Redmondmag.com

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Redmondmag.com

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Foley: Microsoft Spreading Itself Too Thin? 80
NOVEMBER 2007
REDMONDMAG.COM
The
Greene-ing
of VMware
Diane Greene leads
virtualization
into a new era. 40
7
25274 867 27
1
11 >
NOVEMBER • $5.95
2007 ASBPE
Award Winner
Best Editorial
Best Feature
+
Beta Man Gives ‘Katmai’ a Thumbs Up
How Big Is Your Carbon Footprint?
14
64
The Top 5 Tricks for Word and PowerPoint
49
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Redmond
2007 Winner for Best Single Issue
Computers/Software, Training
& Program Development/Trade
The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community
Contents
N O V E M B E R 2 007
REDMOND REPORT
COV E R STO RY
To
Virtualization
and Beyond
VMware’s Diane Greene is on a quest to make
server virtualization ubiquitous.
11
12 Marathon Offers
Low-Cost Fault
Tolerance Solution
14 Beta Man
SQL Server 2008: ‘Katmai’
Page 40
F E AT U R E S
Longhorn’s Terminal
Services: The
Server Manager
Page 49
49 Top 5 Tricks for Word
and PowerPoint
These flagship Office 2007 apps have
some interesting new functions, if you
know where to look.
59
Unix: The 64-Bit
Gold Standard
Page 59
6
Many say it will be years before
64-bit Windows becomes a
serious challenger.
64 Manage Your
Carbon Footprint
COLUMNS
Barney’s Rubble:
Doug Barney
Super PCs Deserve a
Super OS
Page 64
The growing importance of energy
efficiency gives IT a leadership role in
the enterprise.
REVIEWS
Product Reviews
19 LinkScanner Pro Keeps Your Computer Safe
Track computer exploits and learn how they work through LinkScanner Pro and the
Exploit Prevention Labs Web site.
Reader Review
21 Outlook 2007 Gets Mixed Reviews
While most readers like Microsoft’s latest e-mail client, some say it’s still not
ready for prime time.
Redmond Roundup
29 Automating the Desktop
Making your job easier, one tool at a time.
16 Mr. Roboto:
Jeffery Hicks
Power Up Your
GPO Management
70 Windows Insider:
Greg Shields
VM Within a VM
74 Security Advisor:
Joern Wettern
The Weakest Link
80 Foley on Microsoft:
Mary Jo Foley
Spreading Itself Too Thin?
A L S O I N T H I S I S S U E 4 Redmondmag.com | 8 [email protected] | 78 Ad and Editorial Indexes
COVER PHOTO BY RYAN NOTCH
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Redmondmag.com
NOVEMBER 2007
RedDevNews.com
Q&A: Programming in
the Multi-Core Age
W
hen it comes to multi-core processing, Intel Corp.’s
James Reinders
James Reinders says the time to move is now: “My
analogy is, if you thought someone might be coming over to your house but
you weren’t sure, would you pick it up and clean it up a little bit? Well, if you
had a serial processor, you would wait until the doorbell rang to clean your
house up. And you’d hang a little sign on the front door that says ‘Please wait,
I’m cleaning the house up.’”
Read more of Reinders’ perspective (including tips and tools for a smooth
transition) in this RDN Q&A. FindIT code: RDNQRein
You can also catch up with RDN’s past Q&As, including luminaries like
John A. Zachman, C. Wayne Ratliff, Anders Hejlsberg, Dan Bricklin and
many others. FindIT code: RDN Q&A
Redmondmag.com Special Report
Storage Management
in the New Millenium
T
here’s more (and cheaper) options for storage every day. But there’s
also more to store—and more risk if something goes wrong.
Experts say there’s nothing more important when creating a new storage
architecture than planning. “It’s about prioritization more than anything,”
comments Jason Buffington, senior technical product manager at
Microsoft’s Windows Storage Solutions Division.
See what else Buffington and the other storage gurus we interviewed
have to say about the future of IT storage in this Redmondmag.com special
report. FindIT code: StorMil
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What shortcomings of DFS
Paul Marsala
should admins be aware of?
DFS lacks a central feature important
for collaboration: file locking. Also, DFS
replication typically works on a single
threaded, “pull” process, so sync tasks
can “queue” up and create a backlog—
another time delay.
What’s the biggest misconception
admins have about file replication?
That it’s easy. Introduce real-time
replication and multiply a bunch of
processes across an enterprise and what
may have seemed simple no longer is.
Your company says to “Think Enterprise.
Act Peer.” Explain.
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4 | November 2007 | Redmond | Redmondmag.com |
Project2
7/16/07
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Page 1
Access Begins with Identity
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“SafeWord is just about the
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©2007 Secure Computing Corporation. All Rights reserved. All trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.
1107red_Rubble6.v7
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Page 6
Barney’sRubble
by Doug Barney
Redmond
THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF THE MICROSOFT IT COMMUNITY
R E D M O N D M AG .CO M
N OV E M B E R 2 0 07
Super PCs Deserve a Super OS
■
VO L . 1 3
■
N O. 1 1
Editor in Chief Doug Barney
Editor Ed Scannell
Executive Editor, Features Lafe Low
Executive Editor, Reviews Peter Varhol
Managing Editor Wendy Gonchar
F
or decades Moore’s law stood and the density of
transistors doubled every two years—just like Gordon
predicted 30 years ago.
But even as we regularly doubled our
transistor counts, the chips remained
based on a monolithic, single microprocessor model.
Now the hardware geniuses are
adding some
pretty wild twists.
We all know
about multi-core
processors (an
area where AMD
has been nicely
assertive). By
2015, Intel says it
could have processors boasting hundreds of cores.
The graphics
chipmakers are
doing even wilder work. NVIDIA
recently announced a new line of Tesla
boards (I’m not sure if these are named
after the bad ’80s hair band or the inventor of the AC/DC current) that come
with as many as 128 parallel processors.
My annoyance is overshadowing my
excitement. Software historically has been
able to sap the strength of the fastest new
chips. But let’s face it. Much of this software was bloatware doing things we
never asked it to do in the first place.
Now hardware is firmly in the lead.
Even the cycle-sucking combo of
Windows and Office will have a hard
time stressing an AMD quad-core,
Tesla-equipped PC.
Unfortunately, my last point is purely
theoretical. Right now, Windows is
designed mostly to exploit our old style
of processing. To truly exploit PC-style
supercomputing, brush up on your C
programming skills. Many of these sys-
tems are built for scientists and engineers who don’t mind getting down and
dirty with code.
Microsoft can
solve this problem,
but it involves
changing the very
way software is
written against
Windows. First it
has to get over its
fear of 64-bit and
go nuts supporting
state-of-the-art
processors. And not
just Opterons and
What would
Athlons and ItaniCray say?
ums (remember
that one?), but the
Power6 processor,
which can now boast the world’s fastest
microprocessor and drives the fastest
server and supercomputer as well.
Microsoft, especially Microsoft
Research, is working on these problems.
These efforts seem way more aimed at
specialized applications, rather than
transforming the fundamental way
Windows works with back-end hardware.
However, there are companies built to
solve this. Google recently bought
PeakStream (perhaps to optimize its
own server farms). While I don’t see
Google apps as a threat to Redmond, if
it can promote a PeakStream API to
developers, our old friend Windows
could be very much under siege.
Whether Google or Microsoft take the
plunge, either way we may eventually be
able to reinvent what PCs are capable of!
What kind of computer power are you
jonesin’ for? Let us all know by writing
[email protected]. —
Associate Managing Editor Katrina Carrasco
Editor, Redmondmag.com Becky Nagel
Online News Editor Keith Ward
Associate Editor, Web Gladys Rama
Contributing Editors Mary Jo Foley
Jeffery Hicks
Greg Shields
Joern Wettern
Art Director Brad Zerbel
Senior Graphic Designer Alan Tao
President Henry Allain
VP, Publishing Matt N. Morollo
VP, Editorial Director Doug Barney
VP, Conferences Tim G. Smith
Director, Marketing Michele Imgrund
Executive Editor, Michael Domingo
New Media
Executive Editor, Becky Nagel
Web Initiatives
Director, Rita Zurcher
Web Development
Senior Marketing Tracy S. Cook
Manager
Marketing Programs Videssa Djucich
Manager
President & CEO Neal Vitale
CFO Richard Vitale
Executive VP Michael J. Valenti
Managing Director, Dick Blouin
Events
VP, Financial William H. Burgin
Planning & Analysis
VP, Finance & Christopher M. Coates
Administration
VP, Audience Marketing Abraham M. Langer
& Web Operations
VP, Erik Lindgren
Information Technology
VP, Print & Mary Ann Paniccia
Online Production
Chairman of the Board Jeffrey S. Klein
Reaching the Staff
Editors can be reached via e-mail, fax, telephone or mail.
A list of editors and contact information is available at
Redmondmag.com.
E-mail: E-mail is routed to individuals’ desktops. Please use the
following form: [email protected].
Do not include a middle name or middle initials.
Telephone: The switchboard is open weekdays 8:30 a.m.
to 5:30 p.m. Pacific Time. After 5:30 p.m. you’ll be directed
to individual extensions.
Irvine Office 949-265-1520; Fax 949-265-1528
Framingham Office 508-875-6644; Fax 508-875-6633
Corporate Office 818-734-1520; Fax 818-734-1528
The opinions expressed within the articles and other contents
herein do not necessarily express those of the publisher.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN TAO
Project2
7/16/07
2:18 PM
A
nyone who has given birth to an Exchange
network knows it can get sick and needs
some nursing to stay healthy. In fact, 72%
of Exchange Administrators surveyed* have
“experienced” an Exchange disaster (feels
like the flu)—usually from improper feeding
and care.
Like many databases, constant adding and
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so it eventually turns sour. Replicating,
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You may have tried the free utilities to fix
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“GOexchange corrected 2,264 errors
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In addition to fixing the database,
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end result is increased performance and
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that’s 31 to 55% smaller! Combine this
with archiving and the database is up to 91%
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“..our information stores were reduced
“Without routine maintenance,
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ER
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Page 1
Dale Huitt, Systems Lead
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First, GOexchange is easy to setup and use.
Twenty minutes—that’s all it takes to get
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The software notifies the users, validates
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a comprehensive system analysis and
diagnostics, logs the errors, and notifies you
if it discovers a “stop” error—then it repairs
and defragments the database, generates a
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You can do some of this work yourself, but
why waste time doing repetitive maintenance,
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Why not call now, or visit our resource
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Go to: www.Lucid8.com/GoRED
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Copyright © 2007 Lucid8. All rights reserved. Microsoft® Exchange Server is a registered trademark of Microsoft® Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. * Refers to Survey conducted by Lucid8. See press release for more details.
1107red_Letters8.v4
10/16/07
10:39 AM
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[email protected]
Not at Home with Windows Home Server
Regarding Mary Jo Foley’s August 2007 column (“Microsoft’s
iPhone?”) I’m really curious where Microsoft thinks they’re
going with Windows Home Server (WHS). I mean, do they really
think they’re going to enable everything in ASUS gear for less
than $200? I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to be able to do that.
So, what do they bring to the table? Maybe digital rights
management (DRM) and proprietary formats. This sounds more
like something they would sell to content providers rather than
content users (who certainly don’t want DRM, as they obviously
don’t care about proprietary formats yet). Maybe it’s another run
at the “set-top box”?
I suppose they could sell this on the
basis that it’s a home server for people
that don’t know much about networking. My ASUS box was pretty simple
to set up, but I also know to change
the default SSID and enable encryption on my wireless router, so that puts
me way ahead technically of most people. (I have a friend whose exact words
were “I have wireless?” Yes, and it’s
wide open and unencrypted.) Maybe
this is being targeted.
Still, someone is going to have to
know where to plug the cable. I guess
my point is, if you know about the concept of servers, you will be beyond
WHS from the get-go. Just buy a NAS
and be done with it.
Hans Fairchild
Paso Robles, Calif.
I enjoyed Foley’s article about WHS. I
have a question, though, with Windows
Server 2003 and the like: You create a
domain and then on the desktop PC
you go into the Control Panel, click on
“System” and then “Computer Name”
to add the PC to the domain. However,
Windows XP Home Edition and
Windows Vista Home Standard and
Home Premium don’t have the ability
to connect to a domain. My question
is: How would one connect to WHS?
Do you have to have XP Professional
or a version of Vista other than the
Home versions?
If so, I can’t see a home user spending
the money to upgrade their desktops
and then buying WHS. Perhaps WHS
has an upgrade that you run on the
Home versions to give them the ability
to connect to WHS.
Can you imagine the uproar from
users of any of the Windows Home
versions should they buy WHS only to
find out that they can’t use it because
their version of Windows won’t conNeil Ragone
nect to it?
Titusville, Fla.
Hot Debate over Certs
One more thought about the value of a
cert [see “Redmond’s Top 10 Hot Certs
for 2008” (September 2007)]:
There’s a huge spectrum of
topics to consider when
trying to become a
valuable developer.
What do you focus
on first? Certs can
provide a useful syllabus for organizing
and directing your selfstudy as well as a barometer
for judging progress. Leverage the
“Skills Being Measured” section from
the Preparation Guide for each
Microsoft cert by using it to keep track
of the vast amount of vocab, notes and
code that you’ll gather while studying.
Properly harvested, these breadcrumbs
can then be presented to potential new
employers as real and detailed evidence
of what you have done and can do.
Greg Pugh
Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Where’s VMware Certified Professional
(VCP)? You’re telling me—with all the
talk about virtualization—that VCP isn’t
even listed? While I understand that this
magazine is Microsoft-centric, if you’re
going to include CCNP then you should
also include VCP. Like it or not,
VMware is here to stay and Microsoft
has no comparable product to VMware
Doug Smith
Infrastructure 3—yet.
Upstate New York
As for Microsoft Certs,
you missed some that
are hard to get and very
valuable: the Microsoft
Dynamics Certifications
for Dynamics GP and
Dynamics CRM or
Dynamics AX.
Curt Spanburgh
San Diego, Calif.
Project3
8/6/07
4:16 PM
Page 1
MULTIPLY MOBILE SECURITY
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Deploy security upgrades to notebooks remotely, even if they’re powered off.* Automatically isolate an
infected notebook before it infects other devices. With 64-bit capable Intel Centrino Pro processor technology,
powered by the Intel® Core™2 Duo processor, you multiply your power to manage your systems.
Learn more about why great business computing starts with Intel inside. Visit intel.com/centrinopro
*Intel® Active Management Technology requires the platform to have an enabled chipset with connection to a power source and corporate network. Capabilities may be limited on battery power, hibernating or
powered off. Learn more at intel.com/technology/manage/iamt/ ©2007 Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel. Leap ahead., Intel. Leap ahead. Logo, Intel Centrino, Centrino, Intel Core and Core Inside are trademarks
of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.
Project5
10/8/07
11:07 AM
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1107red_RedReport11-14.v5
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RedmondReport
Longhorn’s Terminal Services:
The Server Manager
Simplifying the installation and configuration of Windows Server 2008.
By Greg Shields
This is the second installment of a five-part
series by contributing editor Greg Shields,
which takes a close look at Microsoft’s
upcoming Windows Server 2008 operating
system, commonly referred to as Longhorn.
This installment examines the new capabilities of Terminal Services.
If you’ve played with Windows Server
2008 at all, you’ve likely noticed its new
Server Manager. Although a little complicated to get used to, where Server
Manager shines is in its centralization of
much of the installation and initial configuration of Server 2008 services.
Server Manager is brought up on the
initial logon by an administrator or by
right-clicking Computer and choosing
Manage. If you’re used to the old Computer Manager screen you’ve seen since
the Windows of old, this one will strike
you in how different it really is. To
enable Terminal Services, you need to
first right-click the top Server Manager
node and select Add Role.
Server 2008 does a much better job
than previous versions of Windows in
terms of componentizing the various
Citrix Published Apps
in Terminal Services
The Drive to
Longhorn
port that role. Often, a Role requires
one or more Role Services as dependencies before it can be installed. Each
Role also has a number of Features that
can augment that role. For our example, we see the following:
• Role: Terminal Services
• Role Services: Terminal Services,
TS Licensing, TS Session Broker,
TS Gateway and TS Web Access
• Features: TS RemoteApp Manager
In order to enable a minimal installation of Terminal Services, you’ll need to
enable the Terminal Services Role and
Role Service as well as the TS Licensing Role Service. If you want to manage
remote applications, you’ll need to
enable the TS RemoteApp Manager.
It sounds complicated, but the engine
does a relatively good job of telling you
which components must be installed for
the Role to function as you want.
TS RemoteApp adds the ability to publish a specific application to
your users. Combined with TS Web Access, you’ll see that this new
functionality is Server 2008’s killer feature.
Windows services you would normally
install onto a server. If you don’t enable
the service, the bits aren’t there. This
helps reduce the attack surface of the
server and increases its security profile.
Services are now broken down into
Roles, Role Services and Features, with
Roles generally encompassing “what
you want the server to do” and Role
Services being the processes that sup-
Once the initial installation is complete, Server Manager will contain our
old friends Terminal Services Manager
and Terminal Services Configuration,
as well as the new menu item TS
RemoteApp Manager. Unlike previous
versions of Windows, where we had to
go to multiple places to manage our Terminal Server configuration, nearly all of
it’s done now within this single interface.
For years one of the biggest draws to the
Citrix platform has been its ability to
securely publish not only Windows
desktops, but seamless Windows applications as well. Now with Server 2008,
you get that functionality in the box and
for no extra charge.
TS RemoteApp adds the ability to
publish a specific application to your
users. Combined with the TS Web
Access functionality that we’ll talk
about in the final part of this series,
you’ll see that this new functionality is
Server 2008’s killer feature. If anything,
this alone may drive your upgrade to
Server 2008 faster than any other.
What is TS RemoteApp? Add the
Terminal Server role to your Server
2008 system, then the TS RemoteApp
Manager Feature. You’ll see a new configuration window in Server Manager
that gives you the ability to identify the
initial executable for common applications and then create RemoteApps from
them. From this configuration screen,
you can publish those applications to a
Web page using TS Web Access. This
means your users need only go to their
Web Access Web page to get all of their
applications and they’ll appear like
they’re running locally. The result looks
more-or-less exactly like Citrix’s implementation of Seamless Windows.
