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Winner for Best Computer/Software Magazine 2005 RedmondTHE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF THE MICROSOFT IT COMMUNITY

COVER STORY REDMOND REPORT Can Microsoft 9 Hell: Frozen Over Save the World? Microsoft and teams with Novell promise top scientists to tackle the world’s to play nice. most pressing problems—and it 10 Small Business could turn conventional computing Lives Large on its head in the process. Office Live helps small businesses Page 46 feel big. Page 9 12 The Low Down To Save and To Protect FEATURES 28 Making Sense of Microsoft Collaboration The pieces are out there, but fitting them COLUMNS together has proven a long and 4 Barney’s Rubble: Doug Barney confusing process. Saving the World—One Line at a Time 39 Licensing Plan Hopes to Solve Virtualization Dilemma The virtualization locomotive just keeps on coming, and Microsoft has laid new tracks for its licensing. 22 Mr. Roboto: Don Jones Page 28 54 Cool Tools that Shut Down, Redux Rule—and They’re Free! 65 Never Again: Jim Madden Finding the right tool for the job can be difficult and finding The Grass Is Greener in Your it for free next to impossible. But standing next to impossible Own Backyard Page 39 is the Redmond Free Top 25. We think it can make your search a lot easier. 67 Security Advisor: Joern Wettern Security Myths Exposed: Part 2 REVIEWS 72 Foley on Microsoft: 15 Follow the Rules 24 Reader Review Mary Jo Foley This strong, rules-based system VMware Workstation is Microsoft Prognostications: will keep a close watch over your What’s up in 2007? network’s population. a Virtual Powerhouse Readers say VMware’s desktop ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 18 Keep Your Hard virtualization tool, although pricier than Microsoft’s free 2 Redmond Magazine Online Drive Healthy Virtual PC, is definitely worth Diskeeper helps keep today’s the money. 6 [email protected] monster hard drives neat and organized. 71 Ad and Editorial Indexes 1206red_OnlineTOC_2.v7 11/14/06 10:42 AM Page 2

Redmondmag.comDECEMBER 2006

MCPmag.com Questions with ... ADUC: Too Clicky? Bill Soward

ired of the ADUC—the Users & Com- CEO, Adaptive Planning puters—with all its click madness? Greg Shields pens a Michael Domingo interviews T Bill Soward new column for MCPmag.com that keeps what he calls the Bill Soward, CEO of Adap- “mouse-moving and clicky-clicky” to levels well below the tive Planning, on Redmond threshold for carpal tunnel syndrome. Greg’s weekly quick- Radio this month, now available on TIPs column starts with a four-part series on simplifying Catch Greg iTunes. FindIT code: Radio Shields’ new, ADUC admin options through the command line, and fol- weekly tip lows on with useful tricks for the virtual world and beyond. column on With Google and Microsoft competing MCPmag.com. He’s also open to suggestions. FindIT code: MCPQTS in the free application space, will bit players be able to compete? Yes—by offering ones optimized for Security Watch mid-market and enterprise customers. Our free, open source product is sub- Hackers Get More Ways to Hide stantially better than anything offered by Microsoft and Google. ew tools keep popping up that can help hackers hide their identity— Nfrom the custom Firefox browser Torpok, which promises better Will open source applications ever anonymity than any browser before, to The Onion Router, which offers con- make serious inroads in the enterprise? stantly random IP addresses. It’s already happening. SugarCRM, Com- But according to our Security Watch columnist, Cybertrust’s Russ Cooper, piere and Adaptive Planning all see rapid the risk isn’t just from browsing. “From a corporate perspective, the bigger adoption by companies of all sizes. risk here is that the TOR network gets used to set up a server internal to your organization that’s participating in the TOR Where does OpenOffice rank among network,” he writes. “Such a server could be difficult to identify, free apps? given that the traffic to and from it is encrypted via SSL.” It’s gaining momentum, but Microsoft Keep on top of all the technologies you need to watch out Office won’t be displaced for a long time. for by subscribing to Russ’ columns in our Security Watch newsletter. FindIT code: Newsletters Russ Cooper SOUND BYTE REDMONDMAG.COM RESOURCES “A lot of what you can do with .NET FX 3.0 you Resources Enter FindIT Code could do before, but it was >> Daily News News prohibitively difficult.” >> E-Mail Newsletters Newsletters —Ami Vora, Microsoft Product Manager, .NET 3.0 Framework >> Free PDFs and Webcasts TechLibrary Source: “Working the New Framework,” Mary Jo >> Subscribe/Renew Subscribe Foley, RedDevNews.com, November 2006 >> Your Turn Editor Queries YourTurn REDMOND MEDIA GROUP SITES: Redmondmag.com • RCPmag.com • ENTmag.com MCPmag.com • CertCities.com • TCPmag.com • TechMentorEvents.com

2 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project5 4/12/06 1:15 PM Page 1

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EMC2, EMC, and where information lives are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © copyright 2006 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. 1206red_Rubble4.v7 11/14/06 11:43 AM Page 4

Barney’sRubble Doug Barney

RedmondTHE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF THE MICROSOFT IT COMMUNITY REDMONDMAG.COM DECEMBER 2006 ■ VOL. 12 ■ NO. 12 Editor in Chief Doug Barney Saving the World: [email protected] Editor Ed Scannell [email protected] Executive Editor, Reviews Lafe Low [email protected] One Line at a Time Executive Editor, Features Carolyn A. April [email protected] Managing Editor Wendy Gonchar [email protected] apitalism is all about exploitation—making workers Editor, Redmondmag.com Becky Nagel [email protected] Associate Managing Editor Katrina Carrasco produce for owners more than they take home in [email protected] Contributing Editors Mary Jo Foley wages. That’s how Carnegie, Rockefeller and now Don Jones C Greg Shields Joern Wettern Gates got so rich. Gordon Gecko wor- pre-dates even Altair BASIC and MS- Art Director Brad Zerbel [email protected] ships this approach, while Karl Marx DOS!). This is a fundamentally new Senior Graphic Designer Alan Tao was less impressed. model of capitalism as much as it is a [email protected] In the old days, robber barons donated new model of software. For a public some of their proceeds to relieve a little company to purposely devote resources guilt, and because charity cocktail par- (Microsoft Research is $6 billion to $7 Group Publisher Henry Allain ties rule! There wasn’t a lot of oversight billion and counting) to projects that [email protected] Editorial Director Doug Barney of their money, they gave it, scarfed may never make them a dime, or return [email protected] Group Associate Publisher Matt N. Morollo champagne and a few truffles, and went dollars to them decades in the future, is [email protected] straight back to making more. pretty much unheard of. Director of Marketing Michele Imgrund [email protected] The new generation has the potential Not everyone has the extra fundage Creative Director Scott Shultz to be so much different. Sure, they make for pure research the way Microsoft [email protected] Senior Marketing Tracy S. Cook their money the old fashioned way—by does. Even so, there Manager [email protected] Senior Web Developer Rita Zurcher bringing in more than they pay out. But may be ways oth- [email protected] when they give away these collected ers can apply Marketing Programs Videssa Djucich Manager [email protected] earnings, they apply the same discipline the Redmond Editor, ENTmag.com Scott Bekker of capitalistic effi- model. Food, [email protected] Editor, MCPmag.com Michael Domingo ciency. The best drug, auto and [email protected] example is the Bill energy compa- Associate Editor, Web Gladys Rama [email protected] & Melinda Gates nies could all Intern Michelle Rutledge Foundation, which make a difference by [email protected] watches its money working with independ- closer than an ent scientists on tech- President & CEO Neal Vitale accountant on a nologies that can save [email protected] fixed income. lives and the environ- CFO Richard Vitale [email protected] Microsoft Corp. ment—instead of buying Executive Vice President Michael J. Valenti is doing just as up all the good patents. [email protected] much, and proba- Maybe someday they Director, Circulation and Abraham Langer Data Services [email protected] bly way more could even make a buck Director, Erik Lindgren good—and profits or two by selling products Information Technology [email protected] Director of Web Operations Marlin Mowatt remain a motive (am I starting to sound that replace the need for oil, gas, surgery, [email protected] Director, Print Production Mary Ann Paniccia like an Ayn Rand rehash?). As you can refrigerators or even Windows XP. [email protected] see by our story “Can Microsoft Save And how do I hope to change the Controller Janice Ryan [email protected] the World?” Redmond researchers are world? All my cash goes to buying Director of Finance Paul Weinberger working with scientists to craft new Madonna CDs, K-Fed concert tickets [email protected] tools to fuel scientific breakthroughs. (someone has to buy ’em!) and saving the Chairman of the Board Jeffrey S. Klein [email protected] These folks are in the trenches, crafting mansions in Newport, R.I. The opinions expressed within the articles and other contents vaccines, cures for cancer, ways to fight Do you think Microsoft can really do herein do not necessarily express those of the publisher. global warming—even trying to find some good and, if so, how? Tell me at the origins of Life (which apparently [email protected].

4 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN TAO Project1 10/16/06 9:52 AM Page 1

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[email protected]

Dynamics: The Perfect Fit? I am preparing for an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system selection and really enjoyed Doug Barney’s article in the November 2006 issue, “Should You Buy ?” I’ve seen a lot of companies make a huge ERP system selection mistake by trying to “run with the big dogs.” The size of the “organization unit” staff

should be the indicator, not the size of No Great Expectations the overall company. [In regard to the November 2006 Reader I’m currently working for a company Review, “Microsoft Virtual PC: Good that has roughly $1 billion in sales and Enough—for the Price,”] when Microsoft almost 7,000 employees. I can tell they bought (and thus gained Vir- want to go with the “best” and seem to tual PC) it was a very competitive product this point, Bill will be ready to take on all be leaning toward SAP. If we were a with VMware. That was a bit over two comers, including Arnold. But, with single business with factories in multi- years ago. Since then, VMware has added Microsoft’s software release track record, ple locations serving the same or similar a whole slew of new features. I haven’t could Bill accomplish all this by 2008? markets, they might have a valid point. seen a single new feature in Virtual PC or Randy Johnson The fact is we have at least five different Virtual Server in that time. I don’t expect Alpharetta, Ga. markets served by three very different anything from Microsoft. However, its businesses with 27 fairly autonomous virtual offerings aren’t even close to Nice thoughts, Barney, but unfortu- locations on three continents. We only VMware and I wouldn’t recommend or nately that is all they are. You answered have two sites with $100 million in sales, use them in a corporate environment. your own question when you doubted and the average is closer to $25 million. Dan Gilbert that all regimes would react the same I think we’ll be making a huge mistake Austin, Texas way. Why? Because their approach to trying to force the complexity of Oracle the world is not logical. Is Islam logical? or SAP on $25 million business units Tough Crowd Or, as a matter of fact, is any religion where each has less than a 50 total G&A Sorry, but currently Bill would only gar- logical? Or is any human really logical? headcount. We need a flexible SMB ner the “Windows geek” vote, as dis- I’d like to think I am, as I’m a very system with some of the financial con- cussed in Doug Barney’s October 2006 analytical type. But I have to admit, I solidation and analysis tools of an enter- column, “Bill for President.” He needs do have my illogical moments. Who prise -class company. to drop exclusive alliances and broaden am I going to vote for? Probably a In my opinion, one of the selling his acceptance of alternate worldviews. Republican—lower taxes, less govern- strategies for SAP and Oracle has been For example, Bill should install ment regulation, a strong defense, pro- to focus on total corporate sales volume VMware Workstation on his XP laptop life, marriage between one man and and not operating unit size to expand and run at least three different flavors of one woman and a host of other reasons. their target audience. Linux. This would likely endear him to Bill? Well, I doubt it, but then again, I Name withheld by request “all geeks.” didn’t think a former actor who became Los Angeles, Calif. Second, Bill has no appeal in the governor of California would make a southern “red” states. He needs to start good president, either. Now I think he’s a NASCAR racing team (a la Joe one of the best we’ve had. Gibbs). He can endear himself even fur- I’m an independent software developer Whaddya Think ther by jumping over the pit wall from a developing custom database applications Send your rants and raves to standing position. with Microsoft Access. I’m also a retail [email protected]. ?! Finally, Bill needs the “Hollywood business owner. I’ve got 35 years of expe- Please include your first and celebrity” vote. Bill should hire Mel rience in the software business so I’ve last name, city and state. If we Gibson to do a movie about his life. Mel experienced just about all of it. use it, you’ll be entered into a can get some blood and guts in the Lon A. Wiksell drawing for a Redmond t-shirt! screenplay to toughen Bill’s image. At Overland Park, Kan.

6 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project6 10/30/06 11:52 AM Page 1 Project4 10/30/06 11:33 AM Page 1 1206red_Report9-12.v8 11/14/06 11:03 AM Page 9

December 2006 INSIDE: Whether you’re running virtual, remote or some- where in between, you need to protect your vital data. RedmondReport Page 12 Hell Frozen Over Microsoft and Novell promise to play nice.

BY ED SCANNELL AND STUART J. JOHNSTON Linux could offer greater appeal to n an announcement many thought corporate accounts that already have a they would see only after hell froze healthy of both Windows and Iover, bitter rivals Microsoft Corp. Linux in their shops than what Red Hat and Novell Inc. recently signed a peace could offer by itself. agreement that lays the foundation for Other observers caution that Red

Windows and Linux and their respective Hat’s position may not be as dire as it PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN TAO applications to work smoothly together. appears. It remains to be seen how Under terms of the deal, Microsoft will many major vendors in the open source offer its corporate customers a chance market will endorse the Microsoft/ to license its Windows operating system Novell deal. “This does put some inter- as part of a package offering mainte- esting pressures on Red Hat, but what Microsoft and Novell working nance and support for Novell’s SuSE you have to remember is the deal is together, in a penguin Linux operating system. between Novell and Microsoft, not suit ... hell has clearly frozen over. “They said it couldn’t be done,” says between Microsoft and the open source Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “This is community. We have to wait to see significant revenues from Linux, such as a new model and a true evolution of our how the community responds, and IBM Corp., Hewlett Packard Co. and relationship that we think customers what kind of technology evolves out of perhaps even Microsoft. “The burning will immediately find compelling this,” says Al Gillen, research vice pres- question that may not be answered for a because it delivers practical value by ident of System Software with IDC in while is, is Oracle doing this as a tactical bringing two of their most important Framingham, Mass. slap at Red Hat, which will have modest platform investments closer together.” Another development that complicated impact on the market, or it is more Both companies plan to improve the Red Hat’s life just a week before the strategic and aimed at putting pricing way Microsoft’s Office desktop applica- Microsoft/Novell deal was Oracle pressures on IBM, HP and Microsoft tions and OpenOffice, its open source Corp.’s announcement that it would forcing them to respond,” says Dana competitor, work together. As a way to offer Red Hat customers technical serv- Gardner, principal analyst with Inter- further encourage corporate users to ice and support for Red Hat’s version of Arbor Solutions Inc. in Gilford, N.H. accept Novell’s operating system, Linux at aggressive rates. Red Hat gen- The Microsoft/Novell deal, a five- Microsoft officials promised not to erates a significant amount of its rev- year agreement that has been in the assert its patent rights over any of its enues and earnings from such services. works since April, has three major components: a technical cooperation This move clearly indicates they are maturing in their agreement, a patent agreement and a approach to how they interact with open source. business agreement. Ballmer promised the deal will be Al Gillen, Research Vice President of System Software, IDC good for any IT shop running both proprietary technology that might be Oracle also promised to indemnify Windows and SuSE Linux. He says the intermingled with SuSE Linux or with customers against patent infringement. technical aspects of the deal will result code developed for OpenSuSE. Red Hat was quick to respond, quietly in “higher levels of interop between the Some observers believe the agreement announcing on its Web site that it has two environments.” immediately improves Novell’s com- amended its OpenSource Assurance pro- This sentiment was echoed by petitive position against Linux market gram to now include indemnification. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian. “When leader Red Hat Inc. on both the server Some analysts wonder if Oracle’s move you look at the customers’ environ- and desktop fronts. They believe is solely directed at Red Hat or if it’s also ments, that mixed source environment Microsoft’s endorsement of SuSE aimed at larger companies that also earn that they’re dealing with brings a

