So what is QBObjproxy.dll anyway?  On machines running Quickbooks and IE 7 or Vista every now and then on web sites I get a "this web site needs to run this DLL from Quickbooks" and I'm like, HUH? 

http://208.39.45.21/messageview.aspx?catid=7&threadid=3367&enterthread=y

http://www.google.com/search?q=QBObjproxy.dll&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-13,GGLG:en&sa=N&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tab=gw

And it's obviously from reading the threads that removing it breaks things...but why does launching certain pages trigger it?  Not sure.....hmmmm...Prob should launch one of those shiny new sysinternal process explorer tools and see what it's doing.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/14pogue-email-2/

Being nice...on an R2 Friday (that's an inside joke for some), that is also near the Christian holiday season and the start of Hanukkah, we all need to step back and say life it too short to be taking some of this stuff quite so seriously.

How about we say a kind word or too?  Sit on an email and don't send it just yet.

But how about we all agree that life is too short for some of this and just relax.

(yeah... I'm filing this under 'rants')

Once upon a time there was Lotus 123 that gave us folks that do a lot of spreadsheets... seemingly unlimited number of colors to choose to do background highlighting.  Life was good.

And then came Excel, XP, 2000, 2003 even...that limited our selections of colors so we had to chose the basic ones.  We were not happy in spreadsheet land.  We went from unlimited to limits.

Until 2007.  When tonight I realized that no longer were we limited in our color palette... on no.. but with a magical button labelled "more colors"...... 

Suddenly an entire array of colors popped up

The folks at the office will love that... that's been a major annoyance from the migration from Lotus 123 eons ago... to Excel... the loss of Colors....in fact this has been a question with each upgrade of Excel "Are there more colors?"  I can now say "Yes, we have more colors!"

Life is good...

Do you work 8 to 5?  Do your clients?

What if you didn't care about the time anymore?

Check these out:

http://culturerx.com/ and http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_50/b4013001.htm

(yes I know it's Best Buy and all that...but the concept is the same.. 9 to 5 doesn't make sense anymore)

"A Results-Only Work Environment is one where people do whatever they want whenever they want as long as the work gets done.

In the park, in a coffee shop, in the shower. At midnight or 3am or on Sunday. Whenever and wherever.

ROWE is a bold, cultural transformation that permeates the attitudes and operating style of an entire workplace, leveling the playing field and giving people complete autonomy - as long as the work gets done"

You know how many laptops I see in Starbucks?  Tons!

The mega mondo, new and improved how to instructions to get Quickbooks to run as a normal user with Quckbooks 2006 in a server setting using the power of group policy so you don't have to sneaker net around to each client is

http://www.threatcode.com/group_policy.htm

... of course I still think the easier solution is to buy Quickbooks 2007 as it was built to run without admin rights (after the R4 version in particular) and will run on Vista.... but that's just after doing screen shots for a few hours so that might have a bearing on that attitude....

(and word is tech support is still saying that you need to give it admin rights, which is totally incorrect as this is a supported method to do this  - admin rights are not manditory at all and all you need to do is fire up that Group Policy Management console and start making your users happy non-administrators)

Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs

FOr the past week or so I've noticed that the MSNBC news webpart has not
updated. In the past i've had to clear my cookies and temp files to get fix
this problem but it seems that it's not on my workstation end, but on the SBS
end.

Anyone know where to begin to hunt this down?

Thanks!

Bad news:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=929197

So now we're in search of replacements.... got ideas?

It's Patch Tuesday is what it is.... and you should have read Christopher's Blog as a result...

http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2006/12/12/december-2006-monthly-security-bulletin-release.aspx

You might want to deploy those daylight savings time patches as well while you are in the patching mood!

So tonight I was teaching a class on Quickbooks to farming clients at the local University of California extension office and the lab computers had been preloaded with Quickbooks and data files.  And so we go to launch the software and Quickbooks lovely "You must be an administrator or power user to run this program" popped up.

...and I smiled...

Because even though we had to then scramble to call the lab administrator, tell her that the desktops needed local admin access and she had to remotely change the settings and reboot the box it meant... yes... you guessed it... I had a captive audience for the next 15 to 20 minutes to talk about why the fact that Quickbooks 2006 (not 7) didn't load, why this showcased that UC Merced cared even about how their labs were set up...that their administrator was running the lab in a more restricted setting that  limited what could be downloaded to the desktop.  And this action meant that they were more secure from bad things getting on the systems.  And while we were still waiting, I showed on the Vista laptop that I brought along that this new operating system needed a new version of Quickbooks to run properly on it.  And when the administrator had made the changes, that the systems were less secure than they could be and now bad things could happen on the system.

The question came up in regards to the security of Vista and I truthfully said that while Vista was better, that it still depended on "us" to be hardened.  I said that there was talk on a security listserve that it was harder to break into a fully patched system these days so the bad guys were using tricks to get us to download things.  I said to the class that in Vista, while there were lots more good security in it (Roger talks about some of them here) if you got tricked into installing something, that the security issues were still there as long as bad guys could trick you into installing something you shouldn't..and I said that we had to "harden" us to ensure we weren't as susceptible to this kind of stuff.  I said that my Mom always warned about things that sounded too good to be true and then I gave samples of some of the "Phishing emails" that I personally had received. I told them that we need to listen to "Mom" a lot more in the future. 