To create a new RemoteApp, simply
right-click on the TS RemoteApp Manager and choose Add RemoteApps. All
installed applications on your system
that can be enumerated via WMI will be
displayed for you to select. If your application isn’t listed, you can click the
Browse button to select an application
or customize an existing one with execution switches. Click Finish to complete.
| Redmondmag.com | Redmond | November 2007 | 11
10/16/07
10:41 AM
Page 12
RedmondReport
Once the application is created, there
are four ways to deploy that application
to users. First, as discussed above, you
can publish that app through TS Web
Access. You can also create and deploy
an .RDP file or install it via an .MSI
file. Lastly, you can associate a filename extension with a RemoteApp.
Interestingly enough, the GUI for the
RDC currently doesn’t support connecting to a RemoteApp unless you
double-click a pre-generated .RDP file.
But, using a combination of the mechanisms above, you can deploy applications behind the scenes to your users
and centralize your application support
back on your Terminal Servers.
the same interface for printer properties
they’ve always seen with their local
driver. In fact, the UI used to configure
that printer is actually run from the
client machine. Clicking print creates
an XPS print job on the server that is
pushed down to the client.
Now, obviously there are going to be
some environments where this isn’t the
optimum configuration. If the print
server is close in network proximity to
the Terminal Server instead of the
client, then that job will need to tra-
verse the network twice. Citrix has a
built-in mechanism for configuring
local printing on the Citrix server for
these sorts of scenarios. But for most
configurations, the printer is usually
located right next to the client and away
from the Terminal Server. So, most of
us will appreciate this new feature. —
Greg Shields ([email protected]),
MCSE: Security, CCEA, is a principal consultant for 3t Systems (www.3tsystems.com)
in Denver, Colo.
Easy Print Is Easy
Marathon Offers Low-Cost
Fault Tolerance Solution
No matter how users traditionally got
their applications, printing and printer
drivers have long been the bane of
Terminal Services administrators. The
pain of keeping the right drivers on the
right servers—while hoping and praying
that none of them would cause the
dreaded blue screen of death—has kept
many an admin awake at night. With
previous versions of Terminal Services, it
was critical that the device driver on the
server matched the one installed on the
client. With driver names all over the
place, ensuring that one-to-one mapping
was correct often ended up in failure.
With Windows Vista and Server 2008,
a big portion of this pain goes away. In
Server 2008’s Terminal Services, the
administrator no longer needs to install
drivers onto the Terminal Server. This
functionality works due to the incorporation of the new XPS print path built
into Vista. That print path, combined
with the ability to redirect the printer
device down to the client, means that
the user can utilize their local print
drivers to print to remote printers.
Because the XPS print path is available
by default on every Vista client, print
jobs can be redirected with a maximum
amount of confidence.
What does this look like to the client?
When a client uses Vista to connect to a
Server 2008 Terminal Server and clicks
to view their print properties, they’ll see
By Peter Varhol
n a unique combination of fault tolerant computing and virtualization,
Littleton, Mass.-based Marathon
Technologies Corp. has developed a
low-cost fault tolerant solution that utilizes standard hardware while supporting virtualized servers. The company’s
technology stretches a virtualization
layer across two identical servers running Windows Server. This layer takes
any interaction with the OS or its application and duplicates it across the two
servers. Also, server processors run in
lockstep with each other, thereby
returning identical results simultaneously. If one server fails at any point,
the results from the second server are
used alone.
Marathon owns several patents on
the technology behind enabling the
processors on separate servers to
execute in lockstep. Think about it: If
one of the servers goes down, not a
single processor cycle is lost. Most
fault tolerant solutions work by doubling up on system hardware, but are
unable to maintain accuracy down to
the level of a single processor cycle in
the event of a failure.
This is impressive, but it’s not where
the virtualization comes in. At the
recent VMworld conference, Marathon
won the Best of VMworld Award for
I
New Technology. This technology,
called everRun for XenSource’s
XenEnterprise v4, provides the ability
to do the same level of fault tolerance
not across two physical servers, but
across two separate virtual machines
(VMs). Those VMs run on two separate servers, so that if one fails, the VM
running on the second physical server
provides the same processor cycle
accuracy for the running applications.
This also works for multiple VMs
running on one physical server, paired
with identical VMs running on another
physical server, or the collection of
paired VMs that can be running on
several different servers. Marathon’s
everRun requires a dedicated gigabit
Ethernet connection between the two
servers and a guaranteed 10ms
response time across the connection.
This means that the physical servers
can be geographically separate.
Marathon officials say the longest distance between servers in a customer
deployment is about 100 miles.
Perhaps the best news is that
Microsoft considers those paired identical Windows Server installations,
executing in lockstep, to be a single
Windows Server license. The Windows
Server installation is actually the same
instance, duplicated across separate
physical boxes.
Project3
4/16/07
2:56 PM
Page 1
10/16/07
10:41 AM
Page 14
RedmondReport
BetaMan
By Peter Varhol
SQL Server 2008: ‘Katmai’
Another step on the road to integrated
data and applications.
I
n 1912, Katmai, an active volcano on
the Alaska Peninsula, imploded over
a period of three days in the most
violent eruption of the 20th century. In
the process it lost its peaks as they subsided into the void left by escaping lava,
and had a large lake form in its caldera.
This is a rather unusual legacy for
Microsoft to use as a code-name for its
upcoming SQL Server 2008, which is
available as a beta download.
Key Improvements
Microsoft lists four areas of improvement and enhancement for SQL Server
2008: mission-critical platform, dynamic
development, beyond relational data and
pervasive business insight. It was a bit
difficult for me in a brief test to look at
how Katmai may be a mission-critical
platform—especially in beta form—but
I did take a closer look at development
and data management.
It doesn’t do a lot of good to touch on
SQL Server without talking about what
it does for developers, so I also installed
the Visual Studio 2008 beta.
One technology enabled by the use
of the .NET Framework 2.0 is the
ADO.NET Entity Framework. This
Framework enables developers to
work with logical data entities that
have a meaning within the context
of the application, instead of accessing
data directly with database tables
and columns.
Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
also fits in here. The new LINQ extensions to the .NET Framework and languages extend Visual C# and Visual
Basic .NET to support a SQL-like
query syntax natively. You write your
query directly into your code, using
data access constructs. It does away
with the need to write SQL directly in
the application code.
And, of course, you have the whole
.NET Framework to work with here.
That supports the ADO.NET Entity
Framework, but also enables you to
write .NET code on the database
server. While it’s not yet a substitute for
T-SQL for triggers or stored procedures, it does provide a level of flexibility in integrating applications and data
not available with other databases.
SQL Server 2008 enables
developers to work with
and manage any type of data
in their apps, from traditional
data types to advanced
geospatial data.
To Relational and Beyond
Most database management systems
have to deal with more than textual and
numerical data arranged in rows and
tables. They have to be able to organize, store and retrieve geographical
data, music clips, videos and all the part
and parcel that make up business and
personal life.
SQL Server 2008 enables developers
to work with and manage any type of
data in their apps, from traditional data
types to advanced geospatial data. The
new FILESTREAM data type allows
large binary data to be stored directly in
an NTFS file system while letting the
data remain an integral part of the database and maintaining transactional con-
sistency. The database also enables
applications to model tree structures in
a more efficient way.
Despite all of the improvements for
developers, perhaps the most farreaching improvement surrounds data
protection. SQL Server 2008 enables
encryption of an entire database, data
files and log files, without the need for
application changes. This feature alone
helps it in its goal of being a trusted
platform for mission-critical applications and data storage.
SQL Server 2008 offers support for
occasionally connected applications by
using a synchronization mechanism
that enables synchronization across
applications, data stores and data types.
It lets you create occasionally connected
applications using Visual Studio by way
of new synchronization services in
ADO.NET and offline designers in
Visual Studio. It also provides support
for change tracking, so that there’s no
surprise when a data store is modified
when a disconnected application
re-accesses the database.
It’s unlikely that Katmai will be an
implosion on the scale of the volcanic
eruption of almost a hundred years
ago. In fact, it shouldn’t be an implosion at all. SQL Server 2008 should
see ready adoption as a replacement
for earlier versions of SQL Server, as
well as more gradual use for new
database installations in applications
that require data encryption and
nontraditional data-management
along with support for occasionally
connected applications. —
Peter Varhol ([email protected])
is Redmond’s executive editor of reviews.
Project4
10/15/07
2:32 PM
Page 1
defeating witches.
easy.
defeating worms.
easier.
1. Boil, bubble, toil, and trouble.
Witches are big with brews. Why not
make one of your own to use against
them? Sure, eye of newt is tough to
find at the local market, but it’s
probably available online.
1. Implement Microsoft Forefront.
®
2. Melt the Witch.
You’ve seen the film so you know the big ending. A bucket of water,
poured directly Witchward, causes her to steam, melt, and dissolve into
a puddle on the floor. Lure her to the watercooler and you’re done.
TM
Forefront makes defending your systems easier. It’s a
simple-to-use, integrated family of client, server, and
edge security products (such as ISA Server 2006)
that helps you stay ahead of your security threats
more easily than ever.
For case studies, free trials, demos, and all the latest
moves, visit easyeasier.com
3. Fight magic with magic.
With a wand of your own—
say a pointer—you can create
some magic of your own.
Before you know it, you’ll be
turning Witches into toads.
4. Insult the Witch.
Witches, despite their warty
exteriors, are quite sensitive.
So asking “Hey, Witch—is that
your nose or a green banana?”
can be devastating.
5. Steal her broom.
Nearly every Witch has a magic
broom, and if you can get it away
from her she’s basically grounded.
And, with a little practice, you can
cut your commute in half.
1107red_Roboto16.v5
10/16/07
10:42 AM
Page 16
Mr. Roboto
Automation for the Harried Administrator | by Jeffery Hicks
Power Up Your GPO Management
G
roup Policy management can be a full time job.
Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) no
doubt made your life much easier, especially if you
had a scripting background. You could create scripts to
leverage the GPMC object model. “Advanced VBScript for
Windows Administrators” (which I cowrote with Mr. Roboto emeritus Don
Jones) has a chapter devoted to that topic.
While GPMC is great, the release of
PowerShell gives a few more options.
The “GPO Guy,” Darren Mar-Elia, has
just released two free PowerShell
cmdlets: Get-SDMGpo and NewSDMGpo. You can download these
cmdlets from GPOGuy.com. Be sure to
read the online instructions carefully.
The first cmdlet lets you retrieve a
Group Policy Object (GPO):
PS C:\> get-sdmgpo "default
domain policy"
DisplayName
: Default
Domain Policy
Path
:
cn={31B2F340-016D-11D2-945F00C04FB984F9},cn=policies,cn=
system…
ID
: {31B2F340016D-11D2-945F-00C04FB984F9}
DomainName
:
company.local
CreationTime
: 7/28/2006
10:11:18 PM
ModificationTime
:
7/29/2006 11:17:24 AM
UserDSVersionNumber
:1
ComputerDSVersionNumber : 3
UserSysvolVersionNumber : 1
ComputerSysvolVersionNumber : 3
As you can see, there’s some useful
information here. You just can’t do
much in terms of configuring individual
Group Policy settings with this cmdlet.
This cmdlet also requires that you
install the GPMC so it can take advantage of the GPMC object model. This
means you can use it for tasks like
backing up, copying, enabling or disabling user or computer nodes, and
creating reports:
PS C:\> new-variable -name html value 1 -option Constant
PS C:\> $gpo= get-sdmgpo
"Default Domain Policy"
PS C:\> $gpo.GenerateReport
ToFile($html,"c:\DefaultDomain
.htm")
In this example, I first define a constant—$html. I’ll use this in the
GenerateReportToFile() method on
the third line. The method requires a
report type and destination file.
Because the cmdlet returns objects, I
can take advantage of the pipeline. For
example, suppose I want find all my
GPOs where the user node is disabled.
I would use an expression like this:
PS C:\> get-sdmgpo * | Where
{$_.IsUserEnabled() -eq $false } |
select Displayname
Or here’s how I might find all GPOs
modified since Aug. 1, 2007:
PS C:\> get-sdmgpo * | Where
{$_.ModificationTime -ge
'08/01/2007' } | select Display
name,ModificationTime
The New-SDMGpo cmdlet creates a
GPO “shell.” You can do basic GPO
tasks like disabling the computer configuration node or setting security. To
really manage GPOs in PowerShell
though, you’ll need a copy of the
GPExpert Scripting Toolkit. This
toolkit consists of a rather complex
cmdlet called Get-SDMgpobject.
The Get-SDMgpobject cmdlet lets
you automate individual setting management within Group Policy. You can
use Get-SDMgpobject to get access to
any setting within GPO in Active
Directory or local GPO on any network computer. Even if you don’t have
AD, you can use this tool to manage
local Group Policy settings.
I don’t have space to show you everything you might accomplish with this
cmdlet. The Scripting Toolkit has a
great help file with many examples.
The more you work with it, the more
you’ll find it a valuable addition to
your toolbox, especially if you spend a
lot of time creating, modifying and
managing GPOs.
The GPExpert Scripting Toolkit is a
commercial product, developed by
Darren Mar-Elia and offered through
SDM Software Inc. You can register
for a demo at www.sdmsoftware.com.
The software is licensed per user at
what I think is an extremely reasonable price, so even a small-to-midsize
shop will find it affordable.
Using this product in conjunction
with free Group Policy cmdlets will
add some real power to your Group
Policy management. —
Jeffery Hicks ([email protected]),
MCSE, MCSA and Microsoft PowerShell
MVP, is a scripting guru for Sapien
Technologies. Jeffery is a 16-year IT
veteran who has authored and co-authored
books, courseware and training videos on
administrative scripting. His latest book is
“WSH and VBScript Core: TFM”
(Sapien Press, 2007).
Project2
4/24/07
4:43 PM
Page 1
Project2
10/16/07
12:47 PM
Page 1
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1107red_ProdRev19-20.v5
10/16/07
3:50 PM
Page 19
ProductReviews
LinkScanner Pro Keeps Your Computer Safe
Track computer exploits and learn how they work through LinkScanner Pro and
the Exploit Prevention Labs Web site.
By Peter Varhol
I have a firewall on my network, and my
IP address is a non-routable Class C
address that’s handed out by my DHCP
server. The Windows Firewall is also
turned on. I use an e-mail filter on my
POP3 server and Outlook 2007 scans for
junk and malicious e-mail. I have ongoing
subscriptions to Norton AntiVirus, and
my virus definitions are always up-to-date.
In other words, I do everything a reasonable person would do in order to
LinkScanner Pro 2.6.5
Starts at $19.95 per copy
Exploit Prevention Labs | www.explabs.com
keep their systems and network clean.
However, I still get adware, unwanted
cookies, bogus e-mails and even an occasional virus. Part of this occurs because of
the large number of Web pages I scan
through on a regular basis. Another part
comes from the variety of applications
The LinkScanner Pro console is a
marvel of information packed into a
small space. Through separate tabs at the
top of the form, I can completely control
how and where my computer goes once
it leaves the safe confines of its physical
case. Finding different types of information, as well as configuring the software,
can be done with the click of a tab.
Working with
LinkScanner Pro
Figure 1. LinkScanner Pro’s console displays all running processes and highlights
those that are actively transferring data.
RedmondRating
Installation 20%
9.0
Features 20%
8.0
Ease of Use 20%
9.0
Administration 20%
9.0
Documentation 20%
7.0
Overall Rating
8.4
Key:
1:
Virtually inoperable or nonexistent
5:
Average, performs adequately
10: Exceptional
that I use and review; many of these
applications need access to the network
and even the Internet to work properly.
But since I’ve been running Exploit
Prevention Labs’ LinkScanner Pro, I’m
now fully aware of every process that’s
actively sending and receiving data
across the network, sites and exploits
blocked, and what sites might be dangerous. I’m warned of the hazards of
visiting various Web pages, and why
they might be hazardous.
One of the product’s key features
enables you to scan a site ahead of time
to determine if it’s safe, and immediately
advance a browser to that page if there’s
no problem. If there is a potential or
real problem, it will not automatically
go to the page, but it will tell you what
the issue is so that you can make the
determination yourself. You can do this
from the LinkScanner Pro console, or
through integration with your Web
browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox and
Opera are supported). Even if you don’t
use this feature, LinkScanner Pro will
slide up an unobtrusive window if it
detects an issue with a Web page or
other questionable contact with your
PC, telling you why you should be wary.
The feature I enjoyed most was the tab
that displayed all running processes and
highlighted them whenever they sent or
received data across the network. Even
though I do technical work with computers, I don’t know what some of the
processes are that Microsoft displays in
the Task Manager. It seems entirely possible to slip one process among many
that’s stealing data or doing unauthorized communication with the Internet.
1107red_ProdRev19-20.v5
10/16/07
3:50 PM
Page 20
ProductReviews
This running process tab is great for
looking at processes that communicate
with the network, including when they
are doing so and how many bytes they
are sending and receiving. It’s given me
an excuse to look up some of the
processes that are running to determine
if they’re really supposed to be on my
system, and what I should do about
them if they’re not. The LinkScanner
Pro software doesn’t provide all of that
information, but it does give enough
for me to be careful in my research.
Another tab shows exploits prevented
and sites blocked. The “exploits prevented” information includes the type
of exploit, where it came from, the originating IP address and the port it came
in on. If you need further explanation of
what those potential exploits are, simply
click on an exploit’s name and it will
provide you with a brief description of
that issue. Need more? You also have a
link to a more detailed explanation from
the company Web site.
Building a Community
As you might imagine, collecting information on exploits from Web sites and
other sources is a long, complex and
never-ending job. Exploit Prevention
Labs attempts to leverage the resources
of its user community to assist with this
process. As a part of the product installation, users are invited to join the
Community Intelligence Network, a
way of sending information on exploits
and sites that host exploits to a centralized database, accessible to anyone.
The company also provides several
resources on its Web site for understanding new exploit techniques and
what to do about them. Exploit Prevention Labs CTO Roger Thompson pens
a blog that provides a quick and easy
way to understand and deal with various
exploits. And the company also publishes
monthly assessments on new exploits
and how they work. Further, the
Knowledge Base of exploits makes for
fascinating reading.
LinkScanner Pro is better suited for a
more technical audience, rather than for
the average business PC user. It’s difficult
for someone who doesn’t pay a lot of
attention to what happens on their computer to understand what an “Invisible
IFrame launcher” is, for example, which
is one of the potential exploits cited on
my list. The sort of information provided
by LinkScanner Pro and Exploit Prevention Labs is more meaningful to someone who takes an interest in what’s
happening on their computer and why.
But even people who use computers
only because they have a job to do will
also benefit from LinkScanner Pro—
not because of the information it provides, but because of the warnings and
blocking of exploits. You don’t have to
be a rocket scientist to take advantage
of these features without necessarily
understanding what they mean. —
is Redmond’s executive editor, reviews.
