OWSUG.ca

Wiggle Waggle Walkathon Sept 12

SMSUG.ca — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:41:29 GMT

We are Wiggle and Waggling on Sept 12, http://www.ohsre.ca/ehood , Are you?...(read more)

Remote Desktop Services Resource Kit

The J Files — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:35:18 GMT

For those out there who use Terminal Services or plan on implementing / upgrading to Remote Desktop Services, the RDS Resource Kit is set to be published December 15th 2010. http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Server-Desktop-Services-Resource/dp/0735627371 Read More......(read more)

SecTor–Speakers Announced and Last Chance for Early Bird Pricing!

Canadian IT Professionals — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:57:53 GMT

SecTor - Security Education Conference Toronto 2010 October 25 - 27, 2010, Metro Toronto Convention Centre Save $250 today on Canada's leading security conference - standard rates increase to $999 on August 31st - GO SecTor is the premier event in Canada that attracts the world's brightest (and darkest) minds together to identify, discuss, dissect and debate the latest digital threats facing corporations today. This is one day of training and two days of conference that you can't afford to miss....(read more)

Desktop Image Consolidation–Notes From the Field

Canadian IT Professionals — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:53:28 GMT

I was having an IM conversation with Brian at CMS Consulting about some deployment work and how IT departments support the desktops computers in their environment. A few days later Jason Cotton, a senior consultant at CMS Consulting Inc., sent the following in. It is a great article with useful information to help you improve your desktop environment. ------------------------- As a consultant, I've had the opportunity to see how many organizations support their desktop environments. How...(read more)

TechDays 2010 & TechNet Subscriptions - Helping You to Continue Your Learning

Canadian IT Professionals — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:54:16 GMT

TechDays 2010 is getting closer with Vancouver conference just a few weeks away. As such the team has been hard to make this an impactful event that will allow you to grow your skills and support you in areas important to your job and career. I am happy to announce that the hard work has paid off and we have been able to work with Microsoft corporate and each TechDays 2010 attendee will get a TechNet Plus subscription ! This benefit is added to the over 50 Sessions of technical content, networking...(read more)

PowerGUI 2.2 public beta is now available!

Poshoholic — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:59:22 GMT

Today we released a public beta of our upcoming PowerGUI 2.2 release. This beta includes a very significant change to our debugger as well as compatibility support with version 1.4 of the Quest AD cmdlets. Here are a few of the improvements that come with the new debugger: Native support for the PowerShell 2.0 debugger, [...]...(read more)

Security Bulletins for the Regular IT Guy - Episode 20 –August 2010

Canadian IT Professionals — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:20:00 GMT

Over pints Pierre Roman, Bruce Cowper and Rick Claus decided they would put together a concise and timely podcast each “Update Tuesday”. The object is to keep it simple by letting you know in plain non technical language what the updates are, what they resolve and why you should care. Have a listen directly from the embedded Silverlight player OR subscribe to the feed and download it to your iTunes / Zune software. As always - if you have suggestions on making it better - please pass...(read more)

Driver Management in MDT2010

Todd's Blog — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:05:00 GMT

If you manage drivers in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, you know it can get unwieldy to manage all the drivers in one big folder. I had done it that way for quite a while as I only had 3 or 4 builds of computers that I managed from MDT. These days though I manage about 10 [...]...(read more)

Driver Management in MDT 2010

Todd's Blog — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:05:00 GMT

Information on how to manage drivers from multiple vendors in Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010....(read more)

Windows 7 MCITP Enterprise Desktop Support Technician

SMSUG.ca — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:52:33 GMT

Well this morning I did it. I became a MCITP: Windows 7 MCITP Enterprise Desktop Support Technician. I wrote the upgrade exam (70-682) which is based on 70-680 MCTS: Windows 7, Configuring and 70-685 : Windows 7, Enterprise Desktop Support Technician This is an exam that I have be “working” on for a while, it all started with the Ottawa Windows 7 Study group. I got the MS Press book before the group even started and I finished reading the book long before the group has its first meeting. Needless...(read more)

Enhancing Your TechDays 2010 Experience with Partners Offers & Giveaways

Canadian IT Professionals — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:00:00 GMT

I have to admit that since we announced the abstracts for all the sessions at TechDays 2010, the main topic of emails I have been receiving has changed. In fact, the number one question I get asked these days is “What else will I get by attending TechDays 2010?”. Fair question. One of the things that is really exciting about TechDays 2010 is the number of partners who have come forward to help with the development of content, providing speakers to present in many of the cities, as well as coming...(read more)

Expiry Dates, Yogurt and TechDays Vancouver Earlybird

Canadian IT Professionals — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:36:59 GMT

(Photo credit Thomas Quine from Wikipedia Commons ) Did you notice that the Early Bird pricing deal for Vancouver TechDays reached it’s expiry date yesterday? Yup – it’s seriously 6 weeks before TechDays 2010 opens in Vancouver. Wow! I’ve been off on vacation over the last little while and didn’t really paid much attention to all the activity that the team, session leads and speakers have been up to. It kind of hit home for me on a conference call yesterday with Damir and the leadership team...(read more)

Local Flavours Track at Microsoft TechDays Canada 2010

Canadian IT Professionals — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:14:30 GMT

