SnagIt

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For the last few days, I’ve been writing a migration process for an Active Directory and Exchange migration that I’m working on.

It shouldn’t be necessary to cram documents for technical people full of screenshots but experience tells me that:

  • It’s what many IT team leaders expect.
  • If you don’t provide lots of pictures then people don’t follow the process correctly.

Unfortunately, experience also tells me that:

  • People don’t follow the process correctly anyway.
  • Adding many screenshots to a document greatly increases the time it takes to produce the process and the cost of maintaining it.

Anyway, getting back to the point, I’ve just written a document with a lot of screen shots in it. It makes very dull reading (and it wasn’t much fun to write either) but the process of taking the screenshots was greatly improved using the SnagIt screen capture software from TechSmith.

Why not just stick with Alt+PrtScr? Because that needs me to paste the screen grab into something afterwards (and before someone leaves a comment – yes, I do know that Linux and Mac users can just save a .PNG file to the desktop). SnagIt will let me select the region of the active window that I want to grab (e.g. just a particular menu), control output of the screenshot, name it for me, put it in a folder, etc. and generally save me a load of time.

Microsoft releases a beta for Hyper-V

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Windows Server 2008 beta testers are probably aware that the release candidate distributions include a pre-release version of the new virtualisation platform that is now known as Hyper-V (formerly known as Windows Server Virtualisation and codenamed Viridian).

With Hyper-V due to follow Windows Server 2008 release (within 180 days), it was widely anticipated that no formal beta would be available until Windows Server 2008 was finalised but Microsoft is announcing the first Hyper-V beta release today, including support for quick migration and high availability, ability to run Hyper-V as a Server Core role and integration of Hyper-V into Server Manager. Further details of Hyper-V are available on the Microsoft website.