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1107red_ReaderRev21-26.v11
10/16/07
3:31 PM
Page 21
ReaderReview
Your turn to sound off on the latest Microsoft products
Outlook 2007 Gets Mixed Reviews
While most readers like Microsoft’s latest e-mail client, some say it’s still not
ready for prime time.
By Joanne Cummings
For the most part, Outlook 2007 is a
solid update to a familiar workhorse.
That’s the general sentiment of readers
who have used the new version. Of all
the Office 2007 applications, Outlook
has changed the least in terms of user
interface. There’s still the familiar File,
Edit and View menu options, not the
ribbon interface that’s a hallmark of the
other Office 2007 apps.
That lack of change is a good thing for
most. Whereas the other Office apps
require a significant investment of time
and training, Outlook is fairly straight-
Microsoft Outlook 2007
Bundled with Office 2007: Office Small Business, $449;
Office Professional $499
Microsoft Corp. | 800-426-9400 | www.microsoft.com
you use hotmail, it already knows the
servers to enter and add for your
account, so it’s pretty easy,” he says.
Still, others have had problems
deploying Outlook 2007 in a corporate
setting. “You can’t apply [Group Policy
Objects] the same way you could in the
past,” says Frank Callanan, co-owner of
Webletechs, a consultancy in Carmel,
N.Y. “You can’t apply GPOs individually
The overlay feature is nice in that I can overlay any
calendar on top of any other ... and come up with a
block of time when everybody is free much faster.
Teresa Rader, Administrative Assistant to the Director of IT,
Development and Engineering, Liberty University
forward. “Overall, there’s not a huge difference from an end user standpoint, and
I think that’s a good thing,” says Mike
Roeser, IT administrator at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Outlook is fairly easy to get up and
running as well, say readers, especially
with its improved auto account setup
features. “When you configure Outlook 2007, it actually pulls in configuration settings based on your login
information to Active Directory,” says
John Sullivan, director of IT for Major
League Soccer and Soccer United
Marketing in New York. “That helps
our desktop guys because it saves them
a couple of minutes on each desktop.
It’s basically two clicks to get Outlook
set up at that point.”
Auto account also works well for hotmail and other well-known services. “If
based on users anymore.” Callanan uses
Outlook 2007 with Vista, but says most
of his clients run it on XP.
Others can’t seem to get Outlook
deployed at all. Bob Milhaus, a contract IT service desk analyst at the
American Bankers Association in
Washington, D.C., says that ever since
he deployed Outlook on his XP
machine, it’s been one headache after
another. “It’s slow, it’s unstable, and it
has a tendency to crash,” he says. “I
wouldn’t recommend it quite yet.”
Justin Carlson, director of IT at
Maryland Office Interiors Inc., an
office furniture dealer in Baltimore, had
a similar story specific to Outlook’s new
instant search. “When you install
instant search for Outlook 2007, it’s a
performance drag. And if you’re a network administrator and want to install
the Exchange tools, it completely
breaks and won’t work,” he says. “Here
I am, the guy trying to kick the tires,
and I can’t test the search functionality.
That didn’t make me very happy.”
New and Indeed Improved
A few of Outlook 2007’s new features
make the move worth the effort, say
most readers. Among those are the
ability to preview attachments, perform fast e-mail searches, the new ToDo Bar, and its enhanced mobile and
calendaring capabilities.
Previews are big in Outlook 2007,
much as they are in the other new
Office apps. Readers say this greatly
improves efficiency. “I constantly have
people sending me Excel spreadsheets
with quotes for my budget,” Sullivan
says. “It’s not something I need to edit;
I just need to see a couple of numbers.
Using the preview feature, I don’t have
to launch another application.”
It also bolsters security. “With preview, you no longer open up your system to different viruses,” Callanan says.
“Now, it’s in a protected area until
you’ve had a chance to see what exactly
has been sent to you.”
Others say the feature that convinced
them to make the upgrade to 2007 is
instant search. “The search capabilities
built into Outlook are incredible,” says
Todd Bailey, systems administrator at
Aplicare Inc., a pharmaceutical company
in Meriden, Conn. “It saves you an
immeasurable amount of time every
day, especially when you’re dealing
with unusually large mailboxes. If I
Continued on page 24
Project5
10/15/07
2:39 PM
Page 1
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more, their ability to act on priorities by knowing
who is available and being able to communicate
with them regardless of communication mode or
device is extremely beneficial.
By helping employees communicate, share, interact,
influence, direct and arrive at decisions, business
collaboration becomes a core element of the value
chain. Key characteristics for successful business
collaboration include:
• The ability to remain connected and maximize
availability
• The tools to participate in multiple teams and
create impromptu conferences and meetings
• Easy multimedia access to the flow of information
• The ability to seamlessly shift between different
communication modes and media
Users drowning in messages—voice,
e-mail, fax—and trying to manage
them using multiple messaging
inter-faces will find the integrated
approach of Avaya and Microsoft
extremely liberating. Users needing
to reach out and connect realtime will find their ability to
do so greatly enhanced.
Our previous article titled “Extend the
Value of Microsoft Office Applications
with Avaya Unified Communications” at
Redmondmag.com/showcase/avaya
highlighted the Unified Communications
products that both Avaya and Microsoft
have released to provide an
integrated communication platform.
This month’s article titled “The
Business Value of Unifying
Communications” provides insight to
the following:
• Infrastructure Optimization
• Embracing the Converged
Communications Trend
• Return on Investment
Infrastructure Optimization
Avaya Unified Communications for Microsoft environments brings together the best of two worlds, by
combining application-based collaboration and
messaging systems with traditional and enhanced
telephony services. While this solution presents an
awesome opportunity to enhance the way
we communicate, there are underlying
dependencies that have to be configured and tweaked to provide such a
platform. IT decision makers must
work with and link their company’s
technicians who service telephony
and voice networks with their
applications teams, as these
two completely different
worlds collaborate for the
first time. What happens to
these existing systems and
how do organizations
combine a new team of
converged communications experts together to
optimize a network so it can leverage a Unified
Communications platform?
Embracing the Converged
Communications Trend
Unifying Communications requires a convergence on
many fronts including systems, applications,
Project5
10/15/07
2:40 PM
Page 2
consulting staff/expertise, and most importantly, a
mind-shift change for business users. Users may be
accustomed to picking up a phone to communicate
but still correspond separately with Instant
Messaging and E-Mail applications. The challenge
of introducing a converged communications solution
to a sometimes very stubborn host of business users
is the primary obstacle standing in the way of
counting a UC deployment a success. How do you
ensure that your deployment is a success?
Unified Communications ROI
holders by increasing their efficiency and
effectiveness. Key Unified Communications
elements that enable these gains include
desktop telephony, mobility, conferencing,
video, messaging and business communications consulting. These solutions can enable
employess to improve customer interactions,
increase productivity, enhance collaboration,
mitigate risk and lower costs. Utilizing the
Avaya Business Value Analysis Tool (Sample
Figure 1), makes it easy to determine the potential
ROI you can gain by unifying your communications.
How much money can your business save?
Download the full article titled, “The Business Value
of Unifying Communications” at Redmondmag.com/
showcase/avaya/go, to get the full insight and
answers to the topics and questions presented above.
About Avaya
FIGURE 1: Sample Data for Demonstration Purposes Only
Avaya Unified Communications for Microsoft
Environments helps organizations be more productive
and improve service to their customers and stake-
Avaya delivers Intelligent Communications solutions
that help companies transform their businesses
to achieve market-place advantage. More than
1 million businesses worldwide, including more
than 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500®, use Avaya
solutions for IP Telephony, Unified Communications,
Contact Centers and Communications Enabled
Business Processes. Avaya Global Services provides
comprehensive service and support for companies,
small to large. For more information about Avaya
visit www.avaya.com.
© 2007 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved
For the full Avaya article, go to Redmondmag.com/showcase/avaya/go
10/16/07
3:31 PM
Page 24
ReaderReview
Continued from page 21
was recommending that someone go
from 2003 to 2007 and they’re in a
business enterprise environment, that
would be the number one reason to
switch—for that search capability.”
Bailey says the search is very fast, especially when paired with Vista’s indexing
function. In fact, it starts returning
search results even before he finishes
typing a query. “Literally, as you type, it
gives you results,” Bailey says.
Sullivan agrees that the new search
function is a huge improvement. “Most
of the people here have 4GB or 5GB of
archive folders, and going back and
finding a press release from two or
three years ago is something they need
to do on a daily basis,” Sullivan says. “So
this is definitely a big improvement over
XP and Office 2003 with regard to
indexing and searching. It literally takes
just seconds now with Vista and 2007.”
Search also works fairly well on XP.
One caveat for XP users, though: they
first need to download and install a program called Windows Desktop Search.
“If you have Windows XP and you don’t
install Windows Desktop Search, you’re
definitely not going to get the same
experience as you would using Vista,”
Bailey says. “Once you install it, you get
close to the same speed and experience.”
That could be the problem for some
readers who are less than enamored
with the new search features. For example, Milhaus eventually removed
Windows Desktop Search because it
kept crashing Outlook. Carlson says the
search capability is far less impressive
than a third-party search tool he used
with Outlook 2003 called LookOut.
Incidentally, Microsoft bought LookOut and that’s the technology upon
which it based its current search function. “They stripped it down. It doesn’t
work as well, it doesn’t index your entire
Outlook database, and it’s slow,” Carlson
says of LookOut in its new incarnation.
“You can tweak it to make it actually look
at your entire account, but that’s annoying. I can’t get visibility into my data.”
Carlson says he has tried Google
Desktop search, but cautions that the
Outlook 2007 Wish List
A
lthough Outlook 2007 sports a bevy of upgrades, there are
four features readers would have really liked to see in the
newest version of Microsoft’s e-mail client:
1. Integrated training: Most say the current tutorials and training
options aren’t up to the task of getting users comfortable with
Outlook 2007. “One feature I’d like to see either online or within
the system itself is some kind of self-tutorial training,” says Greg
Art, director of product development at Aplicare Inc. in Meriden,
Conn. “How do I do X? How do I assign a task to somebody and
how do I track it—those kinds of things. What are my options for
views? It would be really nice to have a really simple tutorial that
people could go to and easily understand.”
2. Domain blocking: Most readers are happy with the improved
junk-mail filters within Outlook 2007, but say one feature is missing. “When you’re in your inbox, and you right-click on an e-mail,
the options for junk mail are there but they don’t allow you to
block the domain,” says John Sullivan, director of IT for Major
League Soccer and Soccer United Marketing. “From there, you can
only block the sender ... I’d prefer to be able to block a domain
right from the e-mail.”
3. Easier public folders: “In both versions, it’s not easy for the
average user to jump over to see public folders,” says Todd Bailey,
systems administrator at Aplicare. “And that’s not necessarily just
2007, because they did it in 2003. You have to actually change
your view to the folderless view and then scroll down and expand
and this and that, rather than just adding it to one of the main buttons they already have. It’s not very intuitive.”
4. One more calendar view: Although most agree the calendars in
Outlook 2007 are greatly improved, readers say there is one feature missing. “If you’re in a month view, it only shows a limited
number of events each day, maybe four or five total,” Bailey says.
“The only way to see more events is to click on the small arrow
pointing down, and then it changes the view and goes to the single
day view. That makes it more difficult because then you have to
jump back to the month view that you typically use. It would be
better if that day popped up as a separate window temporarily and
went away when you took your mouse away from it.”
—J.C.
Google tool and Microsoft’s Windows
Desktop Search don’t play well together
and end up crashing your system. Now,
he uses a different third-party tool
from Copernic Inc. to handle searches.
“In my opinion, Microsoft search for
Outlook is completely deficient and
inadequate,” he says.
Facelift for Calendars
Beyond search, Outlook’s next most
popular improvement is the new calendaring functionality, especially the abil-
ity to overlay two calendars to see conflicts and optimal meeting times.
“We have a public calendar where we
post different events, when people are
going on vacation, product launches,
anything like that,” Bailey says. “I like
the fact that you can have two calendars
side by side, but there’s also a feature
where you can actually put the two calendars on top of each other.”
Teresa Rader, administrative assistant
to the director of IT development and
engineering at Liberty University in
10/16/07
3:31 PM
Page 25
ReaderReview
Lynchburg, Va., agrees. “I have my personal calendar, I have three meeting
room calendars, and I have access to
other people’s calendars so that I can
see where they are if someone comes
looking for them,” she says. “The overlay feature is nice in that I can overlay
any calendar on top of any other. You
can overlay all the calendars and come
up with a block of time when everybody is free much faster.”
You can now drag-and-drop e-mails
directly into calendars, which readers say
is a big time-saver. “That’s a neat feature
because you can take an e-mail [and]
rather than going into the calendar,
clicking new meeting and so on, you can
just take the e-mail and drag it right into
the calendar,” Sullivan says. “Then it
pops up with the contents of the e-mail
and you can see exactly what it is.”
It’s also easier to share calendars in
2007. “Sharing a calendar is easier and
more intuitive now,” Roeser says. “You
can now send the calendar via e-mail,
When you configure Outlook 2007, it actually
pulls in configuration settings based on ... Active
Directory. It’s basically two clicks to get Outlook set
up at that point.
John Sullivan, Director of IT, MLS and Soccer United Marketing
and that’s not something you could do
as easily in 2003.”
To-Do Bar Works Well
Another of Outlook 2007’s new features
is the To-Do Bar, which runs down the
right side of the screen in the inbox
view. It shows a small monthly calendar,
upcoming appointments and a task list.
It’s designed to let users be more productive by letting them see and handle
several tasks from one main view.
“It gives you a snapshot look of everything you have going on with regards
to calendar tasks and contacts, recent
e-mails and all that,” Sullivan says. He
notes that with previous versions of
Outlook, he had to buy a third-party
tool to achieve the same functionality.
“So 2007 has let me eliminate a software package,” he says. “I only had five
or six people using it, but we don’t need
it anymore because of the To-Do Bar.”
Bailey agrees that the To-Do bar is a
big help. “That’s nice to be able to see
that information without having to go to
the calendar,” he says. “It’s a time-saver.”
Going Mobile
Callanan says the biggest change he’s
noticed since moving himself and some
of his clients to 2007 is that mobile users
10/16/07
3:31 PM
Page 26
ReaderReview
Mixed Opinions
The search capabilities built into Outlook are
incredible. It saves you an immeasurable amount of
time every day, especially when you’re dealing with
unusually large mailboxes.
Todd Bailey, Systems Administrator, Aplicare Inc.
are far happier. “They’re the ones who
tend to complain the most because they
need access to things all the time,” he
says. “And everything’s easier in 2007.”
Microsoft significantly upgraded the
synchronization tools in Outlook 2007
to make the process more seamless.
“The upgrade has been solid, and everybody I’ve dealt with has had no issues
keeping things synchronized between
devices, laptops and portables or a desktop and a portable,” Callanan says. “I
don’t see the issues we had in the past
trying to set up synchs either through all
the different wizards or the third-party
applications to do it. It just works now.”
Mobile users also see a speed increase.
“It definitely cuts down on the time it
takes for an e-mail to clear and be able
to be viewed on a mobile device,” he
says. “It used to be that e-mail came in
and your virus scanner would have to
hit it, and then your spam blocker
would hit it, and by the time it loaded,
three or four minutes had gone by.
That’s not the case anymore. Now, as
soon as Outlook loads, it’s done everything. Everything pops up and it does
everything on the fly, so you don’t need
to wait for a second or even third application to kick in and do something
before you view e-mail.”
Overall, most readers seem happy with
the new Outlook. “Normally, you see
people complaining about upgrades,
but I haven’t noticed that with Outlook
2007,” Callanan says. “Everyone seems
fairly comfortable and I haven’t heard
any real complaints.”
Others who have struggled to get
the new Outlook up and running have
a different opinion. “I use Outlook
2007 every day, but I’m seriously
thinking of using something else
now,” Milhaus says. “Either that or the
next computer I buy will be a Mac,
because I will not personally go to
Vista. Or I will just switch my computer over to Linux, and go with Evolution [for e-mail]. I just don’t think
Outlook and Office 2007 are ready for
prime time.” —
Joanne Cummings (jcummings@
redmondmag.com) is a freelance technology
journalist based in Massachusetts.
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Project2
8/14/07
10:04 AM
Page 1
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Project3
4/16/07
1:38 PM
Page 1
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1107red_Roundup29-38.v7
10/16/07
3:26 PM
Page 29
RedmondRoundup
Automating the Desktop
Making your job easier, one tool at a time.
By Peter Varhol
Your company may be growing, but the
IT group isn’t. There are double the
number of desktop systems at your
facility than there were five years ago,
as well as a proliferation of notebooks,
BlackBerries and other edge-computing
devices. You’ve just added a dozen new
application and file servers, and are
planning on more in the next six
months. Yet you have the same team
you did before that growth spurt.
You’ve cut some corners, and are using
some tools for automated patch distribution and password resets, but really
haven’t looked into other ways of
improving your processes.
It gets worse. There are more tasks to
do, as well as more systems on which to
do them. Security, patching and application maintenance are just a few of the
tasks that require more time today. You
have to make the hardware last longer,
which means periodically cleaning up
the systems because they became too
cluttered with extraneous utilities and
files. It would have saved you a great
deal of effort if you could completely
lock down the systems, but management insists that open access is required
for business reasons.
If you’re on the help desk, in desktop
support, or are required to roll out new
applications and patches and perform
regular maintenance on applications
and systems, you’re looking for ways to
work smarter. How can you perform
the variety of everyday tasks in a way
that lets you take on additional work,
and additional desktops, with little or
no increase in resources?
I looked at several tools that make it
possible to automate processes and
tasks on desktop systems. These tools
are more complementary than competitive in that they perform different
InThisRoundup
Privilege Manager 3.0
Pricing starts at $30 per desktop
BeyondTrust Corp. | 603-610-4250 | www.beyondtrust.com
ActiveBatch
$8,000; includes unlimited deployment of the UI, one training
credit and one year of Version Upgrade Protection
Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. | 800-229-2724 | www.advsyscon.com
Desktop Authority
$410 for a one-admin license with one year of support
ScriptLogic Corp. | 561-886-2420 | www.scriptlogic.com
RedmondRating
Privilege
Manager 3.0
Active
Batch
Desktop
Authority
9.0
Installation: 20%
7.0
7.0
Features: 20%
9.0
9.0
9.0
Ease of use: 20%
9.0
8.0
9.0
Administration: 20%
9.0
8.0
9.0
Documentation: 20%
8.0
8.0
8.0
Overall Rating
8.8
8.0
8.8
Key:
1: Virtually inoperable or nonexistent | 5: Average, performs adequately | 10: Exceptional
actions. Used separately, they can help
with specific tasks that are highly
time-consuming. Taken together, they
can put a serious dent in your day-today workload.
