What does your security plan look like? Richard chats with Dana Epp about the ever increasing attack surface of our organizations and the ongoing battle to provide better tools and techniques to keep the lights on. Hackers are getting more clever, even hacking cars - how do you keep up? Dana talks through a series of policy approaches to deal with the reality that you are going to be breached, but how to you detect the breach and limit the damage caused? Check out Dana's article on credential th...
Oct 14, 2015•36 min•Ep. 442
There are lots of reasons to instrument your apps in production - but one of the most powerful is to understand how your users actually use your apps. Richard talks to Andreas Grabner of DynaTrace about the variety of instrumentation approaches possible for applications - some driven by operations, and some by development. But everyone in the organization can benefit from a deeper understanding of how applications are used. Andreas talks about the diversity of metrics that can be taken, from you...
Oct 07, 2015•36 min•Ep. 441
Well, that's it - ARIN is out of IPv4 addresses. Richard chats with Ed Horley who has been warning of this day for a number of years now. So what does it really mean? No, the internet isn't going to stop working. Ed talks about how much IPv6 is already going on - some ISPs have double-digit adoption already! And certain marketplaces need it the most, such as smartphones. There are billions of smartphones, and the Internet of Things looks to bring many more billions of devices online as well... w...
Sep 30, 2015•37 min•Ep. 440
Windows 10 has shipped - but has it really, really shipped? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about his take on Microsoft's on-going efforts to get the operating system just right. After some history discussion about how Windows 10 came to be, from Vista on up, Paul digs into the truth of the matter - Windows 10 isn't quite done yet, it's fine for consumers, but IT Pros need to look carefully. It's a powerful operating system that alongside the upcoming Server 2016 should be able to take infrastr...
Sep 23, 2015•33 min•Ep. 439
Docker is coming to Windows and it's going to be huge! Richard chats with Taylor Brown of the Windows Core Virtualization team about the new Windows Server containers coming in Server 2016. With the TP3 release of Server 2016, you can start experimenting with Windows Containers! The discussion also focuses on the upcoming Hyper-V Containers, and the differences and reasoning behind having two different types of containers. Taylor digs into the focus on configuration-as-code for containers, so th...
Sep 16, 2015•32 min•Ep. 438
So where is remote access going these days? Richard talks to Richard Hicks about Microsoft DirectAccess and more. Recognizing that VPNs don't make people happy, Richard Hicks talks about how DirectAccess did a good job of making remote connectivity seamless and invisible - at the price of being a challenge to set up in the first place. Having your remote access roles as isolated VMs in your network has distinct advantages! However, the domain join requirement is a significant limitation, and one...
Sep 09, 2015•33 min•Ep. 437
Have you looked at everything available in an Office 365 subscription? It's easy to stop at Exchange or SharePoint online, but what about the services side of Office 365 including OneDrive for Business and Azure Active Directory Applications. Office 365 is more than just the Office suite in the cloud, there are APIs available to allow developer to build mash-up style applications that integrate with Exchange, SharePoint (both on-prem and cloud) as well as a huge number of third party application...
Sep 02, 2015•37 min•Ep. 436
So how interesting can power management be? More than you might believe! Richard chats with Microsoft PM Joao Botto about how Surface has taken power management to a new level. While it's easy to just think about power management as a tool to reduce company power consumption over night, when you get into the tablet space, it's also about conserving battery life. Joao talks about Connected Standby mode, which utilizes hardware, drivers, operating system and software together to minimize power con...
Aug 26, 2015•34 min•Ep. 435
Ready to manage Azure from the command line? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard chatted with Brian Lewis about the PowerShell support available for Azure. Every command and more available in the Azure GUI Dashboard works from PowerShell. Brian talks about the advantages of using scripting to control Azure, creating repeatable, consistent execution plans through scripts for all sorts of configuration changes, including creating new VMs, configuring networking and activating serv...
Aug 19, 2015•32 min•Ep. 434
How do you build a data warehouse in Azure? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard sat down with Michael Blumenthal to talk through a particular case study. Michael talks about the early days of Azure, and how for this particular project, Azure was used only as a VM host - entirely an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution. Using SQL Server and Integration Services, the system gathered data from a number of disparate systems and loaded into separate databases. Then the consolidation!...
