TechNet Magazine: May 2010

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Editor’s Note: Keeping Tabs on Remote Offices By Lafe Low With the myriad challenges you face every day as an IT manager, keeping a corporate network running that supports all sorts of remote offices has got to rank somewhere near the top. You have all the standard challenges—providing the right applications, ensuring certain performance and service levels, maintaining bandwidth and capacity planning, ensuring a rock-solid backup and disaster recovery plan—and now you have to do it from miles away. And there’s often no one at the remote office who “speaks IT.” Read more...

Featured Articles

Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controllers: Plan Carefully for RODCs

By Paul Yu
Read-only domain controllers are new features of the Active Directory Domain Services in the Windows Server 2008 R2 and they represent a fundamental change to how you’d typically use domain controllers.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core: Securing the Branch Office Connection

By Paul Yu
Windows Server 2008 R2 allows you to make fundamental changes to how you can deploy and leverage domain controllers (DCs) in remote environments.

Desktop Virtualization: Care and Feeding of Virtual Environments

By Wes Miller
No matter how you’re using virtualization, if you’ve used it for any length of time, you’re no doubt realizing that it comes with its own set of challenges—just as maintaining physical hardware has its own dilemmas.

Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010

By Alan Le Marquand
The Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint is what truly drives the integration between SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint Server 2010. See how to configure and use this service.

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Tip of the Day

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SQL Q & A: Moving, Performance Tuning, Backing Up and Mirroring Databases By Paul S. Randal  Paul S. Randal answers questions about moving a publication database, preventing “page latch” issues, using database snapshots; and why mirroring does not propagate database corruption. WindowsPowerShell: Writing Cmdlets in Script By Don Jones In Powershell v2 you can write a function in script that has the same capabilities as a “real” cmdlet written in C# or Visual Basic and compiled in Visual Studio. Windows Confidential:The Third Rail of Keyboard Shortcuts By Raymond Chen Sometimes easier isn’t necessarily better. What the Windows+E hotkey taught us about user behavior and the long journey to where we started.

Toolbox: New Products for IT Professionals By Greg Steen Two new tools to consider: SmartDeploy Enterprise, for system image deployment; Tweak7, which centralizes, categorizes and explains the Windows 7 features for tuning your system. Utility Spotlight: Microsoft Office Environment Assessment By Lance Whitney The free Microsoft Office Environment Assessment Tool checks a PC’s overall configuration to see how it will fare during an upgrade to Office 2010.

Geek of All Trades: iSCSI is the Perfect Fit for Small Environments By Greg Shields Things have changed since the days of SCSI. iSCSI makes management easier and makes better use of storage, but it still requires some special techniques and a few extra protocols. The Cable Guy: Changes to the DNS Client Service in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 By Joseph Davies We explore the new critical factors in the Domain Name System (DNS) Client service in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to help you work with the DNS more effectively and efficiently.