If  you were waiting to get your hand on the CTP of Microsoft Security Compliance Manager v2 after I wet your appetite in my previous blog post.  I am happy to report that it is now avaialbe for download and the instructions to download i can be found at http://blogs.technet.com/b/secguide/archive/2011/03/10/scm-v2-ctp-available-to-download.aspx In case you did miss my previous post about the…

Last week Microsoft held its annual MVP Summit where it invites all the MVP’s in the world to their campus in Redmond to talk about… Stuff… This year 6 of the 10 Group Policy MVP’s in the world made it to the event where we meet up and talked about Group Policy and all sorts of other topics. Sorry to…

If you have anything to do with Group Policy and/or security in your organisation you have probably already taken a look at Microsoft Security Compliance Manager tool. This tool simply put is an repository of security templates with a lot of additional information that can be applied to organisation to maintain security of your system in accordance with recommend practices from…

I mentioned last week a few new Group Policy related Knowledge base articles that were just released / updated. Well Scott Goad from one of my favourite blogs (Ask the Directory Service Team) just published a round up of all the Active Directory KB articles from 6th Feb to 19th Feb . So for your convenience I have extracted the…

Update: Now that I have installed the final version of IE9 on 6 computers 2 of them needed to rebook so it would seem that it may or may not require a reboot. This seems to be dependent on what application you are running at the time. Therefore it would still be prudent to plan for a reboot but not…

Microsoft today  announced (after what seems to be a very long time) they have RTM’d Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and it will be released to the public on February 22nd. Update: Service Pack 1 is now available for download for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Previously I had listed the hotfixes in the beta version…

Microsoft today released the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate to the public for testing at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ . This new browser is the cleanest, fastest, most secure, standards compliant browser that Microsoft (and anyone else) has ever released. If you have using IE9 in your organisation (and you probably are) they you need to take a serious look a upgrading to…

Microsoft have recently released a couple of hotfixes relating to Group Policy. As you are probably aware there are a number of Group Policy related hotfixes in Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 which is about to be released (on Feb 22nd 2011) however these two particular patches are listed as being required even for Service…