Aug 12, 2015•31 min•Ep. 433
Ready for a new version of Desired State Configuration (DSC)? Richard chats with Don Jones about the second version of DSC, although it's bundled as part of The Windows Management Framework 5.0. Don discusses the evolving nature of server management and DSC's role in it, and how the tools need to improve to manage your scripts and configuration files. The conversation also turns to testing, and the tool Pester on GitHub as the ideal way to do testing for PowerShell. Don also suggests that if you...
Aug 05, 2015•34 min•Ep. 432
How do you provide granular administrative privileges to junior administrators? Richard talks to Mark Minasi about the idea of Just Enough Administration (JEA). And it's not just for junior administration - the conversation dives into this idea that administrators should be domain users most of the time, and only elevate their privileges for specific tasks. JEA helps you organize privilege sets for those tasks so that you have no more capability than necessary. Administrator accounts are the hot...
Jul 29, 2015•35 min•Ep. 431
Is ITIL still relevant in a cloud-centric world? Carroll Moon says yes! Richard talks to Carroll about his work building out the service management infrastructure of Office 365 and how those learnings can apply to your organization as it moves to the cloud. Carroll focuses first and foremost on monitoring - until you can see how your applications are operating in real time, other DevOps-type improvements are hard to quantify. And the instrumentation needed should be going down to the client, jus...
Jul 22, 2015•34 min•Ep. 430
How do you filter spam and malware for your mail server? Richard chats with Peter Schmidt about Exchange Online Protection (EOP). Remember Forefront? This is where the product went, into the cloud. As an Azure product, EOP is available when you use Exchange Online - but you can also put it in front of your on-premise Exchange server at a stunning price of one dollar per user per month. Peter discusses the spam and malware filtering, but EOP also offers mail proxying in general so that your mail ...
Jul 15, 2015•36 min•Ep. 429
Are you ready for Windows 10? Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the impending release of Windows 10. Mark talks about the new features of Windows 10 that will make you happy you're upgrading, including Universal Apps (no really, they're good!), the new store mechanism and the new browser - Edge. This leads to a conversation about managing updates, browser compatibility and keeping your business environment stable. Not everything will be ready in July, but the upgrades will be ongoing through ...
Jul 08, 2015•45 min•Ep. 428
Desired State Configuration and SQL Server? Richard talks to Patrick Curran about using DSC for more than just setting up a web farm. In fact, Patrick uses DSC to set up an entire SharePoint infrastructure - including SQL Server! And that is the tricky bit, since SQL Server isn't quite as PowerShell friendly as IIS. Patrick talks about battling the SQL PowerShell bits which sometime install, sometimes not so much - ultimately you're better off using SQL internal scripting for a reliable install....
Jul 01, 2015•30 min•Ep. 427
Does your organization need Yammer? Richard talks to Chris Poteet about the whys and hows of Yammer. The conversation starts out on the why of Yammer - what does this tool bring to the table? There are lots of pseudo-social-media products out there for the enterprise, but they only work if people use them. But Yammer's approach makes it familiar and easy to have conversations within the organization that can be searched and shared. Chris then digs into the install process: There almost isn't one...
Jun 24, 2015•32 min•Ep. 426
How does Microsoft use SharePoint? Richard chats with MS IT SharePoint Server owner Jared Shockley about how Microsoft uses SharePoint internally. As it turns out, Jared has been part of the team moving Microsoft SharePoint sites into Office 365 - according to him, 93% of the on-premise sites are now in the cloud! The last 7% represent the tricky bits. Serious customizations are the main issue, and the mechanisms for customizing SharePoint on-premise are very different from SharePoint in Office ...
Jun 17, 2015•37 min•Ep. 425
An update on Windows update? Richard talks to PFE Robert Smith about the announcements coming out of build around how Windows will be updated going forward. No more rollups! Well, almost. The conversation digs into the on-going evolution of updating Windows, the lack of Service Packs (and their meaning), rollups, hotfixes, and so on. As Terry Myerson said on stage at Ignite, for unmanaged environments, updating is going to be far more automatic. If you run a strict update environment with WSUS, ...
Jun 10, 2015•33 min•Ep. 424
What burning questions do you have about SQL Server? Richard moderates a panel discussion with Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar and a host of other folks at the SQL Intersection conference in Scottsdale Arizona. Taking questions from the audience, which are sometimes answered by other audience members (who happened to be speakers and/or Microsoft employees), the conversation ranges over SQL 2016, indexing, high availability, federation, data types, query governors and more!
