I have been spending quite some time now figuring out Vista’s activation mechanisms, and I think I know all of its options. The main question, however, is, would you use MAK (Multiple Key Management) or KMS (Key Management Service)? In this article, I summarized the pros and cons of KMS. In one of my next posts, I’ll write about the advantages and disadvantages of MAK activation. If you are not yet familiar with both technologies, I suggest reading one of my introductory articles about Vista activation first (see links above).

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Sometime ago, I reported that we were unable to set up our KMS (Key Management Service) under Windows Server 2003 because we already exceeded the number of allowed KMS installations. You can only install 6 KMS hosts by default. Since we accidently used the KMS key to activate some Vista clients, we couldn’t use this key anymore to activate the KMS host on a Windows server.

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There were a lot of announcements at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007 (MMS). I just summarized the most interesting ones:

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Last week, when I reported about this new Symantec study comparing different operating systems with respect to the vulnerabilities detected in the second half of 2006, I wondered when will the first study come out that includes Vista. I just stumbled across 90 days Vista vulnerability report of Jeff Jones, Microsoft security strategy director. There is an interesting debate going on now in the blogosphere.

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Microsoft just released System Center Operations Manager 2007, the successor of MOM 2005. When I first read the new name, SCOM 2007, I was somewhat surprised. I don’t know anything about marketing, but isn’t it a bit too close to “scam”? But when I accessed the download page today, I saw that Microsoft seems to prefer the abbreviation “OpsMgr 2007“. At least, this is what they use as the HTML title of the page (see title bar of your browser). Anyway, I think most will use SCOM 2007. So, what are its new features?

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The February issue of WindowsITPro has an interesting article about Group Policy annoyances (subscribers only). I think the most common problem is Group Policy settings not taking effect immediately. You change a setting and reboot the machine, but the change doesn’t seem to show immediately.

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Symantec has just published their new Internet Security Threat Report. They compared Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, HP and Sun. And guess what? Microsoft got the best grades! You know, there are many comparable studies and they all find different things depending on who financed them. But this one is interesting.

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Microsoft published a white paper which might be of interest to those who did not yet decide to deploy Internet Explorer 7. Actually, I am one of them. Some months ago, I posted an article where I recommended not deploying IE7 before 2007. Well, it is already end of March and I am still not convinced.

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Last Friday, I blogged about the “Skipream hack” that lets you use Vista without activating it. A commentator here on 4sysops linked to an article on a Microsoft blog claiming that this workaround won’t work. Although the arguments of Alex Kochis, the author of this post, are quite convincing, it is strange somehow that Brian Livingston, who is supposed to be a reliable source, purports that the Skiprearm trick actually worked in his tests.

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Update: The Adminpak for Windows Server 2003 SP2 has been released.

Microsoft released another compatibility update for Vista. Aside from computability issues, it should also fix problems with the Adminpak (Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Administration Tools Pack). However, it seems that one still needs this workaround to install the Adminpak under Vista.

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