BeyondTrust
Privilege Manager
Security, access control and data protection remain among the biggest consumers of administrator time. They
are important considerations; an
increasing number of enterprises are
locking down user desktops and limiting them to running as standard users.
But when you do that, you can suffer a
significant loss of functionality from
applications. Some application features
may not work without higher privilege
levels; other applications may not
work at all.
BeyondTrust Privilege Manager
keeps all of the applications in the
enterprise—and all of their features—
accessible to the users who need them.
Its goal is to establish a least-privilege
policy for all users and all applications
on the network, and elevate that privilege automatically only when required
by the application being used and the
work being performed.
You install Privilege Manager on any
system on the network, using an
account that has the ability to set and
maintain policies. Privilege Manager is
implemented as a true Group Policy
10/16/07
3:26 PM
Page 30
RedmondRoundup
tures and flexibility it provides are
essential as enterprises navigate the
transition to Windows Vista over the
next several years. In particular, any
enterprise with a number of custom
applications is probably having a great
deal of difficulty implementing its
security and access policies, as custom
software is notorious for requiring
admin privileges to use. As enterprises
continue to press access-restriction
policies, it might be very difficult to do
without in the future.
Advanced Systems
Concepts ActiveBatch
Figure 1. The Privilege Manager Group Policy Object Editor enables an admin to finetune group privileges to provide required access without granting too many privileges.
extension, and allows administrators to
attach permission levels to applications.
All you have to do is specify the application and which security groups
should be added to and/or removed
from the process token when the application is launched.
I created and set a test user as a standard user on my network, and launched
an application that I knew required
administrator privileges to execute
some parts of it. Sure enough, the
application warned me that as a standard user I wouldn’t have access to
some features. Through trial and error,
I identified a couple of features that
wouldn’t work. I went back to Privilege
Manager, identified that application and
raised its privilege level to Administrator, then I went back and launched the
application. I received no warning, and
was able to run the features of the application that were previously inaccessible.
The process of configuring Privilege
Manager and having complete access to
all application features took less than 10
minutes, even though I was working
without reference to instructions.
In another case, an application wouldn’t
launch at all for a standard user, displaying a message saying that privileges
were not sufficient. Once again, launching Privilege Manager, changing the
test user’s privilege level for that application, and starting the application up
once again—successfully, this time—
took only a few minutes.
The software has a default set of
applications and settings to get you
started in cases where the privilege
needs are known and the application is
a popular one. It also provides for
reporting on applications accessed and
used, as well as what security levels
were required. Admins can use its
reports to get a better idea of the need
for different levels of access for enterprise applications.
Privilege Manager offers a great deal
of flexibility in setting privileges for
users, applications and even application
components. As long as it’s manipulating a policy that uses tokens, it can
adjust the tokens easily. It’s not a sexy
application by any means, but it can be
essential in keeping a locked-down
environment for security and access
reasons, while also enabling users to do
legitimate work with applications
they’re authorized to use.
I saw very little downside to
Privilege Manager. Arguably, the fea-
An important part of automating the
desktop is the ability to execute tasks
across large numbers of systems. While
the scripts typically run from the server,
they can perform actions on individual
desktops that provide an automated way
of accomplishing repetitive tasks.
ActiveBatch addresses the problem of
automating those sequences of repetitive tasks across the desktops. The key
to ActiveBatch is workflow. The product focuses on accomplishing sequences
of processing that complete a complex
task or set of tasks that can be broken
down into a discrete series of steps.
I had some difficulty setting up the
database necessary as a precondition to
installing ActiveBatch. Rather than
Figure 2. ActiveBatch lets you set a trigger
so that if an event or sequence of events
occurs, you can execute a specific response.
Project2
10/1/07
9:09 AM
Page 1
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Project6
9/14/07
10:54 AM
Page 1
Access Data
Anywhere Anytime
SIXTY-FOUR BITS QUALITY
SQL Server is an ideal
application to run on 64bit Dell PowerEdge
servers powered by
multi-core AMD Opteron
processors. Running SQL
Server 2005 on x64
servers can provide high
performance, and breaks
32-bit memory and I/O
barriers, increasing the
capability of each database server. The Direct
Connect Architecture of
AMD Opteron processors
provides fast memory
and I/O access avoiding
traditional bottlenecks
inherent in legacy frontside bus x86 architectures, offering highthroughput responsiveness and scalability for
your applications. That is
power!
With SQL Server 2005,
you’ll be able to do more
with your data. With its
integrated SQL Server
Reporting Services, SQL
2005 gives you real-time
access to business intelligence, the intelligence
that can help make a difference for your organization. You’ll be able to analyze data warehouses,
generate a report and
deliver it to the right people, at the right time, letting them make the right
business decisions. Dell
PowerEdge servers powered by multi-core AMD
Opteron processors allow
you the flexibility of running the database and
analysis on the same
server, giving your users
the reports they demand
when they need them.
Now that is access to
data anywhere and anytime!
LOW TCO
Dell PowerEdge servers
running AMD Opteron
processor technology
offers a power efficient
platform for consolidating
your database servers
with SQL Server 2005.
Consolidation can help
reduce software licensing
fees while allowing you to
serve more concurrent
users and provide a high
transaction throughput
per database server. A
large number of databases can be consolidated
into a single SQL instance
gaining you the same
benefits as when you
consolidate multiple
instances onto a single
physical server. This can
help lower your energy
bills and better utilize
your datacenter’s floor
space. Dell and AMD can
make it possible to run a
greener database!
Aboutt thee authorss
Danielle Ruest (MVP in Virtualization) and Nelson Ruest (MCSE, MCT, MVP)
are multiple book authors focusing on systems design, administration,
and management. They run a consulting company that concentrates on
IT infrastructure architecture, change and configuration management.
You can reach them at [email protected]. www.reso-net.com
SECURE
Data security is one of
the most important
aspects of any database
architecture and SQL
Server 2005 is outstanding in this regard. SQL
Server now has a
reduced attack surface
by letting you install only
the components you
require on each database
server. SQL Server 2005
installations are now
secure by default and
implement the principle of
least privilege in each
aspect of their design.
And, when running on
processors, your Dell
PowerEdge database
servers can take advantage of Enhanced Virus
Protection* (EVP), which
can help protect against
viruses, worms and malicious attacks, all to help
ensure the integrity of
your database servers.
EFFICIENT
Today, IT Managers must
build an efficient datacenter. With your database servers now running on 64-bit Dell
PowerEdge hardware,
efficiency is what you’ll
get, especially from
AMD64 technology. The
AMD Opteron processor
is designed to enable 64bit computing while
remaining compatible
with the vast x86 software still in production,
and allows you to migrate
seamlessly to 64-bit
computing and multi-core
technology when you are
ready. This means you
can have access to
improved system efficiency and application performance for both multitasking and multi-threaded applications without
changing the processor
footprint.
www.dell.com/amd
A
A
e
t
4-
e
re
e
n-
-
Project6
9/14/07
11:04 AM
Page 2
With the release of SQL Server 2005, Microsoft has produced its most mature database application. It’s
no wonder with improvements in security, manageability, availability and scalability, Microsoft has enhanced this database
engine from a powerful data management tool to an enterprise-class data storage and manipulation system. Databases can
now span multiple terabytes. Data manipulation capabilities support better decision making through advanced analytics,
more sophisticated reporting tools and extensive data mining capabilities. With these new tools, administration and
application development has never been easier. As an IT professional, you should look to SQL Server 2005 for database
consolidation, running fewer but more powerful servers with larger databases. Today Dell offers great technology to run these
consolidated systems on the Dell PowerEdgeTM servers powered by multi-core AMD OpteronTM processors. These enterprise
class servers systems will provide the ideal platform for SQL Server 2005 and the next generation of SQL Server coming in
2008. Use the following nine reasons to justify your move to SQL Server 2005 on Dell PowerEdge running AMD OpteronTM
processor technology.
RELIABLE
SQL Server 2005 delivers high
performance. In fact, Dell
migrated to SQL Server 2005,
which powers www.dell.com,
and experienced a performance enhancement over SQL
2000. SQL Server 2005 has
been optimized for high availability clustering to provide continuous access to your data.
And, with its new data mirroring
capabilities, SQL Server 2005
can help ensure business continuity as well as automate a
number of the lengthy manual
processes associated with
replication and log shipping.
Running this solution on Dell
PowerEdge servers with
AMD64 technology gives you
confidence, because both are
known for providing enterprise
class solutions that are
compatible, reliable, stable, and
supported by world-class
ecosystems.
VIRTUALIZE
More than moving to a consolidation of SQL Server instances,
Dell PowerEdge servers running
processors allow you to virtualize your installations of SQL
Server 2005. Virtualization provides the best of all worlds: run
64-bit host operating systems
and either 32 or 64-bit guests.
This can give you greater compatibility for existing applications and greater growth capabilities for new ones. And, with
the changes Microsoft made in
SQL Server 2005 licensing, virtualizing SQL Server is a winning proposition on all fronts.
You’ll gain simplified operations,
improved utilization and costeffective scaling.
EXTENSIBLE
Database usage grows with
time; every administrator knows
this all to well. Dell PowerEdge
servers running multi-core AMD
Opteron processor with Direct
Connect Architecture enable
you to easily transition to multicore technology at your pace
without sacrificing current performance and IT investments. In
addition, Dell and AMD provide
a simple upgrade path to quadcore AMD Opteron processors.
You can double your processing power in your Dell
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good news is, you can run
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Evaluate your options today!
Multi-core AMD Opteron
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future-proof and build on your
investment. Whether you’re
planning to move to SQL Server
2005 or preparing for SQL
Server 2008 or whether you’re
just buying new servers with a
look to the future, find out
which AMD Opteron processorbased servers Dell offers.
Check them out at
www.dell.com/amd. Want to
learn more? Look up “How Dell
Does It”, a new whitepaper on
its own move to SQL Server
2005 at www.dell.com/sql.
About Dell
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global
systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to
www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.
©2007 All Rights Reserved. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices,
Inc. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Other names are for
informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
References:
* Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP) is only enabled by certain operating systems, including the current versions of the Microsoft® Windows®, Linux®, Solaris, and BSD Unix operating systems.
After properly installing the appropriate operating system release, users must enable the protection of their applications and associated files from buffer overrun attacks. Consult your OS
documentation for information on enabling EVP. Contact your application software vendor for information regarding use of the application in conjunction with EVP. AMD strongly recommends
that users continue to include third-party antivirus software as part of their security strategy.
Project1
8/14/07
9:10 AM
Page 1
A DV E R TO R I A L
Four Critical Elements That Determine Disaster Recovery Success
Every minute of every day, somewhere around the world,
there is an extremely frustrated systems administrator futilely
attempting to recover a failed server without the benefit of a
tool designed expressly for this purpose. Without one, a
recovery can take anywhere from two hours to two days,
and cost thousands of dollars. Many organizations are
simply unaware that there is an inexpensive solution to
remedy this problem.
There are numerous products that help eliminate computer
downtime by offering fail-over and redundancy. However, the
important issue is that those products do not help once a
machine becomes unbootable. The quickest and easiest
method of restoring a failed Windows server or workstation is
by implementing an image-based disaster recovery (DR)
solution like UltraBac Software’s UBDR Gold.
With UBDR Gold, live snapshots can be periodically stored
on the network for easy disaster recovery retrieval—simply
boot the dead machine and restore the operating system
partition in as little as five minutes. UBDR Gold may also be
used for provisioning, roll-back or any other need that might
require a quick restore or creation of a server.
The Four Critical Elements:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Product Reliability
Support
Features and Functions
Ease-of-Use
For a DR tool to be of benefit, it must be extremely reliable in
both taking the snapshot and in its ability to boot and recover
the image successfully. In today’s market, this means not only
restoring an OS to the same machine, but also being able to
recover it to a totally different hardware configuration. A
quality product should also provide the ability to recover a
physical server to a virtual environment.
No matter how fast a disaster recovery product might be,
it will be rendered useless if an insurmountable restore
problem is encountered by an operator during a vital recovery.
Therefore, a critical element is being able to quickly engage a
qualified technical support representative if and when
required. To put this into perspective, UltraBac Software’s
industry leading support hold time is less than five minutes.
Along with reliability and support, a disaster recovery product
must also offer great flexibility to meet the needs of both the
SMB and enterprise markets. UBDR Gold, for instance,
allows users to back up snapshots to any disk or tape target,
along with options for TSM and FTP devices. The program
even offers a fail-over to an alternative device to ensure a
quality backup.
Lastly, ease-of-use can make or break a disaster recovery
attempt. While UBDR Gold is straightforward in its use for
manual recoveries, restores can be 100 percent automated so
an operator need only insert a CD or USB key and initiate a
boot. Remote DR operations may even be performed via
centralized management.
About UltraBac Software:
In its 25 years of business, UltraBac Software has earned the
reputation for providing reliable, fast, and innovative backup
and recovery software to organizations of all sizes. Visit
www.ultrabac.com to receive an evaluation copy of UltraBac
and UBDR Gold.
BACK U P AN D DI SASTE R R EC OVE RY SOF T WAR E FOR P EOP LE W HO M EAN B US I N E S S
>
W W W. U LT R A B AC . C O M
10/16/07
3:26 PM
Page 35
RedmondRoundup
Is Hardware the Answer?
hile you might normally think of software
box. In addition, you can package up software and
tools in automating desktop management
prepare it for installation, monitor license compliand maintenance, sometimes it makes sense to
ance, obtain patch status and more things than I
think about hardware. If plugging in a hardware
can name. The agent communicates back to the
box for management agrees with you, take a close KBOX and to your dashboard as often as you’d
look at the KACE KBOX solution. The KBOX is a 1U like; the default is every two hours.
rack-mountable, server-type system running FreeBSD that helps
KBOX
automate a number of different
$9,500 for a 100-node license
areas, including help desk, deskKACE Networks Inc. | 877-6468-3663 | www.kace.com
top hardware- and softwaremanagement, system monitoring
and a host of other tasks.
The amazing thing is the
Setting up the KBOX is easy,
amount of information you have
especially with a sales engineerat your disposal. Can’t lock down
guided Web conference that
your desktops but concerned
KACE provides to all customers.
about unlicensed software?
The shipping box also includes a
Check. Have no way of determinlarge sheet, a la Dell, with siming if all of your systems are upplified instructions on setting up
to-date with patches? Check.
and configuring the KBOX and
Need to know the versions of all
dispersing agents to the local
installed software to make sure
systems. Once you configure the
everyone is compatible? Check.
Figure A. KBOX provides help-desk funcKBOX through its Unix display
While not strictly a desktop
tionality that lets admins track and correct
and hook it up to your network, issues without visiting every system.
solution, the KBOX does have
you can bring up its Web intercertain things going for it. First,
face and have an amazing number of tools at
the cost is fixed and not dependent upon the
your disposal.
number of desktops. Second, it helps to automate
Logging in as administrator, you can deploy
a large variety of tasks, rather than just one or
KBOX agents to any number of systems on the
two. Its Web interface provides a nice dashboard
network, either manually, one system at a time or
for you to obtain, monitor and change just about
automatically based on an IP address range. The
any desktop configuration. Lastly, it’s easy. There’s
agent runs as a service on Windows PCs. Once
no reason why KBOX can’t be on your network,
you have an agent installed, you can get a cominstalling agents on the desktops, in less than 30
plete hardware and software inventory of that
minutes after you open the box.
—P.V.
W
offering an integrated MSDE install like
Desktop Authority, it required a new or
existing SQL Server installation available before installing the software. It
couldn’t connect to my existing implementation (SQL Server 2005 Developer
Edition), so I had to recreate a database
connection for it to work with.
ActiveBatch lets you accomplish a variety of different things, including support
for Active Directory and Windows security, the ability to perform SQL queries
and search for the presence of specific
files, and the ability to schedule script
execution and run in a resource-
constricted environment. Virtually any
server or desktop task can be scripted
and run automatically. The upshot is
that you have to write the scripts to do
the automation, but once written, they
should require little or no change.
Its scripts employ variables in a hierarchical structure that allow scriptwriters
to easily pass information between
scripts. This means you can string scripts
together to perform a series of activities
while keeping them separate for flexibility or maintenance purposes.
ActiveBatch lets you compare specific
changes and approvals for each revision
level of a process or script to a previous
or baseline change. In doing so, it identifies and documents what has changed.
This provides both a change log for
administrators seeking to find out what
has changed and why, and an audit
facility for reporting on changes for
compliance purposes.
One of the things I really liked about
ActiveBatch is the ability to design reasonably complex and complete scripts
without having to actually write code. It
also provides you with a set of library
functions that script typical tasks, often
requiring only very minor changes to
work in unique environments.
Project3
10/16/07
12:55 PM
Page 1
ADVERTORIAL
A New Recovery Strategy
for Always On Business
D
riven by a combination of regulatory mandates, highly visible
disasters and outage events, and
common sense dictates of
always-on business operations,
business continuity planning has suddenly
become a “front office” issue. Now, senior
management is seeking information on what
disaster prevention and disaster recovery
capabilities are in place and whether they are
up to the task of supporting the continuation
of mission critical business processes within
recovery time targets.
A key problem is that your disaster recovery
plan, as it currently stands, is “old school.” If it
wasn’t written 30 years ago, chances are that
it still borrows heavily from the best practices
playbook that held sway when IT lived inside
of a glass house.
But times have changed.
Distributed computing has changed the
playing field. Critical information assets are
hosted on everything from big iron arrays to
laptop hard drives. Business applications are
no longer hosted in a central mainframe; many
are multi-tier client/server builds that are
about as stable as a Jenga block tower.
Hardware no longer plays by the rules
established by one dominant mainframe
operating system vendor. Storage vendors are
differentiating their wares by adding a lot of
complex “value-add” software to proprietary
array controllers and there are as many disk
mirroring and tape backup processes in play as
there are vendors.
And now, the new CIO is embracing server
clustering or server virtualization in a big way.
Digging deeper, you realize that your current
recovery strategy is bifurcated—with half of
your business recovery processes aimed at
server failover, the other half at data replication. You need tools that will enable you to
integrate all of the processes that you have in
place for server and network failover and for
storage recovery and data protection.
