Some companies still run Exchange 2003 and are content with its performance. However, Exchange 2003 is slowly getting close to the end of its lifecycle. Besides the end of mainstream support, there are other good reasons to switch to a newer Exchange version. In particular, Exchange 2010 offers many features that are just too good to be ignored. In addition to high scalability, the most welcome feature is the Database Availability Groups (DAG). It has never been easier to offer High Availability services for your users. But what about the migration to Exchange 2010; is it as simple as building a DAG?

The migration certainly is easier than what most administrators will expect. Microsoft also offers some nice guides, such as the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. Though I strictly followed the guide, I encountered more than one problem. As problem solving can take quite some time, I decided to share my experience. This is by no means a complete migration guide or an alternative to the documentation available on TechNet or elsewhere. It is merely a supplement to the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant.

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The Windows Memory Diagnostic tool checks the computer’s memory (RAM) for failures. If you have recurring error messages or computer crashes and can’t figure out what causes them, it might be time to check the memory.

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Are you looking for a freeware tool to synchronize folders? SyncBack is free and a great application to synchronize folders. Besides that it can also create backups of your data. But you are reading this because you want to synchronize folders, right? So go ahead and download SyncBack here and you’ll have a working folder synchronization tool within a minute.

When you start the application for the first time you are asked if you want to create a profile. Without a profile you can’t do anything, so you should create one. In the next dialog window you have to choose between a backup and a synchronization profile. No matter how you decide, you will have to make additional specifications. This time the options are manifold:

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Sometimes it gets very frustrating to use Windows Explorer for such simple tasks as copying files, especially when the amount to copy is large. First, it always seems to take more time than it should. More speed is always needed. Second, if any error occurs during the process, the whole operation is aborted or at least stopped. Third, if the data is copied, there is no way to verify whether the copy is valid. Fourth, if you have to abort a copy job, there is no way to resume it.

If any of the above points bugs you, you should check out TeraCopy. It solves all four issues.

Depending on your OS, file transfers between hard disks are up to 40% faster when using TeraCopy. The speed increase is only significant on locally attached disks, though. Copies to a network share are not speedier at all because network bandwidth is a limiting factor on modern hardware.

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Those running SharePoint 2007 already know the major enhancements that this Software can bring to the corporate culture. With SharePoint 2010 the products strengths are developed further. Here, you can find a short summary of the improvements and new features of SharePoint 2010. Due to the vast positive changes SharePoint 2010 brings, most companies want to migrate to the new software as quickly as possible. Basically, Microsoft supports two migration paths: In-place upgrade and database-attach upgrade.

System Requirements and Preparations

Both Versions of SharePoint, SharePoint Foundation (the previous WSS) and SharePoint Server (the previous MOSS), require Windows Server 2008 SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Besides that, you need Microsoft SQL Server for versions 2005 SP3, 2008 SP1, or 2008 R2. All of them have to be 64-bit installations—32-bit is not supported by SharePoint 2010.

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Sandboxie is a very lightweight Windows sandbox that — guess what — runs applications in a sandbox. This Windows sandbox is completely detached from your Windows installation. So if the website or application starts to do malicious things, everything stays inside the box. No registry keys are set, and nothing is written on your hard disk. You can find the Sandboxie homepage here.

Keeping your computer secure and tidy is a tedious but necessary job. If you don’t want to waste time on dealing with security measures, there is a simple solution to minimize your computer’s exposure to security risks: Install only the most necessary applications, and don’t surf on untrusted sites. However, in an administrator’s daily life there is always a reason to bend this rule.

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According to the developers, Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Windows. This is a big understatement, though—it is a multi-purpose security tool. So what does this tool offer besides password recovery? A network enumerator, a remote registry editor, a network sniffer, a route table manager, a password cracker, a password decoder, a traceroute GUI, a Cisco Config Downloader/Uploader, a wireless scanner, a database query tool, and much more. Because of this vast application area, I can’t describe every function in detail here. I will concentrate on the password recovery features.

The homepage says that Windows is only supported up to XP, but the tool also installs smoothly on Windows 7. However, some of the functions don’t make sense in a Windows 7 environment, such as the feature to recover Internet Explorer 7 passwords. Some features won’t work at all. But the limitations for Windows 7 users are few.

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The release of SharePoint 2010 caused a lot of hype. Nonetheless, its predecessor Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is still used in many companies. For those who haven’t updated yet, I want to introduce a very valuable tool: SharePoint Utility with a Smart, Helpful Interface (SUSHI).

SharePoint is a big success for various reasons; one of them is certainly the ease of administration. Once you have internalized the structure of SharePoint, it is very straightforward to use. Almost too straightforward: because it is so easy to create new websites and lists, web applications often grow too fast and unstructured. Keeping the content ‘findable’ often requires the taming of the rank growth. It is a difficult task, but doable.