So that 15 minutes of blank time I had to fill because the Quickbooks couldn't handle running without administrative rights......yeah.... priceless  :-)

WSUS Product Team Blog : New Product Category for ISA Firewall client:
http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2006/12/12/new-product-category-for-isa-firewall-client.aspx

How to obtain the version of Firewall Client for ISA Server (December
2006) that includes Windows Vista support:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929556

Finally the ISA firewall client that will support Vista is out today and there's a new WSUS category to boot!

This is a tad confusing because the page on the download site says "Public beta" but the KB article doesn't say beta, nor does SeanDaniel.com....in the public ISA newsgroup it was posted that these are indeed final parts.

Vlad says this:

http://www.vladville.com/2006/12/no-outlook-for-you-exchange-2007-licensing-change.html

I say that it's funny because many SBS var/vaps have said that their client always felt double charged as they bought Outlook on their Office suite and then got it again with Exchange.

Can't please everyone can you?

And for those who say "yes but now my client won't buy Outlook 2007", the mismatch of Office to Outlook suites broke more than it was worth in my opinion... send to and mail to won't work if you have a mismatch going on.

Bottom line.... be careful what you ask for... you just might get it...

From the mailbag...

Can I ask this question?  Where in the SQL 2005 SBS 2003 Premium installation do we find the SQL 
Management Studio that allows you to import and export databases 

First off ... and I think this is a smidge weird.. but it's not default installed... I think the Premium
install steps document tell you to click and install more and ensure you get this but unless you
click on the Management tools and change that "X" to a "Will be installed on the local hard drive"
you won't get the management tool console that you are looking for.

I also clicked on the SQL reporting tools and installed that fully as well

In fact, while you are there you may want to click around and see what other things look
interesting to install :-)

The Crabby Office Lady talks about passwords in this video and she says that if you've lost the password to a file, you've lost that file for good. And dear Crabby.... in the forensic world of computing the answer is actually.. "it depends"....there are ways to get into a password protected file if you've forgotten the password especially if the password is pretty lame in the first place.

You see there are vendors that do sell programs that ...uh..well.. sort of are able to break into things.  Now a few years back most things used crappy (not to be confused with crabby) encryption and algorithms to secure files... these days they are a little bit better but they really rely on YOU.  If you choose a crappy password.... something easy...short... no funky characters... it's pretty trival for Elcomsoft.com to brute force a password for a file that you've forgotten if the password is say.... password.

P.S. you might want to subscribe to her web site and RSS feed as you get more into Office 2007.....

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/FX101679371033.aspx

Looking for a third party cert that works with ALL PHONES, ALL THE TIME?

https://partner.microsoft.com/global/partner/40027352

Then don't do Godaddy as it does have some limitations... As it will only do 5.0 w/MSFP only.... but if you can limit your phone selection to that...

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ssl/ssl.asp?isc=microsoft then the SBSized Godaddy one does indeed work...

(and P.S. ... as a fyi to a certain person.... I did not find that link using google... but via Windows Live search instead... I knew it was there but couldn't find it using google.... interesting huh?)

Pssst..... if you are a SBSCer... come over here... and in particular.... right HERE.

If you are a SBSCer you get the benefit of these quarterly web casts... broadcasted forums if you will to ensure that the SBSC community gets to hear the new plans, and gather feedback.  Tuesday, December 12th at 9:00 a.m. Pacific is the next one.

Aren't yet a SBSCer?  So let's see... SBSCers get special quarterly webcasts...they get 4 hour response times in newsgroups... they get a Telephone Partner account manager....and lots more special stuff that will be talked about on that webcast. 

.... and how did I get reminded of this special benefit to me?  My wonderful Telephone Partner Account Manager is how!  So become a SBSCer too and you too can get all this love and attention!

The other day the RDP v6 came out and I blogged about how you can save the username and information inside the RDP interface.. so here's the follow up question....someone has 25 profiles pointing to the same IP.. and I guess I'm a bit confused?  As when I want to be flexible I don't save the username/password at all so I can change it to whatever I like?

But there may be another way, a better way to connect to RDP.. there's a Terminal Services MMC also known as Remote Desktop MMC that may be easier for this

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309375

You first need to get the admin pack for Windows 2003 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E487F885-F0C7-436A-A392-25793A25BAD7&displaylang=en 

One other tweak I made was change to "always connect even if authentication fails....

Just a few suggestions for the new RDP client

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: OT:  SBS 2003 with Trend Micro C/S/M Suite - Vista Clients
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2006 09:51:16 -0500
From: Stu Howe <sheodi@no.spam.please.cogeco.ca>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs

Hi all,

We have a nicely running SBS 2003 domain using Trend's CSM Suite.

I have added a Vista client to the domain and now need to add anti virus to
the client.  I looked around the Trend site but can't seem to decide if the
client install packages on the SBS server will work with Vista.

Has anyone tried this?  Are there any gotchas?  Did I miss info on the Trend
site?

Thanks!

Stu

Been there, done that, and it's not ready... There's a lot of little things I'm finding that just aren't in place for me to consider Vista "business ready" and this is one of them.  I don't see any sign of a Vista ready version for Officescan either.  So for now, Vista is on my laptop and a few other "bleeding edge" machines, but not rolling out to the fleet.  Remember that while Vista has Defender, it does not have antivirus built in and thus will still warn you about not having full malware protection.

Trend does have a beta program though - http://endpointsecurity.trendmicro.com/pr/tm/en-us/enterprise/eps/vista.aspx?alsck=35

P.S.  some other interesting info on antivirus...
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=157391
http://www.av-comparatives.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=340&sid=ea3d26926cf868aa1b5e0263a36f21bc