Jun 03, 2015•56 min•Ep. 423
PAL is growing up! After a few months of rest from publishing his book Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide, Richard talks to creator Clint Huffman about the latest update to PAL - Performance Analysis of Logs. PAL helps you sort out PerfMon to understand your performance problems in all sorts of Microsoft products. Clint has added a new auto-detect feature to check through your perfmon log file and know what profiles from PAL to pull in. And the latest features is the PAL Collector tool, wh...
May 27, 2015•32 min•Ep. 422
Rights Management in the Cloud? Richard talks to Morgan Simonsen about Azure Rights Management. Azure RMS works with Office 2010-13 and a variety of other applications to provide rights like read-only, modifiable, even limit viewing times - as well as letting you know when secured docs are viewed. And it can work outside of your systems as well, through Azure Active Directory. For other applications, there is the general RMS service that handles text files and images at portal.aadrm.com. It does...
May 20, 2015•32 min•Ep. 421
So what happened at Ignite? Stephen Rose chats with Richard about the keynotes, sessions and announcements at Ignite. One of the biggest shows Microsoft has ever done, more than 22,000 people soaked up a huge amount of knowledge over a week in Chicago. Stephen also talks about the upcoming Mobility Transformed Tour around the US in May and June 2015!
May 13, 2015•32 min•Ep. 420
Are Public Folders evil? Peter Schmidt says no! Richard chats with Peter about Modern Public Folders that come with Exchange 2013. Treated more like regular mailboxes (only BIGGER), the public folders in Exchange 2013 are much easier for the administrator to handle while being essentially the same as far as the users are concerned. The migration is a bit tricky, but you can do it on-premise as well as to Office 365. Peter has a great video about migrating to 2013 public folders from NICConf. Che...
May 06, 2015•34 min•Ep. 419
How do you tune your stored procedures? While visiting Kim Tripp at her home, Richard chats with her about her approach to turning stored procedures. The conversation starts out focused on query plans, which applies to all sorts of things, but stored procedures have some special foibles around parameter sets and recompilation - there are good techniques and bad! Kim also digs into session parameters. If you've ever had a stored procedure that performed great in Management Studio but sucked out i...
Apr 29, 2015•37 min•Ep. 418
How do you manage your SQL Servers? Richard talks to Boris Hristov about using Policy-Based Management tools in SQL Server. These tools have been in the box since SQL Server 2008, but it's amazing how many folks still don't use them - are you really RDPing into every SQL Server? Hristov talks about using the Policy-Based Management tools to sweep across all of your SQL Servers and check what various settings are at - and change them if you need to! The conversation also digs into creating a Cent...
Apr 22, 2015•34 min•Ep. 417
So what does it take to live stream the largest sporting events in the world? Richard chats with Ian Philpot, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft, about his work troubleshooting streaming issues for events like the Winter Olympics in Sochi, 2014 FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl XLIX. Of course it takes a team to make a project like this happen, and Phil talks about the entire service chain, from NBC's broadcast to iStreamPlanet to Azure Media Serviecs, Akamai and Adobe's Primetime Player. The conve...
Apr 15, 2015•32 min•Ep. 416
Are you looking at Chef for deploying your infrastructure yet? Steven Murawski is back to talk about the latest development in Chef, including his role as the Community Software Development Engineer. Chef integrates with DSC and PowerShell to make managing your Windows instances and everything else much simpler when you roll out applications. Steven also talks about Chef going all open source, with some paid services if you need them. You should check it out!
Apr 08, 2015•32 min•Ep. 415
How fast can you analyze incoming data? Richard talks to Scott Klein about Azure Stream Analytics. Scott discusses how stream analytics is different from data warehousing, being an additional "near real time" service you can add to your application infrastructure to let you react faster to business opportunities. The conversation digs into gradual adoption of stream analytics, taking small bites into the new technology to give your applications and services new capabilities without having to go ...
Apr 01, 2015•37 min•Ep. 414
Virtualization at Microsoft continues to evolve! Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the on-going evolution of virtualization and the options available in Azure to use it. It's not just about Azure-hosted virtual machines any more! The conversation ranges over a number of Azure technologies in use today, including Active Directory. You need AD in the cloud to make your hybrid infrastructure work effectively, but it does take time to figure out all the options. Aidan also talks about Microsoft Az...
Mar 25, 2015•36 min•Ep. 413