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One of the biggest buzz words in IT at the moment is Green IT. IT does not have the best image when it comes to ecology; data centers in particular have a bad reputation because of the massive amounts of energy they use. Hence, when people talk about Green IT they often focus on servers. But if you want to go green, you can’t neglect the desktops. Depending on the hardware you use there is much room for improving the ecological footprint of your company.

If you bring up the idea in your next executive board meeting it will get support but one question will be raised: What does it cost? If it involves high costs the support will dry up fast. But going green doesn’t necessarily mean more expenditure. If everything is planned well, going green might even save the company some money. Here’s an example of how we managed to go green and save some bucks:

Last year many of our desktops ran out of support and their advanced age caused more and more malfunctions. It was clearly time to get new computers. Up to that point we used common desktop hardware. A single desktop burned around 70 W when the desktop was idle; more when the computer was under load.

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According to ITIL, the Service Desk is the central hub and single point of contact for users. Due to high licensing fees for commercial ticketing software, however, Service Desk staff members sometimes have to live without a supporting software packet. Some of them get creative and develop their own ways of structuring the requests. Others just use the task list feature of Outlook to organize the requests. The drawbacks of these custom solutions are many; for example, there is no way to measure the time spent with each support case. However, the biggest issue is the lack of a software mechanism that enforces the defined policies.

Request Tracker is Open Source software that supports the organization of the Service Desk. It is written in Perl so it runs on various platforms. For those who can’t or don’t want to install the software in house there is also the option to pay for a hosting service. Once installed you can adjust and configure the software via a web interface.

Request Tracker offers everything you need to build an ITIL compliant Service Desk. You can receive requests by email or via a web interface. Using the web interface, you can search for, prioritize, assign, escalate, and close the tickets. You can also define different queues for e.g. Problem and Incident Management.

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We all know that backing up our data is essential. Data backup usually it isn’t something we have to worry about; centralized backup is found even in small companies, and if the backup policy doesn’t protect all of our files we do manual backups. So in theory there shouldn’t be a market for applications that recover deleted files. But we also know that backups can be out of date or the backup process could have failed completely.

Many applications exist that try to recover deleted files in these situations. Most professional recovery software is pretty pricey, though—it’s almost as if their producers want to make some extra bucks from your misery. If you ever find yourself in the unpleasant situation where you lost some files and don’t have an up-to-date backup, you might not care much about the price to get these files back. However, powerful recovery tools are available for free. One of them is NTFS Undelete. As the name implies it can recover deleted files from NTFS formatted drives.

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We recently migrated our Windows Server 2003 based DHCP Server to Windows Server 2008 R2 because I wanted to use Network Access Protection to improve our network security. After half an hour the software was installed and I started to configure the DHCP server. I quickly defined scope, NAP configuration, and all the other options and all I had left to do was move the DHCP reservations to the new server. I had no intention of transferring the addresses manually—it’s not that I am lazy, but copying and pasting many items is an error-prone process—and so I started looking for a migration tool.

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Recently I wanted to check the performance of some of our servers. I was especially interested in the speed of the built-in hard disks versus the speed of our SAN. A quick Google search revealed a few free benchmarking tools. The data I was looking for is not supposed to hold any scientific standards, so I didn’t care much about which one I should choose and I just downloaded the first one.

After the download had finished I unzipped the archive, started the program, and immediately got an error (CrystalDiskMark). I didn’t want to waste time figuring out what the problem was, so I just downloaded another tool from the Google result list from my previous search. This application (hdtune) did execute without any problems but after all tests were run an average transfer speed of 1419 Mb/sec was displayed. Quite impressive for a SAN with SATA drives.

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Last year, Intel introduced a new system platform called Atom^TM, which consumes less power compared to standard CPUs and is highly integrated. A new type of PC developed around this platform: the netbook. Although the Atom offers very little CPU power, certain advantages of the netbooks make them attractive to mobile home and business users alike: compact size, long-lasting battery charge, and low price.

Because netbooks are designed to be taken with you everywhere, their small size makes it easier for you to forget them and for criminals to steal. A lost netbook containing sensitive data could  be a real threat, particularly to enterprises whose very survival can depend on the security of their data.

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These days there are quite a few types of computers which don’t have an optical drive built in. For the average user this is no great loss. Today Software is downloaded and not bought on a CD or DVD anymore. Also the CD has lost its popularity for exchanging data, people use the Internet or USB sticks. However, there is one big drawback for PCs without optical drives: For installing an OS you need to boot from the installation media. Without an optical drive you run into problems, because USB sticks aren’t bootable by default and installing from a network is quite a hassle.

So you either have to buy an external DVD drive or you make your USB stick bootable and copy the ISO image on it. As nobody wants to spend 60 bucks on buying an external DVD drive just for installing their shiny new OS most prefer the second option. Manually making the USB stick bootable is a pain though. Fortunately there are some applications available which exactly do that for you.

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