This is Internet Explorer. This is Internet Explorer for the Desktop.

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out, so you also have access to preview the next version of Internet Explorer – Internet Explorer 10! The new Windows 8 operating system and Metro style interface brings new challenges as Microsoft strives to move forward while still supporting everything you can run on Windows 7, including everyone’s favorite application – the Internet browser.

Internet Explorer 10 supports modern standards like HTML5, CSS3 and SVG developers the ability to build more powerful web apps and continue to support the security enhancements brought to you with Internet Explorer 9.

Metro style applications are the native type of application for Windows 8. So it’s no surprise that Internet Explorer 10 completely embraces this with it’s Metro style “experience”. (Special Note: The IE 10 experience presented to the user on Windows 8 shall hereby be referred to simply as “Internet Explorer”. Do not forget this. It is important.)

Internet Explorer is a touch-centric, add-in free, plug-in free browsing experience that doesn’t support ActiveX, Flash or Silverlight.

But wait! What about existing websites and web apps that require those components? I can’t use these on Windows 8?

Windows 8 completely supports the full desktop “experience” that you know and love from Windows 7. All of your current Windows applications can run using the desktop experience, including the Internet browsing you already do.

Oh cool. So I can install Internet Explorer 9 and get my plug-ins?

No, Windows 8 doesn’t support IE 9. But within the Windows 8 desktop, Internet Explorer 10 presents a different browsing experience. Using the same engine, Internet Explorer for the Desktop supports the traditional browsing features, such as tabs and plug-ins as well as compatibility modes for IE 7 and 8.

So I get two versions of Internet Explorer 10?

Nope. Internet Explorer 10 is one application that provides two browsing experiences, depending on your needs and the feature requirements of the web page itself.

“Internet Explorer” is the touch-centric experience for the new Windows interface. “Internet Explorer for the Desktop” is the experience similar to Internet Explorer 9 – available on the desktop and uses a traditional tab layout and supports plug-ins.

It’s the same, but different!

Can’t I just call it all “Internet Explorer”?

You could. But that means you’ve already forgotten the special note from earlier in this post. The application is Internet Explorer 10 and your browsing experience will vary depending on if you launch the browser natively – Internet Explorer, or through the desktop – Internet Explorer for the Desktop.

Remember, you are already used to different browsing experiences, websites are often customized for different devices and display formats. Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 allows you to get the full experience from websites designed with the most modern standards, while not having to abandon other sites that use plug-ins or older coding.

This is a win-win, no matter what you call it.

Check Out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

This week, I’ve been busy at the Microsoft MVP Summit, of which most is covered under our NDA. If you are following me on Twitter, you’ll notice that I can talk the most about the food and the weather here in chilly Redmond and Bellevue, Washington!

However, the one thing I can share this morning is that Microsoft’s Windows 8 site went live. It has a direct download to the ISO bits for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and over 300 pieces of new content.

Windows 8 has some great new features that you can review and see how they can complement your exisiting Windows 7 desktops. Visit http://technet.microsoft.com/windows/windows-8 to see what all the fuss is about!

Where Will You Be on March 22nd and 23rd?

I hope you be joining me at the Pacific IT Professionals 2 day IT Professional conference in San Francisco – TechDays SF. We have a great lineup of speakers to present on current topics that IT Professionals won’t want to miss, including me!

The speakers also include Microsoft MVP’s Mark Minasi, Richard Hicks, Jessica DeVita, Steve Evans, Darren Mar-Elia and many more distinguished presenters. In addition, from Microsoft we will have Stephen Rose, Joey Snow, Chris Avis and Harold Wong.

Session abstracts are being posted as they become available. The conference agenda shows all the topics being covered for example, Best Practices for Group Policy Design, Beginner and Advanced PowerShell, Windows Failover Clustering and 10 Things to Know about Windows Server 2008.

To register for this incredible conference, please click here. The 2 day multi track conference is just $300 US dollars if you register before March 6th, after that it goes up to $400.

