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Kevin Remde's IT Pro WebLog

Breaking News: Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) is releasedMarch 4

“FIM 2010?  Is that a new product?”

In name, yes.  But “FIM has evolved from Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007, which was previously Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003, which originated from Microsoft Metadirectory Services (MMS).” 

“Wait.. Who are you quoting there?”

I’m quoting Alan Le Marquand and his very informative blog post about the release. 

“So, FIM 2010 is an identity manager?”

As the name implies.. yep.  Some organizations (you know who you are) have more than one directory of user accounts to manage.  That’s tricky.. creating them for new employees, keeping them in sync, making sure they’re all disabled or deleted in a timely manner if the employee leaves, etc.  And add to that the prospect of managing certificates, or even just the upkeep o

Questions (and answers) from our Omaha TechNet EventMarch 4

We had a great time in Omaha!  Thanks to all of you that came to our TechNet Event last Thursday. 

As usual, I had a few questions that I wanted to find the answer to so that I could put them here in my blog.  Here they are:

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“In Windows Azure you say that the fabric controller watches for what servers are running, and can recover a role instance if it sees that the server is down.   But what assurance do we have that the fabric controller won’t go down?”

I am told that you can check the XML file and look for the setting:  <disk_merge_pending type="bool">False</disk_merge_pending>

Beyond that I wasn’t given any details.  I hope that helps.

“I had a virtual machine with a hard disk on a running server t

RTW: Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer and the Exchange Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0March 4

A couple of new tools are available for those of you either in the planning stages of an Exchange 2010 deployment, or looking to verify the configuration of your Exchange organization’s configuration:

Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer - Brief Description

The Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer performs an overall topology readiness scan of your environment and provides you with a list of decisions that need to be made before you deploy Exchange Server 2010.

Get the Pre-Deployment Analyzer HERE.

Overview

“You can use the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer to perform an overall topology readiness scan of your environment. When you run the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer, it provides a detailed report that will alert you if there are any issues within your organization, which could pr

If you can read this, it wasn’t you!February 25

Have you heard of “Botnets”?

“You mean those legions of computers that are being controlled by criminals because they’re running malware that their owners don’t even know about; perhaps to use them to send spam e-mail?”

Exactly.  And if you’re reading this post right now, you can breathe a little easier knowing that you aren’t currently operating on behalf of a particularly nasty network of infected computers.**  This week Microsoft petitioned for and received the ability to block the access to several domains that are listed as known sites working on behalf of the criminals involved in the “Waledac" botnet. 

This blog post spells out what we did:

“The takedown of the Waledac botnet that Microsoft executed this week – known internally as “Operation b49” – was the result of months of investigation and the innovative application of a tried and true legal strategy. One of t

Do your kids know what YOU did today?February 24

As a parent of four (count ‘em!  4) kids, three of whom are in High School or College, I think it’s great when someone provides easy-to-use resources for young adults to help them figure out what they want to do with their working lives in the near future.  So I’m thrilled to see this really well-done “S2B Career Streams” site go live.

“S2B?”

That’s “Student-to-Business”.  The idea is to address the fact that students have a lot of questions about what sorts of jobs are available in the Computer Sciences.  So we want to make it easy for them to find out more about what kinds of jobs are out there.

Here’s a portion of the blurb I received in e-mail about it:

It’s hard for students