TechNet Magazine July 2006

Shared and privileged account passwords are commonplace, but far too many organizations fail to adequately manage these shared passwords. This creates a serious security issue. Explore the risks involved with shared and privileged accounts, and discover better approaches to managing more secure passwords.

Chris Stoneff

TechNet Magazine September 2008

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Windows Server 2008 and the new Windows Server Backup utility bring many changes and welcome enhancements to backing up. Here is an in-depth guide to backing up and restoring Active Directory in the new server OS.

Gil Kirkpatrick

TechNet Magazine May 2008

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Utility Spotlight: Robocopy GUI

Traditional copy and paste works well enough for simple tasks, but for advanced functionality, you need Robocopy. But what if you're not a fan of the command line? Enter Robocopy GUI.

Joshua Hoffman

TechNet Magazine November 2006

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Far too often, people who are not trained database administrators somehow end up responsible for a database. They lack the proper training and knowledge to maintain their database, and problems begin to develop. Here’s a primer for all those involuntary DBAs who need a crash course in database maintenance best practices.

Paul S. Randal

TechNet Magazine August 2008

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Utility Spotlight: SyncToy

Face it, most of the users you support just don't back up there data. SyncToy provides an unintrusive way to ensure your users' files are always backed up and ready to be easily restored.

Jay Munro

TechNet Magazine March 2007

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Our Blog

Windows Confidential

Have you ever wondered why you sometimes get a message that says Windows can't replace a file that is currently in use? In the November 2008 issue of TechNet Magazine, Raymond Chen looks at the underlying reason for this and explains why it would be more accurate to say Windows can but has chosen not to ...

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TechNet Magazine Toolbox

In every issue of TechNet Magazine, Greg Steen (a practicing IT professional) discusses free and relatively inexpensive tools and utilities that help him do his IT work and "getting the job done."

In the November issue, Greg looks at mapping data graphically with MapForce, creating and managing ...

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is the Microsoft implementation of Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM)—a technology that lets you access information about the objects in your enterprise environment that have to be managed, such as systems, applications, networks, devices, and other managed components. Not surprisingly, the information is accessible via script ...

"For developers, one difficult problem in SQL Server is tracking what data has changed in a database. An even greater challenge is architecting a simple solution that doesn’t heavily impact workload performance and isn't difficult to create, implement, and manage. So why go to all the trouble to track changes? Is tracking changes really worth all this effort? Two commonly cited examples are to support updates to a data warehouse and to support the synchronization of heterogeneous, occasionally connected systems." ...

Proxy authentication lets users perform a simple bind to an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance but still have an association to an Active Directory account. This can be very useful: it gives developers full access to a user object without giving them access to the Active Directory account, and it allows products that require the X.500 format to be used with Active Directory. ...

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July 2006

Managing Identity: The 7 Laws of Identity

Digital identities have taken on an increasingly important role in the corporate infrastructure, as IT departments define what applications and data sources each individual user can access. But as the role of identities has grown, so has the complexity of identity systems. Joshua Trupin

Managing Identity: MIIS Gets your Directories in Sync

Trying to maintain security and identity information in a large, heterogeneous network can be difficult and complicated. And this can put your network at risk. Fortunately, Microsoft Identity Randy Muller

Managing Identity: 5 Essential Tools for MIIS

Identity and access management. These are important issues as your business implements systems that provide corporate information to employees, business partners, and customers. Jenn Goth

Managing Identity: Automate Active Directory Group Management

Group management is central to today's businesses. Groups are commonly used to control access to network resources, computers, buildings, and so on. Simultaneously, they need to grant access to Craig Owen

Managing Identity: Simplify Single Sign-on Using ADFS

Matt Steele

Managing Identity: Create Custom Directories with ADAM

Active Directory Application Mode, also known as ADAM, is often misunderstood. In this article I will demystify ADAM, explain how it can be a useful tool in many organizations, and show you some valuable utilities that make it easier to use. Brian Redmond

Managing Identity: Extreme VPN Makeover

Who decided that Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, were a good idea? With VPNs, we could let armies of mobile workers with "legitimate" business needs connect to our nice corporate David Conrad

Managing Identity: The InfoCard Identity Revolution

Keith Brown

Microsoft Office: Create Scorecards For Your Business With Office

Let's assume, as I'm going to do here, that you manage a sales team tasked with meeting regular sales quotas. Team member sales are logged into your corporate database, but you have no easy way of telling your team members how well they are doing. Mauro Cardarelli

Columns

From the Editor: Summer is finally here, and you know what that means—vacations, travel, long days by the pool sipping margaritas, without a care in the world! Joshua Trupin	Toolbox: New Products for IT Professionals System and network administrators always seem to be looking for a better monitoring solution. By better, I mean more stable, more cost-effective, more scalable, and loaded with more features. NETIKUS. Greg Steen	Utility Spotlight: The Shared Computer Toolkit One of the most common requests I get at my Group Policy forum, GPanswers. com, is how to take machines and "lock them down. " People want to ensure their machines can’t be broken by Joe User or Harry Badguy. Jeremy Moskowitz
SQL Q&A: Monitoring DBAs, Replicating Sprocs, and More Your queries answered by Microsoft IT professionals. Nancy Michell	How IT Works: SMS Client-Side Software Installation When configuring a software package for distribution in Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003, the administrator must choose the user context under which the software will be installed—either the logged-on user or the administrative context. Steve Rachui	Hey, Scripting Guy!: It’s About Time (Oh, and About Dates, Too) You know, the Scripting Guys hardly ever wax philosophical. (We hardly ever wax our cars or our floors, either, but that’s a different story. ) When it comes to the nature of time, however, well, in that case we just can’t help ourselves. The Microsoft Scripting Guys
Inside Microsoft.com: Managing SQL Server 2005 Peer-to-Peer Replication The Microsoft corporate Web sites rely heavily on databases, which power such high-traffic destinations as Microsoft® Update, Download Center, Communities, TechNet, and MSDN®. Microsoft. com operations has a team of 17 engineers, the SQL Server™ operations team, that manages these database systems. David Lindquist	Security Watch: Help Wanted—Need "People" People I’m not really a people person. I’ve said so for years. My old college roommate, Joe, had a better way to put it, but the way he said it is unfortunately not suitable for print. Frankly, not being a people person is a good part of the reason I went into IT in the first place. Jesper Johansson	Field Notes: An Ounce of Prevention All good IT pros worry about their servers. If something goes wrong it’s your problem and it’s usually a big one. Most of you stick your servers in a closet and neglect them. Unless something blows up, you may not even look at them for months at a time. Jay Shaw
TechNet Update: Resource for the IT Professional The complete Microsoft TechNet Program provides comprehensive tools and authoritative information to help IT professionals get the most out of Microsoft products and technologies. It’s where you turn for the latest security alerts, live discussions, virtual testing labs, free tools, and in-depth articles that allow you to be more responsive, more informed, and more effective.	Windows Confidential: A Brief and Incomplete History of FAT32 Why did classic Windows 95 limit local hard drives to 2GB? Some people would lead you to believe that the FAT file system team said, "Y’know, the FAT file system supports hard drives of indefinite size, but let’s impose an artificial cap just to make people’s lives more frustrating. Raymond Chen

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