Business application vendors say they have
the tools you need, but they don’t. Server
vendors and virtualization software houses
are also talking the talk, but not walking the
walk. Storage hardware vendors have tools,
too—but only if you allow yourself to be
locked in to their gear exclusively.
Basically, you confront what seems like the
world’s meanest task: you’ve been handed a
mess and told to bolt on an airtight recovery
strategy.
Project3
10/16/07
12:56 PM
Page 2
New realities require “new school” business
continuity solutions. To start, you need to
adjust your focus from platform-centric
recovery to business process-centric recovery.
You need a toolset that will enable you to
recover all of the infrastructure components
supporting that process. Seamlessly. Holistically.
define scenarios for failing over your mission
critical business operations to an alternate
location—whether at a service provider’s hot
site facility or a recovery center of your own.
CA XOsoft WANsync can help you to monitor
replication and backup processes and, if you
elect to use their Assured
Recovery option, can
enable you to test failover
infrastructure… from your
desktop.
CA XOsoft WANsync can
give you visibility into your
mirroring processes so you
know that the right data
will be available at the right
time in your recovery effort.
Visit ca.com/xosoft
It would help if you had a single pane of glass
where you could develop recovery scenarios
and track and monitor all of the disk mirroring,
tape backup and other aspects of your plan
without dragging personnel off site every
month for testing. Visibility is key: you have
heard war stories about companies that
discovered only after a disaster that their
remote disk mirroring setup wasn’t replicating
all of the data that they thought or that tape
jobs were abending before critical data was
backed up.
All of this needs to be done without adding
personnel or allocating a lot of additional time
to business continuity concerns that takes
away from your real job. Bottom line: you
probably should be considering CA XOsoft
WANsync.
CA XOsoft WANsync provides a convenient
way to consolidate all of the data replication
and backup processes in one place, and to
The first of a three-part
whitepaper on the new
rules of business continuity
and how CA XOsoft
WANsync can help you to
address them is available for download here:
Redmondmag.com/showcase/caxosoft
About Jon Toigo
Jon Toigo is CEO of Toigo Partners
International and founder of the Data
Management Institute. A consultant, author
and analyst, he is focused on discerning the
underlying business value of information technology. He is a 25-year IT veteran who has
worked both as an operative within corporate
IT departments and as a senior consultant
with two international systems integrators.
Toigo has published thousands of articles in
the computer trade press and his blog,
DrunkenData.com, is read by over 180,000
visitors per month.
Toigo has written fourteen books, including
Disaster Recovery Planning: Preparing for the
Unthinkable, which is now in its third edition.
He has assisted over 100 companies in their
business continuity planning efforts.
Redmondmag.com/showcase/caxosoft
10/16/07
3:26 PM
Page 38
RedmondRoundup
Overall, if you’re looking for a scripting solution that helps you design and
maintain workflows, ActiveBatch will get
the job done for you. That’s especially
true if you have a mixed server environment, as it supports Windows, Linux,
AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and OpenVMS. If
you’re tired of maintaining dozens of
Perl scripts or shell scripts to automate
parts of your desktop administration,
ActiveBatch can take a lot of pain out of
ScriptLogic’s Desktop Authority does
just that. It automates the day-to-day
tasks that are the most mundane yet
typically take an incredible amount of
manual effort. It focuses on management, inventory, security and support.
Desktop Authority installs automatically onto a desktop system. You can use
an installed or networked SQL Server
installation to hold configuration information, or a local MSDE installation
that the software will install for you.
Figure 3. One of Desktop Authority’s features is collecting and maintaining
inventory on desktop systems scattered across the enterprise.
building workflow scripts and keeping
them up-to-date.
ScriptLogic
Desktop Authority
The bread and butter of desktop
automation includes desktop management, patch deployment, anti-spyware
and interactive, Web-based remote management of individual systems. If you
automate tasks such as these, you’ve
probably taken into account more than
half of the manual effort that you may
spend on individual desktops.
Once installed and once the database is
configured, the software presents a comprehensive console to perform a variety
of activities targeting desktop systems.
For desktop management, Desktop
Authority provides a way to centralize
log-on scripting, group policies and
user profiles across the range of desktops. Further, it enables desktop client
configuration automatically throughout the day. This allows midday configuration updates, configuration of
mobile workers using cached credentials and continual security-policy
enforcement. In addition, you can
deploy MSI-based applications from a
central location via a distributed MSI
repository, letting you perform remote
desktop installs. Of course, it also does
patch distribution in a similar way.
While it’s not the only tool that can do
this, combined with the other desktopmanagement features, it’s as close to a
comprehensive remote deployment
solution as you can get.
How about inventory? That’s the reason for the SQL Server database installation. Desktop Authority uses the
database to check systems and report
against information stored there. You
can take an inventory at regular intervals and match its results against previous inventories. That way you don’t
have to lock down systems, yet you can
monitor license compliance over time.
Desktop Authority uses USB and
external port locking to protect against
data theft and the introduction of malicious software. By implementing a
policy-based lockdown of removable
storage and communication devices, the
product applies a set of restrictions that
thwart the simplest and most common
type of data theft. It also protects
against spyware and provides reporting
and removal.
As the company name implies (the
company was recently acquired by
Quest Software Inc., but is being run as
a separate business unit), you can also
script the features provided to give a
level of customization to how it works.
I didn’t do any scripting in my brief
test, but having it there is always a
comfort when you need it.
I found Desktop Authority to provide
great information and make a number
of activities involving servicing desktops far easier than they could be done
manually. If anything, the sheer number
of features made for complexity; you
should know what you want to do with
it before you embark on an exploration
of its features. It can be difficult to
decide where to begin. —
Peter Varhol ([email protected]) is
Redmond’s executive editor, reviews.
Project19
9/11/07
1:00 PM
Page 1
1107red_F1Greene40-46.v6
10/16/07
10:04 AM
Page 40
President, CEO and
co-founder Diane Greene
is at the center of the swirl
of development activity
at VMware.
10/16/07
10:04 AM
Page 41
To
Virtualization
and Beyond
By Ed Scannell
VMware’s Diane Greene is on a quest to
Y
make server virtualization ubiquitous.
ou can’t burn much hotter than VMware Inc.
is right now.
Fresh off one of Wall Street’s hottest IPOs of 2007,
VMware has risen from an obscure startup evangelizing
the relatively novel idea of virtualization on x86-based systems back in 1998 to a top-tier software powerhouse that
has made virtualization very much a mainstream technology.
The woman largely responsible for putting VMware in
the spotlight is Diane Greene, a co-founder of the company and its president and CEO since its inception.
Greene has grown VMware’s revenues to $709 million in
2006, a jump of 83 percent over the previous year, largely
on the strength of its Infrastructure 2 suite of software,
which offers tools to mange several different brands of
virtual machines, as well as its ESX Server and Virtual
Server offerings.
While Greene’s company has dominated the x86-based
virtualization market, it no longer has that space to itself.
Microsoft over the past couple of years has made it clear it
very much wants to play and play hard in the virtualization
space. Redmond is putting a lot of marketing and technology
muscle behind its Virtual Server 2005 release, trying to buy
market share with a free version of its Virtual PC 2007 product, and will include a hypervisor technology, called Viridian,
in its upcoming release of Windows Server 2008. Greene figures to increasingly fight the virtualization war on two fronts,
as VMware continues to get growing competition from the
open source community, most notably from XenSource Inc.
(recently acquired by Citrix Systems Inc.).
Prior to co-founding VMware, Greene, 52, held technical
leadership titles at Silicon Graphics Inc., Tandem Computers
and Sybase Inc., and was the CEO of VXtreme. Greene
holds degrees in mechanical engineering, naval architecture
and computer science from the University of Vermont,
PHOTOS BY RYAN NOTCH
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University
of California, Berkeley, respectively.
Greene sat down with Redmond magazine Editor Ed
Scannell to talk about some of the reasons for the growing
industry acceptance of virtualization technologies, being
one of the few companies to successfully fend of Microsoft
in a strategically important market, and the prospect of a
thriving third-party market for virtualization.
Redmond: How would you characterize the era
we’re now entering with virtualization technology?
Greene: I would say virtualization has become very much
mainstream. In the late 1960s and early 1970s IBM developed it for mainframes but it kind of died out. The problem
with the x86-based processors has been they were not
designed with virtualization in mind whatsoever. There was
research done at Stanford by some of VMware’s founders
around the idea that virtualization could gain isolation for
mainstream applications. That’s why we founded VMware,
really, to bring that to industry-standard systems. I think we
invented some important modernizations that allowed virtualization to work on industry-standard systems by taking
advantage of the extensive support for distributed computing. When we introduced it, we did so as a way to run
Linux on Windows in order to get a lot of people to start
using it on the desktop. Then, as we started partnering with
the server vendors, IBM in particular, they had some large
servers where the partitioning aspect of virtualization
allowed them to deliver compelling solutions to customers
and so server consolidation took off. It has now moved well
beyond that to where people see the power of virtualization
to the degree it’s causing an entire industry refresh. You can
do all sorts of systems infrastructure functionality in a new
and more powerful way.
10/16/07
10:04 AM
Page 42
Q&A: Diane Greene
“We estimate that about 90 percent of applications
today belong in virtual machines. Once the final
hardware assist is there from the processor and
peripheral vendors, all applications will run in
virtual machines.”
Diane Greene, Co-Founder, President and CEO, VMware Inc.
How soon before we get to the point where we
have virtualization for everyone?
Virtualization is definitely headed toward ubiquity. At
VMworld [in September] we announced our embedded
hypervisor, the ESX3i, and many of the major x86-based
hardware vendors announced they will ship servers with an
embedded ESX server in them. Anything that’s virtualized
has more flexibility, better utilization, and stronger reliability and security properties. I’d say there’s still some
hardware-assist work to be done. We estimate that about
90 percent of applications today belong in virtual
machines. Once the final hardware assist is there from the
processor and peripheral vendors, all applications will run
in virtual machines. What it gives you is this single way to
manage your software and manage it completely separately
from your hardware.
There’s some industry talk about the eventual
emergence of a complete virtualization system.
What’s your vision for that?
Once you have a comprehensive virtual infrastructure in
place where you buy servers already virtualization-enabled,
where you’re running a VMware infrastructure, then you
can have hot-pluggable machines. So if you’re running out
of capacity you can add servers and through VMware—or
some virtual infrastructure—the system will automatically
detect that you just added new resources and bring them
all online and make them available for applications. With
things like our VMotion technology you can automatically
move running applications around. Or if you want to take
something out of the system to service it, the systems will
automatically move the applications off with no interruptions because you have a fully distributed system infrastructure running. A virtual infrastructure really takes all
your hardware, server storage and network resources and
pulls it all together so you can run it as a single system.
So this idea of hot-pluggable virtualization, how far
away are we from seeing it on a wider-spread basis?
Well it works today and we have many customers running
over 50 percent of their servers with VMware infrastructure. We have some that run it on 100 percent. You’re asking how far away we are from everyone running that sort
of virtualized infrastructure? Well, I tend to be always
optimistic about adoption but it always happens more
slowly than you’d expect. It’ll be sooner rather than later. I
get nervous about making predictions these days because
now they call it ‘forward-looking statements.’
Do you envision a virtualization software stack
emerging around a set of industry standards?
Absolutely. In fact, I think we’re making progress there.
We announced right around VMworld the Open Virtual
Machine Format [OVF] that’s backed by many hardware
vendors and all the virtualization [software] vendors
including Microsoft and XenSource. So right there is a
virtual machine that can be self-describing, managed
and manipulated, and that contains an operating system
and applications. I think this is a big step forward. We
work actively with the DMTF [Distributed Management Task Force Inc.], which is a standards group for
APIs, formats and protocols for virtual-machine management. So in terms of what there will be for a stack,
there’s the core virtualization where the hardware will
just come virtualization-enabled. Then you have a full
virtual infrastructure that takes that virtualization layer
and exposes it to the software in a way that increases the
reliability, availability, security, capacity and utilization.
Then, on top of that, you’ll see vertical solutions like
solutions around desktop posting, virtual desktop infrastructure, or a solution around how to manage, test and
develop through virtualization. What virtualization is
making possible is an ability to truly automate the management of the software.
What’s the biggest obstacle to establishing
meaningful standards in the virtualization market?
There, too, we’re starting to make some really good
progress. Any standards process I’ve ever seen has a slower
pace than the pace of technology innovation just because
it’s bringing together a number of different companies all
moving at a different pace with different priorities.
I’ll be more direct: How big an obstacle is Microsoft
going to be in terms of setting meaningful standards?
Coming out and backing the OVF standard, I thought, was a
big step for them. We hope to do more and more with
Microsoft because it’s what our mutual customers want.
Project2
8/10/07
4:32 PM
Page 1
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10/16/07
10:04 AM
Page 44
Q&A: Diane Greene
History tells us that Microsoft’s inclination will be
to bundle as much virtualization technology into its
operating system as it can. In the past this sort of
strategy has served to wipe out whole categories of
competitors. What is to prevent this from happening
with virtualization software?
There are a number of reasons why we don’t see that happening. First, the last thing you want to do is bundle virtualization with the operating system. That just undermines a lot of
the value. With virtualization you are virtualizing the hardware so you want your hardware to come virtualization-
products. We also focused on making sure everything
works very well with Microsoft’s software stack. So as well
as adding value to our customers, we add value to the
Microsoft stack. The other thing we’ve done well is executed. We’ve consistently brought out major new innovations year in and year out. So the more of our functionality
customers use, the more money and time they save.
Is coopetition with Microsoft getting easier or more
difficult the last three or four years?
There are parts of Microsoft where I think we have pretty
good communication. Certainly I think there’s room for us
to improve our relationship.
In what areas?
“… The last thing you
want to do is bundle
virtualization with the
operating system. That
just undermines a lot
of the value.”
Diane Greene, Co-Founder,
President and CEO, VMware Inc.
enabled. That hardware will run any virtual machine, and
that virtual machine can have any version of any operating
system in it. The application can then choose the optimal
operating system, and you don’t have to choose the application based on what operating system the hardware supports. The other thing is, you don’t want to include an
operating system with a hypervisor because the smaller you
can make a piece of code, the more performance, security,
scalability and reliability it will have. If you can make it reliable and secure you don’t have patching issues to deal with.
I think in the areas of mutually giving our customers
what they want around licensing, and customer support,
there’s more we can do together. I think working jointly
more on open standards, APIs, protocols and formats. I
think we could work more with them around things we
could do with the hypervisors and the operating systems,
how we support their applications like Exchange or SQL
Server. We have large numbers of customers running
these major Microsoft workloads in our virtual machines.
There’s a lot more we can do to help these customers and
to the extent we can do these things together with
Microsoft would be great.
In some cases in the past Microsoft hasn’t been as
forthcoming as it could have been about things like
APIs with ISVs. What’s your experience there?
Customers understand what’s going on and have become
very articulate with Microsoft that they [Microsoft] need
to be more open, and understand that they can’t use arbitrary mechanisms to control the market. I think customers
speaking up are starting to cause some change in how
Microsoft approaches working with ISVs.
What has been your strategic approach to open
source, and to competitors like XenSource?
We’ve always worked extremely well with the Linux community. We developed a paravirtualization interface for how
an operating system could run on a hypervisor, and the
same binary could run both on the raw hardware as well as
on the hypervisor. We contributed that to the open source
community. In fact, that’s pretty much what Ubuntu Linux
is now shipping with. We were pleased with the open
source hypervisor community in that we were able to work
with them and get the OVF standard adopted. I think once
software has been around for years and years and isn’t on a
steep innovation curve, that’s the place for open source.
VMware is one of a handful of companies able to
fend Microsoft off in a strategically important
market. How have you been able to do this?
What’s the next big market opportunity for
VMware in virtualization?
I think it has to do with focusing hard on customer value,
working well with our partners and producing compelling
We have a huge vision of how we can further automate
and basically improve how software is delivered, man-
Project4
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SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
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KACE and KBOX are trademarks of Kace Networks, Inc.
All other registered trademarks are owned by their
respective companies.
Systems Management. Done.
10/16/07
10:04 AM
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Q&A: Diane Greene
aged and maintained. That’s a pretty broad statement but
we have a number of initiatives around increasing the
reliability, the security and the automation of managing
your software.
We’re working with ISVs around the virtual appliances
area and that’s very exciting. It’s a very rich roadmap and
it’s a roadmap where there’s so much opportunity for all
the companies in the tech industry. It’s a big opportunity
because it’s not often you get this sort of refresh cycle
where people are upgrading their hardware and software;
changing the way they manage their software, changing
how they organize their IT because they can now treat the
software in such a uniform way.
enjoy working at VMware and the people here and so we
can bring back the most talented people.
What influence do you think virtualization will
have on IT shops more aggressively adopting
green technologies?
Well, power companies like PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric
Co.] were the first to launch a program—and now there
are about 20 other power companies in the U.S.—that
actually offers rebates if you virtualize because of the huge
power savings. I was recently talking to one of our partners
who told me that they have a major green program and
they said the most leveraged way to go green in your data
“We’ve estimated that, accumulatively, something
like 7 billion kilowatt hours of power have been
saved with our virtualization software. We estimate
that’s enough to produce all of New England’s power,
heating and cooling for a year.”
Diane Greene, Co-Founder, President and CEO, VMware Inc.
How do you see a larger, vibrant, third-party
application market for virtualization evolving?
There will be explosive growth as all the hardware starts
becoming virtualized with virtualized infrastructure.
Then, there will be lots of solutions getting built. I believe
at VMworld we had almost 200 people exhibiting their
products, so there obviously is a lot of different ways
people are supporting virtualization. There’s a lot of it in
the infrastructure space but there are also solutions
around training, hosting and around software lifecycles.
There are the virtual appliances and software being
distributed in a virtual appliance, too.
How do you find great young talent for what you’re
doing there? Is it easier to attract people now that
virtualization technology is well-known?
Certainly, as we have become more visible, it has been
easier to find high-caliber people. As the impact of virtualization grows, really talented people are more and
more interested. We’ve always been able to attract good
people, but the number of good people we’re able to
attract has really gone up, which is a wonderful thing for
the company.
center is to virtualize. We’ve estimated that, accumulatively,
something like 7 billion kilowatt hours of power have been
saved with our virtualization software. We estimate that’s
enough to produce all of New England’s power, heating
and cooling for a year. It’s very significant and it’s something we here feel really good about.
Any ideas that have come to market from your
competitors that you wish you had thought of first?