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 9 1206red_Report9-12.v8 11/14/06 11:03 AM Page 10

RedmondReport

whole host of benefits in each one of the individual platforms while creating Small Business Lives Large other complexities for our customers,” he says. Office Live helps small businesses feel big. The deal also calls for the two compa- nies to establish a joint research facility BY CAROLYN A. APRIL wrapped up a beta test period involving at which Microsoft and Novell technical ne of the nice things the Web 160,000 customers, from which experts will architect and test new soft- gives small business is the ability Microsoft gleaned an enormous amount ware solutions, particularly in the areas Oto look and act big. Something of feedback. of virtualization, Web services for man- as seemingly simple as e-mail has One Microsoft executive insisted that agement of physical and virtual servers, changed the way the little guys navigate Live offerings don’t conflict with the and document format compatibility. the economy. With its recently released traditional on-site business software. Some see this as a welcome matura- Office Live, Microsoft is looking to cap- Instead, the Live services fill small tion of Microsoft’s attitude towards italize on small companies’ online ambi- business needs that are distinct from open source, which Ballmer once tions with a set of services that will help other types of customers’ needs. described as a “cancer” in the industry. affordably present and manage their “Our fundamental message when it Even Chairman once called online business. comes to Software as a Service and open source developers “communists.” Despite the name, Live Offerings will be around choice,” “This move clearly indicates they are Live has nothing to do with Word or says , recently named maturing in their approach to how PowerPoint for the masses. The sub- corporate vice president of the they interact with open source. It’s a scription-based services address specific Microsoft Business Solutions Group. direct reflection of the thinking of business functions to help automate The services are meant to be extensible people like Ray Ozzie and Bill Helf at small businesses, providing customers so IT pros and partners can customize Microsoft now having real impact,” with such things as a company domain them as needed. To that end, Microsoft IDC’s Gillen says. name, tools to set up a Web site, corpo- published a developers’ guide and Another surprising aspect of the deal rate-branded e-mail and IM accounts, other tools for the Office Live platform is that Microsoft will distribute about and online storage. Office Live recently last month.— 70,000 coupons per year for support and maintenance of SuSE Linux Enter- prise edition. Each coupon entitles the 3 Flavors of recipient to a one-year subscription for maintenance and updates to SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. A critical aspect of the deal was deter- mining how Microsoft’s “proprietary Office Live Price: Free source code” would co-exist with devel- Services include: Company domain name, Web site with 500MB storage, opers in the open source community. site reporting tools, 25 company-branded e-mail accounts (2GB storage Microsoft promised not to sue individual each), IM, calendaring and Office Live adManager Beta (to manage search open-source developers for the use of its advertising campaigns). intellectual property, as long as the work is for non-commercial purposes. However, this peace agreement hardly Office Live Essentials Price: $19.95 per month means a new era of détente between Same as Basics, but with two online business applications (Office Live Busi- the two companies. Ballmer says ness Contact Manager and online Workspaces for 10 users), an additional Microsoft will continue to compete 1GB of Web site storage, 50 company-branded e-mail accounts and offline hard against SuSE Linux. e-mail access in Outlook. “Tactically this is Microsoft saying, ‘You better pay a premium to SuSE in order to be safe from us,’ but that’s Office Live Premium Price: $39.95 per month likely an idle threat,” InterArbor’s Same as Essentials, but with more storage (2GB for Web site, 2GB for e-mail Gardner says. “Strategically it is and 1GB for Workspaces), increased capacity for 20 additional users and a Microsoft finally recognizing it has to set of Internet-based business applications. play with Linux,” he says. —

10 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project1 10/16/06 11:15 AM Page 1 1206red_Report9-12.v8 11/14/06 11:03 AM Page 12

The RedmondReport LOW DOWN By Lafe Low To Save and To Protect Whether you’re running virtual, remote or somewhere in between, safeguarding information is vital.

ost assets can cost big bucks, ports 64-bit platforms, which helps it With the Vocabra integration, those and the cost of the physical manage applications running within alerts can now come through a natural hardware is only part of the VMware ESX Server or Microsoft Vir- language interface. When you get a call Lstory. The intellectual prop- tual Server VMs. Now you can consoli- from your network, you acknowledge erty and personal information to date your servers and still have the same the alert and accept responsibility for which those machines have access sort of safety net for your data managing the alert condition. is virtually priceless. Repercus- and applications you’d Pretty cool stuff, but I have to wonder sions from losing those types of have on a physical machine. where the voice comes from. Would assets quickly outstrip the you really want a voice that sounds like cost of computers. Go Back in Time a cantankerous New York cab driver Vector Networks has That’s exactly what you want bellowing at you, “Hey pal, you’re run- blended its asset manage- to do after a data-destroying nin’ outta bandwidth here!” ment technology with RFID tech- disaster. And now you can. nology. RFID, or radio frequency DataCore Software has a new contin- Burning the Midnight Oil identification, has started to take hold uous data-protection product called Microsoft is certainly keeping busy these of keeping track of wandering pets, Traveller, which protects your data days with the imminent release of Vista peripatetic kids and now grocery items by letting you roll back to a previous and Office 2007 (a release celebration (Wal-Mart has famously declared its time prior to a virus attack, power out- for the latter is planned for Nov. 30 in intent to use RFID chips for product age or some other disaster. New York). Besides the rock-star level tracking). For tracking IT assets, it Traveller uses high-availability data products like Vista and Office, it’s also makes perfect sense. mirroring and storage virtualization to busy putting the wraps on Exchange and Vector’s Asset Management Profes- restore data to a known, “good” state working on a whole other wave of tech- sional now uses RFID technology not prior to disaster. It’s a potentially nologies coming in 2007. only to determine the physical location smoother approach than data snap- That next wave includes the long- of an asset, but also to trigger an alert shots, which can leave gaps between delayed “Longhorn” (apparently now when an unauthorized user picks up a recovery points. Traveller chugs away in the pre-beta stage) Win- laptop or if someone tries to tamper with transparently in the background dows Server, updates to or remove the RFID chip. Stay tuned for without affecting any applica- its virtualization prod- news of upcoming deals Vector has in tions or other operations, ucts, Windows Small Busi- the works to help organizations use just waiting for Godzilla ness Server (code-named RFID to keep track of their machines. to crush your data center. “Cougar”), for midsized businesses (code-named Virtual Protection Speak Up “Centro”), Windows Storage Server, What do you do with all those applica- Argent Software has teamed up R2 Service Pack tions and all that data running on virtual with Vocabra to add voice alerts to 2 and Certificate Lifecycle Manager. It machines (VMs)? Just because you’re Argent’s monitoring and alerting suite. will be another busy year for those using the awesome power of virtualiza- Vocabra’s Voice Alert Portal will give who use—and observe—Microsoft tion doesn’t mean you should be skating Argent users the option of receiving technology.— on thin ice when it comes to data pro- interactive voice alerts. tection and availability. Argent Extended Technologies Lafe Low is Redmond’s executive editor of SteelEye Technology’s LifeKeeper already sends alerts via e-mail, text mes- reviews. Reach him with any company or Protection Suite for Windows now sup- sage, pager and to the Argent Console. product scoop at [email protected].

12 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project1 3/14/06 3:47 PM Page 1 Project18 9/5/06 3:39 PM Page 1

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¤ ® 1-800-546-9728

www.raxco.com June 8, 2004 May 24, 2005 PerfectDisk 6.0 PerfectDisk 7.0

Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. PerfectDisk is a registered trademark of Raxco Software. PC Magazine Editors’ Choice Award Logo is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. Used under license. All other product names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. 1206red_ProdRev15-20.v8 11/14/06 12:21 PM Page 15 ProductReview Follow the Rules This strong, rules-based system will keep a close watch over your network’s population.

ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0 TNT has made a number as other utilities of its class. Pricing begins at $50 per IP node, $80 per workstation, $425 per server, $835 per cluster node of improvements since ELM has a central adminis- reviewed an earlier tration utility as an MMC TNT Software Redmond version in January 2004. snap-in, a Web-based inter- 360-546-0878 Most are aimed at delivering face, a database that collects www.tntsoftware.com more concise information. the messages for ELM and a TNT redesigned the console series of agents that commu- to create categories around nicate with the central system. BY RICK A. BUTLER On the other end of the Keeping tabs on the health of wire, ELM uses three differ- your systems and servers is a ent types of agents. Service fundamental and essential Agents install directly to the task. ELM Enterprise Man- system and have the most ager 4.0 uses filtered alert functionality. If you don’t monitoring and rules-based want to install something on notification to let you know your server, you can use a exactly what’s happening Virtual Agent. This is what throughout your network. TNT used to call a Remote ELM 4.0 is actually a Agent. These monitor almost combination of three of as well as the Service Agents, TNT’s tools: but they do so from afar. • ELM Log Manager ELM also comes with IP collects event information Virtual Agents that monitor and creates central aggre- non-Windows platform gated views devices, which is good for • ELM Performance Figure 1. ELM gives you full details on every alert. capturing the status of routers Manager tracks perform- or Unix-based systems. ance in real time tory for Windows Event the major functions. ELM Agent management is quite • ELM Event Log Moni- Log data. Advisor now provides pop-up simple with ELM. You just tor creates a central reposi- ELM monitors Windows style messages when specific go into the console and add networks, including alerts are triggered. The At- an agent for the node you REDMONDRATING Windows NT, 2000 and A-Glance views create specific want to monitor. If you no ___ 2003 servers and Windows groupings of alerts, which longer want to monitor that Documentation: 20% 8.0 NT, 2000 and XP worksta- make it easier to analyze a node, simply delete the Installation: 20% ______6.0 Feature Set: 20% ______7.0 tions. It also works with particular segment of your agent from the list. If you’ve Performance: 20% _____ 9.0 Active Directory, IIS, infrastructure. ELM also installed the Service Agent Management: 20%______9.0 Exchange and ISA. Through added a tighter integration to the system, it will auto- syslog events and SNMP for ASP.NET and souped-up matically roll off the system. Overall Rating: 7.8 ______traps, it supports non- the Web components. Installation was a bit of a Key: Windows platforms and IP Architecturally, ELM challenge when dealing with 1: Virtually inoperable or nonexistent 5: Average, performs adequately devices like printers or Enterprise Manager oper- requisites. While the tool 10: Exceptional routers as well. ates in much the same way does install quite easily, one

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 15 1206red_ProdRev15-20.v8 11/14/06 12:21 PM Page 16

ProductReview

improvement would be to There’s data on hardware ELM can even send you an The one thing I would’ve have it sweep to make sure specifics, software, drivers, IM if you’re using MSN liked to see in the report everything required is in modules and DLLs, service Instant Messenger (or scheduler is a “Run Report place and operating. The status, status on the IP stack, Yahoo! now that the two are Now” option. The Scheduler requisites are in the docu- modules in use by the Brows- more conjoined). lets you run reports on a 15 mentation (for those of you er—the list goes on. This One of the more quaint minute granularity. In order who actually read the direc- level of information is a huge notification methods was the to execute a run report order, tions before installation), so benefit in a trouble-shooting Marquee Device. ELM can you have to wait for the next you should be OK. If you run capacity. Similar functions on send notifications to an LED quarter hour before doing so. into trouble, Tech Support is I do like the fact that you can ready to help, and they are The System Information function is one of set up reports to automatical- quite a responsive group. ly run based on a specific time The installation routines the most comprehensive snapshots I’ve ever period. This helps keep the won’t tell you if you’re miss- seen in a tool like this. information current and cov- ing something, though. It ers the range of times you will just error out or freeze. other tools are so bland that Reader Board. At first, I was need to monitor. Installing to SQL Express their usefulness is question- thinking that server errors Performance Monitoring is 2005 was a showstopper. I able after the first pass. aren’t something I’d like to also part of the Results area. ended up installing MSDE ELM’s primary function is see in lights. If you have a You can configure ELM to 2000 so I could continue with to monitor and report events large data center with a lot of watch the server for specific the installation. Once all the as they occur, but such a tool activity, though, using a performance events. While requisites were sorted, the would be remiss without a reader board to announce you can log those and chart software installed in around solid notification utility, and issues with your server net- them out with minutes, very clean and the one within ELM Enter- work might be a good idea. Performance Monitor, ELM neat. All the databases were prise does not disappoint. Still, I would be willing to can notify you of specific created and configured, and ELM’s powerful filtering bet that most ELM shops performance-related events: the principle services were ability is connected to tar- aren’t going to be using this for example, if a specific added and started—all that geted scripts. That means notification method. process spikes the processor without a reboot. ELM can run certain scripts to 100 percent or uses a cer- or notifications based on Robust Reporting tain amount of RAM. To Monitor and specifics within the logged Reporting—the last major The updates TNT has To Protect event. This gives you the functional area—is of critical made to ELM Enterprise ELM centers around three information that you need to importance for any tool that Edition 4.0 have made it major functional areas: mon- see without overwhelming will be used for compliance easier to use, but haven’t itoring, notification and you with data you don’t need. issues, whether HIPAA or given up one iota of power reporting. Monitoring is Speaking of filtering, you can Sarbanes-Oxley. ELM comes or functionality. If you’re ELM’s shining attribute. set up each Windows event, with a strong reporting capa- scouting for something to There are a number of pre- syslog event or SNMP trap bility, bundled with a good monitor and manage your configured monitoring to include it or exclude it range of report formats. You growing network popula- items, and you can create from interest, depending on can also quickly create your tion, make sure ELM is on your own based on a list of what you need. own report formats to cover a your list of contenders. It’s 23 different categories. You ELM handles notification range of time or role-based well-designed and well-suited can also place a polling fre- through a number of differ- activities, such as a view for for whatever monitoring quency on each monitor ent approaches, such as an your DBA, exchange admin tasks you have in mind. — item, such as “ping XYZ serv- e-mail or a page. The system or sys admin. You can also er every five minutes and can beep or even talk if capture reports for trending Rick A. Butler, MCSE+I, is report if there is no reply.” you’re using the Microsoft analysis and export them out the director of information serv- The System Information TTS engine. You can set up of the system for long-term ices for the United States Hang function is one of the most pop-up messages to appear storage. Reporting was the Gliding and Paragliding Associ- comprehensive snapshots I’ve on a desktop console, similar main reason behind the con- ation. Reach him when he lands ever seen in a tool like this. to an IM notification. Heck, sole redesign. at [email protected].

16 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | 1206red_RDNSubAdFinal 11/14/06 12:47 PM Page 1

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ProductReview Keep Your Hard Drive Healthy Diskeeper helps keep today’s monster hard drives neat and organized.

