Five downloads from Microsoft Research for Academia.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/feature/academic_downloads.aspx

Good post be Richard Dixon on using the ConfigMgr Toolkit V2 to check up on your clients.

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rdixon/archive/2010/12/22/check-and-validate-if-a-sccm-client-agent-is-receiving-policies-or-not.aspx

shorlink:  http://bit.ly/i1944i

Well, not that new... but this blog offers some good information and will get you started.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/belpta/archive/2010/12/23/new-security-baselines-and-setting-packs-for-windows-server-2008-r2-office-2010-windows-7-and-ie8.aspx

shortlink:  http://bit.ly/hB9apj

New security advisory released today.  Affecting IE 6,7, and 8.  Good thing I run 9 beta ;)

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2488013.mspx

Thanks to our Microsoft TAM getting use this information quickly!

Aiding in moving those applications to the cloud

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ieitpro/archive/2010/12/22/microsoft-server-application-virtualization-ctp-released-run-more-of-your-applications-on-windows-azure.aspx

shortlink:  http://bit.ly/eO49iI

I wonder if we can virtualize them and run them locally?  I'll have to dig around.

Saw this blog post and thought it might be interesting.

Walsall College would like to invite you to a free event on 28th January 2011  showing efficiency of using Microsoft SharePoint with sessions from Walsall College, Microsoft, Capita and RSC WM.

• Personalisation using SharePoint
• Live@EDU and integration with SharePoint/Moodle
• Managing technology changes
• SharePoint 2010 - what's new!
• SharePoint and information systems integration
• Business process improvement with SharePoint

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukschools/archive/2010/12/22/efficiency-using-microsoft-sharepoint-free-event-walsall-college-9-30am-15-30pm-28th-january-2011.aspx

Not that greate of news, but at least Microsoft is looking in the right direction.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-porting-windows-to-arm-in-case-intel-tablet-strategy-fails-2010-12

I'd rather see WP7 on a tablet.  Unless of course they are completely redesiging Windows to have instant on, built for touch, easy on the battery...

Maybe that's Windows 8, but I want it now!

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/SocialNetworkingToolstoFacilit/219139

shortlink:  http://bit.ly/ifdMBL

A nice write with findings on the use of social media.  The product they used was ConnectYard, for more information that see, http://www1.connectyard.com/solutions

New Kinect  hack for educational purposes!  The (legally) hackable Microsoft product is blowing me away!  Who do they think they are ,Google before they became evil (correction, amoral)?

http://www.neowin.net/news/american-sign-language-is-making-its-way-to-kinect

Group policy tools from GPO guy!  The registry.pol viewer was just updated yesterday, and their are other really nice tools for troubleshooting and creating group policies.

http://www.gpoguy.com/FreeTools/FreeToolsLibrary/tabid/67/Default.aspx

Hot off the presses!  A dedicated IPv6 forum from MS.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/ipv6/threads

First and only post, 43 minutes ago... it may take a bit to get going.  But if you have questions, where it's so new... you'll likely get IPv6 experts from MS answering your questions.

This article referes to an update released by Microsft, make note that it is not a security update and it's for Outlook 2007, so not likely distributed broadly.  If you installed the update for Outlook 2007 you'll likely want to uninstall it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2485531/

From the article: 

Experiencing slow logons or you want the user to wait until all group policy is applied before being able to start working?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg486839.aspx

Good points on what to do to successfully add custom tasks to task squences.

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/cnackers/archive/2010/12/16/adding-custom-tasks-to-task-sequences.aspx

In case your wondering I do have a very strong feeling about the cloud being a game changer for IT.  We need to conintue to take steps to prepare ourselves for supporting our end users in the cloud and in a state of ubiquitous computing that is fast approaching.

Here's couple of links I put together on primers and explanations of the cloud for IT Pros from Microsoft and other links

Cloud Computing Primer for IT Pros

http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2010/11/15/cloud-computing-primer-for-it-pros.aspx

Cloud Computing Concepts for IT Pros (1/3)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2010/12/15/cloud-computing-concepts-for-it-pros-1-3.aspx

Cloud Computing Concepts for IT Pros (2/3)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2010/12/17/cloud-computing-concepts-for-it-pros-2-3.aspx

nope, 3/3 is not available yet...

