For the last few months, I’ve been working on a Conchango service offering around Microsoft Windows XP service pack 2. Well, today I learned that we have a link from the Microsoft website.
For more information on how Conchango can help your organisation to prepare for XP SP2 deployment, see the Conchango website, call 01784 222 222 or e-mail talktous@conchango.com.
(Please note that this blog is a personal website and is in no way affiliated with Microsoft or Conchango).
My work laptop is a Dell Latitude D600 – the specification offers me all I need (well, I would like a Toshiba Portégé M200 tablet PC but that’s another story), including built in 802.11b and Bluetooth support. Except that it doesn’t – some of our D600s have had problems with the Bluetooth cards not being correctly seated or requiring motherboard replacements before they will detect the Bluetooth card – mine is one of those…
The trouble is:
Its been three weeks since I first requested support and this is the catalogue of incompetence I’ve endured so far:
Dell equipment may be (relatively) inexpensive, and (reasonably) well specified, but it now seems my argument for buying Intel-based servers from Compaq (now HP) and IBM rather than the less expensive Dell equipment is equally valid in the PC world – there is a cost in the overall quality of the product (and associated service) with any low-cost PC (and by that, I mean business-focused OEM equipment – of course you can buy no-name or consumer PCs for even less).
If you are looking for a new PC and you want my advice – don’t buy Dell.
I recently missed a webcast that I had pre-registered for (hmm… attend a project review with a client who doesn’t heed any advice or listen to a Microsoft speaker with a monotone American accent… tough choice that one) – you may be interested to know that Microsoft UK publish the event resources for many of their events on their website so if you miss an event, you can listen offline later.
Whilst researching some IIS issues, I came across a useful checklist for securing IIS courtesy of the University of Washington.
As part of the current drive to increase the security of its products, Microsoft plans to remove some of the current remote synchronisation functionality in ActiveSync 4.0.
The following text is taken from an e-mail yesterday from Microsoft’s Mobility Partner Advisory Council to Windows Mobile Partners:
“We are hard at work refining the next version of Windows Mobile in terms of features and security. One of the items that we are targeting for removal in ActiveSync 4.0 is remote sync with a PC. In future versions, we are planning to discontinue remote (network) incoming support to desktop ActiveSync. This means that if you are currently developing a mobile redirector solution that depends on remote (incoming) connection to desktop ActiveSync, this may impact you. We want ensure that partners who use this feature have plenty of time to formulate alternate approaches and also consider feedback if you feel strongly that this functionality should be preserved. We also want to hear from any partners that feel the removal of this feature would directly break their code or impact their product roadmap.”
Microsoft publishes best practice guidance under the general heading of Microsoft solutions for management. All of these best practices are based on the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which includes guidelines on how to plan, deploy, and maintain IT operational processes in support of mission-critical service solutions.
Within this guidance is the Account Management for Windows Server 2003 Solution Accelerator, specifically the User and Location Management Guide, which contains conceptual information, best practices, and detailed procedures related to managing the creation, changing, or deletion of user accounts and physical locations. In the last chapter of this document are some Active Directory object naming conventions, which are actually quite restrictive – basically the only allowed characters are:
Interestingly, no mention is made of other accented characters (e.g. ç or é).
I came across this whilst researching issues with Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) scripts producing errors when certain non-alphanumeric characters were parsed, but as general advice and guidance, adhering to these standards should be seriously considered, even though various AD management tools allow other characters to be used.