I love the technical community in Canada. In particular, I find that it's our collective willingness to share knowledge and insights with others that makes us special. I see this demonstrated on a daily basis through our team's interactions with user group leaders, Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft RDs, and influential members of the Canadian technical community. "Developer Foundations" at Microsoft TechDays Canada 2009 Last year, my manager (John Oxley) and I spoke to many folks across the Canadian technical...(read more)

Security Bulletins for the Regular IT Guy Podcast – O.O.B - 8/2/2010

Canadian IT Professionals — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:10:46 GMT

Sysadmin Appreciation Day

Canadian IT Professionals — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:17:00 GMT

The last Friday of July is “officially” Sysadmin Appreciation Day . The day to pat your self on the back and receive the accolades you all deserve for keeping things running and maintaining sanity while dealing with complaints such as “The Internet is down”. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it! So take some time, enjoy the day, laugh at one of my favourite videos from DeadTroll.com and take off a little early and have a beer. You deserve it! ...(read more)

New Disk2VHD Sysinternals (v1.62) Tool Available

Brad Bird — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:38:09 GMT

I ran a Windows 7 Deployment workshop for the Western Quebec school board several weeks ago. The workshop audience consisted of a mixed level ITPRO audience but they grasped the deployment concepts fairly quickly.

Once the basics of deploy, capture, package, etc were done we moved to some cooler topics like boot from VHD and P2V conversion. We tested out the P2V conversion tool from Sysinternals but ran into limitations from the Virtual PC hard limit of 127GB. The PCs that we were converting had volumes on a single partition of over 500GB some of which were 1TB drives…

It seems that the limitation is present if the disk itself which you select your volumes from is more than 127GB. Even if the total space you select to convert is less than 127GB, somehow the VM knows that the VHD file was converted from a disk that was bigger than 127GB in size and Virtual PC will not support it.

A new version (1.62) was released on yesterday. I am hoping this particular limitation was bypassed.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

PowerGUI Script Editor Essentials

Poshoholic — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:30:46 GMT

Have you ever thought to yourself that it would be great if the PowerGUI Script Editor would allow you to… …select all of my files and open them at one time; or …turn on line/word wrap? How about if it would allow you to… …view white space characters (tabs and spaces); or …move the cursor [...]...(read more)

VM Heaven aka 24TB

SMSUG.ca — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:06:51 GMT

So, my test lab has been running lean and mean for a while. A few weeks back I decided that in order to test ConfigMgr v.Next. I needed to update my lab. In the past I had a few discussion about Hyper-v and getting more performance out of it. The summary of the tips are: · Separate the OS drive from the VMs · Separate the page file from the OS and VMs · More drives...(read more)

TechDays 2010 Session Abstracts & Local Flavours Submission Guidelines Now Available

Canadian IT Professionals — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:53:00 GMT

Over the last few weeks I have been getting more and more emails from individuals wondering when the abstracts for the 50+ sessions available at TechDays 2010 will be posted. The wait is over! You can view all of the sessions and their abstracts at www.techdays.ca/sessions - remember to click on each track to see the sessions that are available in that track. I am really excited about this year’s content. We have sessions on how to develop applications in Silverlight for both the PC as well...(read more)

PCs without IE 8

SMSUG.ca — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:08:09 GMT

select Distinct CS.Name0 from dbo.v_GS_COMPUTER_SYSTEM CS left outer join dbo.v_GS_SoftwareFile SF on CS.ResourceID = SF.ResourceID where SF.ResourceID not in (select Distinct ResourceID from dbo.v_GS_SoftwareFile where FileName = 'iexplore.exe' and FileVersion like '8.%') and FileName = 'iexplore.exe'...(read more)

Dynamic Subnet Collection

SMSUG.ca — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:02:01 GMT

select * from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGURATION on SMS_G_System_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGURATION.ResourceId = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_NETWORK_ADAPTER_CONFIGURATION.IPAddress like "192.168.1.%"...(read more)

VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack – now with Visio 2010 support!

Poshoholic — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:57:30 GMT

Tonight I have published a new version of the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack. This release (version 2.4.0) is the first release that provides near 100% feature parity between both PowerGUI and the Virtualization EcoShell. I say near 100% feature parity because PowerGUI supports displaying progress dialogs during calls to Write-Progress but the Virtualization EcoShell does [...]...(read more)

PowerCLI 4.1: A fork in the road

Poshoholic — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:05:55 GMT

Earlier this week, VMware released version 4.1 of the PowerCLI. This release brings some great improvements that the community has been waiting for, and you can read about them on the VMware PowerCLI site and a number of other blogs that have been publicizing the release. I’m not here to talk about the new features [...]...(read more)

Security Bulletins for the Regular IT Guy - Episode 18 - July 2010

Canadian IT Professionals — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:36:00 GMT

Cloud Services and IT Professionals – the prequel

Canadian IT Professionals — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:37:00 GMT

I’ve opened a can of worms with a post a couple of months back (ok – a LOT of months back – was it REALLY February?) about should IT Professionals care about Cloud Services yet and what type of cloud service would have a direct impact on IT Pros daily lives. That post had over 22 comments (albeit a big number from “mike”) prodding for more information about Privacy and Security (two very different things when it comes to cloud) and impact on things like Patriot act and...(read more)