Monday, May 4, 2015

Take upgrading to #Windows10 for phones under advise. @Microsoft @Windows

Hi! First of all I dedicate this post to make Windows 10 for phones better and to provide feedback for Microsoft to implement in later versions. This post is not meant to bash on the platform. I am a Windows Phone user since 2 years now and I love the platform. I honestly think WP is underrated by most of the smartphone users. So why this post… Well maybe you own a Windows Phone with WP8 or WP8.1 and you are thinking about upgrading it to Windows 10 for phones pre-release using the Insider program.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

What you say? Windows Nano Server? Looking great, but…

As we all know by now Microsoft Announced Windows Nano Server edition to be released in the Next version of Windows Server yesterday. Here are some of my thoughts about it :).
In my years as a IT consultant, architect, trainer and scripting fanatic I love to see evolvements in the IT landscape.

As an early adopter for PowerShell back in 2006 when it was sort of launched with Exchange Server 2007 I really love to see what you can do with it. I wrote and still write a lot of advanced scripts to make our lives easier in the admin and migration process. I also am involved in the design and architecture of new Windows based infrastructure and trying to get customers or IT admins to adopt the new and rich possibilities the Windows Server and Windows client OS brings.


For some years now I’m trying to convince a lot of my customers to move on to use PowerShell and Windows Server Core edition (no personally not 2008 (I think this version was not really good), but since 2012), but still a lot of IT Pro’s and IT admins still don’t know how to use PowerShell and what you can do with it. To be more clear, I still see that IT admins for example are trying to change the same setting for 4000+ users within Active Directory. Not very efficient I think and also very fault sensitive. Therefore the adoption of Windows Server Core Edition is not happening as quickly as I would have wanted to see.

And this is where I have double feelings about Windows Server Nano. I personally I think it’s great to see you don’t have any overhead anymore in forms of a GUI, local logon, no more WOW64 support and many other stuff. I love to work with remote PowerShell. I think connecting to a server with RDP and then do your stuff on it is slow and you are limited to a maximum number of sessions. Also all these components require updating and installing a lot of hotfixes and patched and so on.
Removing all this overburden leaves you a much more hardened server, a lower footprint (less harddisk space, memory, etc). It also saves you the installation of a lot of updates that you don’t need and leave you with a lot of potential security risks if you don’t install them.

However, as I wrote earlier, in my experience is that the adoption of these new evolvements with the current generation of IT Pro’s (Yes unfortunately I now a lot of IT consultants and engineers that still don’t know how to use PowerShell) and IT admins is a thing to worry about while getting Windows Nano and Core edition server to be adopted.

I do hope it will be a success and personally I will adopt it and recommend it in my advise and designs to customers, but there needs to be a real change in the IT landscape and mindset of IT related people. I think…

Do you guys have any thought on this?

Let me know… I like to have interesting discussions about it :)


Reference:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2015/04/08/microsoft-announces-nano-server-for-modern-apps-and-cloud.aspx

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Strange behavior AD FS Windows Server 2012 R2 after changing the service communications certificate

Yesterday I ran into a problem in my demo environment after I changed the AD FS service communications certificate. My old certificate wasn’t prepared for DRS (Device Registration Service) and since I wanted to test some things with DRS in combination with Office 365 I needed to replace the certificate with a new one which included the enterpriseregistration.domain.com UPN suffix.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Is Office 365 really going to save me money?

Saving money is something every organization wants, right? Well it is if it was my organization. But is moving to Office 365 really cheaper on the long run like Microsoft says it is? And is saving money the only thing you'll need to consider when moving to a public cloud platform like Office 365?

This is the question most of my customers have and is, unfortunately, not so easy to say or predict. Although in theory most of my customers can save an average of 66% compared to their current solution, saving these amounts are usually not very feasible.


Tuesday, April 29, 2014

To IE or not to IE?

Vanmorgen heeft de Telegraaf een bericht uitgebracht dat je geen Internet Explorer (IE) meer moet gebruiken vanwege een zero-day bug. Er zijn nu mensen die vragen "Wat moeten we nu, alle IE browsers verwijderen?" en "Microsoft wordt wel lekker in de verlegenheid gebracht he?".

Mijn antwoord: Nee natuurlijk niet, dit kan helemaal niet!

Ten eerste deze bug is niet nieuw en het nieuws ook niet. Dit is al een tijdje bekend!

Ten tweede, wat de Telegraaf vergeet te vermelden is het volgende:
"Microsoft suggests a few other workarounds, such as switching on IE's Enhanced Protected Mode or setting security levels to “High” to stop ActiveX controls and Active Scripting working.

The upside, if there is any, is that Windows Server's default settings make it hard to create the kind of honeypot website that could exploit this flaw."

Zoals gewoonlijk is de media weer eens verantwoordelijk voor het plaatsen van een verkeerde context door bewust informatie weg te laten.

Je kunt je bovendien natuurlijk altijd het volgende afvragen "Hebben andere browsers dan geen of nooit problemen?" en "Wordt door deze bug nu automatisch iedere IE browser aangevallen?". Het antwoord hierop is, natuurlijk, nee!

Hiermee praat ik uiteraard niet goed dat er een bug is die er niet had moeten zijn, maar ik probeer wel de context recht te zetten.

Heb jij andere meningen, deel ze, graag!