Diskeeper 10 Price: Professional: $50 per seat, Server Enterprise: $999 Diskeeper Corp. 818-771-1600 www.diskeeper.com

BY RICK A. BUTLER When you save, the file There’s no end to an admin’s system breaks files into to-do list. The top three tasks blocks so they can fit in a these days are invariably run- contiguous space. As you ning anti-virus and anti- add or delete files, you end spyware checks, installing up mixing up blocks of data software updates and patches because the file system will and defragmenting hard start using the first free drives. While the latest virus space it finds. and the headaches of “Patch Because you have no real Tuesday” grab more head- control over where or how Figure 1. Diskeeper shows you fragmentation levels on a time- stamped chart. lines, the health of your hard it gets stored on the disk, drives is no less deserving of the OS ends up making attention. Not running a reg- generally inefficient deci- Defrag Veteran prise is virtually unlimited. ular defrag has a huge impact sions and your data ends up Diskeeper has been a main- As with previous versions, on system performance. scattered across the drive. stay since the days when it Diskeeper 10 does an excel- In a perfect world, hard This causes your hard disk filled the void for Windows lent job of quickly sorting drives would store every file heads to thrash around NT 4 (NT 4 had no defrag- through your disk and align- contiguously and arrange looking for chunks of data, mentation utility). Even ing your data. them so each file would be which takes time. While today, Windows XP ships Diskeeper reports the aver- quickly accessible. This we’re only talking millisec- with a scaled-back version of age number of file fragments would save on hard disk onds of access, if you’re Diskeeper 6, paving the way per file, the fragmentation of access time, which translates accessing a couple thousand for Diskeeper 10 to impress your master file table (MFT) to time saved and less wear files, that adds up. you with some of its more and the response time you and tear. However, that’s Some users thought bigger advanced features. would potentially gain by rarely the case. hard disks would alleviate the At the core of the suite is reading a fully defragmented problem, but it only made the product we all know and volume. All the machines REDMONDRATING things worse. People store love, the defragmenter tool. upon which I ran Diskeeper larger files and more data in Diskeeper 10 has five edi- showed me nearly a 50 per- Documentation: 20%___ 7.0 larger volumes. Improved tions, each suited for systems cent gain in seek time per- Installation: 20% ______8.0 Feature Set: 20% ______7.0 hard drive seek times, faster with increasingly larger file formance by executing the Performance: 20% _____ 8.0 processors and vast quantities volumes: Home, Professional, defrag. In most cases, I Management: 20%______9.0 of RAM have helped, but the Professional Premier, Server found my MFT to be more hard disk is typically the and Server Enterprise. Pro- fragmented than what Overall Rating: 7.8 ______slowest component in a fessional will defrag a Diskeeper was calling accept- Key: computer. Fragmented files 768GB volume, whereas able. In each case, I noticed a 1: Virtually inoperable or nonexistent 5: Average, performs adequately can grind performance into Server operates in the ter- modest performance increase 10: Exceptional the ground. abyte range. Server Enter- after defragging.

18 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project6 9/12/06 2:29 PM Page 1

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Copyright © 2006 Lucid8. All rights reserved. Microsoft® Exchange Server is a registered trademark of Microsoft® Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. 1206red_ProdRev15-20.v8 11/14/06 12:21 PM Page 20

ProductReview

What’s Next to conduct defrags in an period between defrags intelligent way. I-FAAST should be. This is pretty s this review went to press, Diskeeper was just prepar- adapts to the changes in cool, as your system doesn’t Aing to ship a new version of its defrag tool. Diskeeper your file storage habits based kick off a defrag cycle when 2007 automates many defragmentation and disk maintenance on your disk geometry. This there’s little to defrag. tasks. Here’s a look at the significant upgrades coming in makes the product adaptive In Professional edition, Diskeeper 2007: because it essentially ana- Diskeeper has a power- • InvisiTasking technology performs true real-time lyzes a volume to determine saving function that works defragmentation, automatically handling fragmentation as what type of volume it is and for notebooks. It cuts down it occurs. how often you’re actually on power consumption • I-FAAST 2.0 speeds file access through intelligent moni- retrieving “commonly while quietly cranking away toring. It learns which files are needed most and accelerates accessed files.” It then on those pesky fragments. access to those files by anywhere from 20 percent to 80 arranges the files on the You can just use the percent. (This feature is available in Professional Premier, drive in such a way that the Windows Defragmenter, Server and Enterprise Server versions.) most common files are within which works reasonably well • The Frag Shield maintains system stability and reliability the easiest reach. for most situations. You’d by preventing fragmentation of critical system files. It used to be that if you still be using a proven version • The Terabyte Volume Engine 2.0 (TVE) provides thorough were going to defragment of Diskeeper, albeit several real-time defragmentation of large volumes (more than 60GB). your system, you had to wait versions earlier than the cur- • The improved interface provides flexible and intuitive until later at night to ensure rent version. Diskeeper’s key controls, simplified configuration, and reports on disk that disk activity would be at selling point is that it’s a health, real-time performance and fragmentation statistics. its lowest. If the computer huge improvement over the • Automatic online directory consolidation boosts antivirus had to read or save to the packaged Windows version. scans, back-ups and file searches. hard disk while a defrag rou- It all comes down to how • Diskeeper 2007 now has native 64-bit support for tine was in process, the you use your storage, what Windows operating systems. integrity of the data would your read/write activity is often be in question and the and whether your drives are What’s really cool here is logins access the defrag- software would begin the getting fragmented. You version 10 sports a boot time ment utility. process again. It could also can run an analysis in defragmentation sequence. I did have one hang up end up running so slowly Windows and begin measur- This lets you defragment the with the Admin tool. You that performance would be ing how fragmented your paging file rather than have to make sure TCP/IP heavily affected. data has become. deleting it. It turns it off in is turned on as a protocol if Diskeeper created I/O If it’s truly getting thrashed Windows, performs the you opt to use SQL Server Smart so the tool could con- around on a regular basis, defragmentation and then re- 2005 Express as your data- tinue working through and you’re able to determine creates the page file. base engine. I’m told accesses by halting the that it’s due to drive frag- Apart from the defrag- Diskeeper will update this defrag process and allowing mentation, latching onto a menter utility itself, info as part of the documen- the file activity to continue tool like Diskeeper is proba- Diskeeper Administrator is tation/installation in subse- and complete before resum- bly a good idea. Diskeeper a great interface that lets quent versions. While this is ing defrag. This is powerful has been at it a long while, you control your enterprise certainly not a failing of because the system takes so it’s worth a long look if defragmentation efforts. Diskeeper, but rather a advantage of idle time when you need an enterprise-level From the console, you can change in how MSDE/SQL it would otherwise have to defrag solution. — roll out the appropriate provides exposure, it do maintenance. versions of Diskeeper to can throw you for a loop if Depending on the level of Rick A. Butler, MCSE+I, is machines across your net- you’re not ready. file activity on the disk, the the director of information work, schedule primary and size and types of files used, services for the United States secondary policies of when Intelligent and the amount of free space Hang Gliding and Paragliding to run defrag operations on Defragmentation available, Diskeeper can use Association. You can reach groups of machines, and Diskeeper 10 contains a the Smart Scheduling fea- him when he lands at even let non-administrator number of features designed ture to figure out what the [email protected].

20 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project2 8/11/06 12:43 PM Page 1 1206red_Roboto22.v7 11/14/06 11:05 AM Page 22 Mr. Roboto Automation for the Harried Administrator | by Don Jones Shut Down, Redux

hutting down, restarting and logging remote comput- ers must be a hot topic for Windows administrators. S After running a column entitled “Shut Down Already” (see Mr. Roboto, July 2006), I received numerous comments

from clever readers. They all had Free. It’s a plug-in for Active Directory’s other ideas for remotely shutting Users and Computers console—a tool down and restarting remote machines with which most admins already spend en masse. plenty of quality time every day. One reader—who shall remain Using this tool, you don’t have to anonymous for his protection—simply select individual computers. Instead, you suggested that we should all “make the can select a whole organizational unit interns walk around and do it.” Sorry, (OU) full of machines (see Figure 1). Figure 2. After making a change, you'll but Mr. Roboto is not into the Intern- Then your options include restarting see a graph showing the results. Net method of doing anything. Besides, the computer, shutting down the com- why Microsoft didn’t build in a similar nothing would cause an uprising of the puter, starting the computer (using type of functionality. It doesn’t really interns quicker than that. Wake-On-LAN, requiring that the matter because Specops stepped in. Another reader, Mark Mills, had a computer have a WoL-compatible net- Because the tool is free and works well, better suggestion. He uses Special work adapter), or forcing the computers there’s virtually no reason not to use it Operations Software’s Specops Gpup- to refresh their Group Policy settings. and continue to restart manually. Let’s date tool (download the tool from As its name would imply, that’s the hope we see more companies producing www.specopssoft.com/products/specop tool’s primary purpose. free tools like this.— sgpupdate/default.asp). This tool meets When you select any of these options, the First Law of Roboto with its price: you get a bar chart showing you the out- Don Jones ([email protected]) is a con- come of the operation (see Figure 2). tributing editor for Redmond magazine. You’ll see how many computers are still He’s currently working on “Windows Pow- working on it, how many are complete, erShell: TFM” (www.sapienpress.com). how many didn’t work and how many couldn’t be contacted because they were Long Live Free Tools either offline or protected by a local fire- y now, you’ve probably wall. By the way, if it’s the Windows Bheard about Microsoft’s Firewall that’s blocking access, you can purchase of Winternals, the use a Group Policy setting to open the company co-founded by guru proper exceptions to allow this kind of Mark Russinovich. Mark remote administration. That’s an impor- recently stated in his blog that tant trick to keep in mind. Microsoft plans to keep the Anyway, you’ll see a detailed list that huge library of free Sysinter- will show you exactly which computers nals (www..com) are in which category of success or tools available to the public. failure. That’s when you can put the In case Microsoft changes its Intern-Net to work to handle the com- mind later, you should go puters you couldn’t reach remotely. download them all now. Figure 1. Gpupdate lets you select an Looking at the simplicity of the — D.J. entire Active Directory organizational unit. Gpupdate tool, you have to wonder

22 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project3 11/10/06 11:45 AM Page 1 1206red_ReaderRev24-27.v7 11/14/06 10:55 AM Page 24

Your turn to sound off on the ReaderReview latest Microsoft products

D ER R D IV

A E

E N

VMware Workstation is R

a Virtual Powerhouse Redmond Readers say VMware’s desktop virtualization tool, although pricier than Microsoft’s free Virtual PC, is definitely worth the money.

BY JOANNE CUMMINGS Mware Workstation 5.5 debuted in December 2005 to rave reviews. VMware Workstation 5.5 Although Microsoft, its primary competitor, has bolstered its arsenal of virtu- $199 Valization tools in recent months (see “Virtual Server Has Real Fans” and VMware, an EMC Company “Microsoft Virtual PC: Good Enough—for the Price,” October and November 877-486-9273 Redmond, respectively), VMware is still widely considered best of breed when it comes to desktop virtualization. “We are a Microsoft partner and a VMware partner, www.vmware.com so we support and use both,” says John Hanley, CEO of Portlock Software, a storage management and disaster recovery software provider in Redmond, Wash. “VMware Workstation is, in my opinion, a much better product than Virtual PC a Pfizer SharePoint Lead and a member because it’s more flexible and has more options,” he says. of the Microsoft Center of Excellence. VMware Workstation 5.5 runs on Windows or Linux hosts, a decided advantage “Maybe down the road it might make a over Microsoft’s Virtual PC, which supports only Windows hosts (although it difference, but I don’t think it’s going does support limited Linux guests). VMware also supports more flavors of Linux to affect me in terms of testing Web guests, including the latest distributions from Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Sun parts and different applications.” Solaris x86 and FreeBSD. Hanley agrees that 64-bit support will “There’s more Linux expertise in VMware. I’m sure Microsoft has vast Linux become more important. “Most of our expertise, but they don’t apply it to developing products for Linux,” Hanley says. desktops are still 32-bit, so we can’t run That could be changing, though. “VMware Workstation is a better product for a 64-bit virtualized OS on our desk- Linux now, but that may not be true once all the Linux extensions come out with tops,” he says. “As we replace them with Microsoft,” he says. new 64-bit machines, that will change. But right now, I haven’t been all that thrilled with the 64-bit Windows XP We can take snapshots of our data and ship version’s reliability or stability.” those to our Texas office, and vice versa. VMware Workstation 5.5 also offers experimental support for virtual sym- Steve Birchfield, Network Administrator at AnazaoHealth Corp. metric multiprocessing, in which users can dedicate as many as two virtual processors to a given virtual machine Bit by Bit (VM), as long as the host machine is Workstation 5.5 supports both 32-bit and 64-bit guest and host machines configured with at least two logical (Microsoft’s Virtual PC supports 64-bit hosts, but only 32-bit guests). VMware processors. This is an advanced feature, also lets users run 32- and 64-bit operating systems simultaneously on the same however, that most readers have yet to physical machine. The 64-bit guest capability is only supported on certain AMD use. “I haven’t tried the 64-bit stuff or 64 and Intel VT-enabled processors. (VMware provides a free utility that checks the multiprocessor,” says Paul Moore, a for supported processors as part of the download process.) senior developer at a small software For most readers, the 64-bit support is important, but not yet critical. “Most of the company in Mountain View, Calif. environments I’m working with right now aren’t 64-bit,” says Bob Fox, an inde- Moore’s company uses VMware pendent consultant who is also a Microsoft MVP for Windows SharePoint Services, Workstation primarily because of its

24 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project4 11/14/06 1:54 PM Page 1 1206red_ReaderRev24-27.v7 11/14/06 10:55 AM Page 26

ReaderReview

Linux and Windows support. “We do a “So if something happens here, a hurri- it’s configured to run in Chinese, it’s lot of development on Red Hat systems cane or some other event, they can just easy,” he says. “I make a clone of the and we do development for Red Hat bring those copies of the virtual first domain controller and fire that one talking to Active Directory. We need machines up and we can function and up while the first one is still running. lots of domain controllers that we can operate out of the other location.” Then, on the second one, I can go into bring up, take down, roll back and so Other readers like the snapshot capa- the control panel and say, ‘OK, you’re on. Plus, we need lots of Red Hat sys- bility but find it difficult to navigate. “I now running in Chinese.’ And it hasn’t tems we can bring up, take down and tried the snapshots, but I got myself all taken 10GB of space, because for the roll back. VMware is perfect for our confused on which snapshot was which, second one, VMware is just maintaining environment,” he says. so I just deleted them all and started the differences between the two. It’s over again,” Hanley says. “I think better very efficient on disk space and it’s very Bread and Butter tools for managing snapshots in efficient to set up.” Beyond the Linux support, most users VMware would be cool. We’re con- cite VMware Workstation’s snapshot stantly changing the environment and Some Support Still Lacking and cloning capabilities as key differen- like to go back to known states.” VMware Workstation isn’t perfect, tiators. “The snapshot feature is very Storage space is another caveat when however. Readers find it lacking in appealing,” Moore says. “If I’m about it comes to snapshots, readers say. “The some key areas, including support for to try something weird or different I problem I have is the hard drive require- and the fact that it can just take a snapshot, and that snap- doesn’t yet have a physical-to-virtual shot is very fast and lightweight.” VMware Workstation (P2V) converter for Linux. “VMware VMware Workstation lets users take Workstation doesn’t support Windows snapshots at any time, even while the lets users take snapshots Vista very well,” Hanley says. “I’m virtual machine is running. The result at any time, even assuming that will be fixed rapidly with is a lightweight copy that takes the Vista going to manufacturing. When snapshot and stores only the changes while the virtual you pop an image of Windows Vista from that point. and start VMware on that, the graphics “It has a very nice tool for managing machine is running. look atrocious. It reminds me of the snapshots,” Moore says. “The UI actu- Atari ‘Pong’ days.” ally shows you all the different snapshots ments,” says Fox. “You are definitely Not only are the graphics less than you’ve made. You can give them all going to be losing space fast because stellar, but Vista also tends to crash the names, and it’s fairly easy to navigate. So you’re storing all those images.” Fox whole machine. “I’ve had Vista as my you can try one thing and if that doesn’t says he usually stores snapshots on a host machine for a half hour at one feel quite right, you can go back to a separate 300GB portable hard drive to point and it was just blowing up so I previously known good state, without avoid space problems. just reverted back,” Fox says. “Vista as destroying where you just were.” Cloning is another key feature of a guest on VMware runs fine, but the Virtual PC right now has no snapshot VMware Workstation 5.5. Users can host has some issues to work out.” capability, although it does let users “go make either a full copy of a VM (called This should change once Vista is out back” one level. “For developers who a full clone) or a linked clone. Linked in production. “In all fairness, Vista are always messing around, the snapshot clones are lightweight copies in which isn’t a production operating system yet, feature is really useful,” Moore says. only changes are saved. “VMware’s so you really can’t expect Workstation “When you’re developing things deep ability to clone one [VM] based on to support Vista when it hasn’t shipped,” down inside Windows, if you make a another is a great feature,” Moore Hanley says. mistake with a real machine, you have says. “If I have a [VM] and a snapshot Workstation also has no support for to clear the whole thing off and re- of that machine, the linked clone fea- Linux P2V, an important feature for install. It’s a big problem.” ture lets you have both of those AnazaoHealth’s Birchfield. “Right Non-developers also find the snap- machines running simultaneously.” now, VMware really doesn’t have a shot worthwhile, especially for disaster This works well for Moore because he P2V for Linux at all—it’s just for recovery purposes. “We can take snap- can quickly and efficiently create multi- Windows. And that’s one thing that’s shots of our data and ship those to our ple copies of VMs sporting only incre- lacking for us.” Texas office, and vice versa,” explains mental changes. “If I have a domain AnazaoHealth is a pharmacy, and Steve Birchfield, network administrator controller and want to make another many applications in that industry run at AnazaoHealth Corp. in Tampa, Fla. domain controller just like it, except that only on Linux. “When we purchase