There are things people are doing out there that I wish we
had. We have so many more ideas than we can execute on,
but we share them with our partners now because we can’t
get to them all. We’re so immersed in this that we see all
kinds of things to be done. I can’t say I’ve been surprised
by anything anybody has done, but some people are doing
really good things, that’s for sure.
What’s your acquisition strategy for the next
few years?
Do you prefer to recruit more experienced talent or
develop it yourself?
In the case where we’re building something and we don’t
have all the technology pieces and there’s a little startup
that has that technology, we’d look into acquiring them.
Where there are solutions being built around VMware
infrastructure that have strong compatibility with what
we’re doing and that our customers are asking us to give
them, we’d look into the possibilities of acquisition.
We do both. We have a really strong college intern program and so we work very closely with the universities. It’s
great to bring people in as interns and then they come to
Ed Scannell ([email protected]) is the editor of
Redmond magazine.
Project4
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Page 49
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These flagship
Office 2007 apps
have some
interesting new
functions, if you
know where to look.
By J. Peter Bruzzese
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SCOTT BURROUGHS
ur collective attention span seems to be getting shorter these
days. We don’t have time to hear every minute detail about a
new application. We want to hear “just the facts.” Tell us what’s
new, tell us what’s better, and tell us how it’s going to make our
lives easier or more productive. That’s what “Top 5” lists are all
about. So, in that spirit, here are the top five latest and greatest new features and
functions for the new Microsoft Word
2007 and PowerPoint 2007 apps.
O
1
Word 2007:
Saving Files as
PDF (or XPS)
If you’ve ever had to convert a file to a
PDF, you know how frustrating it can
be if you don’t have the conversion
tool. I’ve been so desperate at times
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Word & PowerPoint 2007
that I’ve paid online companies to do
it for me. Not anymore.
You have to download an add-on
from Microsoft (go to Microsoft.com
and search for “2007 Microsoft Office
Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or
XPS”). Once it’s installed, you’ll see
this option every time you go to save
your documents.
You know what PDF is, but XPS certainly isn’t as well known as a file type.
It’s the new XML Paper Specification
that is an up-and-coming format for
sharing documents. A document converted to XPS maintains its look and
feel with no loss of quality. Your fonts,
formatting and high-quality images
still look the same. XPS is based on an
open standard—viewers are free for all
to download and use. You can even
open XPS documents with IE7. For
more information about viewing and
generating XPS files, check out
http://tinyurl.com/37z3yk.
Figure 1. The Document Inspector strips your document clean of personal
information before you share it with others.
Other Cool Stuff …
In Word
The new ribbon interface—we know many hate the change, but it’s the
future. It looks cool and it’s easy to use once you get the hang of it.
■ You use the Blog Editor for other purposes, so why not blogging, too?
■ The Office 2007 suite has enhanced SmartArt.
■ Themes traverse Office applications to give presentations a unified look.
■ The Contextual spelling checker helps when you spell things correctly,
but use words in the wrong context.
■ Live Previews lets you see what something is going to look like before you
make the final selection and have to use the Undo key if it doesn’t work.
—J.B.
■
2
Word 2007: Document Inspector
Your documents may contain metadata
or other information you might consider private. You don’t want to send
this along when you need to e-mail
your files to a colleague in another
department, branch office or company.
Items like comments, revisions, headers
or footers may contain information
you want to strip from a document
before you send it.
Finding all that hidden data can be
time-consuming and confusing. The
Document Inspector does it in just
moments. Select the Office orb, then
Prepare and then Inspect Document.
You can select or de-select any of the
options (see Figure 1), and then
choose the Inspect button to give
your file a run-through.
3
Word 2007: Full
Screen Reading
Personally, I’m not much of an “onscreen” reader. I prefer a good oldfashioned book or magazine in my
hands. There are many, however, who
spend hours reading documents on
their screens. The new screen-reading
display in Word 2007 is much
improved from Word 2003 when it
was called Reading Layout.
The purpose of Word 2007’s new
display is to make documents more
legible onscreen. It uses ClearType
technology, which provides a
crisper display of text on modern
monitors. Several new fonts are
designed to take advantage of
ClearType technology, such as
Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara,
Corbel and Constantia.
4
Word 2007:
Building Block
Organizer and Quick
Parts Gallery
I remember the days of Word 6.0
macros. Ah, the good old days. Word
2007 gives us better days with the
Building Block Organizer. Sometimes
you don’t want to create an entire
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document template. You just need a
piece, like a header/footer arrange-
ment or a cover page you can use over
and over again.
With Word 2007, you can create
your own “blocks” to add to the
Quick Parts Gallery, which is located
on the Insert ribbon, under the Text
grouping (it’s listed as “Quick Parts”).
You could also select from one of
many pre-configured “blocks” to add
preformatted content (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. The Building Block Organizer gives you a quick way to add
preformatted content.
5
Word 2007:
Built-In
Translation Tools
¿Habla Español? Ni keyi shuo
Zhongwen ma? Do have any idea
what I’m saying?
No worries, because Word 2007
includes built-in translation tools.
The Translate tool and the Translation ScreenTips tool are both located
on the Review ribbon, under the
Proofing group.
These are excellent for those of us
who work with documents in other
languages from time to time. When
you use the Translate tool, the
Research pane will appear. A company
called WorldLingo.com helps with
the translation. Translation ScreenTips operate a bit differently. You
select a language to which you want a
word converted, hold your cursor
over a word and it will bring up a definition for that word.
PowerPoint
1
PowerPoint
2007: The
Selection Pane
Sometimes you’ll end up with a PowerPoint slide so complicated and filled
with so many objects that you can’t see
them all, especially if they’re layered
over one another. If revising the slide
for greater simplicity isn’t an option for
whatever reason, there’s another way to
get the whole slide into view.
The Selection Pane can help you
see your objects by listing them all in
a side panel. You can select them
individually to make them appear.
This pane isn’t easy to find, however,
so it might have gone unnoticed. It’s
located right on the Home ribbon in
the Editing group. Click on the
down arrow next to Select and
choose Selection Pane. By selecting
or deselecting the little “eye” next to
a shape, you can make them appear
or disappear.
2
PowerPoint
2007:
Presenter View
If you frequently use PowerPoint to
give presentations to a large audience
using additional AV equipment, you’re
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1:25 PM
p
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d
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overpaying on license fees and inappropriate usage of software/internet by employees.
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1107red_F2Top5_49-56.v10
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Other Cool Stuff …
In PowerPoint
The zoom slider makes zooming in and out much quicker and easier.
Use Ctrl+G (or Ctrl+Shift+G) to group or ungroup selected items.
■ You can save files as PDF or XPS, just like in Word.
■ There are a couple of new autoshapes and font effects.
■ PowerPoint also has the Inspect Document feature.
■ You can select undo/redo even after you save your file.
—J.B.
■
Figure 3. The Presenter View makes giving the presentation much more fun and
easy to understand.
going to love this feature. I had the
chance to use this feature at Redmond
magazine’s last TechMentor Conference in Orlando when I was speaking
on the subject of Windows Vista and
Office 2007.
Essentially, the Presenter View lets
you display your PowerPoint slides on
another monitor or onto a screen
through a projector. While you’re
doing this, PowerPoint shows you—
the presenter—a view of your notes, a
preview of the current slide and
upcoming slides in your slide deck.
Rather than trying to memorize your
presentation, or work from a side set of
awkward notes, you can enlarge them
so they’re easy to see (see Figure 3).
You can also use the thumbnails to
choose slides out of order if you need
to customize your presentation on the
fly. This is a great feature, because
instead of clicking through five slides
and saying, “You don’t need this one,
or that one,” you can jump right to the
slide you need to make your point. To
turn on Presenter View, go to the Slide
Show ribbon and look for the settings
under the Monitors group.
Master and make changes so your
presentations conformed to a certain
look without having to change each
individual slide. You would just make
changes to the Master Slide and the
entire presentation would have a uniform look.
PowerPoint 2007 still uses a Slide
Master, but it has a section of slide
layouts beneath it as well. In other
words, you have the primary slide format, and beneath that you have a title
slide layout, title and content slide
layout and so on. The individual layouts inherit formatting from the Slide
Master. From there, you can make
additional changes to each layout. To
see these layouts, go to the View ribbon, then the Presentation Views
group and select Slide Master.
Another change you might like
(especially if you’re really into PowerPoint) is the ability to change placeholders within Slide Masters. For
PowerPoint novices, a placeholder is
the message that comes up in your
established section boxes that say
things like “Click to Edit Text.” It can
also be a pre-determined spot for a
chart, table or diagram. To change
placeholders, you need to open the
Slide Master. Then on the Slide Master ribbon, under the Master Layout
group, select the down-arrow next to
Insert Placeholder and you’ll see your
options (see Figure 4, p. 56).
4
3
PowerPoint
2007: Slide
Master Configuration
In previous versions of PowerPoint,
you could always go into the Slide
PowerPoint
2007: MS Graph
Is Gone
You can say goodbye to MS Graph if
you also have Excel 2007 on your
system (which you most likely would
with the Office 2007 suite). You can
add a chart or graph to your presen-
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1107red_F2Top5_49-56.v10
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Page 56
Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation
(Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685, United States Postal Service)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Title of Publication: Redmond
Publication No. 1553-7560
Date of Filing: 10/01/07
Frequency of Issue: Monthly
No. of issues published annually: 12
Annual Subscription Price: $39.95, Canada/Mexico $54.95, All other
International $64.95.
7. Mailing address of known office of publication: 9121 Oakdale Ave.,
Ste. 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311.
8. Mailing address of the headquarters of general business offices
of the publisher: Same as above.
9. Name and complete mailing address of Publisher, Editor, and
Managing Editor:
Henry Allain, Publisher, 16261 Laguna Canyon Rd., Ste. 130,
Irvine, CA 92618.
Doug Barney, Editor in Chief, 16261 Laguna Canyon Rd., Ste. 130,
Irvine, CA 92618.
Wendy Gonchar, Managing Editor, 16261 Laguna Canyon Rd.,
Ste. 130, Irvine, CA 92618.
10. Owner (s):
1105 Media, Inc. dba: 101communications LLC, 9121 Oakdale Ave,
Suite 101 Chatsworth, CA 91311. Listing of shareholders in 1105
Media, Inc.
11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning
or Holding 1 Percent or More of the Total Amount of Bonds,
Mortgages or Other Securities:
Nautic Partners V, L.P., 50 Kennedy Plaza, 12th Flr.,
Providence, RI 02903
Kennedy Plaza Partners III, LLC, 50 Kennedy Plaza, 12th Flr.,
Providence, RI 02903
Alta Communications 1X, L.P., 1X-B, L.P., Assoc., LLC, 200 Clarendon
St, Flr. 51, Boston, MA 02116
12. The tax status for Redmond has not changed during the
preceding 12 months.
13. Publication Title: Redmond
14. Issue date for Circulation Data Below: October 2007
15. Extent & Nature of Circulation:
Average No. Copies
No. Copies of
Each Month
Single Issue
During Preceding
Published Nearest
12 Months
to Filing Date
a. Total Number of Copies
(Net Press Run)
84,839
84,856
b. Legitimate Paid/and or
Requested Distribution
1. Individual Paid/Requested
Mail Subscriptions
Stated on Form 3541
80,352
80,087
2. Copies Requested by Employers for
Distribution to Employees by Name or
Position Stated on PS Form 3541 0
0
3. Sales Through Dealers, Carriers,
Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and
Other Paid or Requested Distribution
Outside USPS®
235
97
4. Requested Copies Distributed by Other
MailClasses Through the USPS 0
0
c. Total Paid and/or
Requested Circulation
80,587
80,184
d. Nonrequested Distribution
Nonrequested Copies Stated
on PS Form 3541
3,074
3,348
1. Nonrequested Copies Distribution
Through the USPS by Other
Classes of Mail
0
0
2. Nonrequested Copies Distribution
Outside the Mail
716
869
e. Total Nonrequested Distribution 3,791
4,217
f. Total Distribution
84,378
84,401
g. Copies not Distributed
462
455
h. Total
84,839
84,856
i. Percent paid and/or
Requested Circulation
95.51%
95.00%
16. Publication of Statement of Ownership for a Requester Publication
is required and will be printed in the November 2007 issue of this
publication.
17. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and
complete:
Abraham Langer, VP of Audience Marketing and Web Operations
Figure 4. Changing the Slide Master and adding placeholders gives you greater
control over your presentations.
tation in one of two ways. If you
embed and insert the chart into the
presentation, you’ll do the editing in
an Excel 2007 worksheet. The worksheet file is saved with the PowerPoint file, so you won’t need to keep
track of two files. If you already have
a chart in an Excel worksheet, you
can paste the Excel chart into your
presentation and it will link back to
the Excel worksheet.
To see some of these features at work,
just add a new slide to your presentation
and choose the Picture with Caption
layout for that slide. Add your picture
by selecting the icon in the middle, then
selecting the Design ribbon.
From the Themes group, notice
what happens to that picture if you
choose one of the many theme
designs. For example, if you choose
the Opulent theme, the picture looks
like it’s part of a stack. If you choose
the Solstice theme, the picture looks
like it’s attached to the slide with
tape. Each one is a little different and
you can change the pictures even
more with the many picture tools.
Just the Facts
PowerPoint
2007: New and
Improved Effects
We’ll cover the top five greatest new
features and functions of Microsoft
Excel 2007 and Outlook 2007 next
month. If you have any favorite
aspects of Word or PowerPoint that
we didn’t cover here, let us know at
[email protected]. —
The graphic improvements are outstanding, from effects like shadows,
reflection, glow, soft edges, warp,
bevel and 3-D rotation to shapes,
SmartArt graphics, tables, text and
WordArt. There are also picture
styles, recoloring abilities and interesting photo edges.
J. Peter Bruzzese ([email protected]),
MCSE/MCT, is the author of “Tricks
of the Vista Masters” and “Excel 2007
Brilliant PocketBook.” He’s also the
co-founder of ClipTraining.com, which
provides brief training videos for
Microsoft tools and applications.
5
Project7
9/14/07
10:41 AM
Page 1
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Project5
10/8/07
11:15 AM
Page 1
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1107red_F264bit59-62.v7
10/16/07
10:17 AM
Page 59
Unix:
The 64-Bit
Gold Standard
Many say it will be years before 64-bit Windows
becomes a serious challenger.
By Paul Korzeniowski
icrosoft may be the behemoth of the software
industry, dominating lucrative markets like desktop operating systems, productivity applications
and application development tools, but there is
one area where its influence is miniscule, not monstrous.
It still lags behind in high-performance computing.
M
“For compute-intensive applications, medium and large
companies still turn to Oracle running on a Unix server
rather than SQL Server running on a PC server,” says John
Enck, a vice president at Gartner Inc.
An important reason for the continued performance delta
between Unix and Windows is the former’s superior support
ILLUSTRATION BY RALPH VOLTZ
1107red_F264bit59-62.v7
10/16/07
10:17 AM
Page 60
for 64-bit processing. In the Unix market, the migration to
64-bit computing has become routine. On the other hand,
Windows still finds itself in a relatively embryonic stage of
64-bit computing. At the turn of the millennium, Microsoft
made significant investments in this area, but they resulted in
little to no progress. There are a handful of reasons for that.
“Microsoft has been trying to get software vendors to
move to 64-bit computing, but most just haven’t seen a
compelling reason to do that,” says Joe Clabby, president
of market research firm Clabby Analytics.
Despite its lack of progress, Microsoft continues to throw
research and development dollars at the high end of the
computing market. SQL Server has operated with 64-bit
processing for a few years, Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit
modes, Exchange and other Windows Server 2007 products were built to run with 64-bit microprocessors, and the
company is requiring that all third-party vendors deliver
64-bit versions of their products in order to gain Microsoft’s
blessing in the future.
While these steps should help Microsoft present a
stronger case to Fortune 500 companies, observers expect
many more years will pass before they rely on Windows for
complex, back-end processing. “It took close to a decade for
Microsoft to move Windows from 16-bit to 32-bit processing, and it looks like that will also be the case with its migration from 32-bit to 64-bit processing,” says Gartner’s Enck.
Performance Matters
In the heart of the data center, where high-performance
applications reside, performance is king. And 64-bit processing flat out delivers more than 32-bit. The difference
centers on how the system manipulates data. In the 32-bit
world, you can place a maximum of 4GB of data in a computer’s internal memory. Placing data in internal memory,
as opposed to reading it from disk, improves performance
because there are fewer input/output read/writes to disk
subsystems. This takes significantly longer than working
directly with the information.
A 64-bit system can work with up to 16TB of internal
memory. Consequently, 64-bit systems address more memory faster and process more data per clock cycle. This
greatly improves complex application performance.
In 2003, Microsoft released its Windows Server 2003
Datacenter Edition. Executives boldly discussed burrowing
their way into the back-end of the data center. “I did
expect faster adoption of 64-bit computing on Windows,”
notes Aaron Foint, Windows systems administrator at
Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Right now, there are just
not a lot of 64-bit applications available.”
One necessary building block has fallen into place. Many
servers (estimates range as high as 90 percent of all servers
sold since 2006) can indeed run 64-bit applications, even
though most now work with 32-bit operating systems, says
Jason Hermitage, senior product manager at Microsoft.
The crooked path of Microsoft’s 64-bit server strategy
has been a problem, though. Initially, the company crafted
When Will 64-Bit Computing
Arrive at the Desktop?
Like throwing a rock into the middle of the
lake, moving to 64-bit computing starts at the
heart of the data center and gradually ripples
out to the edges of a company’s network. The
first ripple is evident. Hardware vendors have
been delivering 64-bit servers for a few years,
and a select number of applications now take
advantage of that extra processing power.
Now it’s clear that desktop hardware manufacturers are also getting ready for 64-bit processing. “Many desktop systems already come
with 1GB of internal memory,” notes Nathan
Brookwood, principal analyst at market
research firm Insight 64.
Currently, it only costs a company a few hundred dollars to outfit a PC with 4GB of memory.
This is currently 32-bit processing’s upper
threshold. Intense competition is expected to
push memory pricing down and the amount of
memory on these systems up. Therefore, in the
next 12 to 18 months, a growing number of
desktop systems will indeed be able to support 64-bit computing.
Microsoft laid the foundation for its movement to 64-bit computing at the desktop with
Windows Vista, which supports both 32-bit
and 64-bit processing. While the operating
system is 64-bit-ready, few applications
require that much bandwidth. High-end imaging, complex multimedia and financial-analysis
applications are three that will lead the charge
to this migration.