We bring the best IT Professional speakers and content to the SF Bay Area so come join us for two packed days of IT knowledge!

Microsoft End of Life Dates – Mark Your Calendars!

Where is 2012 going? It seems like just yesterday I filed away my planner for 2011 and crack open that fresh page to January 2012. Now that we are racing towards Spring, you might want to highlight a few of these special dates for the future.

Here are some future “end of life” dates for some Microsoft products you might still have floating around on your network. Some will be supported for several more years, but it never hurts to keep your eye on the horizon.

These dates are the end of support life for the product as a whole (no more extended support), so start thinking about your budget cycles and internal support needs for the next few years.

Windows XP – 4/8/2014
Server 2003 – 7/14/2015
Windows Vista – 4/11/2017

Exchange Server 2007 – 4/11/2017
SQL Server 2000 – 4/9/2013
SQL Server 2005 – 4/12/2016

Office 2003 – 4/8/2014
Office 2007 – 10/10/2017

These dates are for specific service packs for these products, so be sure to install the latest available service pack, if you haven’t already.

SQL Server 2005 SP 3 -1/10/2012
Exchange 2010 SP 1 – 1/8/2013
Office 2007 SP 2 – 1/8/2013

For more information about other Microsoft Server products, check out the Lifecycle Info for Server Products list. – http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeSelectServ

** 11/21/14 Update **

For some current end of life dates – visit this post. Interested in learning more about getting away from on-prem Exchange and Office? Check out these courses from the Microsoft Virtual Academy –

Customizing the Name of the Online Archive… Unfortunately Still Buggy.

With Exchange 2010 SP1, I have a lot more options for helping users manage their emails and help our company meet requirements regarding email retention policies, compared to past versions of Exchange. While the original Exchange 2010 RTM “Managed Folders” features are still available via PowerShell, the most current iteration of MRM involves Retention Tags and Retention Policies.

While our lawyers hammer out the details regarding how long we should be holding onto mail, I’ve been playing around with the tags and working out the most suitable way to implement the technology for our office. Part of this involves the use of the “Online Archive” feature as a way to eliminate the difficult to manage PST files and to ensure that the primary mailbox database remains small enough to restore quickly in the event of a system failure.

Online Archives act as an extension of the primary mailbox and the folders and mail within it are still subject to the retention tags that were applied to mail messages and folders. So for my needs, the “archive” is simply a place to automatically move the mail that is subject to our longer retention needs.

By default the label of the archive in OWA and Outlook is “Online Archive – User Name”, however for my office I’d like to change the name from “Online Archive” to something more appropriate for our use of the feature, like “Retained Mail – User Name”.

The word “archive” seems to imply that any message put in that area will be saved indefinitely and I want to make sure it’s clear that those messages are still subject to the retention rules. It’s a cosmetic change and mostly semantics, I know, but I think it’s important for the scope of our project.

Within EMC there is a spot on each users mailbox settings where you can customize the display name of the title. I changed my test account and was happy to see it reflected in OWA and Outlook 2007. We’ll be upgrading our users to Outlook 2010 in order to fully support the retention tag features, so I updated my lab workstation to Outlook 2010 as well.

Much to my dismay, I noticed the online archive title was not customized in Outlook 2010. It now read, “Archive – email address”. Curious. I did a little search on the Internet and found a detailed posted describing the problem from fellow MVP, Tim Harrington. The post dates back to December 2010, so I’m disappointed that the bug still exists after a year’s worth of Office 2010 patches and updates. But there you have it.

Another quick note on Office 2010… If you launch Outlook during your Windows session, then close it and launch it again, it may hang on the “Loading Profile” step. Switch over to Task Manager and you’ll likely find several “agent” processes. Kill them and Outlook will load properly when launched.

