RunAs Radio

SharePoint Document Management Described byEd Musters

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard sat down with Ed Musters to talk about document management in SharePoint. The conversation starts out exploring why SharePoint is used for document management - resisting sending files in email, better security, document control and actually knowing where everything is. Ed describes the challenges of setting up a coherent taxonomy of documents, how everything needs to be tagged and organized in a way that makes it discoverable and controlled. And the same rules apply to outward facing web sites - great taxonomies make sure the right data is shown to the right people! Ultimately, everything is a document.

The Next SQL Server and More with Richard Baumet

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While at DevTeach, Richard chatted with Richard Baumet about his experiences at the 2012 PASS conference, including the sneak peeks at the upcoming version of SQL Server. The conversation largely focuses on how changes in hardware, including faster and more CPU cores, faster and larger memory and storage, ultimately shape how SQL Server works. An exciting time to be a DBA!

Why Data Warehousing Projects Fail with Craig Utley

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While at DevTeach in Toronto, Richard talks to Craig Utley about his experiences building business intelligence systems. The discussion starts out with the concepts of data warehousing, OLAP and business intelligence, and how many business owners get fooled into focusing only on the results of the business intelligence effort without acknowledging the huge body of work that goes into it with ETL, data cleansing and coherency. Craig talks about the right ways to get into a business intelligence project (it's about the business) so that you can avoid the pitfalls that lead to a failed project.

Steve Evans Virtualizes Networks with Hyper-V

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 29 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While at TechDays in San Francisco, Richard sat down with Steve Evans to talk about the new virtual networking features in Server 2012 Hyper-V. The conversation starts with a focus on the challenges of networking in a virtualized world - problems around assigning NICs to individual VMs, dealing with failover, etc. But as Steve describes, once you get to 2012, physical NICs are entirely about bandwidth - teaming as necessary. And the virtual side creates a separate NIC for each role, assigned to VLANs and moving across the collective physical hardware. It takes a lot of planning, but networking has never been more flexible!

Women in IT Panel Discussion at TechDays SF

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While at TechDays SF, Richard moderated a panel on Women in IT. The panelists include Jennelle Crothers, Jessica DeVita, Christa Anderson and CA Callahan. The panel discussed the role of community in engaging more women into IT, finding peer support, and dealing with the various challenges of being a part of a still male-dominated industry. There are a number of questions posed by the audience and the conversation ultimately ends up focusing on getting kids involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at an earlier age.

Mark Minasi Does Science in San Fran

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While in San Francisco at TechDays, Richard runs into Mark and ends up with a recording about their favorite science topics. Not exactly an IT show, but good fun!

Dana Epp Uses the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to Dana Epp about using cloud technology for disaster recovery. Dana digs into Microsoft Azure first, talking about how the new Azure Storage Services and secure connectivity make it much easier to maintain replicas of your virtual machines in Azure, synchronizing only the changes on a regular basis. The conversation also covers some of the Amazon EC2 features available for disaster recovery, as well as focusing on not giving up your responsibilities and an IT Pro - it's still your data and needs protecting, the cloud won't do everything for you! Dana also refers to Scott Guthrie's Blog Post on the new IaaS features of Azure, including even better pricing!

Johan Arwidmark Does Deployment the Right Way

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to Johan Arwidmark about his experiences doing deployment with Windows, using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Configuration Manager and more!

Aidan Finn Does Hyper-V on Windows 8

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard chats with Aidan Finn about Windows 8 Hyper-V Client. With Windows 8, Microsoft brings Hyper-V support to the desktop. Aidan discusses a variety of use cases for Hyper-V on the client, including presentations, testing, security and that darn XP/IE6 app you just can't seem to get rid of. The conversation also digs into the licensing requirements for using Hyper-V on the desktop as well as the differences between Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V on Server 2012.

Ed Horley Builds Private Clouds

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard chats with Ed Horley about something other than IPv6 - building private cloud infrastructure. Ed talks about the innovations happening in the cloud space at the biggest level (large enterprise) and smallest (start ups)... but relatively little in between. The conversation digs into some of the standards emerging such as OpenStack to make utility computing even simpler. Also check out Microsoft's Private Cloud offering which explores the tooling and techniques for getting your own infrastructure more like the cloud.

Brent Ozar Updates Us On SQL Server 2012

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his experiences deploying SQL Server 2012. The conversation digs into the challenges of running SQL 2012 on Windows 2008R2 - and why you'd want to upgrade to SQL 2012 in the first place. For Brent's projects, it came down to utilizing Always On technology, which depends on advanced clustering features that 2008R2 struggles with - so SQL 2012 is best on Server 2012! From there, Brent talks about the impact of the cloud on on-premise servers, the need for better instrumentation and understanding of your data when talking to business. It's a fun time to be a DBA!