26 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | 1206red_ReaderRev24-27.v7 11/14/06 10:55 AM Page 27

EGDI:8I

other pharmacies, chances are they’ll NDJG 8DBE6CNÁH have a Unix or Linux system,” Birch- field says. “It would be nice if VMware had some kind of tool where we could H:CH>I>K: easily pull their servers into a virtual environment and not have to worry about supporting that hardware.” 96I6 There are some tools like PlateSpin PowerConvert to do conversions, but support is a problem. “You’re kind of on your own as far as support,” he says. “Other people going through the same thing try and help you out, but really, as far as official support, there’s not much.” BLAUDE VMware currently offers a Windows- only converter. The next version of VMware’s Converter tool will convert Windows physical machines into VMs, as well as converting Microsoft Virtual PC VMs into VMware Workstation VMs. That tool is currently in beta and expected to be released in early 2007. Beyond P2V, VMware support can be a soft spot. Readers say VMware Work- station is a solid, stable product that needs very little support. For those pushing the envelope, though, support can be hard to find and expensive. “There’s no support after 30 days. You can buy it, but it’s not included,” Ndjg _dW ^h id egdiZXi ndjg XdbeVcnÀh YViV# 7ji ndj Moore says. “I’ve had a couple of issues XVc cZkZg WZ hjgZ l]ZgZ ndjg YViV b^\]i ZcY where I haven’t been able to get things je# L^i] 9g^kZAdX` ndj l^aa `cdl/ Dcan l]ZgZ working. I went onto some of the ^iÁh cZZYZY# JhZ 9g^kZAdX` id XZcigVaan bVcV\Z eZg^e]ZgVa YZk^XZ VXXZhh# Fj^X` id ^chiVaa! ZVhn id forums, got a few suggestions and still bVcV\Z VcY l^i] ÊZm^Wan iV^adgZY VXXZhh g^\]ih# ;dg couldn’t make it work. It wasn’t critical, idiVa Xdcigda d[ ]dl bdW^aZ YZk^XZh XdccZXi id ndjg but if it was, I would have had to cough XdbeVcnÀh XdbejiZgh# up the money and pay for support.” Even with its downsides, readers say 9g^kZAdX` )#& ide [ZVijgZh/ that VMware Workstation is head and ´

Joanne Cummings is a freelance technology lll#Yg^kZadX`#Xdb journalist. You can reach her via e-mail at [email protected].

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 27 1206red_F1Collab28-36.v10 11/14/06 10:16 AM Page 28

28 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | ILLUSTRATION BY MARK COLLINS 1206red_F1Collab28-36.v10 11/14/06 10:16 AM Page 29

Making Sense of

Microsoft Collaboration The pieces are out there, but fitting them together has

proven a long and confusing process. BY CAROLYN A. APRIL AND ED SCANNELL

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 29 1206red_F1Collab28-36.v10 11/14/06 10:16 AM Page 30

Collaboration

hree years ago, We see real value Portal Server. Cool stuff. People were Microsoft Chairman impressed, if not a little confused. and Chief Software in providing Fast-forward to today and reality Architect Bill Gates sinks in. Microsoft’s ambitious col- Tstood before a crowd customers with laboration strategy is just beginning in New York City and laid out to take shape, and it’s still confusing. a dizzying new direction for the Some products and features are far company’s flagship Office suite. intuitive access to more ready for prime time than oth- No longer merely a collection of ers. IT pros are faced with a portfolio core desktop productivity applica- the information that’s voluminous, lacks complete tions, he contended, the newly unification and, quite frankly, fails to dubbed Office System had evolved they need to do sidestep a rash of redundancies. On into a seamless collection of clients, top of that, Microsoft’s budding servers, services and tools that everyday work. support for emerging voice and other would enable a new era of worker unified communications technolo- , President, collaboration. gies—which it considers an integral Microsoft Business Division Gates then went on to demon- part of the overall collaboration strate such things as one-click Web story—sets the stage for some tricky conferencing, integrated presence in the Outlook client and training, implementation and development work for IT capabilities of the new collaboration darling, SharePoint managers over the next couple of years. MicrosoftMicrosoft SpeaksSpeaks UpUp

on’t underestimate Microsoft’s ambitions could work out for both given Nortel’s pres- Dto establish voice technology as a key ence as a large international company,” says ingredient of its collaboration product stew. Peter Pawlak, a senior analyst with Directions The company has plans to make it work inte- on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. grally with all things collaborative and could “Voice will play a huge role in their next gen- signal the company’s entry into the telephony eration of [collaborative] products, to the business as a serious competitor. point where Microsoft could conceivably jump One indication of those ambitions is the into the telephony business in a major way deal it struck with Nortel earlier this year. The and do something way beyond just v-mail deal is seen by many as a concerted effort working with Exchange and Outlook. It could to transition the more traditional business be Active Directory providing your whole phone systems into software by leveraging directory and security structures and Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform Exchange providing a place to queue mes- with Nortel’s software products to improve sages and unify communications servers,” telephony functions. The deal has more Pawlak says. strategic implications for Microsoft’s collab- Microsoft thinks of voice as yet another oration plans than the joint development application, and that it’s at a stage now where deal it has with Cisco for voice technology. instant messaging was in the enterprise five Where Microsoft and Cisco work together years ago. “We are moving to a world where but also compete in the voice market, people will use software to switch VOIP very Microsoft and Nortel will work together, quickly. These legacy PBXes and voice mail but avoid any “coopetition.” systems represent a huge investment our “Someone near the top at Nortel did some users have made and so we will continue to soul searching and decided software develop- offer interoperability with those systems. We ment was too far outside the company’s core will deliver a VOIP PBX software solution,” competency and made the decision to har- says John Richards, Microsoft’s director of ness their efforts to Microsoft’s. It’s a deal that SharePoint Services. — E.S.

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Collaboration

“Being a stack architect is very difficult these days. It That lack of inherent unification in past and current col- used to be so simple to pick the right Microsoft tech- laboration products is something that Microsoft is nologies and build a stack,” says Tim Huckaby, CEO of working hard to address in the 2007 platform InterKnowlogy, a custom .NET development shop. releases expected to begin in phases starting “These days, it’s overwhelming.” this month. Huckaby is no neophyte, either. His firm is a “We continue to evolve and improve bleeding-edge adopter of Microsoft technologies, upon our Office System,” says Jeff and has been in on the ground level of the whole Raikes, president of the Microsoft Busi- raft of collaboration products. The com- ness division. “We see real value in pro- pany’s latest project, with The Scripps viding customers seamless, intuitive access Research Institute, involved building a to the people and information they need collaborative molecular environment within the context of everyday work.” (CME) client-based tool that lets The cornucopia of upgrades includes Microsoft researchers share 3-D information via Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Communications Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Server 2007 (formerly Live Communications Server 2005), and Vista. Among other things, the application Exchange Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007, Office achieved better—and necessary—integration Groove 2007 (formerly Groove Virtual Office 3.1) and between SharePoint and some of the other Office clients, Office Outlook 2007. New products like the Office Round- including PowerPoint. Table 360-degree audio/ video conferencing device will also CollaborationCollaboration RivalryRivalry icrosoft’s primary rival in the collabora- around partnering with third-party networking Mtion space remains IBM Corp., which has vendors such as Cisco, Avaya and Siemens. In been forging ahead with real-time collaboration, these solutions, IBM’s Sametime delivers the unified communications, e-learning and social real-time collaboration components, while the networking capabilities like wikis and blogs. partner provides audio/visual services to IBM’s Lotus division is the anchor to its enable multimedia conferences or connect-to- efforts. Key to that is Sametime, the real-time call scenarios, according to Bisconti. collaboration platform that enables pres- Perhaps the most confusing thing about ence, instant messaging, application sharing IBM’s strategy has been reconciling the rela- and Web conferencing. The latest version of tively new Workplace portfolio of Web-based the platform, Sametime 7.5, features the collaboration and messaging tools with the Eclipse development environment, which client/server Notes/Domino franchise. Bisconti helps simplify integrating Notes-based appli- acknowledged this has been a sticky issue for cations and other software inside a corporate customers and partners trying to decide what environment, according to Ken Bisconti, they need and what they don’t. One of the IBM’s vice president of workplace, portal and things IBM is doing today is using Workplace collaboration products. as a platform for technical innovation, then “We believe the next-generation of applica- taking some of the more cutting-edge fea- tions will be built using the composite model,” tures—server-managed clients and composite Bisconti says. “By putting Eclipse on Same- application support—and driving them into time and Notes you get the ability to combine the core Notes/Domino products. Notes applications with any other program- “[IBM has] Lotus with Notes/Domino and ming model.” SameTime, but they also have WorkPlace, Like Microsoft, IBM has not fully unified its which is a completely different group. From collaboration components and faces some of what I can see there is no more unification the same challenges as Redmond in putting between Sametime and Notes than there is the unified communications puzzle together. between LCS and Exchange,” says Peter Thus far, IBM’s approach to blending collabo- Pawlak, senior analyst with Directions on ration and communication capabilities revolves Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. — C.A.

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Collaboration

debut after years of speculation and discussion. The links offline capabilities made it difficult to keep documents between Office clients, Exchange and SharePoint have properly updated if some were offline and others could not reportedly all been improved, however, many analysts and communicate with them. users say the connections between those products and the “They haven’t laid out how Groove is going to move for- newer communications software remain murky. ward in the next go around, but I’d expect that you’ll no Herein lies the problem: While Microsoft talks about longer see this idea of a separate Groove client. The capa- building a seamless, pervasive collaboration platform, bilities of Groove will likely get folded into SharePoint many analysts and users complain that the company has over time,” Pawlak says. done a poor job of clearly sorting out and positioning the Huckaby agrees, contending that giving Groove a separate many product pieces that constitute that strategy. They Microsoft SKU to sell alone will result in confusion for believe there are some pieces that overlap each other in buyers because Groove’s feature set conflicts with a lot of terms of core functions and they other things within the Microsoft don’t get an adequate feel for the stack. “We paid all this money to get company’s long-term commitment [Microsoft] could Ray Ozzie, but Groove is contradic- to some components. tory to what is ‘Better Together,’” a What seem most perplexing to do a better job reference to an internal mantra some industry observers are the Microsoft applies to its products. various communication products helping the market Quite frankly, it’s becoming a and how they might work in con- SharePoint world. SharePoint, cert with server and desktop pro- understand what is which sits at the heart of any num- ductivity software to form a more ber of combinations of collaboration overarching set of solutions. This really a multi-faceted products, is gaining respect as a has contributed to a rather frac- battle-tested platform among enter- tured view among users as to the story, and how prise accounts. Some now consider breadth of the company’s actual SharePoint in the same category of collaboration strategy. these different mature and reliable products as “They have been dropping the SQL Server and Active Directory. term ‘collaborative’ for a few years technologies address “SharePoint is reaching a state of now, but they only talk about it in maturity now where larger customers piecemeal fashion or as part of very different are not looking down on it. With this some point product discussion. last release it has reached a critical [Microsoft] could do a better job problems. mass to where people say, ‘OK, this is helping the market understand what not going away,’” says John Hender- is really a multi-faceted story, and son, an IT specialist with a large Dwight Davis, Ovum Summit Inc. how these different technologies regional insurance company in Farm- address very different problems,” ington Hills, Mich. says Dwight Davis, vice president at Ovum Summit Inc., a market researcher in Seattle. Pervasiveness Ozzie, the inventor of Groove and now Microsoft’s chief Groove on This software architect, is the man who has supplanted Chairman Take SharePoint and Groove, for example. Microsoft offi- Bill Gates as Microsoft’s guiding light into the murky tech- cials say Groove will continue as a separate product with its nology future. He and Raikes are in charge of the collabora- own unique set of features for the foreseeable future, yet tion and unified communications products, and are trying to there is rampant speculation among analysts that key Groove reshape the collaboration story from one of disparate point features will instead get baked into the SharePoint pie. products to a pervasive platform. They envision a scenario Microsoft’s view of Groove’s role in the larger scheme of where users get the benefits of various collaboration tools— its collaboration strategy has changed since it bought from instant messaging to Web conferencing to document- Inc. in early 2005, according to Peter sharing—within their application or interface of choice, be Pawlak, a senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft in it Outlook or some other client. In other words, collabora- Kirkland, Wash. The initial plan was to leverage Groove’s tion software as embedded infrastructure. peer-to-peer capabilities in a “serverless” environment “This notion of pervasive capabilities is a departure from where people could work jointly on an ad hoc basis on a what people thought about Microsoft five years ago. We variety of projects besides those just involving documents. don’t think about making collaboration as a separate place Those hopes broke down because the product’s online and you have to go to, but something that just happens in the