2 Days–$300–Dozens of Sessions

In March, I’m co-chairing a 2 day IT Professional conference hosted by Pacific IT Professionals called Techdays SF. Join us in San Francisco on March 22 and 23rd. We already have a great lineup of speakers to present on topics that we hope IT Professionals will be interested in.

The speakers list so far include Microsoft MVP’s Mark Minasi, Richard Hicks, Jessica DeVita, Steve Evans, Darren Mar-Elia and more. Additionally, from Microsoft we will have IT Pro Evangelists Chris Avis and Harold Wong, plus some other special MS guests.

The topics to be covered include: Windows Server 2008R2, Windows 8, Deployment, IIS, SharePoint, Hyper-V, AD/GPO, System Center, Exchange, Lync, Powershell and much more. You can see the current agenda at www.techdays.org.

We now have the registration site set up for the event so please sign up here. This 2 day multi-track conference will be $300 US dollars. The first 75 paid registrations will receive a copy of Windows 7. Also, all attendees will be entered in a drawing to win a Kindle!

Please share this your colleagues and friends in the IT industry. If we are able to get sufficient attendance for the event we will consider doing these every 6 months on-going to try and bring the best IT Professional speakers and content to the SF Bay Area so please help us along to that goal and spread the word!

The Joys of "She’s Geeky" Bay Area #5

Oh, how time files and I’ve spent another weekend with the women inspired to attend She’s Geeky – Bay Area #5 (http://www.shesgeeky.org/). Appropriately held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, my Friday morning began with an impromptu “around the water cooler” session at a common area table.

That’s the cool thing about She’s Geeky, or probably any unConference you might attend. If you aren’t interested in a session that is scheduled for a time frame, it’s pretty easy to find someone else in the same situation and have a great conversation anyway. And if there is something you are dying to talk about, it’s totally within your power to announce it, pick a time slot and make it happen.

Your session might be packed, or you might find yourself in a great brainstorming session with another woman or two. Whatever the outcome it was the outcome that was meant to be. Jessica DeVita https://twitter.com/#!/UberGeekGirl) and I hosted a session on Disaster Recovery. We didn’t have much of a plan going into it, but once we were joined by two other women, we spent an hour talking about all different things that need to be consider when protecting your important data and paperwork at home or a work. I think the purchase of some waterproof paper might be in my future.

And it’s not all about what interest you in the here and now, or what you are working on at the office. You can also tap into the geeky interests of others to learn a new skill or get a taste of a completely different hobby.

On Saturday, I sat in on a hands-on session where I learned to solder. Not something I’ll need everyday, but it was fun to do something new and you never know when you might have to break out some solder for a home repair. I’m certainly not an expert after one resistor, but now the tools and concepts aren’t completely foreign to me.

As the weekend came to a close, I also enjoyed a fun lunchtime chat about Systems Administration and Operations, participated a great session on privacy and content management lead by @identitywoman, attended popular talk about dressing for success and picked up some good tips for working with cross-functional teams.

At past She’s Geeky events, I’ve learned about wine tasting and had the opportunity to hear about the “geek factor” behind backyard bee-keeping. With all the information that is at our fingertips via the Internet, it’s still very easy to find yourself in a world filtered to your liking, where you a surrounded by people with similar interests and views. She’s Geeky gives you a great chance to spend an hour on something completely outside of your realm and find inspiration from other great women in science and technology fields.

She’s Geeky is held annually in the Bay Area with another annually event some place else in the United States (DC, Twin Cities and New York have been past locations). Check out the website for information about the upcoming events or review some of the notes that were taken from sessions this weekend.

I’m already looking forward to next year.

Recovering Exchange 2010 – Notes from the Field

With Exchange 2007/2010 more tightly integrated with Active Directory, recovering a server after a loss of hardware can be significantly easier than with previous version of Exchange. This is a boon for those of us in smaller offices where only one Exchange Server exists, holding multiple roles.

Check out this TechNet article with the basics for recovering Exchange 2010. However, there are some little tips that would be helpful, especially when you might be working under a stressful situtation to restore your mail system.

