RunAs Radio

At Tech Ed Europe IT Forum in Barcelona, Richard and Greg sit down with Paul Randal and Kim Tripp to talk about everything new in SQL Server 2008.

Richard and Greg have a second interview with Chris Avis while at Connections in Las Vegas. This time the focus is on that scourge of the Internet, email spam. Chris digs into how the 2007 edition of Exchange extends the spam fighting capabilities of the product.

While at the Connections conference in Las Vegas, Richard and Greg talked to Chris Avis about Windows Deployment Services (WDS). WDS replaces Remote Installation Services (RIS) to provide automated installation of operating systems onto bare-install machines using network boot (PXE).

Richard and Greg talk to Tony Redmond from Hewlett Packard about utilizing Powershell with Microsoft Exchange. Powershell (code-named Monad) is Microsoft's technology for providing command-line interface control.

Richard and Greg talk to Jeremy Moskowitz of gpanswers.com fame about Group Policy in Active Directory. As Jeremy says, if you have Active Directory, you have Group Policy, and you might as well learn how to take advantage of it.

Richard and Greg talk to Randy Smith about locking down Vista for the enterprise. While we can't help making fun of UAC, we do dig into the techniques around using BitLocker and restricting the use of USB keys, etc. Who says security can't be fun?

Richard and Greg talk to Brien Posey about the issues around securing Exchange Server effectively. The discussion ranges over Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, RPC over HTTP, SSL, VPNs and more!

Richard and Greg talk to Doug Toombs about tools that every IT Pro needs! Here are the tools talked about on the show:

Richard and Greg talk to Tony Howlett and Glenn Kramer of Network Security Services about Information Security. More than just protecting credit card numbers, InfoSec is a complex area of security that takes a lot of thinking to get right.

Joel Oleson talks to Richard and Greg about the IT management of Sharepoint. Sharepoint has a knack for showing up everywhere in an organization whether you want it to or not. A solid plan at the IT level to provide Sharepoint services to the organization can solve that problem.

Mitch Garvis talks to Richard and Greg about Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment (BDD). BDD is the evolution of earlier versions, along side products like SMS, Vista and Office to do zero touch and light touch deployments of operating systems and applications.

Richard and Greg talk to Trey Johnson from Cizer about Microsoft's Business Intelligence offerings. The product line up from Microsoft is expanding beyond SQL Server, Analysis Services and Excel to include Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services, the new PerformancePoint Server and ProClarity Analysis Tools.

Brad McGehee discusses the career path of a professional database administrator. Often the DBA role is thrust upon an IT professional or developer without much in the way of specific training. Growing into the role is largely a self-motivated exercise. Brad talks about the habits that successful DBAs have, focused on on-going education and working to protect their organizations data.

Tom Clark talks to Richard and Greg about iSCSI and how its bringing SAN solutions to the medium-scale enterprise. iSCSI uses TCP and Ethernet to provide SAN features and connectivity at a substantially lower cost than Fibre Channel.

Charles Betz talks to Richard and Greg about the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The ITIL provides guidance on all aspects of an IT operation, including service support and delivery, implementing service management, asset management, security, application, communications and even business perspectives.

David Lowe of the Windows Server Team talks to us about Windows Server 2008 Core installation. The Core installation removes most of the GUI, Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and other overhead of the operating system that you don't need for a remote access server. The result is a server with an 80% smaller footprint in diskspace and substantially less memory consumed.

We chat with Donald Farmer about data mining with the Analysis Services components of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005. Donald takes us away from the traditional business-use of data mining (like a 'people who liked this book also liked' application) and into the idea that we can mine our application and event logs for data that will help the IT pro optimize and anticipate problems in the information systems.

Bob Roudebush talks to us about how disaster recovery works when Microsoft Virtual Server and/or VMWare is involved. We dig into the details around backing up within the guest VM and via the host.

Richard and Greg talk with Sarbjit Singh Gill calling all the way from Singapore about Sharepoint 2007. Along the way they explore the history of Sharepoint, and how Microsoft has learned from earlier versions to create a powerful focal point for your information system.

Richard and Greg chat with Stephen Rose about Server Virtualization, including Microsoft's Virtual Server and VMWare's products. Stephen digs into the advantages (and disadvantages) of server virtualization, talks about migrating existing servers and getting the maximum use out of your hardware.

Our most requested topic is finally addressed! Steve Whitner from Quantum talks to us about disk-based backup and how it fits into the ecosystem of backup solutions along with tape backup and replication over WAN connections. We also dig into how disk backup solution use de-duplication to be more space efficient.

Three months after the first discussion on the client side of CardSpace (Show #3), Dana Epp returns to the show to talk about the server side of CardSpace and how quickly the technology is evolving into the future of authentication across multiple platforms.

Richard and Greg dive into a discussion with Charlie Russel on Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services RemoteApp, but not before a detour to talk about Charlie's networking disaster around Service Pack 2 for Windows 2003 Server R2. RemoteApp is a new feature for Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 that allows users to remotely access an application as if it was running locally on their own machine.

The final installment of interviews from Microsoft Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando, Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Sigman, the Release Manager for Network Access Protection (NAP). Jeff digs into exactly what NAP is all about, how it interact with Windows Server 2008, Vista and Windows XP.

Another Tech Ed US 2007 interview from Orlando, Richard and Greg sit down with Richard Turner and discuss how CardSpace impacts the IT professional. CardSpace (formerly codenamed "InfoCard") is a key technology in Microsoft's Identity Platform.

Richard and Greg talk to Bill Varga about what IP (that's Internet Protocol) Intelligence is all about. They also dig into how IP geolocation helps with regulatory compliance and fraud detection. Bill also talks about the new technology Quova (his employer) has developed that can deal with geolocation of satellite and megaproxy IP addresses.

While at Tech Ed US 2007 in Orlando, Richard and Greg sat down to talk to Isaac Roybal, a Product Manager on the Windows Server team who is deeply involved in Web Workload, especially IIS 7. Isaac digs into the details of the new management features in IIS 7, now available as part of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3.

Richard and Greg talk to Eric Marvets about securing laptop drives and other portable media using TrueCrypt. Along the way they dig into different levels of security and the entropy of passwords.Links:Eric's blogTrueCrypt Web Site

Richard and Greg talk to Brian Komar about the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Extended Validation (EV) Certificates and whether or not anybody notices the green bar in Internet Explorer 7.

Rory McCaw talks with Richard and Greg around Microsoft Operations Manager 2007.

Wes Miller talks with Richard and Greg about Vista x64 and Longhorn Server x64, and the issues that surround 64-bit Windows.

Author and MVP John Savill talks to Richard and Greg about Application Virtualization.

Simon Goldstein talks to Richard and Greg about making sense out of compliance with rules and regulations around Information Technology.

Richard and Greg speak to Microsoft Security MVP Dana Epp about Microsoft's CardSpace initiative for secure authentication. They hint at another show focusing on the server side.

Exchange MVP David Sengupta discusses issues and best practices around email policy and related strategies.

Patrick Hynds from Critical Sites kicks off this all-new Microsoft-centric IT podcast with a discussion about storage. This show is atypically long. We're trying for 30 minutes per show.