehouse. Thinking about getting your company using business intelligence? Here's a place to start...
Mar 13, 2013•34 min•Ep. 307
While at the MVP Summit, Richard chats with Tony Redmond about his experiences with Exchange 2013 so far. Exchange 2013 shipped in October of 2012, but as of mid-February, could only be deployed in greenfield scenarios - to get to co-existence with Exchange 2007 and 2010, you need current service packs as well as a yet-to-be-released cumulative update to Exchange 2013. Tony talks about how the interplay between Exchange 2013, Sharepoint 2013, Office 2013 and Lync offer awesome features, but at t...
Mar 06, 2013•37 min•Ep. 306
Richard chats with Robert Smith about his experiences tuning Windows to operate with Virtualized Desktops. Robert starts out with dealing with boot times with Windows 7 - some customers were waiting up to ten minutes to boot! Careful boot log analysis finds answers. The conversation also digs into the whole cycle of patching, WSUS, service packs, hot fixes - every time a base image has to change, it impacts users. If you're even thinking about VDI, there's some great tips here!
Feb 27, 2013•32 min•Ep. 305
Richard talks to Dana Epp about his on-going battles with password security. The conversation digs into various security issues, including public WiFi exploits, rainbow and hash tablets and more. Dana also talks about the rash of account hijacking in 2012 that made a mess of online identities - and the danger of single sign on when that happens. While he's still looking for the perfect solution to not having a password, Dana has a bunch of tips for doing a better job with yours, and your company...
Feb 20, 2013•35 min•Ep. 304
Richard talks to Chris Conte about his experiences deploying SharePoint into the military. Chris talks about his early days in the Navy as a yeoman, first learning the potential of personal computers to make the work of handling the huge amount of data the military produces easier. The conversation digs into how SharePoint governance is as much a challenge for the military as industry, and how strong metadata infrastructure has made data more findable, understandable and useable. Chris also talk...
Feb 13, 2013•36 min•Ep. 303
Richard chats with Benny Lakunishok about storage performance in Exchange 2010. The new storage systems in Exchange 2010 substantially changed the way Exchange works with storage systems. Benny talks about the surprise of having performance problems with Exchange on SANs because of these changes - Exchange 2010 tends to write much larger blocks of data than older versions. Benny mentions JetStress, a free tool from Microsoft for testing the storage system of an Exchange server before Exchange is...
Feb 06, 2013•31 min•Ep. 302
Richard chats with Steven Murawski about his work at StackExchange. The conversation starts out digging into how StackExchange avoided hurricane Sandy by failing the site over from New York to Oregon. Steven also talks about the DevOps attitude at StackExchange, how the developers work closely with operations to test new features, keeping performance and reliability at peak. With his primary responsibility at StackExchange being SQL Server, Steven also discusses the benefits he's gotten from mov...
Jan 30, 2013•34 min•Ep. 301
Hey, it's show 300! For the 300th show, Richard chats with Mark Minasi about a variety of topics, including the good and bad of Windows 8. And somehow the metric system creeps in also. Stick around for the next 300 shows!
Jan 23, 2013•39 min•Ep. 300
Richard talks to Alan Burchill about some of the improvements to Group Policy in Server 2012. The conversation starts out with the new reporting features, including the infrastructure status report that will actually show you when policies have been synchronized between AD servers as well as improve group policy reports to help you understand what policies are (and are NOT) being applied to a given account. Alan then digs into local group policy features in Windows RT (yes, the ARM edition) - yo...
Jan 16, 2013•42 min•Ep. 299
Richard talks to Microsoft PFE Bruce Adamczak about the new high availability features for DHCP in Server 2012. The conversation digs into the problems in DHCP and some of the fundamental strategies for dealing with implementing DHCP to be survivable. Bruce then talks about how Server 2012 allows active-active and active-passive groups (don't call them clusters!) of DHCP servers in Server 2012. You can read more about DHCP high availability at Bruce's Blog. Also check out the Windows Team DHCP B...
Jan 09, 2013•34 min•Ep. 298
For the first show on 2013, Richard chats with Dan Rosanova about big data in the Microsoft space. While the conversation starts out speaking about big data in general, Don focuses in on Hadoop, an open source distributed data manipulation technology that Microsoft has adopted in a big way. Hadoop specializes in doing MapReduce across massive numbers of machines, and if you don't have that many machines, you can always use the cloud. Check out Windows Azure HDInsight for the simplest way to get ...
Jan 02, 2013•31 min•Ep. 297
While on the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Tom Canter about the changes in healthcare information technology going on today. The conversation starts out on the architectural challenges of healthcare information systems. Ultimately, Tom digs into what everyone can learn from building large scale integrated systems, showing advanced data discovery that can turn operations into profit centers. Healthcare technology can lead the way!...
Dec 26, 2012•38 min•Ep. 296
Richard talks to Aydin Aslaner about his work deploying IPv6 in the mideast and Europe. Aydin talks about how the Turkish government is mandating externally accessible web sites having IPv6 in the next year and government organizations having internal IPv6 in 2014. The conversation also walks through the evolution of IPv6 implementations in your organization, between internal networks, external networks, public facing and bridging. IPv6 can't be ignored any longer!
Dec 19, 2012•34 min•Ep. 295
While on the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked with Kamal Abburi about risk assessments around Exchange server. Kamal talks about the common issues he's found in doing risk assessments of Exchange for companies all over the world. Along the way, he talks about a number of powerful tools for doing your own assessment, including the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator, the Exchange Performance Data Collection tool, Exc...
Dec 12, 2012•34 min•Ep. 294
During the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip, Richard chatted with Stephen Rose about the new generation of Windows 8 tablets being deployed into the Enterprise. Stephen talks about the differences between Windows 8 RT and Windows 8 Pro and the strengths and weaknesses of each in the enterprise. He also suggests that we not focus solely on Surface devices - that there are lots of great third party hardware out there as well with their own unique advantages. Is ...
Dec 05, 2012•34 min•Ep. 293