Jeff Stokes Checks PC Performance with the ADK

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to PFE Jeff Stokes about the Microsoft Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). The ADK is a web installer that pulls together a bunch of free tools from Microsoft that can help you understand how PCs are performing. Jeff talks about the Assessment Toolkit, which is a small app that can run on a PC and determine problems with drivers such as memory leaks, as well as whether or not a better video card would improve browser performance. Also mentioned in the show is KB 2775511, which is a roll up for 90 hotfixes for Windows 7 SP1 and Server 2008 R2 SP1 that can significantly improve performance and reliability. It's recommended for everyone, but doesn't show up in Windows Update - you have to go get it from the Windows Update Catalog. Finally, the conversation also digs into risk assessments done by PFE, and Jeff brings up a video on the new Risk Assessment As a Service. Check it out!

Nibin PM Virtualizes Domain Controllers

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard chat with PFE Nibin PM from Microsoft Gulf in Kuwait about his work deploying Active Directory domain controllers in virtualized environments. Nibin digs into the history of virtualized domain controllers first, with the biggest caution of all: don't do snapshots of domain controllers! At least, not until Server 2012. The conversation digs into the challenges of Active Directory maintaining synchronization between different domain controllers, how virtualization influences that and ultimately how Server 2012 solves some of these problems. Nibin also recommends checking out the Premier Field Engineering blog as well as the Directory Services blog.

Heath Graves Talks Microsoft Operations Framework

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Heath Graves about the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). MOF is Microsoft's guidance document for IT, covering every day practices and activities, as well as digging into governance, risk and compliance. Heath discusses how his experiences in the Air Force taught him to value clear documentation and procedure to not only get things working right, but to pass that information along to other reliably. Take a look at the Microsoft Operations Framework.

Robert Cain Gets Us Started with Business Intelligence

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to Robert Cain about getting started with business intelligence. The conversation starts out talking about the role of SQL Server, Analysis Service and various tools needed to get business intelligence up and running. Robert discusses using tools like Excel PowerPivot to do rapid prototyping for potential business intelligence solutions versus the big bang approach of building a data warehouse. Thinking about getting your company using business intelligence? Here's a place to start!

Tony Redmond Deploys Exchange 2013

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 EDT

While at the MVP Summit, Richard chats with Tony Redmond about his experiences with Exchange 2013 so far. Exchange 2013 shipped in October of 2012, but as of mid-February, could only be deployed in greenfield scenarios - to get to co-existence with Exchange 2007 and 2010, you need current service packs as well as a yet-to-be-released cumulative update to Exchange 2013. Tony talks about how the interplay between Exchange 2013, Sharepoint 2013, Office 2013 and Lync offer awesome features, but at the expense of some additional deployment and configuration challenges. And don't forget about the cloud! Exchange 2013 is being rolled out to Office 365 as well, which has an impact on the on-premise features also. Awesome discussion about where Exchange is going!

Robert Smith Optimize for VDI

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard chats with Robert Smith about his experiences tuning Windows to operate with Virtualized Desktops. Robert starts out with dealing with boot times with Windows 7 - some customers were waiting up to ten minutes to boot! Careful boot log analysis finds answers. The conversation also digs into the whole cycle of patching, WSUS, service packs, hot fixes - every time a base image has to change, it impacts users. If you're even thinking about VDI, there's some great tips here!

Dana Epp Hates Passwords

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to Dana Epp about his on-going battles with password security. The conversation digs into various security issues, including public WiFi exploits, rainbow and hash tablets and more. Dana also talks about the rash of account hijacking in 2012 that made a mess of online identities - and the danger of single sign on when that happens. While he's still looking for the perfect solution to not having a password, Dana has a bunch of tips for doing a better job with yours, and your company's security.

Chris Conte Deploys Sharepoint in the Military

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard talks to Chris Conte about his experiences deploying SharePoint into the military. Chris talks about his early days in the Navy as a yeoman, first learning the potential of personal computers to make the work of handling the huge amount of data the military produces easier. The conversation digs into how SharePoint governance is as much a challenge for the military as industry, and how strong metadata infrastructure has made data more findable, understandable and useable. Chris also talks about the concept of 'Responsibility to Share' as opposed to 'Need to Know' - a deep change for the military, but also a huge one to apply to the enterprise. Are you sharing the data you need to share with the people who need to know it? Can SharePoint help?

Benny Lakunishok Tests Storage Performance in Exchange 2010

info@runasradio.com (Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 EDT

Richard chats with Benny Lakunishok about storage performance in Exchange 2010. The new storage systems in Exchange 2010 substantially changed the way Exchange works with storage systems. Benny talks about the surprise of having performance problems with Exchange on SANs because of these changes - Exchange 2010 tends to write much larger blocks of data than older versions. Benny mentions JetStress, a free tool from Microsoft for testing the storage system of an Exchange server before Exchange is deployed on it. It can also be used to test how the system behaves under various failure modes, such as a missing LUN, failed disk or array recovery. Lots to think about for the future of your Exchange infrastructure!