Information on University of Washington allowing the selection of cloud based email provider

https://weblogin.cs.washington.edu/nuage/

The following links are some that I've viewed or read in the last couple months.

SQL Azure Videos

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazure/videos.aspx

Windows Azure

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Cisco Cloud

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns976/index.html

VMware Cloud

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/

IBM Cloud

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/

HP Cloud

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/cloud.html

Gartner on the cloud

http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/cloud-computing/index.jsp

FYI

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sus/archive/2010/12/16/update-on-a-couple-issues-we-are-seeing-related-to-detection-and-installation-of-ms10-090-kb2416400.aspx 

Overview:

This library provides highly optimized versions of primitive functions such as repmat, set intersection, and gammaln. It provides efficient random number generators and evaluation of common probability densities. It provides routines for counting floating-point operations (FLOPS), useful for benchmarking algorithms. There are also some useful utilities such as filename globbing and parsing of variable-length argument lists.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/db1653f0-1308-4b45-b358-d8e1011385a0/default.aspx

Here's the quick hit list of new features

Read more about it and how to leverage at the followig link:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/aralves/archive/2010/12/15/new-windows-azure-platform-features-available-today.aspx

Update:  Thank you Pat for commenting with the current link.  See Pat's comment below for more information, or just hit the page

 http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/enterprise_deployment.html

The navigation on the landing page isn't live yet, but from Pat Wibbeler of the Adobe Reader team the direct links should work.

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/10.x/10.0.0/misc/

http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/win/10.x/10.0.0/misc/CustWiz1000_en_US.exe

Everyone is talking cloud!

http://www.intel.com/en_US/assets/video/resources/plymedia-video-player-popup.htm?v=http://www.intel.com/en_US/assets/video/resources/Intel-Cloud-2015-Vision.flv&p=/Assets/Image/backgrounds/ITC-carstart-cloudvision2010.jpg&t=Intel%20Cloud%202015%20Vision%20video&w=730&h=410&a=true&l=eng,deu,mas,jap,fra,spa,pbr

shortlink:  http://intel.ly/fLhZS5

Is there anything you can't do with powershell? :)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2010/12/15/use-powershell-to-document-your-sql-database.aspx

From the article:  As we enter 2011, the age of ubiquitous computing is upon us.

http://www.technewsdaily.com/in-the-future-computing-is-cunningly-constant--1800/

What are we doing as IT Professionals to prepare for this and to support our users?

It's basically a 2 and half minute commercial, but really highlights the collaboration ability with Windows 7 and Windows Live.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2010/12/13/making-music-with-windows-7.aspx

There's also one that goes behind the scenes of Kinect... a longer commercial but you can skip around and see some of the research that went into and the idea behind the genesis of Kinect.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2010/12/14/the-story-behind-kinect.aspx

For those of you leveraging Group Policy Preferences and using the apply once option you'll want to take a look at the following KB article and see if it applies to you.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2284538

Hope this helps.

There are quire a few people using Task Sequences to deliver software and it's brought up the question again on how to supress the notification bubble for advertised Task Sequences.

Luckily, this was solved a year and half ago by Jim Westover, a bright (now former) student employee that worked for CEHD.  He created a right-click tool that gave admins the ability to suppress notifications by right-clicking a Task Sequence and (if they had the correct permissions) the could choose to enable or disable the notifications.  When this tool is installed and a task sequence is right-clicked there will be an option to "Manage Notifications" and that will expand to give you the options to enable or disable notifications for that task sequence.

Since Jim created the right-click tool and has since moved on to employment in the real world two things have changed, Rick Houchins has changed where he stores his right-click tools in the latest version of right-click tools http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rhouchins/archive/2008/04/09/sccm-right-click-tools.aspx and there are a lot more x64 machines running the console.

So, using Jim's work as a base I made some edits and now Jim's right-click tool is copied into the same location as the new right-click tools from Rick Houchins' for both x86 and x64 console machines.

I also took the liberty to create an optional advertisement and send it to all admin console machines.  You (ConfigMgr Admins) should recieve a optional advertisement to install the x86 or x64 version of Jim's right-click tool depending on the bit level of your OS.