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Collaboration

context of how you work. This notion of pervasiveness is working at various points on the learning curve to imple- really important to drive cultural adoption,” says John ment the platform as a whole. Richards, Microsoft’s director of SharePoint Services. In particular, analysts say the development interfaces in Microsoft now views mobile computing as a core set of the communications product are much harder to learn— investments it must make that, for instance, would give still, in some cases, using COM wrappers—while other enterprise workers access to any SharePoint Web site from products sport Web services APIs. “Programming for a wide range of devices using Microsoft or non-Microsoft [Office Communications Server] is not for the faint of software from any location through a browser. In the heart,” posits Huckaby. upcoming business version of Office 2007, Microsoft con- Nonetheless, Raikes defends Microsoft’s approach. “Cre- tinued that commitment with a wide range of capabilities ating a leading VOIP and unified communications solution that let it work better with the company’s collaboration, helps customers be more productive in their day-to-day communications and voice technologies. work, and it’s an opportunity I’m personally very excited “Having back-end collaboration services integrated into about. A software-centric approach to unified communica- Office apps adds a lot of value,” says Erica Driver, an ana- tions allows information workers to more efficiently man- lyst with Forrester Research who recently published a age all types of communications,” Raikes says. report on Microsoft’s collaboration strategy. “It’s a differ- Overall, the APIs for the entire messaging, team collabora- entiator for Microsoft.” tion and real-time communications/collaborations portfolio In the forthcoming Outlook 2007, for example, users can need smoothing out, according to analysts and users. Angela better take advantage of RSS feeds and work with Share- Hlavka, vice president of strategic solution development at Point content offline (another redundancy with MTS Allstream in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, says Groove). Microsoft still has a way to go to call its the API issue even goes beyond the desire to platform unified, Driver insists, though the streamline the interfaces. She’s simply had truth is that no IT vendor has nailed trouble getting the proper documentation or unification: not IBM, which is the right versions. “When Office Communica- Microsoft’s prime competition, nor tor came out, we did not have the API doc- the raft of available open source solu- umentation to even write presence into tions that largely remain the domain of our applications,” Hlavka says. “Instead, point products. we wrote small sections of code to whatev- er APIs were out there, until we finally Communications got the right documents just recently.” Breakdown Hlavka says Microsoft appears to be One of the things that makes it difficult for addressing some of the interface issues larger enterprises to understand Microsoft’s with the release of the 2007 products, collaboration products and strategies is that many of which her company is already run- there are typically a half dozen different ning in its labs. She’s also had a chance to see where groups of IT pros spread across a single company— Microsoft has done a good job dealing with weaknesses each responsible for only one or two of Microsoft’s collabo- in the products’ overall capabilities. For example, Office rative products. This bogs down decision making or results Communications Server 2007 vastly improves the 2005 in the use of two or three different Microsoft-based collabo- version’s challenges in sending audio and video across rative products. It also becomes a matter of available techni- multiple firewalls, she says. Also, Exchange Server 2007 cal training. Some users blame this on Microsoft, others on now integrates with Microsoft’s Speech Server and their own organization’s lack of dedicated resources. brings together voicemail—unified messaging in a more “[Collaboration] technology gets spread around so many elegant way. areas, you typically don’t get all in the same room the guys in This kind of integration is exactly where Microsoft is IT running SharePoint with the guys in charge of the IM hoping to go as it brings various communications tech- servers with the guys responsible for the communications nologies into the fold. “Within unified communications, stuff. It’s very hard for large shops to get their arms around a you can do a bunch of things to bring together all of the single collaboration strategy just from an organizational different communications capabilities you have, no matter standpoint,” says Mike Drips, an independent IT specialist where you want to work,” says Richards. who works with large IT shops in the San Francisco area. Still, most analysts agree it will take some time before This difficulty intensifies when you add communica- these two sides of the technology pie work seamlessly tions products to the mix. The Office Communications together, and even more time—at least a couple of Server, for example, lags behind more established servers years—before IT managers are implementing this plat- like Exchange and SharePoint, and therefore has IT pros form on a widespread basis.

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Can You Cash In with Virtualization Licensing ?

nterested in jumping onto the virtualization band- The virtualization wagon but still have concerns about the licensing implications? You’re not alone. Microsoft’s policies locomotive just on licensing in virtualization environments are com- plex, to say the least—but times are changing. IOver the last year, the Redmond, Wash., giant has keeps on coming, worked to provide much more clarity around virtualiza- tion in general, and unveiled a set of licensing policy and Microsoft has revisions that, in the end, could be a big boon to your organization’s pocketbook. laid new tracks Microsoft’s new rules should help companies deal with the unintended—and somewhat ironic—consequences of going virtual: the immediate explosion of new server sys- for its licensing. tems and the associated increase in total license costs. Herein lies the problem. In the old way of managing a BY GREG SHIELDS AND STEVE KAPLAN network, startup barriers for adding servers were rela- tively high: purchasing hardware, OSes and software; waiting for delivery, racking-and-stacking; and finally conducting a lengthy and sometimes manual OS and application installation. Fast-forward to the virtual way and things are much easier. Need a new server? How about a copy, paste and rename? So you add them in droves and then wonder where all these additional licenses came from. No fun.

ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP HOWE | redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 39 1206red_F2License39-44.v8 11/14/06 10:20 AM Page 40

Virtualization Licensing

Taming the Growing Beast Is that All? To combat this problem and other uncertainties associated The changes don’t stop with the operating system. Licensing with licensing and virtual systems, Microsoft has released a for some of the more expensive per-processor Microsoft policy update titled, “Licensing Microsoft Server Products servers like SQL Server 2005, ISA Server 2004 and BizTalk with Microsoft Virtual Server R2 and Other Virtual Server 2004 is also updated to include virtualization verbiage. Machine Technologies.” This document was released to For the most recent versions of these servers, software clarify Microsoft’s definition of a virtual machine and inside a virtual environment is licensed based on the number announce additional support for licensing in virtualized of virtual processors rather than the number of physical environments. The policy revision revealed a number of processors on the server. This limitation holds true no mat- changes to how running physical and virtual instances are ter if the number of virtual processors is greater or fewer counted against a business’ available licenses. than the number of physical processors on that server. This Bottom line? How you implement virtualization will can have a substantial impact in one of two ways on how dictate how much you save. Plenty of savings are available these servers are deployed in a virtual environment. if the correct distribution of resources is engineered for For the first, remember that system virtualization tools per-processor applications. However, for those who allow for the concatenation of multiple physical machines haven’t adopted the most recent versions of Microsoft software, many businesses are looking at potentially costly upgrades before they can enjoy those benefits. A Simplistic ROI For versions of Windows prior to In the end, it’s the return on investment that will Server 2003 R2, any running physical or virtual instance of drive the conversion to a virtualized infrastruc- the operating system would count against available software ture. In a simplistic example, let’s assume a com- licensing limits. If you have 10 licenses for Windows Server pany needs to roll out 100 Windows Server 2003, you can run 10 copies of it either on a physical 2003 R2 Standard Edition systems, all of which machine or virtually using virtualization software. are candidates for virtualization. List price for R2 Standard Edition approximates $725 per server with no included CALs. The total price for How you implement virtualization the additional deployment will reach $72,500 for the operating system licenses alone. will dictate how much you save. But because there’s not always a 4:1 compres- sion of virtual machines to physical machines, Though this is essentially no change to the established and because virtual instances are not the same practice for OS licensing, one useful change now grants as physical instances, the licensing math can get the ability to store copies of running virtual machines on a a little complicated. From a conservative per- file server for backup and disaster recovery purposes. This formance standpoint, it is realistic to assume an new benefit makes fully legal the process of creating full 8:1 or better compression of virtual machines OS snapshots of production systems and storing them on onto physical machines. In the 8:1 case, a pur- tape or on file servers for emergency purposes. chase of 25 Enterprise Edition licenses will be The game changes, however, with Windows Server 2003 required to obtain the 100 necessary virtual R2 Enterprise and Datacenter Edition. In what appears licenses. In your network environment, you may aimed at enticing customers to upgrade from R2 Standard only deploy 13 servers to host the 100 virtual Edition to R2 Enterprise Edition, Microsoft grants users machines, but an excess of 12 physical licenses of the most recent server operating system version four remain for other purposes. See Table 1 on p. 42 additional virtual OS instances for every licensed physical for how physical and virtual licenses stack up. instance. The text of these “Expanded Use Rights” for R2 List price for Enterprise Edition approximates reads, “Each software license allows you to run, at any one $2,300 per server with no included CALs. time, one instance of the server software in a physical OS Looking from a financial perspective—even if environment and up to four instances of the server soft- our sample deployment only requires the func- ware in virtual OS environments on a particular server.” If tionality of Standard Edition—an all-virtual roll- you’re one of the few who run Datacenter Edition, you’re out on Enterprise Edition will cost $57,500, bumped to an unlimited number of virtual servers on a minus the sunk cost of the 12 excess licenses single physical server. that can be used for other purposes, for a total It’s important to note that by leveraging Microsoft’s savings of $15,000. Additional savings on “downgrade rights” clause, an organization is allowed to run power, cooling and deployment costs also fac- a previous version of the software in place of the R2 version. tor into the savings.

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Virtualization Licensing

onto the same server. As an example, imagine four two- Adler, a commercial law firm headquartered in Concord, processor servers are virtualized onto a single four-processor Calif., this perk played a role in his decision to migrate to host. If each virtual server is configured to use two proces- virtual infrastructure. sors, then the total number of virtual processors on that “While the primary drivers for our enterprise virtualization physical host is eight. project were certainly the enhanced high availability and DR According to Microsoft’s updated policies, eight per- capabilities,” Hicks explains, “the ability to have virtual processor licenses would need to be purchased for the machines running at our DR site without requiring addi- hosted on those virtual systems. There- tional Microsoft licensing was economically attractive.” fore, although a savings in Windows licenses is realized by aggregating Calling All CALs physical servers onto virtual ones, no Physical Virtual Total Client Access Licenses (CALs) are economies are gained for the licenses Licenses Instances Instances also affected by virtualization. associated with SQL, ISA and other 14 5 According to the new rules, each servers that may be installed on top CAL allows any number of OS envi- of that Windows license. 28 10ronments on a particular client Secondly, for some Windows servers, 31215 device—virtual or physical—to access virtualization’s improved rollout and the server software. Separate CALs resource assignment capabilities may 41620for physical and virtual machines on help. As was discussed before, in the 52025the same physical device are not nec- old paradigm (one service per physical essary. This change holds true for server) barriers to change were diffi- 62430Windows servers like Exchange cult. Because purchasing additional Server 2003, SQL Server 2005 and hardware for existing servers is time- 72835Windows Server 2003, as well as the consuming and costly, new servers 83240associated TSCALs for connecting added to the environment are typically to Terminal Services. purchased with the greatest number of 93645 Users of VMware Workstation, processors and RAM available for the 10 40 50 VMware ACE and Microsoft Virtual chassis type. PC—virtualization applications that Once virtualized, server resource use 11 44 55 operate at the desktop level—enjoy can be more granularly defined. If you 12 48 60 the greatest benefit from this change. find out after deployment that two- For example, should a company wish processors are overkill on your SQL 13 52 65 to provide multiple desktop environ- server, then you can reconfigure the 14 56 70 ments to its user base via one of these virtual machine to run on only one. tools, they are not required to pur- Don’t need six gigabytes of RAM? 15 60 75 chase additional CALs for those OSes’ Reconfigure for two and reboot. connections to file servers, mail This benefit of virtualization means 16 64 80 servers and terminal servers. This that Windows servers previously 17 68 85 clarification can mean a significant over-spec’ed at the time of purchase reduction in rollout costs to support can now be right-sized for greater 18 72 90 multiple desktop environments. efficiency of available hardware 19 76 95 resources. If businesses convert their Virtual Support four-processor instances to two- 20 80 100 This ability to expand systems into processor and/or two-processor to 21 84 105 the virtual space is great, but only if one-processor, they stand to realize a it’s supported by the manufacturer. halving of their licensing costs. Your 22 88 110 In tandem with the clarification on mileage may vary. licensing, Microsoft has updated its 23 92 115 support policy for Microsoft soft- DR on the Cheap 24 96 120 ware running in non-Microsoft Inactive instances of Microsoft prod- hardware virtualization software like ucts, like those running on a failover 25 100 125 VMware’s ESX Server. This Knowl- server at a disaster recovery site, do edge Base article, found at http:// Table 1: Buy one get four free. That’s one not require extra licensing. For Paul support.microsoft.com/kb/897615, physical and four virtual and no more. Hicks, IT director for Eskanos and discusses how Microsoft support will

42 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project12 10/12/06 3:44 PM Page 1

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Sunbelt Software Tel: 1-888-688-8457 or 1-727-562-0101 Fax: 1-727-562-5199 www.sunbelt-software.com [email protected] © 2006 Sunbelt Software. All rights reserved. CounterSpy and ThreatNet are trademarks of Sunbelt Software. All trademarks used are owned by their respective companies. 1206red_F2License39-44.v8 11/14/06 10:20 AM Page 44

Virtualization Licensing

the article. A problem called in to Microsoft support may 100 need to be replicated outside the virtualization environ- ment, but for Premier customers it will not necessarily 80 be required. Non-premier customers beware: You don’t qualify for the same level of virtualization support. “For Microsoft 60 customers who do not have a Premier-level support agreement, Microsoft will require the issue to be repro- 40 duced independently from the non- virtualization software.” 20 With either support level, Microsoft relates the obvious dis- claimer that they do not provide any warranty associated with 25 100 100 0 $57,500 $72,500 0 25 100 100 0 $57,500 $72,500 running their product on top of that of another company.— Enterprise Edition - Virtual Deployment Greg Shields, MCSE: Security, CCEA, is a senior consultant for Standard Edition - Physical Deployment 3t Systems (www.3tsystems.com) in Denver, Colo. A contributing editor to Redmond magazine and a popular speaker at Tech- Figure 1: Fewer gets you more with the five-for-one Enterprise Mentor events, Greg provides engineering support and technical Edition deal. consulting in Microsoft, Citrix and VMware technologies. Reach him at [email protected]. handle issues when the operating system in question lies in a virtualization environment. Steve Kaplan, MVP, is president of AccessFlow, a VMware Pre- According to the document, businesses with a Microsoft mier Partner headquartered in Sacramento, Calif. In addition Premier-level support agreement get special dispensation to co-authoring the Osborne/McGraw-Hill series of Citrix when calling in support cases. “Microsoft will use com- Official Guides and Advanced Concepts Guide books, mercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues Kaplan has had dozens of articles published on various IT topics with Microsoft software running in conjunction with ranging from security to disaster recovery to regulatory compli- non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software,” reads ance. Kaplan can be reached at [email protected]. Project4 10/13/06 12:44 PM Page 1

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Microsoft | Cisco | Oracle | Sun | Linux | CISSP | CEH | CompTIA | UNIX | Forensics | PMP | SOX 1206red_F3SaveWorld46-52.v8 11/14/06 10:32 AM Page 46

Can Mic r Save the W

Microsoft Research teams with hree years ago, William Henry Gates III ordered Microsoft top scientists to tackle the world’s TResearch to launch a Science most pressing problems—and it division. Money was one motive—by staking out a position in the growing could turn conventional computing field of scientific computing, future profits were insured. Fortunately on its head in the process. Microsoft Research doesn’t have to

46 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | 1206red_F3SaveWorld46-52.v8 11/14/06 10:32 AM Page 47

Stephen Emmott: Microsoft’s Man of Science crosoft e World? BY DOUG BARNEY

turn every dollar and man-hour into Leading this charge is Stephen ence, and in the process transform marketable products. The Science Emmott, director of the Microsoft both. “We are at a profoundly impor- group has the wonderful freedom to Research European Science Program, tant point in time where computer work on the big problems: global an Englishman with some 20 years of science and computing have the warming, disease, the future of experience in science and computing, potential to completely revolutionize medicine, the origin of the universe including a stint at Bell Labs. the sciences,” Emmott says. and the creation of life—those sorts Emmott’s main goal is to blend Microsoft doesn’t plan to do this all of things. computer science and traditional sci- alone. Today 14 Microsoft researchers

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 47 1206red_F3SaveWorld46-52.v8 11/14/06 10:32 AM Page 48