Make sure you know where your install directory is if Exchange isn’t installed in the default location. If you don’t have it written down as part of your disaster recovery documentation, you can get that information out of Active Directory using ADSIEDIT.
Make sure you know the additional syntax for “setup /m:RecoverServer” switch. If you need to change the target directory the proper syntax is /t:”D:\Microsoft\Exchange\V14″ or whatever your custom path happens to be.
If you are planning on using the /InstallWindowsComponents switch to save some time with getting your IIS settings just right, make sure you’ve preinstalled the .NET Framework 3.5.1 feature set first.
Don’t forget to preinstall the Office 2010 Filter Packs. You don’t need them to complete the setup, but you will be reminded about them as a requirement.
Make sure you install your remote agent (or whatever components are necessary) for your backup software. Once the Exchange installation is restored, you’ll need to mark your databases as “This database can be overwritten by a restore” so that you can restore the user data.

As always, planning ahead will save you in times of trouble. Happy disaster recovery planning (and testing)!

Start Marking Your Calendar for 2012 Events!

If you like to fill up your calendar with events geared toward the tech community or you’ve got some training budget lined up for 2012, look no further than some of these tried and true events that are coming up in the first half of this year. Prices vary from free to several thousand, depending on your travel needs.

Pacific IT Professionals in LA (1/24, Santa Monica, CA) – Meeting the 4th Tuesday of every month, the LA chapter of PacITPros never ceases to bring lively discussions to the table. This month, Joey Snow will be speaking on Windows 2008 R2 Migration Tools. Join and attend for free!

She’s Geeky (1/27 – 1/29, Mountain View, CA) – Back in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, She’s Geeky is a great way to meet new faces in the STEM fields. This unConference give you a chance to learn from a collection of really smart women and practice your skills of leading a group session yourself if you’ve got a topic you’d like to share.

San Jose Tech-Security Conference (2/2, Santa Clara, CA) – I enjoyed this low cost security centered event last year when there was one held in San Francisco. This event is held in various locations during the year. So if the Bay Area isn’t your home base, you are likely to find another date in your area!

Pacific IT Professionals in SF (2/7, San Francisco, CA) – Meeting the 1st Tuesday of every month, PacITPros has been bringing IT Pros together for over 20 years.

RSA Conference (2/27 – 3/2, San Francisco, CA) – A San Francisco staple, RSA never fails to disappoint. Even if you can only swing an Expo Plus pass, you’ll have access to lots of informative keynotes and the large expo hall.

Security B-Sides (2/27 – 2/28, San Francisco, CA) – A free security event hosted near the Moscone center earlier in the same week of the RSA conference. A great way to complement your RSA Expo Pass!

TechDays SF (3/22 – 3/23, San Francisco, CA) – A two day event with over three dozen sessions planned covering a variety of tech topics of interest to IT Professionals.

Microsoft Management Summit (4/16 – 4/20, Las Vegas, NV) – Geared toward managing your Microsoft enterprise, MMS brings you the latest technical training for desktop and device management as well as data center and cloud technology solutions.

Microsoft TechEd (6/11 – 6/14, Orlando, FL) – As a 7 or 8 year alumni of TechEd, I always look forward to this conference. The expo hall and Technical Learning Center always provides opportunities to connect to vendors and Microsoft employees. Community areas bring MVPs, User Groups and other IT Pros together. And don’t forget the crazy number of sessions you can choose from.

Welcome 2012! Now Start Planning for 2013 and Beyond.

As you file away your planner for 2011 and crack open that fresh page to January 2012, you might want to highlight a few of these special dates for the future. Here are some upcoming “end of life” dates for some Microsoft products you might still have floating around on your network. Some will be supported for several more years, but it never hurts to keep your eye on the horizon.

These dates are the end of support life for the product as a whole, so start thinking about your budget cycles and internal support needs for the next few years.