Enlightenment for Dynamics CRM
January 9, 2007
Security updates from Microsoft from January include four for Office and one for Windows. The Windows update has a version for Vista listed, for all you folk who are already running this in live or test environments. The Windows security update is here:
And the four for Office are: 924085 925525 921585 925257
There are the usual updates for junk mail filtering and the Malicious Software Removal Toolkit as well.
January 8, 2007
After a week of writing things in this blog, I stumbled upon this cartoon and realised how appropriate it was:
January 8, 2007
Microsoft have announced that there will be only four updates delivered on “Patch Tuesday” this month, rather than the eight which some people were anticipating. These four security updates comprise one for Windows and three for Office – it seems likely these will all be classed as critical. It is not clear whether these will be delivered via Windows Update (as well as Microsoft Update) and SUS (in addition to WSUS). The two High Priority non-security updates for Windows will only be made available through MU and WSUS.
There will also be the usual update to the Malicious Software Removal Tool which can be directly retrieved from the download centre or via WU, MU or WSUS. All of these should be available from around 6pm GMT on Tuesday 9th January
See also: SUS is end of life, upgrade to WSUS
Read the full Microsoft Security Bulletin advance notification.
January 8, 2007 1 Comment
PwdMan is a free tool which allows you to easily change the password on the local administrator (or other local user) account on one or many Windows machines in one go. You need to have admin rights already of course (eg through a domain admin account) and have network access to the machine, but this is still a useful tool – especially if a system administrator leaves your organisation.
Read more about it in this Redmond Mag article or go straight to the download page.
January 7, 2007
The Technet Roadshow is returning to Harrogate on 12th March 2007.
Other UK cities on the tour between 2oth February and 20th March include Nottingham, Bristol, Glasgow and London. It’s good to see some of these Microsoft “evangelists” get away from Reading and the South-east for a change, it’s just a shame it seems to happen so rarely.
To find out about other UK events, go to the Microsoft UK events search page. Most events listed are free to attend, and there are online as well as onsite events taking place.
January 7, 2007
Following on from previous security guides with information about best practice, Microsoft have made the Windows Vista Security Guide download available.
The Windows Vista Security Guide provides guidance and tools to further protect Windows Vista against real-live threats such as malware and information theft. This solution accelerator recommends the Enterprise Client (EC) configuration for organizations of all types. Only in extreme security situations does the guide recommend the Specialized Security – Limited Functionality (SSLF) configuration, which considerably limits client computer functionality. The Solution Accelerator includes recommendations about how to use new and enhanced security technologies in Windows Vista to better defend the client computers in your organization against malware. The guide also provides recommendations and best practices on how to use encryption and access control technologies in Windows Vista to protect corporate data.
January 6, 2007
I’ve never had a problem doing this as I have been lucky enough to have third-party tools which do a perfectly good job of it. However, if you do not, you will be pleased to find out that the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (which is free and can be installed on XP) has two command-line tools to help with this – cdburn and dvdburn. Read more about this in Steve Lamb’s blog here.
January 4, 2007
The European directive on the disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) finally became part of UK law on January 2nd, although originally it was hoped it would be adopted by all member states more than two years ago. Some of the provisions will not come into full force until 1st July 2007, but all firms need to start planning for this now.
The full text can be found on the DTI website – Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2006 (pdf).
January 3, 2007
From January 1st 2007 you need to ensure your company emails and websites have sufficient information to comply with the existing E-Commerce regulations and the Companies Act, and clarification brought about by the adoption of the EU First Company Law Amendment directive. Of course, much of this information is useful to your website visitors and business correspondents in any case, regardless of the fact that it is now mandatory.
January 2, 2007
Registration is not open yet, but as advance warning, the next CRM User Group meeting for the UK is planned for:
Click to add the next CRMUG meeting to your Outlook calendar
Agenda is yet to be confirmed, but loosely speaking will be a 9:15 registration and coffee for a 9:45 start.
After a mid-morning coffee break we plan to have two parallel speaker sessions for people to choose the topic of most interest to them. At least one of these will be followed by a related “round table” discussion of Q&A and audience participation.
After lunch we will all get back together for a further general session before “The Marco and Cass Show™” – also known as the Microsoft CRM Roadmap presentation. Given the planned release time frame for “Orion” this session alone is probably enough reason to travel all the way to London for this CRMUG meeting.
We will round the day off with an Experts Panel to try and answer any questions which have occurred to you during the earlier sessions, before closing at approximately 4pm.
Microsoft UK
Cardinal Place
80-100 Victoria Street
London
SW1E 5JL
That’s a 2 minute walk from Victoria tube station, serviced by the Victoria, Circle and District Lines.
Of course I will post once the official page for registrations goes live.
Following our recent CRMUG UK committee meeting, I took on the role of “Vice Chair for Programme” so I need to figure out what things our members want to get out of our events, what sessions will be of most interest, general applicability and so on.
What do you want to “share and learn” at the CRM User Group? Are there any topics you particularly want to hear about?
Do you have a great customer story to tell, with some inspiration or ideas for others to take away and use to get more out of their CRM system? Could you / would you speak for 30 – 45 minutes about your CRM deployment project and what you got out of it?
If you have something to share, or want to find out about a particular aspect of using Dynamics CRM, please let me know in the comments so I can start to assimilate ideas to put together another great event, for users, by users!
January 1, 2007 2 Comments
Support for SUS v.1.0 ended on 6th December 2006
After this date it is no longer be supported, but more importantly it will no longer be able to download or distribute any new updates.
So, if you are still running “old” SUS you need to make the move to WSUS as soon as possible. While there is no ‘upgrade’ as such, you can migrate all your approvals and updates across. Read more of this post
January 1, 2007 25 Comments
DSMOD foundation course 101
I originally wrote this as an email reply to a colleague’s question about updating many Active Directory objects in one go, and later thought I could write it up “tutorial style”. I still think the DSQuery, DSGet, DSMod functions are underused by even fairly knowledgeable administrators, so here is a beginner’s guide to getting the most of these tools.
This is intended to show the principles for changing many AD objects’ properties in one go. There are lots more clever things you could do with this – like a lot of command line stuff, the principles are very simple but can be strung together to very powerful end results with a bit of thought and a step-by-step logical approach.
Basically, DSMOD allows you to change many (not all) of the AD properties of an object, usually a user, computer or group. This tutorial discusses users specifically, but the principles extend to other objects. Read more of this post
December 31, 2006 1 Comment
I finally decided to enter the world of blogging, and the start of a new year seemed to be the perfect timing so I thought I should get it started now and hit the ground running in 2007. Too many thoughts come to mind, too many great web pages are discovered and lost again, too many problems are solved and the solutions forgotten. I wanted to be able to share some of these things with other people.
Since I spend most of my time with computers in one way or another, it’s pretty likely that the majority of my blog entries will be on IT related topics. I am particularly keen to share my thoughts, feelings and experiences of managing Windows systems, active directory admin and using group policy. Over the next few months I should find something to say about Vista and Office 2007 too.
CRMguru 