Microsoft Research

are working with some 40 scientists or computational climatologists or around the world. Those numbers are oceanographers—with people in the rapidly expanding. “Within 12 months, wider science community, to do the there’ll be 30 Microsoft Research kinds of things that neither of us could Cambridge scientists collaborating do on our own,” Emmott explains. with around 80 to 100 scientists world- wide to build new software tools for Understanding addressing important scientific chal- Life Bit by Bit lenges,” Emmott explains. One of the more interesting Microsoft These efforts were given legs during projects is “Simulating Biological the 2020 Science conference, where Systems in the Stochastic Pi Calcu- some 30 scientists, hailing from lus.” The idea is to create a more nations from Japan to Germany and scaleable way to track “the behavior of representing universities such as Stan- biological systems.” One approach is ford and companies like Glaxo- to build a so-called Stochastic Pi SmithKline Inc., gathered. The group Machine, a project driven by Andrew produced an 82-page oversized glossy Phillips of Microsoft Research. book, “Towards 2020 Science,” out- So what does stochastic mean? Well, lining their goals, technologies and a stochastic process is one in which plans. there is a certain amount of random- The conference also set the stage for ness. This means that computers and research projects, now ongoing, that scientists can gather data and analyze match Microsoft researchers with the process, but, due to its random their scientific counterparts. nature, cannot make accurate predic- “The real benefits come from bring- tions about it. ing together people from Microsoft The Stochastic Pi Machine is Research—whether they’re computer designed to simulate and model the stochastic pi calculus, biological models scientists or computational biologists workings of biological systems. Using can be built step by step, where mod- els of small systems are ultimately built into a model of staggering com- plexity—the type of complexity that matches the reality of biological The Gates Factor systems themselves. Interestingly enough, computers are ne peek at the Science 2020 Nevertheless, Gates’ foundation is built much the same way. They start Owork and you’d swear it was privately funding projects that could off simple, but through more and more tailor made for The Bill & Melinda just as easily be paid for by Microsoft memory, networks, grids etc., increase Gates Foundation. Not the case.While Research.While Microsoft Research in complexity in an additive way. so many of the goals are identical, obsesses over the human genome, One of the biggest 2020 goals is they are two entirely separate efforts. the Gates Foundation has earmarked fighting disease, a goal shared by the “Bill has clearly had input into the $2.5 billion to fight malaria by build- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, overall European scientific program. ing a genetic map of the disease. The which has no formal relationship with He launched it last year and has foundation is also working with Microsoft Research Science. provided input on numerous occa- GlaxoSmithKline, a Microsoft Research “It is remarkable to think that it’s sions. With The Bill & Melinda Gates partner, to test a new vaccine. 2006 and it’s not known even how a Foundation there is no formal link Beating meningitis is another item cell works—let alone how a human with what we’re doing. However, on the Gates Foundation’s agenda. works. As a consequence, it’s not well some of the work that we are doing The foundation, along with the understood how to treat disease,” clearly has an implication for the Serum Institute of India, is working Emmott says. “Once we get to a stage areas that the foundation is working on an inexpensive vaccine that works where we have the tools for under- in,” says Stephen Emmott, director across all age levels and prevents the standing fundamental biological of the Microsoft Research European disease from being passed from per- processes, it is only a short step to Science Program. son to person. — D.B. building the tools and the languages to model how disease occurs in those

48 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project8 5/16/06 1:55 PM Page 1

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Microsoft Research

biological systems—i.e. when some- world’s leading mathematical biolo- Climate and the environment are key thing goes wrong or when the system gists at Imperial College in London to factors in understanding and predict- is invaded by a virus.” build a global pandemic modeling sys- ing many diseases. “There’s a tremen- Emmott believes that such an tem to predict when outbreaks of dis- dously important relationship between approach could “completely revolu- eases will occur—global outbreaks of environmental conditions and out- tionize how we think of treating disease diseases from Avian flu to malaria. breaks of third-world diseases, but the and how we can identify and discover This will be a powerful tool for agen- relationship is not well understood,” entirely novel therapies for treating cies such as the World Health Orga- he says. “Being able to more effectively diseases, whether they are third-world nization, for scientific researchers model and understand, say, climate diseases such as malaria or first-world around the world to be able to use to change and increases in, or changes in, diseases such as cancer and obesity.” do their own modeling [and] for med- third-world diseases will be tremen- Projects are on the way. “We’re just ical research councils, as well as for dously valuable eventually for agencies getting underway on a project with my interventionist types of organizations and foundations such as the Bill & team in Cambridge and one of the like the United Nations,” Emmott says. Melinda Gates Foundation.” The future of science, and in particu- lar fighting disease, lies in miniaturiza- Computers Finally, a push e-mail solution and Science: A Short Course the whole office will embrace! Bioinformatics: This field, also called computational biology, applies math, statistics and com- puter science to the understanding of biology, in particular the behav- ior of biological systems (see Systems Biology). Machine Learning: Here software learns from experience. One tech- nique is Bayesian, a machine learn- ing approach applied to spam. One Solution. You choose your device. Molecular Computer: A computer Similar to 5.0 Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP), RoadSync small enough to fit into a cell. By utilizes Exchange ActiveSync® technology, licensed directly from Microsoft to provide detecting its surroundings and ® secure, wireless and synchronization of Corporate Outlook E-mail, Calendar, making decisions, these computers Contacts & Attachments. could support smart drugs. RoadSync extends the capabilities of Exchange Now available for the world’s Smart Drugs: Drugs that can ActiveSync to support a wide range of mobiles most popular . devices and platforms including: adapt to their surroundings—for • instance, releasing their contents if • Symbian UIQ disease is detected. • Symbian S60 Stochastic: A Stochastic process • Symbian Series 80 is “fuzzy.”You can collect the data • Palm OS* and understand certain trends, • Java MIDP 2.0* but you can’t predict precisely Learn how you can maximize your what will happen based on past existing Exchange Server and device experience. The stock market, investment. Now Available For Download a free Office Mobility Kit and receive a especially given the last five years, 30 day trial. Save time, money and increase your Windows Mobile 2003 is a prime example. productivity today. Call 1.800.733.0030 or visit Systems Biology: The attempt to www.dataviz.com/redmond understand how biological compo- *Features vary per mobile platform. nents work together.

50 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | 1206red_F3SaveWorld46-52.v8 11/14/06 10:32 AM Page 51

tion. Take molecular computers. verters performs at such a level. These tiny devices, while small There’s something like 1.6 kilowatts enough to fit into a cell, are smart of energy [from the sun] that falls onto enough to understand inputs, such as every square meter of the planet every whether a cell is diseased, and take hour. The most efficient converter of actions—for instance, releasing just that energy from the sun into its own the right amount of a cancer drug. In energy for a different purpose—for fact, one of the biggest benefits of growth—is a plant,” Emmott says. “It molecular machines is supporting isn’t terribly well understood how they smart drugs, which can be released or make such efficient use of the sun’s held back based on their surroundings. energy. That’s because we don’t even Sensor networks are another exam- know how a cell works, whether it’s a ple of tiny yet powerful tools. Here, cell in a plant or a cell in a human.” massive networks of sensors can be If we fully understood how plants placed—say, around a mountain— that collect information on weather, plant life and trends, and help scien- tists understand the health of the mountain’s ecosystem. Through wire- less networks, this data can be amassed and scrutinized. Similar to molecular computers, small, intelligent, adaptable systems could support new artificial immune systems. “Virtual human immune sys- tems should be able to compute the results of host-pathogen interaction, including solutions to the pattern recognition problem of discriminating between self and non-self,” wrote Soren Brunak, a member of the 2020 Science Group, in “Towards 2020 Sci- ence.” The goal? To “compute a spe- cific vaccine design tailored to individuals with different tissue types in the best possible way,” Brunak argued. Computational Biology, Energy & Global Warming World health is one area where the pairing of computer science and tradi- tional science holds tremendous promise. Future energy is another. New energy sources are important for two reasons: We are running out of fossil fuels, and these fuels, most believe, contribute to global warming. Science, in particular computational biology, could help. With this style of biology, scientists can build new tools for understanding biological process- es. We could “understand how one of the world’s efficient energy con-

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Microsoft Research

convert energy, we could perhaps and oceanographic type of effects, A Brief Timeline “help energy companies and energy with the biotic—produced or caused scientists mimic that process to build by living organisms—elements of 2010-2015: entirely novel technological solutions determining climates and climate ■ for new sources of energy that are change. That [includes] the organisms Molecular machines emerge. ■ currently unimaginable today. That’s that live in the ocean that are carbon Large-scale sensor networks a decade or so away but it’s worth sinks, oxygen producers, regulators of come out. pursuing,” Emmott believes. the carbon cycles and regulators of cli- 2015-2020: Every year, humans crank out three mate, and also the biotic aspects such ■ times the amount of carbon dioxide as forests—terrestrial sources of car- Artificial Scientists perform that nature’s “carbon sinks” absorb. If bon sinks and oxygen producers. It is autonomous experiments. ■ currently largely unknown how the Scientists create a “full model of two interact—the physical and biotic a single cell.” components. It is largely unknown 2020 and beyond: what the impact is of the biotic com- ■ ponents. It’s an incredibly important Synthetic biology creates biologi- component but just one that’s not cal products that are “designed by understood,” argues Emmott. simulation.” ■ The makeup of the universe Science Gives Back is understood. ■ Microsoft is also working with The Biological knowledge is largely Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and has codified. already helped craft an online astron- omy catalog. Physicists and going to be for computer science astronomers for centuries have tried over the next decade. By being at the to unravel the mysteries of the uni- cutting edge of the intersection of sci- verse—yet after all this work our pic- ence and computer science, Microsoft ture is far from complete. will gain remarkable insight as to the “Understanding the universe is a key things the company needs to do on large-scale data-acquisition and data- the broad business and personal com- analysis problem. That is one [area] puting challenges and opportunities a where the standard software tools decade later. They can think of what’s that Microsoft currently produces, happening at the intersection of sci- from Web services to database tech- ence and computing as being like For- nologies to better acquire, share and mula One. BMW and Ferrari do this keeps up, many scientists believe analyze large scale data in the science Formula One because the technology the planet will be forever changed by community, can help the science they need to develop to compete in global warming, perhaps even doomed. community understand origins of the Formula One ends up in any standard While this problem is not on the top of universe and how the universe family car a decade later—and its gives the Microsoft agenda, Emmott’s group works,” Emmott says. them remarkable insights into techni- does hope to help. “Our research While science pushes the envelope of cal engineering,” Emmott says. efforts around climatology and earth computing, computing and Microsoft The 2020 Roadmap is more specific. life support systems, of which climate is also benefit. It argues that by 2015, the work done an important one, are based around “Science is where the real action is to build new scientific software frame- working with climatologists, oceanog- works will “radicalize” business com- raphers and ecologists, and building puting. And beyond 2020, we should new computational tools that scientists GetMoreOnline look for “novel, biologically inspired urgently need,” Emmott says. Learn more about the 2020 Science computing architectures and para- “Climatologists are not short of data, conference and Microsoft’s contribu- digms,” according to the roadmap. — so building tools to create yet more tions at Redmondmag.com. data is not urgently needed. What FindIT code: MSWorld Doug Barney is the editor in chief of they do urgently need are software Redmond and the editorial director of tools to model and couple the physical Redmond Media Group. Reach him at aspects of climate change, atmospheric redmondmag.com [email protected].

52 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project4 10/30/06 11:38 AM Page 1

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© 2006 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved. “PMI,” the PMI logo, “PMP”, and “Making project management indispensable for business results” are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc. "PgMP" is a service mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc. 050-058-2006 (10-06) 1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9 11/14/06 12:10 PM Page 54

54 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | 1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9 11/14/06 12:11 PM Page 55

CoolCool ToolsTools thatthat Rule—Rule— andand They’reThey’re Free!Free!

Finding the right tool for the Disaster job can be difficult and Recovery finding it for free next to impossible. But standing next to impossible is the Redmond Free Top 25. We think it can make your

search a lot easier. BY GREG SHIELDS

Why buy a tool when you can get it for free? hile it represents the smallest category, Disaster That is the question we posed to users in putting together Recovery tools are the ones that can help you the the first Redmond Free Top 25. Sure, some Windows Wmost when your Windows servers won’t boot. administration issues require an end-to-end solution pur- Comprised of bootable tools that provide full functionality to chased from a reputable vendor, but there are times when servers, these products can either completely resurrect a dead a very small problem requires a very small answer. In those server or transfer critical data from one that can’t be revived. cases, the best course is to wander off the beaten track and The first entry is from Wade Lahr, a network adminis- explore the little-traveled roads of the Windows world. trator for Sysco Food Services in Kansas. He casts his vote With the invaluable help of our readers, we present the for the UBCD4Win Recovery CD, which is designed to best of the best and the freest of the free. The only be used as a CD- or DVD-bootable OS. It’s a tool, he says, requirement we placed on user submissions was that they that has saved the day in many different system-down situ- provide great value at no cost. We categorized tools into ations. If you get a “No Operating System Found” mes- four major groups: Disaster Recovery, Network, Devel- sage, just pop in the UBCD4Win Recovery CD to boot a oper and Administrative, with the reviews being split Windows-looking interface that enables you to further between yours truly and our readers. investigate the problem. UBCD4Win, which has several

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 55 1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9 11/14/06 12:11 PM Page 56

Redmond Free Top 25

built-in freeware programs, including Ad-Aware, McAfee AVERT Stinger anti-virus scanner and Disk Tools, can bring a server back to life. If you can’t resurrect a server, the tool allows you to copy important files from the hard drive to a USB flash memory card or external drive. It can even burn files to disk. You can grab UBCD4Win from www.ubcd4win.com. Kirk Unruh, IT manager for Buffalo Air Handling Co. in Virginia, nominates BartPE, which stands for Bart’s Prein- stalled Environment. This tool allows you to create a bootable CD-ROM or DVD that provides a complete Win32 environment allowing access to hard drives and net- Sam Spade provides a console that can run many useful work resources. Once the PE builder is downloaded, just network tests. point it to the Windows installation files, add any additional files or plug-ins and burn a bootable CD. It’s useful for confirming who has what IP address at any given time, as troubleshooting failed hardware and recovering data and it’s well as for checking whether certain addresses have unau- freely downloadable at www.nu2.nu/pebuilder. thorized open ports. It’s available at http://ipscan.source forge.net/ipscan.exe. Troy Sorzano, director of professional services for Ripple- Tech in Pennsylvania, believes www.dnsreport.com is one Network of the leading DNS and mail-server testing tools. If you are concerned that your external DNS is not configured to meet the RFC requirements, then admins should point www.dnsreport.com to any externally-accessible DNS domain name and it will automatically run and report on dozens of tests that validates addresses’ configurations.

lthough many Windows admins shy away from administering the network, all Windows servers rely Aon that same network for their communication. Our free tools in the network space serve to enlighten the Windows admin about what’s open and listening on the network while helping to narrow the knowledge gap between layers seven and one. Bill Brower, network operations manager for the Monroe County Government in Indiana, says that Sam Spade is a freeware network utility that offers a range of network troubleshooting tools through a single interface. The utility includes well-known tools such as ping, traceroute, nslookup and WHOIS, and is best suited for network troubleshooting. If you’re interested in looking at raw HTML instead of rendered HTML in order to trou- DNS Report will run a series of sanity checks on any DNS zone. bleshoot a Web page, you should dig Sam Spade. Most useful is the traceroute function, which is quicker than Mark Morgan, enterprise architect for the Washington the native Windows version and can be tweaked to do State Dept. of Information Services in Washington, reli- parallel queries for a faster response. Admins can down- giously uses the SolarWinds Advanced Subnet Calculator for load it at www.samspade.org/ssw. figuring out subnets, subnet sizes and their boundaries when Tom Cole, a consultant from Delaware, says he finds the he doesn’t want to calculate in binary. The utility will also open-source tool Angry IP Scanner to be a fast and config- carry out a WHOIS lookup for a host server or IP address. urable IP and port scanner. Cole reports that he can install The product is available at www.solarwinds.net/Tools/Free_ it on a range of servers and finds it particularly useful for tools/Subnet_Calc/index.htm.

