From  Microsoft's Failover and Network Load Balancing Clustering Team Blog :

We’ve had a lot of requests for a centralized website to find clustering and high-availability information and…it’s coming soon. J But in the meantime I’ll post some great resources from Microsoft’s Clustering and High-Availability team.

 

I’ll try to update this list when we get a few more. We have several coming out in the near future (including Active Directory considerations).

Check the list at blogs.msdn.com/clustering

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Active Directory Reporting Tool (ADRT) allows you to sort user objects depending on a couple of important attributes: disabled, locked, expires, never expires, expired, password expires, password never expires, password expired, and never logged in.

This product is currently free and 100% functional!

Source :	4sysops.com
Download :	maxpowersoft.com

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It's with great excitement that I get to be the first to announce the initial release of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit!

this first release contains two very useful tools which are both supported on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

The first tool, called "Batch Site Manager", adds new functionality through Central Administration.  From the new "Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections" page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases

The second tool is actually a new command in STSADM called "updatealert". This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade

Source : blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

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The Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) interface.

This month, Microsoft updated its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), a suite of desktop management tools that are currently offered only to the company's Software Assurance (SA) customers. As with earlier versions of MDOP, this suite is a must-have collection of valuable utilities--many of which originated at startups since purchased by Microsoft--and an obvious and tangible benefit of Microsoft's subscription-based enterprise licensing program. If you're not taking advantage of MDOP, it's time to take a look.

Read this great review of MDOP by Paul Thurrott.

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I confess: I love the Office 2007 Ribbon. But I know it’s a source of pain for some people. And truth to tell, even I sometimes have trouble finding a command. Which is why I was so pleased to see the new Office Search Commands add-in

Source : www.edbott.com

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Hilarious !

 

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If your are lucky enough to have a Windows Volume License for Vista Enterprise you should know that you can download a DVD Playback Pack for free. With this pack you will be able to play DVD, MPEG-2, and Dolby 5.1 content.

Source : www.microsoft.com
Download : www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter

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Consolas is a great fixed-pitch font developped by Microsoft for the developpers (Visutal Studio), but it makes a great font for your CMD.EXE windows.

To make this work you have to play a little bit with regedit but it's all worth it. There is an excellent article to learn how to do that on the IEBlog.

Source : blogs.msdn.com/ie

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Finally, IIS 7.0 has a PowerShell Provider!

The IIS7 PowerShell Provider allows you to

• Create Web-Sites, Web Applications, Virtual Directories and Application Pools
• Change Simple Configuration Properties on Web-Sites, Application Pools, Web Applications and Virtual Directories
• Add and Change Complex Configuration Settings
• Query Run-time Data (Web-Site State, Application Pool State, Currently Executing Requests)
• Execute Advanced Configuration Tasks, Scripting, Integration with other PowerShell Snap-Ins and features
• Search and Discover Configuration Settings

Source : blogs.iis.net/thomad

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Seem's that NEOWIN.net had managed to get their hands on the internal schedule for the release of Windows XP SP3 :

• April 14, 2008: Support is available for the release version of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP
• April 21, 2008: Original Equipment Manufacturers, Volume License, Connect, and MSDN and TechNet subscribers
• April 29, 2008: Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Download Center
• June 10, 2008: Automatic Updates

It looks like the real thing (I think we can trust NEOWIN), the news was also publish by bink.nu

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Brandon Paddock, who works on the Windows Shell Team here at Microsoft, wrote a Windows Sidebar Gadget that displays the status of the Windows Search Indexer.

Download the Indexer Status Gadget here.

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Memory is getting cheaper every day. This is one reason why more and more people are equipping their PCs with 4GB RAM or more. Modern desktops often support up to 8GB. So it happens quite often these days that a proud owner of a new a PC wonders why Vista only reports about 3GB RAM even though he bought 4GB. I have been asked this question by several people within the last weeks. Some of them were IT pros, so I thought I should post something about it here. The things I say in this post mostly apply to Windows XP as well.

Read this post at 4sysops.com

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An update to VMRCplus 1.6.0 has been released and is now available here.

 

This release contains several fixes and minor enhancements.

It has been tested on Windows Server 2008 as well.

 

Matthijs

Source : blogs.technet.com/matthts

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On Windows Server 2003 R2, the staging area is contained within a folder under the replicated folder itself. Basically, there is a hidden sub-folder called ‘DfsrPrivate’ under the root of every replicated folder.

...

On Windows Server 2008, the ‘DfsrPrivate’ directory has been moved under the ‘System Volume Information’ folder on the same volume.

Source : blogs.technet.com/filecab

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Windows Vista SP1 is released to Windows Update ... as an optional update (since march 18th). It should be available as an automatic update around mid-april. The Windows Vista Team explained all that in there blog.

If you have a WSUS server in your organisation you could deploy SP1 now by importing the update from Microsoft Update Catalog. The WSUS team has a post describing the procedure in there blog.

You should however note that you can't import an update in WSUS from the Microsoft Update Catalog if your server is setup as a downstream server. You will receive an error number 80131509.

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I've added a bouton on my blog. Now you can send me your comments.

I'm using kontactr for this. It looks great and it is free.

The bouton is in my About section (at the right) and at the bottom of the page.

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As you all know configuring basic components of Server Core could be a little confusing for a new comer. Guy Teverovsky made a great little tool to help us.

Source and download : Windowmaker's blog

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Today marks the release of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2008 - a set of tools for IT Pros managing IT environments for companies who have purchased MDOP plus Windows Software Assurance agreements with Microsoft. There are two key product updates in this release I'd like to highlight that I think IT Pros will find very useful  - Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset 6.0 (DaRT) and Desktop Error Monitoring 3.0 SP1 (DEM).

Source : windowsvistablog.com/

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WinHlp32.exe is required to display 32-bit Help files that have the ".hlp" file name extension. To view .hlp files on Windows Server 2008, you need to install this application.

Download : www.microsoft.com/downloads

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With Microsoft Corp.'s aggressive strategy to build out its Software-as-a-Service capability to online storage—even as physical, hardware-based storage remains ubiquitous and competitive—some businesses may find it tempting to allow employees and workgroups to jump into Microsoft's SkyDrive for some limited purpose.

Read this article by Edward F. Moltzen at crn.com

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