Any migration is yet to appear on the horizon, though. Servers can skirt limitations, like a
lack of device drivers and infrastructure software, because they often operate in a closed
environment, moving information from internal
to external storage. Desktop computers need
all the 64-bit accoutrements to be in place
before they make the switch. So even though
the 64-bit-processing rock has been dropped
in the data center pond, its ripples are still a
long way from reaching the desktop.
—P.K.
Windows XP to run on Intel Corp.’s Itanium microprocessor line as its primary 64-bit platform. That may not have
been the best choice.
“Application developers were unfamiliar with the Itanium
processor,” notes Brian Corcoran, manager of Windows
host development at SAS Institute Inc.’s JMP division.
Compounding that drawback was application compatibility.
The first few 64-bit versions of Windows didn’t seamlessly
support native 32-bit and 64-bit Windows applications.
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Because of this, Microsoft has been moving away from the
Itanium architecture, which has its roots in the Unix market. It has instead focused on x64 microprocessors, which
have a PC microprocessor foundation.
Missing Pieces
Yet another hurdle is that the entire Windows ecosystem
(software, peripherals and device drivers) needs to be
rebuilt to take full advantage of 64-bit processors. For
instance, a 32-bit DLL can’t address memory space larger
than 4GB, which a 64-bit processor does easily. Currently,
64-bit apparel for the Windows world is more of a fig leaf
than a full wardrobe.
Device drivers for hardware peripherals, like scanners and
printers, are hard to find. Few application-development
tools have been rewritten to support 64-bit processing.
Application infrastructure software, like vital anti-virus
software, is also missing.
Because application development is such a chore, only
companies that really need the extra processing power
have taken on the challenge. The first wave of applications
Database management systems (DBMSes) are an area
where 64-bit computing is taking root. If a company can
place an entire database in memory and process a query
without having to read it from a disk, then it can provide
significantly faster results.
In 2006, Gainesville State College (GSC) in Gainesville,
Ga., which has 7,500 students and 750 faculty and staff,
decided to upgrade to the 64-bit version of SQL Server.
After sorting through some pesky problems, like getting its
32-bit applications and 64-bit applications to work harmoniously on the server, the college found that the 64-bit
technology delivered a significant performance boost,
according to Brandon Haag, executive director of IT.
GSC, which relies solely on Microsoft software, has been
testing Exchange Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007.
The goal is to have them fully operational by the end of the
year. This rollout represents a few of several steps that
Microsoft is taking to prod its customer base and third-party
supporters to move to 64-bit computing. Starting in 2008,
independent software vendors will need to deliver 64-bit versions of their apps in order to earn Microsoft’s certification.
Skeptics Reign Supreme
“ It took close to a decade for
Microsoft to move Windows from
16-bit to 32-bit processing, and it
looks like that will also be the
case with its migration from
32-bit to 64-bit processing.”
John Enck, Vice President, Gartner Inc.
has included large database-management systems, decisionsupport and business-intelligence systems, medical applications like drug discovery and medical imaging,
computer-aided design and-computer aided engineering,
enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship
management (CRM) and supply chain management
(SCM), video production and gaming-software design.
Cakewalk, which develops desktop music and sound software, is a true pioneer. It moved to 64-bit Windows in
2005. Because its software manipulates multimedia files,
the extra processing power was desirable. Its migration did
present a few challenges, however.
“In theory, moving to 64-bit computing should have
been simple,” says Noel Borthwick, chief technology officer at Cakewalk. “In reality, we ran into a few unexpected
gotchas.” Cakewalk found that many development tools
rely on 32-bit, not 64-bit, algorithms to track code.
Something as simple as inserting a pointer to tell an
application where to locate data became a cumbersome
programming task.
Even with those moves, many remain skeptical of using
Windows to support complex applications. Although
Windows will have 64-bit capabilities, it lacks other needed
features. “Reliability is a key function for high-performance
applications. Users don’t want their systems going down,” says
Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for market research
firm Insight 64. Unix systems are more resilient than PC
servers because they support features like hot failovers,
where transactions are completed even during an outage.
Personnel requirements are another obstacle. While
there are oodles of Microsoft-certified engineers sitting in
IT department cubicles, the number of them that actually
understand how to deploy and support complex high-end
applications is relatively low. Consequently, Microsoft professionals will need knowledge transfers from more experienced Unix systems administrators. It’s unclear how much
help these individuals may be, however. In some cases, they
may push their enterprises toward Linux alternatives and
away from Windows.
Inertia appears to be still another force working against
Microsoft. “Large companies are extremely cautious with
their key applications,” explains Clabby Analytics’ Clabby.
“They won’t move to a new computing platform unless
something is tried and true and offers them compelling
economic advantages.”
To date, Windows simply hasn’t given them a good reason to make that change. While Microsoft has dominated
many other markets, the back-end of the data center is one
area where the company is now—and will remain for at
least a few more years—a persona non grata. —
Paul Korzeniowski ([email protected]) is a freelance writer
based in Sudbury, Mass. He specializes in technology issues.
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1107red_F2Carbon64-68.v8
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Page 64
Manage
Your
Carbon
Footprint
D
o you know the size of your organization’s carbon footprint? How about
the amount of kilowatts your computers use on a daily basis? If you don’t
know these stats right now, there’s a
good chance you’ll have to in the near future. It’s
good business today, and it’s going to be a big part
of tomorrow’s regulatory environment. Most
importantly, IT will be right at the center.
The European community is much further along
than the United States in terms of integrating ecological considerations into daily life. It’s pursuing
regulation on the ecologically friendly design of
energy-using products (EuPs) through Directive
2005/32/EC. This directive will require manufacturers to calculate the energy used to produce,
transport, sell, use and dispose of almost all prod-
The growing
importance of energy
efficiency gives IT a
leadership role
in the enterprise.
By Peter Varhol
10/16/07
3:39 PM
ucts. It will also require manufacturers
to go back to the energy used when
extracting the raw materials needed to
make its product, including all subassemblies and components.
Don’t think you’re immune if you
don’t do business in the European
Union. There are also proposals in
the United States to provide each and
every company with a carbon allocation. Exceeding this allocation will
result in fines and other penalties. You
can also expect a developing market
for trading carbon credits. This is
likely to be at least two years behind
the EuP, but will almost certainly happen eventually. In the near term, California will soon require some
industries to disclose carbon information to implement its statewide cap on
greenhouse gas emissions.
The need for greater understanding
doesn’t stop at carbon emissions.
Because of the tie-in among carbon
emissions, greenhouse gases and global
warming, it gets the most attention
today. However, there’s both good
public relations and good business in
other sustainable practices like conserving electrical power, recycling and
hazardous waste disposal.
There’s not a direct relationship
between carbon footprint and energy
consumption, but it’s close enough for
IT to generally reduce carbon output
by reducing energy use. In New England, for example, much of the power
comes from nuclear plants and Hydro
Quebec. These are both relatively
clean from a carbon standpoint. Power
from renewable sources like hydroelectric plants and wind farms generally
results in little or no carbon footprint.
Other parts of the country obtain
power primarily from coal- or oilburning plants, and have a heavier
carbon component to their power.
Nevertheless, until it becomes possible to more precisely track the carbon
emissions of all of our processes, we’ll
look at energy use as our measuring
stick in determining an enterprise carbon footprint.
The carbon-footprint measurement
also accounts for all processes and
purchases within an organization. If
you buy a new server, you also get the
Page 65
carbon it took to manufacture and
deliver that server. According to a
Gartner Inc. study, the carbon emitted
before you even hook up the computer
can be as much as 80 percent of the
energy used by the system.
So the carbon footprint is the electricity you use but also much more
than that. Carbon emission applies to
the manufacturing processes that use
energy, chemicals or petroleum products for raw materials. While it does
not directly affect IT, you’ll no doubt
have to track and measure the latter
sometime in the future.
The Impact on IT
There are other forces at work in the
carbon debate. Not many of us see carbon emissions in a data center’s daily
the server room with glass walls for all
to see are over. Today it’s far too easy
for even a casual observer to see a data
center covering several acres as a massive energy drain, rather than a symbol
of power and competence.
IT also remains the aggregator of
data for the enterprise. Carbon usage
will be just another collection of data
to manage and report on. Of course, as
those reports grow in importance and
start to become tracked as budget
items, other executives will start asking
IT about ways to improve the performance of their departments. IT in
many organizations will be leading the
charge on energy use in general while
also getting its own house together.
So what’s an IT manager or CIO to
do? You ignore green issues at your
Much of the energy usage accounting
for an enterprise’s carbon footprint
will come from running computers.
activities—certainly not carbon dioxide
from burning fossil fuels. However, we
do see lots of lights on and lots of
servers running. That need for power
to drive data centers has driven some
of the largest tech companies, like
Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., to
locate new data centers in areas of the
country where power is both cheap
and plentiful.
It’s incumbent upon IT to take a
leadership role in measuring, monitoring and reducing an organization’s
carbon footprint. Why should this
role fall upon IT? From a defensive
standpoint, IT is an attractive target
for environmental activists and others
driving conservation efforts and
financial savings. It may not be clear
how much power it takes to drive a
manufacturing plant, but you can
make a good estimate of the power
requirements of 5,000 servers.
Because IT has a reputation of being a
clean operation, many would be
unpleasantly surprised by its contribution to greenhouse gasses.
Those in a position to offer objections
see this as well. The days of enclosing
peril. It may not be a priority in your
organization, at least at the moment,
but you should be ready for the time
it does become one. Here’s where you
get started.
Energy Awareness
The first step in establishing a plan to
monitor and manage energy and carbon usage in the enterprise is to
improve overall awareness in energy
use, available technologies and best
practices. Energy awareness among
IT managers varies greatly, according
to a recent study by industry analyst
Forrester Research Inc. Forrester surveyed 124 procurement and operations professionals in enterprise IT
organizations in North America and
Europe. It noted that in general, less
than a quarter of those companies
currently included green considerations in their purchasing decisions.
Awareness may not be universal, but
it’s growing. Forrester found that
around half of the respondents
thought green considerations were
growing in importance, with more
than a quarter saying that it was very
10/16/07
3:39 PM
Page 66
Carbon Footprint
important. Still, awareness doesn’t
necessarily translate into action. The
survey also found that only 20 percent
to 30 percent of the respondents factor green considerations into their IT
purchase decisions. “Awareness and
especially action are still in their early
stages. But the growth is there, driven
by both public perception and real
business needs,” says Forrester Senior
Vice President Christopher Mines.
In most cases, European companies
seem to be a few percentage points
ahead of their U.S. counterparts in
both awareness and practice, but the
floor could approach IT for advice on
better utilizing network gear and
data-acquisition devices.
A good deal of that is also the business of IT. The enterprise needs accurate information, trend spotting and
what-if analysis based on data. To
make the entire organization cognizant of the carbon footprint related
to any decision, you may want a carbon charge-back mechanism. For
example, if a group needed a server to
run a specific application, you could
charge the carbon footprint of that
server back to that group. Each
Your goal is to provide a baseline for
measuring and ultimately reducing
your enterprise’s carbon footprint.
general conclusion still holds: As
awareness grows, so too will action.
In discussing energy awareness with
a variety of IT managers and executives, responses tend to mirror those
found in Forrester’s more formal
study. They were all over the map,
ranging from no awareness or interest
to a high level of knowledge and some
action. However, it’s telling that many
didn’t want their names or company
names used. That may be due to insecurity about their own views, or the
views of their organization.
Beyond IT
IT has several roles to play in managing and monitoring the carbon footprint of the enterprise, even in areas
with little IT impact. First, carbon
will likely be tracked and aggregated
by information systems. This is an
enterprise-wide role where data is
gathered, stored and analyzed, with
the results presented to management
for action—a traditional IT function.
Second, much of the energy usage
accounting for an enterprise’s carbon
footprint will come from running
computers. Functional divisions will
look to IT to provide guidance on
how to use desktop PCs and departmental servers in a more energyefficient way. Even the manufacturing
department would have a carbon allocation managed like its budget. This
isn’t so far-fetched, given government
efforts to allocate carbon quotas to
individual companies.
Purchase & Measure
The only way of knowing how much
you can reduce your energy consumption and overall carbon footprint is to
begin measuring the energy you’re
using today. If you see that figure at
all today, it’s likely only as a monthly
electric bill allocated to the fixed costs
of your budget.
You need more information, and getting it can be difficult. Start with your
vendors to get power consumption
stats for servers and other computers,
network equipment, telephone switches
and other electrical hardware. Work
with facilities people to look at power
draw in order to confirm vendor data.
Also, ask vendors to provide a value
that represents the carbon footprint of
the manufacturing process. If they
can’t provide it, look to competitive
vendors for comparative data.
You can use that information to
calculate your carbon footprint. Carbon Footprint Ltd. (www.carbonfootprint.com) provides an online
calculator geared toward personal
carbon use, but the company also
provides commercial services for
businesses. At the very least, it can
give you an idea of the types of energy
use and activities that go into calculating the footprint.
Your goal is to provide a baseline for
measuring and ultimately reducing
your enterprise’s carbon footprint. Of
course, avoiding all carbon emissions
will be almost impossible. In this case,
carbon offsetting plays a vital role. You
can purchase renewable power, such as
wind, hydro or solar, since these don’t
emit carbon into the atmosphere. Odd
as it may seem, you can offset carbon
emissions through activities like planting trees, because they absorb carbon.
Seeking Help
Technology suppliers are putting significant resources into burnishing their
green credentials. Most computer
component vendors have supported
energy efficiency for several years, and
they’re starting to invest in more efficient manufacturing technologies and
business practices.
With energy-efficient products, vendors also offer strategies and best practices for using their products. In part,
they’re leveraging their own experiences as they improve their own operations. They’re also setting up labs to
determine what kinds of configurations
work best in data centers.
Help can also come from software
vendors. According to Paul Rochester,
CEO of asset-management software
vendor PS’Soft, the role of asset management is to “manage the economic
opportunities and consequences of
asset acquisition and use.” That
includes energy use and carbon emissions, he says. In the future, PS’Soft is
looking at including features like a
carbon charge-back mechanism and
analytical tools for managing and
reducing energy use.
Oddly enough, vendors are often
reticent about communicating their
green initiatives with their customers.
In the Forrester survey, only around
one-third of the respondents claimed
to be familiar with their technology
vendors’ green initiatives. Part of that
is driven by a widespread perception
that saving energy is bound to cost
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12:26 PM
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3:39 PM
Page 68
Carbon Footprint
more money. In some cases that’s true,
but in other cases it’s possible to make
a better business case with more
energy-efficient technologies, even if
the initial cost is higher.
Sometimes word on initiatives simply doesn’t reach everyone in the
company. It could be poor communication or a lack of training. You may
have to draw such information out of
your vendor’s sales force. Your preparations for vendor negotiations should
include an energy checklist. Insist on
answers before signing a contract.
A Plan for Action
There are side effects to measuring
and managing carbon use. At a recent
Climate Savers Computing Initiative
press conference, Google declined to
provide hard data about its carbon
usage, despite its public portrayal of
energy conservation. The reason for
Google’s reticence is that, based on
carbon emissions, a competitor could
reverse-engineer the data to determine the number of servers Google is
running. In the highly competitive
search business, this is a closely
guarded secret.
Even if your company’s efforts in
energy efficiency and carbon usage
can’t be fully open for the world to
see, it still represents an important
emerging strategy in IT. We’ve been
trained to think of the electric bill as a
fixed cost essential to keeping the
doors open. If we can influence that
cost through smarter purchases and
better practices, we’re directly saving
money. PS’Soft’s Rochester notes that
the power cost of operating servers
exceeds their depreciation cost, making it a significant ongoing expense.
You’ll provide enormous flexibility
to an enterprise by managing energy
use and carbon footprint—and don’t
discount the public relations benefits.
There are a few smart things you can
do right away. Virtualized servers reduce
the total hardware requirement, which
saves a good chunk of energy immediately. If you’re not rack-mounting then
you’re probably leaving some savings
on the table. Energy Star 4.0, which
went into effect last month, calls for 80
percent-efficient power supplies and
lower idle-wattage ratings than previously required. Dell Inc., for example,
recently released servers, desktops and
notebooks engineered to draw about
one-third less power.
Thinking of energy—and carbon
output—as an asset to be managed is
perhaps the best approach to building
a comprehensive plan. While no
asset-management vendors support
that today, don’t be surprised to see
such features in the near future,
according to Rochester. That means
identify, measure, allocate and manage
on an ongoing basis.
Energy use and carbon emissions also
represent a unique opportunity for IT
to provide leadership for the enterprise
as a whole. That leadership is clear in
an IT-focused enterprise like Google,
but it also applies to any business in
any industry. IT can bring real benefits
to the enterprise that go well beyond
the “keep-the-lights-on” role to which
some shops have been relegated.
To gain traction, sustainable practices must include a sound business
strategy. If you sell a strategy as anything else, you won’t get executive
support and commitment. It looks like
there’s ample potential for real savings, and perhaps even competitive
benefits. Leading-edge organizations
are already in the process of devising
and implementing strategies. Everyone else will have to get on board
once the regulatory requirements
become clearer.
It’s too early to say whether or not a
strategy of tracking and reducing carbon use will substantially improve an
organization’s bottom line or make a
difference in the world in general. One
thing is sure, however: It’s not a fad
that will disappear tomorrow. Thanks
to an almost universal and growing
awareness of environmental issues,
coupled with growing regulatory
requirements, concepts such as carbon
footprint, energy efficiency and other
sustainable programs will almost certainly grow substantially. The role of
IT in support of these factors will also
expand in the coming years.
is Redmond’s executive editor, reviews.
Project3
10/17/07
9:37 AM
Page 1
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WindowsInsider
by Greg Shields
VM Within a VM
A
training company recently approached me to create
some videos on installing and using VMware’s flagship ESX product. They wanted me to demonstrate
all of the product’s features and functionality, including
ESX’s VMotion capability. That got me thinking about how
useful VMotion is to VMware’s ESX Server product.
Unless you’ve had your head in the
sand for the last few years, you know
that VMotion is VMware’s built-in ability to migrate virtual machines (VMs)
from one host to another without needing to power them down. This “hot
migration” capability is only available
in the high-end, high-cost Enterprise
Edition of ESX Server.
It’s “high-end” because it can migrate
machines without losing a beat. That
means much less downtime for critical
applications. It’s “high-cost” because
you’ll need an expensive Enterprise
license to run the ESX Server. You’ll
also need some form of high-end storage to support VMotion’s shared storage requirements.
