… will get even better. Tomorrow morning Sam Devasahayam and I will present the session “What’s new in Active Directory in Windows Server 2012”. It’s loaded from information of the Active Directory Product Group, and I’ll bring in some real-world scenarios. I’m looking forward to the session. Loads of information and loads of reference slides to take away after the session. After the success from TechEd US we decided that we are again taking questions using twitter. If you come to the session, and

Hi there, I spoke to multiple people being totally excited about my demo equipment at TechEd , and was asked couple times if I can blog this. So here we go. The hardware I used is a Lenovo Tablet X220T – thanks Lenovo! It’s a great hardware: I love to work with tablet pc’s, and I’ve worked with it for years, however a hardware I had before died on me (was my personal one, but I used it as main device reducing my work laptop for demo and test). I always preferred Lenovos Keyboards and their solid

Hi again, I forgot to mention that the session is available online – for those who couldn’t make it to TechEd US and were asleep when it was streamed online. For everyone who will be at TechEd Europe , don’t watch it now, come by and say hello in Amsterdam   And … THANKS JIMMY for the pictures!

I’m speaking today about “The Evolution of Active Directory Recovery” at TechEd 2012 US (SIA319, 1pm in Hall N310) . The session will also be streamed. I had a great idea, and I’m looking forward to see how it’s working. And I haven’t seen this before : I’ll be taking questions using Twitter. If you are in the audience (in the hall or online) and you have any questions, just twitter them using the hashtag #TESIA319 – this enables me to follow up with the answers either in the session, or if we are

Hi there, I’m currently at TechEd 2012 in Orlando, and it’s time to get back blogging again. As you’ve propably seen, the Release Candidate for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 Release Preview have been released. No wonder that there is a lot of information at TechEd about the new Windows Operating Systems. I’ve been working with both versions for a while now and love the products. Computacenter Germany is in the Windows Server Rapid Deployment Program and we currently deploy WS2012 in production

I was asked many times “what may break if I update the forest or domain mode?”. Usually … nothing! Actually I’ve never heard of anything breaking when you increased the forest or domain mode. However, in Windows Server 2008 or lower versions of domain controllers there was no possibility to roll back the forest or domain mode. … No way! … No way? … OK – you were able to do a forest recovery (recovering at least one DC of each domain in the forest and rebuild the forest), however I doubt that this

In case you missed it: yesterday was the Keynote of the BUILD-conference (the Professional Developer Conference got a new name), and Steven Sinofski (Vice President of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft) officially introduced the first version of Windows “8” to the broad public. Pretty exciting and a lot of changes. You can see the keynote at www.buildwindows.com , and download the developer preview at dev.windows.com . If you are a MSDN subscriber there are more versions and information available

I’m currently getting ready for some speaking engagements: Tuesday next week (Sept 21st) I’m proud to moderate the Windows Infrastructure Track of the IIR IT-Admin Tech Talk . In this track we are covering not only the operating system related technologies, but also Cloud, Office 365, Sharepoint and Exchange. I’ll also present two sessions myself there: 13 Years Active Directory an overview of previous and future scenarios I will cover various design considerations, misunderstandings

Usually we have one Infrastructure Master in the domain who’s responsible to maintain references to objects in other domains – such as users which are members of a group in a different domain – to make sure if the target-object (user) is being renamed, moved or otherwise his distinguishedname has changed it can still be found. He is doing this by creating phantoms (small objects which contain only distinguishedname, SID and GUID). Actually, making it more complicated but accurate – those group memberships

I just had a pretty interesting discussion via a mailing list with some other Active Directory MVPs and some members of the Active Directory Product Group in Redmond. As we know, there is a new default for the tombstone lifetime in Active Directory. The discussion initiated because there is an article on Technet which is incorrect: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc784932(WS.10).aspx . Currently point 8 states that the tombstone lifetime, if it is <not set>, depends on the version