56 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project1 9/13/06 1:27 PM Page 1

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Redmond Free Top 25

code writers to highlight, edit and debug code, while still ensuring an easy installation at a reasonable price. Nao Takano, software developer for Aurora Loan Services in Colorado, says that GNU Emacs text editor has long been a staple for Unix environments but points out there is also a useful Windows version. While it can’t be con- sidered a fully Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports execution and debugging within the software itself, GNU Emacs does provide more than Developer enough keystroke shortcuts to the point where program- mers can eliminate using the mouse. One of its best features ithout developers, there would be no Windows to is automatic code indentation, which makes logic syntax administer to, nor any developer tools to work clearer and debugging easier for C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript Wwith. Tools in this category make it easier for and Perl programmers. GNU Emacs for Windows can be found at www.gnu.org/software/emacs /windows/ntemacs.html. Hit a home run with management Both Notepad++ from http://notepad plus.sourceforge.net and SourceEdit With the new GFI FAXmaker 12 fax server from www.sourcedit.com are “great free text editors,” according to Chad Ness, director of technology for Art Institutes International in Minnesota. Both prod- ucts have built-in markup of source code that supports a variety of different lan- guages, he says, as well as other features $ 1250Only for 25 users such as multiple views, code highlight- ing, and search and replace. The Chief Code Monkey for Artful Development Organization in Ontario, Canada, Arthur Fuller, claims the single app he couldn’t live without is NoteTab, available from www.notetab.com. What Firefox is to IE, NoteTab is to Notepad, he says. The product has tabbed panes, the ability to reopen every file that was open at the last exit, and leaves every DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE TRIAL FROM WWW.GFI.COM/FRM/ cursor just where you left it. NoteTab even allows you to open Linux text files and HTML files. For programmers with lots of experi- Fax server for Exchange Server & SMTP servers ence using vi, or those jumping back and forth between Unix and Windows, gvim GFI FAXmaker for Exchange/SMTP is an advanced fax server that integrates directly with Exchange has the ability to accommodate both Server and other mail servers and offers users easy faxing from Outlook, Outlook Web Access or other email clients. needs, says Kevin Weinrich, sub-team • New FAXmaker 12 connector works via SMTP leader for the Environmental Protection • Supports Brooktrout, ISDN and modem cards • Supports DID/DTMF routing Agency in Georgia. The tool seems to • 4 fax lines as standard, expandable to 32 intuitively know what you want it to • No schema updates or installation on Exchange necessary • Supports Exchange 2003/2000/5.5 and other SMTP servers simultaneously do, and, Weinrich notes, includes color- • Fax archiving to SQL Server GFI FAXmaker configuration • More than 75,000 installed worldwide coded syntax highlighting for “just • Used by companies like Microsoft, Ericsson, Siemens and Volkswagen about any language” you need to use including Perl, PHP, HTTP and others. Gvim can be downloaded from www.cse. unsw.edu.au/~homecomputing/cdrom/ tel: +1 888 243 4329 | fax: +1 919 379 3402 | email: [email protected] | url: www.gfi.com/frm/ html/gvim.html.

58 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | 1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9 11/14/06 12:11 PM Page 59

Daniel Sheehan, a senior systems engineer for DataLine in Maryland, says he has used POSTIE (www.infradig.com), a utility he uses in batch files to automatically send e-mails, Administrative for years. By combining this command-line e-mailer with some batch environment variables, it allows you to send “bad reports” to one set of users while sending “good reports” to another. He also uses this tool to test SMTP connectivity to remote mail servers when there is a prob- lem with mail delivery.

reating your own tools takes time and effort, but finding free administrative tools on the Internet Cmeans we can go home early and catch the football game. Being a systems administrator means working with other people’s data and using other people’s tools, but finding just the right one is typically the hardest part. The tools in our Administrative category, the largest one in the Redmond Free Top 25, are favorites of systems administra- tors around the globe. Kelvin Lee-Ting, senior technical systems analyst at NoteTab adds tabs and additional functions to our old friend RBC Financial Group in Ontario, Canada, says his Windows Notepad. favorite free tool is still the good old Windows 1206red_F2Top25_55-62.v9 11/14/06 12:11 PM Page 60

Redmond Free Top 25

DOSKEY macros. He uses it to build his own custom network traffic through network cards, server tempera- commands that can take variables as input. Since tures, uptime reports and component pre-failure warn- DOSKEY is included as part of every Microsoft OS, his ings. The tool even generates reports to capture server custom commands can be used all the way from a DOS serial numbers for those painful inventory projects. machine to the current operating system on both work- Insight Manager can be set up to page an administrator stations and servers. If you are looking to shorten an for events like failed hard disks or servers not responding. often-used command, by using DOSKEY you can just The utility and server agents can be downloaded from open a text file called MyCommands.mac and create cus- HP’s Web site, www.hp.com. tom commands like the following: David Loder, an Active Directory architect in Michi- [cmd.exe] gan, claims that joeware is the premier Active Directory mac=doskey /macros:ALL command-line tool. Just by dropping any executable into applog=type "\program your path, you can start banging away at AD to your files\myapp\deepDirectory\myApp.log" heart’s content. Joeware’s single-executable tools allow elog=notepad "\program for rich querying and manipulation of AD and Exchange files\myapp\deepDirectory\myApp.log" Mailbox objects, he says, and can locate and clean old cdapp=cd \\myapp\deepDirectory machines and user accounts. Joeware can be downloaded np=notepad $1 from www.joeware.net. nu=net use * \\$1\c$ /u:$1\$2 $3 According to Tim Grigsby, an IT support manager To use My Custom Commands, start a command prompt from Daytona Beach, Fla., LanSweeper is the best tool with cmd.exe /K doskey /macrofile=D:\MyCommands.mac. for keeping the database responsible for all his company’s Harvey Colwell, senior network analyst for System computers up-to-date. The tool works through a log-on Development Services in Illinois, has owned several ver- script to pull hardware, software and configuration- sions of Adobe Acrobat and swears that for some high- inventory data on every machine on the network into a end publishing-related activities “it’s the only way to SQL or MSDE database. He describes it as “invaluable” go.” But for most people, PDF Creator from for troubleshooting support and for ensuring software- http://source licensing compliance. Download LanSweeper from forge.net/projects/pdfcreator can do everything you www.lansweeper.com. need. Based on the Ghostscript engine, this tool enables GenControl is an “amazing clientless tool,” says Jason a simple Windows printer driver that generates a PDF Boroff, a network engineer in Ohio, because it “allows file instead of a printed output when you click Print. admins to remote into Windows-based computers.” Because Adobe provides Reader at no cost for so many Unlike the VNC application, which requires a software different platforms, the PDF format has long since been installation on each machine you want to control, Gen- the de facto standard for archiving and making informa- Control does not require you to install anything on tion available to the masses. With PDF Creator, now unmanaged remote computers. Download GenControl at even the writing is free. www.gensortium.com/products/gencontrol.html. The favorite free tool of Stuart Garner, computer spe- Gary Praegitzer, senior systems administrator for BVS cialist for the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, Performance Systems in Iowa, stands by CCleaner as his D.C., is IE Privacy Keeper, available from Browser Tools favorite freebie because it is so thorough in the removal of at http://browsertools.net/IE-Privacy-Keeper/index.html. the piles of garbage that Windows can leave behind. It’s This tool performs a suite of browser cleanup processes capable of cleaning up IE cookies, Temporary Internet that clean up the browser history upon exit. Some fea- Files and History, as well as fixing and removing registry tures include the ability to clean up index.dat files with- inconsistencies. CCleaner can be scripted to run silently out restarting and to securely delete files, folders, from batch files, log-on/log-off scripts, or a keys and managing cookies by keeping selected scheduler. Get CCleaner at www.ccleaner.com. ones and automatically deleting all others. It can be set The favorite of Jan Roose, IT manager for BBTK- to run the same for all users or allow individual users to SETCa in Brussels, Belgium, is ClipName, which can be configure selected items. IE Privacy Keeper works with obtained at www.mainsoft.fr/en/downloads.htm. If you all versions of Windows back to running right-click any file on your desktop, this tool will copy the 5.5, or Firefox 1.0 and later. complete pathname to the clipboard, and it’s handy for For admins overseeing HP servers, Dave Krzynowek, a pasting file paths into a command prompt. Also, multiple systems engineer for Excelsior College in New York, file paths can be copied to the clipboard as a space- or car- suggests the Web-based HP Insight Manager designed riage return-separated list. for managing servers. Insight Manager monitors all If unfettered Active Directory Users & Computers aspects of server hardware, which includes monitoring access for your help desk employees is giving them

60 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project6 8/11/06 3:10 PM Page 1

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heartburn, then have them check out Password Control Process Explorer is a Windows Task Manager that pro- from www.wisesoft.co.uk, says Hans Straat, technical vides information on system processes and the resources support specialist for Gentronics in The Netherlands. used by those processes. According to Jenn Davis, an infra- Designed as a super-slim tool allowing help desk structure engineer for SAIC, the product presents this infor- employees to reset passwords without giving them a full mation in a very intuitive and highly customizable format. MMC console, this tool can help with that nasty reflux. With this product administrators can get a complete view of all their apps and processes running on a Windows machine. For each process, you can drill down to see the DLL’s being accessed and the TCP/IP connections being made, or kill a malfunctioning orphan, abandoned thread or even an entire process tree with a single mouse click. Personally, when troubleshooting performance issues on a workstation or server, Process Explorer is the first tool I load. It’s indis- pensable for controlling the CPU and memory usage, and allows me to sidestep costly reboots. Download it from www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html. A Colorado-based IT Specialist, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a big fan of Sysinternals PageDefrag, a tool SysInternals

K, so I lied. There’s a fifth category. Think of it as a surprise bonus. With their recent merger Owith Microsoft, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell’s Sysinternals site at www.sysinternals.com is sure to make history, if it hasn’t already. For years, the Sysinternals Web site has provided free administra- tive tools that solve the problems not resolved through the native Windows toolset. Redmond readers have shown such deep appreciation for the tools of Russi- novich and Cogswell that we felt it necessary to plunk them into their own section. Todd King, lead Internet systems administrator for Sysinternals’ PageDefrag can be set to automatically defrag at Johnson County ITS in Kansas, says that BgInfo from every boot. Sysinternals is his favorite tool because it provides easy access to information like machine names and logon that defrags the page file and registry on systems allowing domains, last boot time, IP address and drive informa- them to perform better. Typically, a well-performing page tion. The product builds a bitmap of system information file means a well-performing system. PageDefrag can be set to display on the machine’s background. If you connect to run at each boot or on-demand. I am so impressed with to a large number of machines through remote desktop, the performance it adds to the overall system that I’ve knowing exactly what machine you are on is important. incorporated the tool into our standard workstation images. You can download BGInfo at www.sysinternals.com/ If you are interested in any of our free tools check out Utilities/BgInfo.html. their associated Web sites, and be sure to thank the In the opinion of John Remillard, IS engineer for Perot authors when you do. Redmond thanks the writers of all Systems in Rhode Island, the entire suite of PsTools, these free tools for their efforts to make the lives of their downloadable from the Sysinternals site, is exceptional. fellow administrators easier and much less expensive..— To use the tools from the command line, just download the PsTools package and copy them into your path. I Greg Shields, MCSE: Security, CCEA, is a senior consultant for personally use them to enable scripted daily event-log 3t Systems (www.3tsystems.com) in Denver, Colo. A contributing gathering from our servers, to help users stop and restart editor to Redmond, Greg provides engineering support and tech- services for their applications, and to remotely launch nical consulting in Microsoft, Citrix and VMware technologies. processes on other machines. Reach him at [email protected].

62 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project1 9/13/06 12:54 PM Page 1 TM07_Red_fpad.v9 11/15/06 11:35 AM Page 1

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NEVER AGAIN By Jim Madden The Grass Is Greener in Your Own Backyard

n the early days of my IT career at Benchmark Computers, union, where we had a much smoother implementation. We completed the I worked at a few field offices after starting in the corporate installation by 8 p.m. on Friday, and I headquarters. I was a systems programmer with a focus on collected the check and drove another six hours back to the office. developing communications software. With this experience, I unloaded all of the equipment by I myself because the hardware tech had I lived the adage that the grass appears greener in the next been dropped off at home along the pasture but it rarely is. way. Before heading home I checked my office mailbox at 4 a.m. Satur- At one point we were having a that bus and returned day and found a company difficult quarter with the sales of our to the office so pay- memo telling the staff credit union software and systems. It roll could be met that they were adjust- was nearing the end of that quarter and on Friday. ing bonuses to only two system sales were made, and When we allow a few more neither of them had been installed. The arrived, a third- technical people technical people had a bonus plan that party hardware to receive them. was based on sales and installations tech was already This increased being completed within a given quarter. there, pulling the pool from They were seeking volunteers to the server out of five people to drive seven hours and install a 32-user the wall and eight people, system, and then from there drive unplugging all the dropping my another four hours to install a 24-user cables, none of which $500 bonus to system, all in the span of four or five were labeled. We needed $320 for the quarter business days. I volunteered and got to keep all port numbers con- just ending. paired with a hardware tech who’d sistent so as to keep all the printer I was livid. On Monday recently lost his driver’s license. Not a groups consistent. morning I asked for a meeting with the good omen. We spent the next 20 hours testing vice president. He was very surprised The following Monday, I packed up cable runs and fixing poorly laid cable. that I was so upset. He said, “Jimmy, no a van with two large systems, some We then went to the hotel, slept about one else complained about this!” I told tapes and 10 to 12 terminals. My four hours and drove back to the credit him no one else had volunteered for instructions were to set up the first union. We worked until 11 p.m. that the hellish week of installations I had system and collect a check for $68,000 Wednesday. Earlier that afternoon I gone through. before the 3 p.m. Greyhound bus left on had asked the manager for the check to Right then I quietly made my deci- Wednesday. The check needed to be on pay for the installation work. At first sion to make my way back home to the she was reluctant to give it to us, but corporate offices in Massachusetts. What’s Your Worst when I promised to complete the project Two months later I was working in IT Nightmare? early the next day she relented. I drove Wisconsin, and a year after that I was to the bus station and made arrange- working at corporate headquarters in Write up your story in 300-600 words ments to get the check back to our Westwood, Mass. The grass really can and e-mail it to Editor Ed Scannell at offices where it made the payroll. be greener in your own backyard, if you [email protected]. That night we drove four hours to the look hard enough. — Use “Never Again” as the subject line next credit union, based in Ottumwa, and be sure to include your contact Iowa, and went right to the hotel. We Jim Madden is now the director of infor- information for story verification. slept for four hours and at 9 a.m. on mation technology at the Andover Newton Thursday we arrived at the credit Theological School in the Boston area.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK COLLINS | redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 65 Project6 11/14/06 2:56 PM Page 1

