One of the common lock down’s that administrator apply to Remote Desktop Services Servers (a.k.a. Terminal Services (a.k.a. Citrix)) is to remove all but the essential control panel items. Previous to Windows 7 you had to specify the .cpl (e.g. timedate.cpl) file name of the control panel item you wanted to show or hide however this has changed in Windows…

When I recently spoke at Infrastructure Saturday I was there I was able to  interview Hugo Ortega the all round table guru (and Tablet MVP) from Tegatech Australia about the the stunning cool Windows 7 tablets that the company he works for makes. What I really liked about this was that this device was a really good example of what…

Ever wanted to know how Group Policy all works… Well Microsoft has a poster for you.!!! Stick it up at your desk at work to impress you co-workers or just stare at it all day trying to figure out what it all means…. For this poster and a whole lot more go to Jorge ‘s Quest For Knowledge!

Microsoft have just announced they will allow small business with less that 10 seats to use Microsoft Security Essentials for free. But even having to configured 10 copies of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) can be a pain so below is a quick tutorial on how you can Group Policy Enable Microsoft Security Essentials. Update: Microsoft have now updated their Microsoft…

Microsoft has now released to the public (download it here) the newest version of Internet Explorer 9 Beta to the public. If you want to know more about the new features in IE9 then i recommend that you check out http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ to see some of the fantastic stuff that this browser enables. If the new functionality alone is not enough…

While I was at TechEd New Zealand 2010 I was asked to step into Jeremy Moskowitz shoes at the last minute as he had been quarantined in hospital with suspected swine flu. So with very little preparation I hobbled together a troubleshooting session based on his slide deck and a few of my own tips… Source http://www.msteched.com/2010/NewZealand/CLI309 Luckily for him…

Ned Pyle from the Active Directory Service team has just done a super post to the Ask the Directory Services Team called Post-Graduate AD Studies. This is a collection of links to pretty much every AD/Group Policy related TechNet article known to man. Definitely a post that you will want to bookmark to use as a reference whenever you have…

In my previous article In this article Best Practice:Active Directory Structure Guidelines – Part 1 I spoke about some of the guidelines I personally use when developing an Active Directory OU structure. In this next part I will discuss some guidelines I use when designing a Group Policy Object infrastructure. Ideally you should make the the Active Directory OU and…