Though Rick Houchins right-click tools aren't required to install or run Jim's right-click tool, I highly recommend installing his as they extend the functionality of the console quite a bit.

Make sure to test in your environment, I verifed the x64 install on my machine but don't have an x86 one available to test quickly.

I hope this helps.  Feel free to comment if you have any questions or comments.

Good article on the emergence of Social in the enterprise and what that means for the enterprise.

http://www.cio.com/article/646423/WikiLeaks_Teaches_Enterprises_5_Hard_Truths?page=1&taxonomyId=3089

Happy Scripting!

http://poshoholic.com/2010/12/09/powergui-pro-and-powergui-2-3-are-now-available/

There's two good blog posts in here.  Read the one at the followig link and the link in the article that states, "everything in IT is up for grabs."

http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2010/12/14/why-does-it-need-to-assert-itself-in-the-enterprise/

This happens at a different level than I operate and it's just one analysts opinion, but there are a lot of new technologies that have just arrived or are arriving that will likely be game changers... e.g. Tablet, Cloud, Social.

A good question for management is how they plan to handle these new technologies that are here.

The Dell OMCI (OpenManage Client Instrumentation) sample scripts in PowerShell and VBS have been updated.

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/OMCI+Sample+Scripts

More about the OMCI

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/OpenManage+Client+Instrumentation+%28OMCI%29 

A good, short introductory video in SQL Azure.  Only 4 minutes. 

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazure/videos.aspx

While looking at that, don't forget about Windows Azure.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/windowsazure/default.aspx 

17 updates for December.  2 Critical, 14 Important, 1 Moderate.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-dec.mspx

To funny to pass up.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mstechcareers/archive/2010/12/08/marry-me-microsoft.aspx 

To funny to pass up.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mstechcareers/archive/2010/12/08/marry-me-microsoft.aspx 

A nice little walk through on how to fix a corrupted user profile if you have to manually migrate the users data.  It shows you want not to migrate.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/Windows7/Fix-a-corrupted-user-profile

Be careful of this one!  Luckily, given the permissions set you can only "select" resources from your assigned base collection.  You still don't want to do that, but at least your neighbor won't do it to you.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/configurationmgr/archive/2010/12/06/all-systems-inadvertently-targeted-for-an-advertisement-after-modifying-a-collection-in-system-center-configuration-manager-2007.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2471057

Take away from the article:

"If you need to modify an existing query based collection, delete the existing query and create a new one instead."

to add to that, whenever you create/modify a query, make sure to double check it and test it before advertising software/OSes to it.

Nice read that'll give you things to think about.

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/12/six-ingredients-of-a-good-life.html 

KB article just released today for windows 7 or Server 2008 servers running ConfigMgr client and have automatic updates enabled.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/configurationmgr/archive/2010/12/06/system-center-configuration-manager-2007-clients-running-windows-7-or-windows-server-2008-reboot-even-though-deployment-management-settings-are-configured-to-suppress-reboots.aspx

Good webinar with John Kotter about getting buy-in to keep your good ideas from getting shot down.  It's a good researched back look at it at what you can do to be prepared.  It's just under and hour, so good for a lunch break or at home.

http://blogs.hbr.org/events/2010/12/buy-in-saving-your-good-ideas.html 

Some oft used commands and some hidden gems.  Like, how may of you have used pathping.exe? I know I never have, until 2 minutes ago... quite useful though.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee924647.aspx

Good overview of ConfigMgr 2012!

http://www.myitforum.com/absolutevc/avc-view.aspx?v=2029

Powershell and WMI eventing. A great match.

 http://powerevents.codeplex.com/

Brought to you by Trevor Sullivan, to find out more about him, http://trevorsullivan.net/about/

He gives a lot to the community and has some great coding abilities. 

So, the elusive FISMA approval is possible for the cloud.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/gfs/archive/2010/12/02/microsoft-s-cloud-infrastructure-receives-fisma-approval.aspx

The cloud is coming.  How are you preparing yourself?  Read the sidenote in this article.  It doesn't get specific.  But I'll post on "cloud" to add to your cloud resources.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2010/12/02/concerns-about-security-when-considering-cloud-technologies.aspx