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SecurityAdvisor JoernRoberta Wettern Bragg Security Myths Exposed: Part 2

ebunking myths of any kind is always an enjoyable group exists is to make badly behaved programs run for non-administrative exercise. People want to know the real deal. Back in users. The real culprits are software July, I wrote about some of the more common security developers who are too lazy to write D their programs so they can be run by a myths—security practices that are widely considered to be non-privileged user. As frustrating as this may be, at least valid, even though they’re wrong. It’s time to look at a few things appear to be getting better. more, give them a thorough examination and debunk them Most software vendors have finally learned how to write programs that once and for all. Along the way, I’ll point out what you can don’t make you have to resort to the Power Users group. Vista also makes it do to avoid falling for these myths. (To read more about easier to let regular users run programs the first two myths—SSL Is Secure and Complex Pass- with potentially risky behaviors—like saving data in the Program Files direc- words Enhance Security—see “Security Myths Exposed,” tory, to use the earlier example. In the meantime, the best you can do July 2006.) is to investigate the rights or permis- sions that prevent problematic pro- Myth No. 3: Power Users Are There are many ways for Power grams from running in the security Not Administrators Users to elevate their privileges. context of a regular user. Then assign When Microsoft created the Power Among the easiest is to replace a legit- just those to your users. If there’s no Users group, it did so to give adminis- imate program in the Program Files alternative to adding users to the trators the flexibility to let certain directory with a malicious one that Power Users group, at least be aware users perform tasks that require ele- will elevate privileges. The next time of the risks of doing so, and plan on vated privileges like computer mainte- an administrator or the system account replacing programs that regular users nance. Power Users can indeed do can’t run. many things, even without having full- fledged administrative access rights. Myth No. 4: You Don’t Need to However, this group is often used as a The problem with Power Worry About Printers crutch to let users run badly written Users is that their I was recently looking into buying a applications. If your accounting pro- new printer. When I searched for gram insists on writing its data files to assigned level of rights information about the model highest the Program Files directory, then your and permissions also on my list, I found a number of secu- accountant needs permission to do so, rity advisories. You may wonder how as the program runs with his creden- lets them elevate their there could be a printer security prob- tials. You would never give full admin- privileges to become lem. After all, printers don’t store istrative privileges to an accountant, confidential data—they just spit out but making him a Power User doesn’t full administrators. paper in return for a steady diet of seem all that bad and it helps get the toner or ink. job done. It does, but it also creates a A networked printer can do a lot serious security risk. starts, this program runs and will ele- more, though. The printer I was con- The problem with Power Users is vate the user. Even worse, this pro- sidering had several vulnerabilities in its that their assigned level of rights and gram may not have been placed there built-in FTP service. An attacker could permissions also lets them elevate by the Power User. Other malicious connect to this service and then redirect their privileges to become full admin- software may have been responsible. the connection to other servers on the istrators. So a Power User is simply an It would be easy to blame Microsoft network. It turns out that some hackers administrator who has not yet elevated for making the Power Users group too love to do this type of redirection to him or herself. powerful. However, the reason that this escape detection. After all, you’d never

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 67 1206red_SecAdvisor67-68.v6 11/14/06 11:15 AM Page 68

SecurityAdvisor

expect that your database server would Greylisting is the latest craze in well for a while. Once they’re widely get attacked by a printer. As a result, spam filtering. Mail servers already adopted, though, spammers notice an your intrusion detection system may use blacklists to block all e-mail from increasing number of their e-mails not sound an alarm if this happens. certain addresses and whitelists to being blocked and quickly come up Also, networked printers are often always accept messages from other with other methods to get around the password-protected to ensure that addresses. When a server receives spam filters. only authorized personnel can change an incoming connection from an I expect the same thing will happen configuration settings. It’s not unknown address, a greylist will gen- with greylisting. Even if greylisting uncommon to see organizations using remains effective, many organizations the same password for all their print- find the delay it introduces by asking ers. In many cases, this is the same You’d never expect that the remote server to send messages password used for other network later is unacceptable, as it can result devices as well. If an attacker can find your database server in delays of an hour or more for this password, the next step is to try would get attacked by a incoming e-mail. using the same password to reconfig- There’s only one thing that will ulti- ure network switches to further pene- printer. As a result, your mately and completely stop spam, and trate the network. As a result, you intrusion detection system that is when spamming stops being should include printers and other net- profitable. People have to stop buying work devices in your organization’s may not sound an alarm items offered in spam messages. As security plan, even though they may if this happens. long as there are people willing to buy not be obvious candidates. fake designer watches, graduate degrees from obscure colleges that may or may Myth No. 5: You Can Completely not exist and V|@gr@, there will be Eliminate Spam erate an error message that says that enough incentive for the spammers to Two years ago, Bill Gates told the the server is unavailable and to please develop more efficient methods to get World Economic Forum in Davos, try again later. The message is only around spam filters. Switzerland, that spam would essentially accepted when the remote server While it appears that spam may be be eliminated by 2006. The last time I sends it a second time. with us forever, you can at least stop checked my mail server, though, more The logic behind this method is that most of it using one or more spam fil- than 99 percent of incoming connec- most legitimate mail servers will auto- ters or a hosted solution. If you’re using tions were due to spam. It appears Bill’s matically try again. Spammers, however, greylisting today, enjoy it while it prediction was just a bit off. normally use a hit-and-run approach. works. I predict that within two years, Gates isn’t the only one who has ever They send messages once, but won’t greylisting won’t be seen as a cure-all made an inaccurate assessment about re-send them if they don’t go through solution, but will join other spam filter- spam. Not that long ago, Bayesian filter- the first time. ing methods as one that works well in ing was supposed to stop all spam. This conjunction with other methods. type of filtering detects spam by learning If Bill Gates can be wrong, though, patterns from the mail that you normally GetMoreOnline then so can I. If spam does completely send and receive, and adjusting its deci- disappear in the near future, I wouldn’t To read more about security myths and sion-making to these patterns. how Joern Wettern debunks them, and mind being wrong about that. — It didn’t take spammers long to fine- to see the entire archive of Security tune their methods to defeat such Advisor, go to Redmondmag.com. Joern Wettern, Ph.D., MCSE, MCT, filters. Even worse, one method spam- Security+, is the owner of Wettern Net- mers now use to get around better fil- work Solutions, a consulting and training tering is to simply increase the number redmondmag.com firm. He has written books and developed of messages they send. After all, a training courses on a number of network- spammer’s goal is to get just a small Some organizations have achieved ing and security topics. In addition to help- number of responses. Doubling the remarkably high spam-blockage success ing companies implement network security number of e-mails sent essentially dou- rates using greylisting. However, I’m solutions, he regularly teaches seminars and bles the number of messages that arrive afraid this success won’t last for long. speaks at conferences worldwide. Reach him in a valid mailbox. Most new spam blocking methods work at [email protected].

68 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project4 11/14/06 2:02 PM Page 1

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AdvertisingSales RedmondResources AD INDEX Advertiser Page URL Acronis Inc. C3 www.acronis.com Algin Technology 51 www.utools.com www.avepoint.com 41 www.avepoint.com Capella University 49 www.capella.com CenterTools Software 27 www.centertools.com CNS Software 69 www.cns-software.com Matt Morollo DataViz, Inc. 50 www.dataviz.com Associate Publisher DigiVault by Lucid8 19 www.Lucid8.com 508-532-1418 tel Diskeeper Corporation 5 www.diskeeper.com 508-875-6622 fax EMC Corporation 3 www.emc.com [email protected] Famatech 11 www.famatech.com GFI Software 58 www.gfi.com West/MidWest East GOexchange by Lucid8 35 www.goexchange.com IBM Corporation 7,37 www.ibm.com Dan LaBianca JD Holzgrefe iTripoli Inc. 23 www.itripoli.com Director of Advertising, West Director of Advertising, East Microsoft 21 www.microsoft.com 818-674-3417 tel 804-752-7800 tel netikus.net ltd 44 www.netikus.net 818-734-1528 fax 253-595-1976 fax [email protected] [email protected] NetOp 31 www.netop.com New Horizons Computer 57 www.newhorizons.com Learning Centers SALES IT CERTIFICATION Quest Software C4 www.quest.com & TRAINING – USA, Project Management Institute 53 www.pmi.org Bruce Halldorson Raxco Software Inc. 14 www.raxco.com Western RegionalSales Manager EUROPE Red Gate Software Ltd. C2 www.red-gate.com CA, OR, WA Al Tiano Redmond Magazine 17, 70 www.redmondmag.com 209-473-2202 tel Advertising Sales Manager 209-473-2212 fax 818-734-1520 ext. 190 tel SAPIEN Technologies, Inc. 25 www.sapien.com [email protected] 818-734-1529 fax ScriptLogic Corporation 33 www.scriptlogic.com [email protected] Specialized Solutions 61 www.specializedsolutions.com Danna Vedder St. Bernard Software 13 www.stbernard.com Manager PRODUCTION 253-514-8015 tel Sunbelt Software 8,43,63 www.sunbelt-software.com 775-514-0350 fax Kelly Ann Mundy TechMentor Conferences 64 www.techmentorevents.com [email protected] Production Coordinator The Training Camp 45 www.trainingcamp.com 818-734-1520 ext. 164 tel TNT Software 38 www.tntsoftware.com 818-734-1528 fax Tanya Egenolf Ultrabac Software 66 www.ultrabac.com Advertising Sales Associate [email protected] 760-722-5494 tel Western Governors University 59,69 www.wgu.edu 760-722-5495 fax [email protected] EDITORIAL INDEX Company Page URL Adobe Systems Inc. 60 www.adobe.com Canada/Mexico $54.95; outside North CORPORATE ADDRESS Avaya Inc. 32 www.avaya.com 1105 Media America $64.95. Subscription inquiries, 9121 Oakdale Ave. Ste 101 back issue requests, and address Brixoft.net 58 www.sourcedit.com Chatsworth, CA 91311 changes: Mail to: Redmond, P.O. Box BrowserTools.net 60 http://browsertools.net www.1105media.com 2063, Skokie, IL 60076-9699, email Canonical Ltd. 24 www.ubuntu.com [email protected] or call (866) 293- MEDIA KITS: Direct your Media Kit 3194 for U.S. & Canada; (847) 763-9560 Cisco Systems Inc. 30 www.cisco.com requests to Matt Morollo, associate pub- for International, fax (847) 763-9564. Diskeeper Corp. 18 www.diskeeper.com lisher, 508-532-1418 (phone), 508-875- POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DNSstuff.com 56 www.dnsreport.com 6622 (fax), [email protected] Redmond, P.O. Box 2063, Skokie, IL 60076-9699. Canada Publications Mail Fookes Software 58 www.notetab.com REPRINTS: For all editorial and advertis- Agreement No: 40039410. Return Unde- Free Software Foundation 58 www.gnu.org ing reprints of 100 copies or more, and liverable Canadian Addresses to Circula- Gensortium Ltd. 60 www.gensortium.com digital (web-based) reprints, contact tion Dept. or DHL Global Mail, 7496 Bath PARS International, Phone (212) 221-9595, Rd Unit 2, Mississauga, ON, L4T 1L2. Hewlett Packard Co. 60 www.hp.com email: [email protected], web: IBM Corp. 32 www.ibm.com www.magreprints.com/QuickQuote.asp © Copyright 2006 by 1105 Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Infradig Systems 59 www.infradig.com LIST RENTAL: To rent this publication’s e- Reproductions in whole or part prohibited InterKnowlogy LLC 32 www.interknowlogy.com mail or postal mailing list, please contact except by written permission. Mail McAfee Inc. 56 www.mcafee.com our list manager Worldata: requests to “Permissions Editor,” c/o RED- Nortel Networks 30 www.nortel.com Phone: 800-331-8102. MOND, 16261 Laguna Canyon Road, Ste. Email: [email protected] 130, Irvine, CA 92618. Novell Inc. 24 www.novell.com Website: www.worldata.com/101com. Open Source Technology Group 58 http://sourceforge.net Postal Address: 3000 N. Military Trail, The information in this magazine has not Red Hat Inc. 24 www.redhat.com Boca Raton, FL 33431-6375. undergone any formal testing by 1105 Media, Inc. and is distributed without any Siemens AG 32 www.siemens.com Redmond (ISSN 1553-7560) is published warranty expressed or implied. Implemen- SolarWinds 56 www.solarwinds.net monthly by 1105 Media, Inc., 9121 Oakdale tation or use of any information contained Special Operations Softw 22 www.specopssoft.com Avenue, Ste. 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311. herein is the reader’s sole responsibility. Periodicals postage paid at Chatsworth, While the information has been reviewed Sun Microsystems Inc. 24, 72 www.sun.com CA 91311-9998, and at additional mailing for accuracy, there is no guarantee that the The FreeBSD Project 24 www.freebsd.org offices. Complimentary subscriptions are same or similar results may be achieved in TNT Software 15 www.tntsoftware.com sent to qualifying subscribers. Annual all environments. Technical inaccuracies subscription rates for non-qualified sub- may result from printing errors and/or new VMware Inc. 24 www.vmware.com scribers are: U.S. $39.95 (U.S. funds); developments in the industry. This index is provided as a service. The publisher assumes no liability for errors or omissions.

| redmondmag.com | Redmond | December 2006 | 71 1206red_Foley_72.v7 11/14/06 10:34 AM Page 72 Foley on Microsoft By Mary Jo Foley Microsoft Prognostications: What’s up in 2007?

t’s that time of year again for eggnog-laced predictions “Winix.” Lately, a few market watch- ers have said that, in datacenters, at about what Microsoft should, could and just might do least, Solaris is gaining on Linux. in the new year. What if Microsoft decided to give its I nearly three-year-old collaboration This time around, I’ve decided to anonymous blogger, who is known for agreement with Sun some teeth and break my traditional Top 10 predictions stumping for a leaner, meaner Microsoft, take Solaris off Sun’s hands in order to list in two: One half being what I con- has been wavering a lot over the past lock up the high-performance market? sider relatively safe and well-considered year as to whether he (we know the 3. J Allard is appointed to head bets on what Microsoft is likely to do person is male) will continue in his role Windows Mobile and brings his (and is likely to fail to do) in 2007, and as Microsoft’s conscience. I foresee Midas touch to phones. Why not give the other my out-on-a-limb list of 2007 as the year that Microsoft gets the and MP3 player wizard Microsoft predictions. tougher on its bloggers. a true challenge: Propel Microsoft’s mobile unit into the stratosphere? 5 (Relatively) Safe Bets: Maybe there will 4. Adobe will sue Microsoft. 1. Microsoft will manage to ship Adobe almost sued Microsoft in Longhorn Server in 2007. (And be a Microsoft June—if you believe the press maybe even Vista Service Pack 1 to reports—but didn’t actually pull the go along with it.) A few months back, Linux, after all … trigger. But once Microsoft ships its Microsoft quietly slipped the expected Expression design tools (meant to arrival date of Longhorn Server from 5. Microsoft won’t buy Yahoo! or compete with Dreamweaver et al) and the first half of 2007 to the second half. AOL (or Google, for that matter). Windows Presentation Foundation Beta 3 is looking like it will hit in the Wall Street will predict that Microsoft Everywhere (WPF/e) Flash-killer in first quarter, as expected. And tester will buy a Web-centric powerhouse to 2007, watch Adobe’s legal department feedback has been unusually positive. shore up its own MSN/ kick into action. 2. Visual Studio “Orcas” will slip unit. So many seem to forget that 5. Microsoft is forced to rescue into 2008. While most developers and Windows, Office, devel- Novell from angry GPLers. Log on to partners with whom I’ve spoken consider opment tools and server Redmondmag.com I’ve been leery of the Visual Studio “Orcas” to be a 2007 products are the cash cows for more Microsoft Microsoft-Novell partnership deliverable, few Microsoft developer for the foreseeable future. prognostications. since it was announced in division officials have called the product FindIT code: early November. If Novell is “Visual Studio 2007.” I’m hearing 5 “What the Heck Foley1206 excommunicated from the rumblings of an early 2008 product. was She Thinking (and GPL camp, Microsoft might have to 3. First-year Windows Vista sales Drinking)” Predictions: swoop in and shore up SuSE Linux in will stall. Many PC makers and 1. Microsoft starts selling Oracle additional ways. Maybe there will be a resellers still aren’t promoting Vista. services. If Microsoft really wants to Microsoft Linux, after all … Many can’t answer even basic questions mess with Oracle, what better way than Got any of your own—either half- about which machines will and won’t to offer paid support for disenfranchised baked or fully cooked—to share? Write run the various Vista SKUs. Granted, Oracle users. Maybe they should just me at [email protected].— Microsoft moves the bulk of Windows offer support for customers unhappy copies via OEM preloads, not retail with Oracle’s Red Hat support. There Mary Jo Foley is editor of the new ZDnet sales—but I’m still dubious. are sure to be a few of those … “All About Microsoft” blog and has been 4. Mini-Microsoft will be outed (or 2. Microsoft does a Novell-type covering Microsoft for about two decades. just drop out). Microsoft’s infamous deal with Sun: co-markets Solaris as Contact her at [email protected].

72 | December 2006 | Redmond | redmondmag.com | Project1 9/13/06 1:12 PM Page 1

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