VM? Absolutely—and depending on
your desktop’s configuration, it’ll pack
enough performance to help you develop
your virtualization skills right there at
your desktop.
Beefy Workstations
When you’re building a VM-within-aVM environment, you need a powerful
desktop host. After all, that host is running virtual machines that are also running virtual machines. They’ll require
lots of RAM and processor power.
You’ll need a desktop with at least a
dual core that also supports Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT) processor
extensions or newer versions of AMD’s
equivalent AMD-V extensions. The
A VM within a VM? Absolutely—and depending on your desktop’s
configuration, it’ll pack enough performance to help you develop
your virtualization skills right there at your desktop.
My immediate response to the training company was to tell them about
the hefty hardware I would need to
fully demonstrate the software. It just
wouldn’t be possible on an author’s
budget. Then I started digging around
and discovered some new functionality
in the recently released desktop version of VMware Workstation 6.0.
With just a little tweaking, you can
get Workstation 6.0 to fully support
VMware ESX instances running inside
VMware Workstation. A VM within a
virtualization extensions are a necessity
because they help the processor handle
the workload associated with virtualization more efficiently. Your system
should also have at least 3GB of RAM
to support all the virtual machines you
plan to run.
In order to successfully complete
your VMotion setup, you’ll need at
least four simultaneously running virtual machines. Two of those will be
ESX servers, the third will serve as the
Virtual Center management server,
and you will use the fourth as an
iSCSI target for shared storage
between the hosts.
ESX Server can use SAN-based storage, NFS and iSCSI targets for its
shared storage where VMotion-capable
virtual machines are housed. iSCSI is
an excellent low-cost medium for
shared storage as there are numerous
open source iSCSI tools available on
the Internet.
OpenFiler, which is an easy to use
Linux application, is a good choice.
You can download it from
www.openfiler.com. Once you’ve
installed it within a Linux virtual
machine, use OpenFiler’s Web interface to create a disk partition, a volume group and a volume for the
shared storage. Once you’re done, you
can also use the same interface to
share that volume as an iSCSI target
with your ESX servers.
Recursive VMs
Once you’ve completed the setup
process, you can create a fully functional ESX virtual machine by following these steps (or find them online at
http://tinyurl.com/yuumay):
• Create a new custom virtual
machine. Set its hardware compatibility
to “Workstation 5” and check the box
marked “ESX Server Compatible.”
• Select the Red Hat Linux operating
system, then provide the machine a
name and location.
• Give the virtual machine two virtual processors and around 1024MB
of RAM. The quantity of RAM
assigned to the virtual machine will
depend on the RAM available in the
host system.
• Select the bridged network option
and choose an LSI Logic SCSI adapter
for the virtual machine.
• Create a new virtual SCSI disk.
Make sure it’s large enough to host the
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3:08 PM
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1107red_WinInsider70-72.v6
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ESX software and any other hosted virtual machines. It’s usually a good idea
to create these disks as pre-allocated to
ensure the best performance.
• Once you’ve created the virtual
machine, remove it from the VMware
Workstation interface and the favorites
list, and close down that Workstation
instance. This ensures that the system
isn’t using the virtual machine’s files we
need to edit next.
• Open the new virtual machine’s
.VMX file in a text editor and make
sure the following lines are present
for each connected Ethernet adapter.
If there are multiple cards configured
for the ESX instance, there will be
one copy of each of these lines for
each adapter:
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
You’ll need to add the following lines
in the .VMX file for Intel-based CPUs:
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor
= TRUE
monitor_control.vt32 = TRUE
If the processor is AMD-based,
replace the line monitor_control.vt32 =
TRUE with monitor_control.enable_svm
= TRUE.
Reconnect the virtual machine with
the Workstation interface, make sure
the ESX media is in the CD drive and
connected into the virtual machine, and
boot the virtual machine.
Final Steps
This will begin the process of
installing the ESX operating system
into the virtual machine. Once the
installation and subsequent reboot is
complete, you can tell whether the
install was successful if the server
boots to the typical ESX screen.
Repeat the process for the second
ESX server and create the Windows
Server virtual machine for the Virtual
Center server.
Once all components are configured,
connect the ESX servers to the OpenFiler iSCSI data store and create your
VM within a VM.
Although this configuration won’t be
fast enough to run any production virtual machines, it gives you enough
performance to learn the product or
study for certification exams without
consuming valuable server resources.
The VMware online community was
very helpful in bringing this capability
into reality. —
Greg Shields ([email protected]),
MCSE: Security, CCEA, is a principal consultant for 3t Systems (www.3tsystems.com)
in Denver, Colo. A contributing editor to
Redmond magazine and a popular
speaker at TechMentor events, Greg is also
the resident editor for Realtime Publishers’
Windows Server Community,
www.realtime-windowsserver.com,
providing daily commentary and expert
advice for readers.
Project4
10/2/07
10:17 AM
Page 1
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SecurityAdvisor
by Joern Wettern
The Weakest Link
N
etwork security involves more than just technology.
You can’t ignore the human factor. To increase
your overall network security, you have to work
with your users to foster an environment of mutual trust
and effective education.
The instructor of my first networking
class gave us a lesson completely unrelated to technology. He stressed that a
network administrator is the king of his
network and that a user’s proper role
was to act as a serf who has to bow to
the king and beg for needed services.
You can still find such attitudes today,
but networks in well-run organizations
revolve around the employees’ needs and
on admins who place users at the center
of their thinking. There are good business reasons for doing this, but making
users a top priority in both your planning
and day-to-day administration also helps
make your network more secure.
There’s no better way to illustrate this
than with the following examples. Each
of the tales I’m recounting here actually
happened to a family member or close
friend (the names have been changed to
protect the innocent—or guilty, as the
case may be). Each of them illustrates
how ignoring users can be detrimental
to network security.
Communication
Breakdown
It all started with a phone call from
Fred’s office. Fred and his co-workers
suspected that a virus was spreading
around their network, but they couldn’t
reach the network support team because
they were offsite for training. Would I
be able to give them some advice?
Sure enough, the company was badly
affected by a fast-spreading virus. The
best advice I could give was to turn off
all computers and wait until the support staff got back to the office.
Early the next day, the network
administrators and support personnel
got together for an emergency meeting.
After some immediate damage control
(which included blaming the virus
infection on an outside vendor), they
came up with a plan to get everything
working again. By the end of the day,
It’s fairly obvious that the problem
here was the lack of communication.
Network staff assumed that sending out
a memo would magically ensure that
users stored data only on servers. Some
on the IT staff were probably happy to
have taught users a lesson about complying with policies.
Talking to users and finding out what
they really did would have alerted the
IT department to where data was actually being stored. With this knowledge,
they would have known to warn everyone about the re-imaging or made a
plan for backing up user data.
This entire episode has serious security
implications. After the incident, most
users didn’t trust network admins with
User education about network security is often not relevant to the
audience. It doesn’t give them the information they really need.
they were ready to implement this plan
and mentally prepared themselves for a
long night at the office. After most
employees had left for the night, the IT
staff started moving from computer to
computer and re-imaged each and
every hard disk.
By the morning the virus had been
eradicated and their problem apparently
solved—at least as far as the IT department was concerned. However, everybody else’s problems had just started.
Many in the company naturally had
stored documents on their hard drives.
As they started work that morning, they
discovered that all of those files had
been permanently deleted when the
hard disks were re-imaged. The help
desk got some angry phone calls, but
they simply pointed to a year-old memo
that had advised users to store important
data on a server.
their data. Instead of storing important
files on servers or local hard drives, many
now copy these files to flash drives that
they take home at night. This raises the
risk of confidential data getting lost or
falling into the wrong hands. Even
worse, the mistrust created by this
episode will make it difficult in the future
to get employees to comply with any
security policy, no matter how important.
Beware of Britney
and Paris
When Laura opened her e-mail, the first
item was an urgent message from the
mail administrator who had detected a
sudden increase in incoming virusinfected e-mail. Some of these messages
had subject lines relating to Britney
Spears or Paris Hilton. The mail administrator urged users to be extra careful
and to not open any suspicious e-mails.
Project5
10/8/07
11:19 AM
Page 1
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1107red_SecAdvisor74-76.v4
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SecurityAdvisor
This e-mail is a classic example of
how IT staffs often communicate with
the rest of the company and why it’s
ineffective. First, the memo was really
about a problem experienced by the
mail administrators—not the users.
The flood of infected e-mail was causing problems on the mail server, but all
these messages were being stopped by
anti-virus software. The memo caused
employees to worry about something
that wasn’t actually affecting them.
At the same time, the memo didn’t
contain enough information to be useful. There were no guidelines for helping users determine whether or not an
e-mail was “suspicious.” Based on the
memo, the one thing to watch out for
was a subject line referring to Paris or
Britney. The logical conclusion was
that it was safe to open messages with
different subject lines.
Unfortunately, user education about
network security is often not relevant
to the audience. It doesn’t give them
the information they really need. A better approach here would have been an
ongoing effort to educate users on how
to detect and react to potentially dangerous e-mail messages.
Secure Yourself
Susan just attended a training session
on e-mail security. Because the government agency she works for requires
that client communications remain
confidential, her agency implemented a
new solution for sending encrypted
e-mail. Now, whenever Susan sends a
message that contains any confidential
information, she needs to add **secure
to the subject line. The mail server then
encrypts all messages with that subject
line before sending them out.
This mode of encryption has some
basic security flaws. It depends entirely
on users to decide what’s confidential.
It also doesn’t work when a user
mistypes **secure. A good encryption
solution doesn’t rely on user judg-
ment. Instead, good e-mail encryption
implementations use an automated
process on the server to decide
whether or not to encrypt a message.
You can configure the server to make
this decision based on message content
or intended recipient.
While there’s nothing wrong with
empowering employees to encrypt data
they consider important, this should
only be used to augment a process that
enforces encryption when it’s required.
Next month, we’ll look at more security considerations that revolve around
the most variable factor in your network—the users. —
Joern Wettern ([email protected]),
Ph.D., MCSE, MCT, Security+ is the
owner of Wettern Network Solutions, a
consulting and training firm. He’s written
books and developed training courses on a
number of networking and security topics, in
addition to regularly teaching seminars and
speaking at conferences worldwide.
Project4
9/11/07
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AdvertisingSales
RedmondResources
AD INDEX
Advertiser
Page
1 & 1 Internet Inc.
18
www.1and1.com
Matt Morollo
Advanced Toolware
57
www.adtoolware.com
VP, Publishing
508-532-1418 tel
508-875-6622 fax
[email protected]
American Power Conversion Cor
71
www.apcc.com
AppDev Training
68
www.appdev.com
Avaya Inc.
22, 23
www.avaya.com
AvePoint, Inc.
47
www.avepoint.com
BeyondTrust Corporation
C3
www.beyondtrust.com
West/MidWest
East
URL
BlueCat Networks
27
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Business Objects-A/P
10
www.businessobjects.com
Computer Associates
36, 37
www.ca.com
32, 33
www.dell.com/amd
Devon IT, Inc.
43
www.devonit.com
Digiscope
13
www.lucid8.com
Dan LaBianca
JD Holzgrefe
Director of Advertising,
West/Central
818-674-3417 tel
818-734-1528 fax
[email protected]
Director of Advertising, East
804-752-7800 tel
253-595-1976 fax
[email protected]
Dell-AMD
Diskeeper Corporation
79
www.diskeeper.com
Erik Nielsen
Dorian Software
39
www.doriansoft.com
Enviromental Support Solution
67
www.ess-home.com
Famatech
55
www.famatech.com
IBM Corporation
C2, 1, 3,
www.ibm.com
48, 61, 63
Imanami Corporation
76
Intel Corporation
9
www.intel.com
iTripoli Inc.
17
www.itripoli.com
IT CERTIFICATION &
TRAINING: USA, EUROPE
KACE Networks, Inc.
45
www.kace.com
Linktek Corporation
58
www.linktek.com
Al Tiano
Lucid8
7
www.lucid8.com
Microsoft Corporation
15
www.microsoft.com
NetSupport, Inc.
53
www.netsupport-inc.com
NetOp Tech, Inc.
72
www.netop.com
Network Automation, Inc.
51
www.networkautomation.com
NORTHERN Parklife
73
www.northern.net
PRODUCTION
SAPIEN Technologies, Inc.
25
www.sapien.com
Mary Ann Paniccia
Secure Computing Corporation
5
www.securecomputing.com
SALES STAFF
VP, Print & Online Production
St. Bernard Software
C4
www.stbernard.com
Tanya Egenolf
Serena Barnes
TDWI
69
www.tdwi.com
The Training Camp
77
www.trainingcamp.com
Advertising Sales Associate
760-722-5494 tel
760-722-5495 fax
[email protected]
Production Coordinator
818-734-1520 ext. 164 tel
818-734-1528 fax
[email protected]
UltraBac Software
34
www.ultrabac.com
United Training, Inc.
75
wwwunitedtraining.com
Bruce Halldorson
Western Regional Sales Manager
CA, OR, WA
209-333-2299 tel
209-729-5855 fax
[email protected]
Patrick Cragin
MidWest Regional Sales Manager
303-255-1733 tel
440-851-6859 fax
[email protected]
Danna Vedder
Microsoft Account Manager
253-514-8015 tel
775-514-0350 fax
[email protected]
CORPORATE ADDRESS
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Redmond (ISSN 1553-7560) is published
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www.imanami.com
VMware, Inc.
31
www.vmware.com
Western Governors University
20, 26
www.wgu.edu
XenSource, Inc.
28
www.XenSource.com
EDITORIAL INDEX
Company
Page
URL
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
70
www.amd.com
Advanced System Concepts Inc.
29
www.advsyscon.com
Amazon.com Inc.
65
www.amazon.com
Apple Inc.
26, 80
www.apple.com
BeyondTrust Corp.
29
www.beyondtrust.com
Cakewalk
62
www.cakewalk.com
Citrix Systems Inc.
11, 41
www.citrix.com
Copernic Inc.
24
www.copernic.com
Distributed Management Task
42
www.dmtf.org
Exploit Prevention Labs
19
www.explabs.com
Google Inc.
24, 65,
www.google.com
IBM Corp.
41, 80
www.ibm.com
Intel Corp.
60, 70
www.intel.com
KACE Networks Inc.
35
www.kace.com
Marathon Technologies Corp.
12
www.marathontechnologies.com
OpenFiler
70
www.openfiler.com
Oracle Corp.
59
www.oracle.com
PS’Soft
66
www.pssoft.com
Red Hat Inc.
70, 80
www.redhat.com
ScriptLogic Corp.
29
www.scriptlogic.com
SDM Software Inc.
16
www.sdmsoftware.com
Symantec Corp.
19
www.symantec.com
VMware Inc.
41, 70
www.vmware.com
XenSource Inc.
12, 42
www.xensource.com
This index is provided as a service. The publisher assumes no liability for errors or omissions.
Project4
10/15/07
2:24 PM
Page 1
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E
1107red_Foley80.v4
10/16/07
10:20 AM
Page 80
FoleyOnMicrosoft
by Mary Jo Foley
Spreading Itself Too Thin?
T
here’s a thin line between diversification and overcommitment. Has Microsoft strayed too far over
that line? I’ve been mulling over this question a lot
lately. While I understand Microsoft’s desire and need to
seek out The Next Big Thing, I feel the company should
stick closer to its core competencies in its quest.
Consider this: In the span of two weeks
in late September, Microsoft rolled out:
• Halo 3
• A new family of Zune digital
media players
• A new Web search engine
• A consumer health-care service
• Test releases of new Windows Vista
and Windows Server
• Media Center Extenders to allow
streaming of content to TVs and
DVD players
• New software for small-business
phone systems
• An updated version of Office for
Windows Mobile phones
• An update to its adCenter onlineadvertising platform
What exactly is Microsoft these days?
A business software vendor? A development tools shop? A consumer-electronics
company? A services vendor? An advertising company?
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would
no doubt answer all of the above, in
spite of his recent proclamation that,
“‘Brand Microsoft’ should be seen as a
software competence company.”
Head in the Sand
Even with close to 80,000 employees,
though, how can Microsoft possibly do
a stellar job addressing its myriad competitors in specialized markets—ranging
from Red Hat and Nintendo to Google
and Apple? Even IBM, the company to
which Microsoft execs traditionally
point when asked who is Microsoft’s
No.1 competitor, is dabbling in far
fewer markets than Microsoft.
It’s the huge investments in consumer
markets Microsoft has made that I’m
puzzling over the most. Microsoft execs
have done their darndest to justify
Microsoft’s increasing focus on gaming,
Microsoft isn’t good at being
hip or cutting-edge.
consumer electronics, IPTV and other
home-entertainment arenas by claiming that consumer technologies are the
source of most technological innovation these days.
Here’s what Chief Software Architect
Ray Ozzie told attendees at Microsoft’s
annual financial analyst meeting in
late July:
“Something has happened ... over the
period of time that I’ve been in this
industry: Technological innovations first
hit within the corporate data center, and
worked their way outward. Nowadays,
GetMoreOnline
Visit Redmondmag.com to read
more about Microsoft’s current
market focus.
FindIT code: 1107Foley
the most exciting things are happening
in consumer electronics, and the technology innovations really find their way
into IT, as opposed to the other way
around. And I think IBM in general, or
any IT company that lacks that consumer component, is going to be disadvantaged from the perspective of IT.”
I don’t buy this line of reasoning. I
think an equally strong case could be
made for Microsoft sticking to its knitting, but that doesn’t equate to sticking
its corporate head in the sand, either.
Two Steps Behind
Instead of looking to build its own social
networking platform with Windows
Live Spaces or investing hundreds of
millions in Facebook, why not look at
how to best add social networking functionality to Windows, Office, Windows
Live and so on? (Even if the real answer
is antitrust fears.) Instead of building an
iPod competitor from scratch, why not
focus on writing software that would
power offerings from Creative or other
hardware partners that have more
consumer-electronics know-how?
Microsoft isn’t good at being hip or
cutting-edge. Those qualities may be
mostly irrelevant in the business and
software development worlds, but they
aren’t in the consumer space. No matter how much outside talent it brings in
to build up its consumer know-how,
Microsoft is going to be two steps
behind the leaders in these realms for
the foreseeable future.
From my point of view, Microsoft
needs more LINQ and less Soapbox.
Do you agree?
Mary Jo Foley ([email protected])
is editor of the new ZDnet All About
Microsoft blog and has been covering
Microsoft for about two decades.
Project3
4/9/07
4:42 PM
Page 1
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Project4
10/2/07
9:06 AM
Page 1

Redmondmag.com

Transcription

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