Ronni Pedersen's Blog Site: Windows Vista

Windows Vista Interactive Virtual Roundtable with Mark Russinovich

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:31:12 GMT

Join Mark Russinovich and a panel of experts at 9:00 A.M. Pacific Time, March 5th for a live, interactive discussion on adopting Windows Vista into a desktop infrastructure. The panel will feature subject-matter experts and IT pros from around the world who have tackled Windows Vista deployment—hear about the challenges, workarounds, and tips & tricks they have learned along the way. Ask your questions live during the event or e-mail your question in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com. The panel will answer as many questions as they can during the 60-minute event so take advantage of this opportunity to ask the experts and find out what you want to know about Windows Vista adoption.

For access to guidance, resources, tools, and straight-talk articles today, visit the Springboard Series for Windows Vista.

Source: Arlindo's Blog

Vista - Windows Meeting Space

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:13:28 GMT

Did you know ? Windows Vista Meeting Space requires IPv6.
So next time someone say that they dont use IPv6, they might need it anyway...

New command line for using Terminal Services Client (mstsc.exe)

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:30:35 GMT

The new switch to connect to the server's active console session is:
mstsc.exe /admin
The old /console doesn't work anymore!

BitLocker Drive Encryption Design and Deployment Guides

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:44:13 GMT

The Windows BitLocker Design and Deployment guides describe the various aspects of planning for deploying Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption for Windows Vista Enterprise and Windows Vista Ultimate computers in an enterprise environment. The document is organized in two guides, and you should carefully consider each guide before you deploy BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption Design Guide
This guide provides a systematic approach when planning for BitLocker deployment and highlights the main decision points. This guide is intended for use by an infrastructure specialist or system architect. It assumes that you have a good understanding of how BitLocker and TPM work on a functional level.

Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption Deployment Guide
This guide provides detailed instructions on how to prepare Windows Vista images for BitLocker and how to deploy BitLocker in an enterprise environment. This guide is intended for use by a deployment specialist or deployment team. It assumes that you have a good understanding of how automated Windows deployment, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) schema extension, and Group Policy works.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=41ba0cf0-57d6-4c38-9743-b7f4ddbe25cd&displaylang=en&tm

Windows Vista Pre-Build VHD available for download

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:32:33 GMT

Download the Windows Vista pre-configured virtual hard drive and get a head start on testing applications on Windows Vista.

Overview
For organizations with complex desktop infrastructures, whether large or small, Windows Vista Enterprise is the operating system designed specifically to help realize a better return on IT investments. In this VHD, you'll have the opportunity to road-test new and improved features including management (e.g. MUI, BDD, etc…) usability (e.g. Search, Navigation, etc…) and security (UAC, Windows Defender, etc…), enhancements to the Windows Vista platform.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Vista; Windows XP

A virtualization product that supports the VHD format is required to use this virtual machine. Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual Server are provided for free and can be used with these VHD based virtual machines. Please refer to the Virtual Server 2005 R2 System requirements page here.
In addition to the System Requirements for the virtualization product, you will need additional disk and memory resources for running the virtual machine. This VHD is pre-configured to use approximately 10GB of hard disk space and approximately 1024 MB of memory.

SoftGrid for Windows Vista

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 07:58:06 GMT

On July 1st, MS will release an update to SoftGrid that will add support for Windows Vista. SoftGrid, a part of the Desktop Optimisation Pack (Software Assurance customers only) is an application virtualisation and streaming solution that resolves issues surrounding software deployment:

Application compatibility issues
Regression testing
Self service
Rapid deployment

For further informantion on SoftGrid, check http://www.microsoft.com/softgrid/

Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 Released

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:54:04 GMT

The final version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 are now released. If you are already familiar with ACT 5.0 make sure you download the new bits and the refreshed product guide here. If you want to learn more about the tools and resources around application compatibility for Windows Vista - please visit our TechNet site.

For people new to ACT, it is a single toolset that can help detect, diagnose, and mitigate compatibility issues found in Windows Vista. I think the single coolest feature of this tool is that you can deploy it in your current environment, Windows 2000 or Windows XP and get an inventory of your applications and see how they'll work with Windows Vista. Other highlights include the Standard User Analyzer (SUA) tool; there have been many changes made to improve overall security and reliability in Windows Vista, and this tool looks for possible issues resulting from those changes for users running as Standard Users, which is what every user in a business environment should be in this new paradigm we’ve delivered. There’s also the new Internet Explorer 7 Test Tool to test apps for use with the latest version of Internet Explorer, and the Setup Analysis Tool which detects any issues your setup packages might have with installing on Windows Vista. Finally, IT Pros can use the new and improved Compatibility Administrator to pull compatibility fixes from a database of existing fixes and apply them to apps one-by-one, or in predefined groups.

Overall, this toolkit is going to be a huge timesaver for the IT Pro community and a great resource for developers to analyze and test their apps. Even if you are just starting to think about planning or deploying Windows Vista, you should download ACT 5.0 and start taking an inventory of your current environment so can scope your workload and be ready to go when the time is right for your company.

Download ACT 5.0 now