Learning to Fly - Mika's Blog

What a hectic month February was! It started with some Windows Server 2003 & Active Directory training. In between I had an opportunity to fly over to UK to "cure" one Active Directory. And then towards the end of month I dug deep into Group Policy. Simultaneously, I was trying my best to be active in R2 beta programme which has been the best beta I've ever participated. Lots of action although some of it took place during day time - PST. We're ten hours ahead of it here in Finland ...

Last Thursday we had the first annual Technet Pro seminar with some 1300 people! The MVP status was lifted into the spotlight when with another MVP, I had an opportunity to speak in the keynote! I started by presenting the Windows Server roadmap and continued by demonstrating Windows Server 2003 SP1 Security Configuration Wizard and "R2" Branch Office technologies such as improved DFS (Distributed File System) and printer management. Interesting stuff!

Later I had a 45 minute talk on securing intranet and its services.The biggest challenge was trying to squeeze all services into as few virtual machines as possible in order to be able to demo them. Some challenges propped out during the demo as well...

Some of the gems I've come across during these busy weeks are:

http://www.microsoft.com/ISAServer/ has links to downloading eval for the Enterprise Edition which was launched last week. This is the first Microsoft product to store its configuration in ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) directory. Enterprise Edition is available for download in MSDN for subscribers. Few days earlier, Service Pack 1 for Standard Edition became also available.

Darren Mar-Elia has a lot of great technical info on Group Policy on his site http://www.gpoguy.com/. The discovery of the months was his info on modifying the registry so that the Properties tab on Active Directory object (site, domain, OU) in ADUC (Active Directory Users and Computers) would show the "legacy" interface after installing GPMC (Group Policy Management Console). In quite a few GP demos before, I have had two DCs so that I can demo both tabs. After all, there is not much to show after GPMC is installed since there is only the Open button for accessing GPMC.

At the end of January (and I tell about it only now...) AutoProf changed its name to become DesktopStandard Corporation. Their PolicyMaker was awarded as SearchWin2000.com product of the year for 2004. I strongly recommend anybody wishing to learn extensibility of Group Policy to get familiar with DesktopStandard's products. Best of all, they've made one of the extensions available in a FREE tool PolicyMaker Registry Extension.

In order to learn how Group Policy processing really works (or doesn't work), you should enable the user environment debug logging. Technet kb article 221833 has the necessary info on modifying the registry. SysPro Software's Policy Reporter makes it much easier to interpret the output of the log file, userenv.log.

TechEd 2005 sessions have also become available. That's all for now, folks!