In an era of increasingly concern regarding regulations and their impact in the production environment, auditing is one of the most important topics. And, SQL Server 2008 introduces a new SQL Server Audit feature. This post will not cover all the details of it, but it will give you an opportunity to taste it.

In a very simple way audit is about WHAT to log and WHERE to log. So, with that in mind, let’s define the three most import audit objects in SQL Server 2008:

• Server Audit: defines WHERE the audit data should go. You can choose among file, Windows Security Log, and Windows Application Log.
• Server Audit Specification: defines WHICH server instance actions should be audited.
• Database Audit Specification: defines WHICH database actions should be audited.

Let’s do it!! In this post we will use SQL Server Management Studio to create an example, keep in mind that you can also use Transact-SQL to create these objects.

Let’s start with a new Server Audit:

1. Open SQL Server Management Studio, connect to your server, and expand the Security.
2. Right-click Audits and select New Audit…
3. On Create Audit dialog box (figure 1) note that I have Queue delay is equals to 0, configuring the audit to be synchronous. You can leave the default value of 1000 (1000 milliseconds) for an asynchronous option and to lessen performance impact.
4. Click OK.
5. Right-click the new Audit object and Enable it.

Now that we know where the audit data will go, let’s create a Database Audit Specification.

1. Expand the database you want to create an audit specification on.
2. Expand Security and right-click New Database Audit Specification.
3. Configure the Audit to be audit object created previously, and add some actions. (see figure 2)
4. Click OK, and do not forget to enable it.

The steps to create a Server Audit Specification are almost the same.

Now that you have everything configured you can test it. And, to see the audit data you can use:

In a just few steps we created an audit solution. To know more about auditing:

• Join us @ ISACA Philadelphia Chapter this Tuesday, November 11th, 2009.
• Attended one of our classes: 6158 and 6231
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392015.aspx
• Post an question.

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If you didn’t already know, this week is SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. Three of Springhouse’s employees are there learning about all of the new features that will be part of SharePoint 2010.

Some bits and pieces of information from the conference have made their way back to our offices and I wanted to share these with our readers.

So here we go!

Terminology: New Ways to Say the Same Thing

Like with any new release, there comes new lingo, phrases, vocab, terminology, or even headaches (if you want to call it that). So get ready to re-learn some of the terminology used in previous versions of SharePoint and what the new terms will be.

Here are some examples:

Changes to the Farm /Architecture / Taxonomy

• Say goodbye to the SPP. That’s right, no more SSP. Most services are now consumable and sharable across web apps and even across farms.
• There is now something known as the Metadata Terms store. Among other things, this means that a lot of the elements that were stored in galleries (site columns, content types, etc.) are no longer held hostage in their respective site collection silos. Create a site column or a content type once, and then reuse it throughout the entire web app (or farm, depending on your preference and the configuration). Good stuff, huh? This will be a significant timesaver!
• Records management can now happen right in the site collections, with or without a Records Center site. You can classify a document in a library as a “Record” and that will lock down pretty much everything about the document. Members can no longer edit/check-out, etc… You need elevated privileges to “un-classify” a record. Of course there is still a Records Center site template for enterprise scenarios.
• No more performance-based recommendations of <2000 items per list container. Lists and libraries now support tens of millions of items.

Ubiquity: Having a presence everywhere

Wikis are now everywhere, and they’re a pretty far cry from the embarrassment they were in MOSS 2007. As one example, Team Sites now employ a wiki web part on their default landing page. The ability to construct relationships between the wiki pages and elements are now GUI driven. You can still use the double brackets to hyperlink a term, but it immediately brings up a navigation element so that you can browse to other pages, images, or whatever you want to link to.

Ratings are everywhere. Looks like SharePoint is finally bringing in a little more of the social aspect by allowing users to rate items within SharePoint, such as: Document libraries, blog posts, etc. It’s the tried and true 5-star layout that everybody is used to. These ratings then become metadata, obviously, so they can be used as criteria for searches, for workflow actions, etc.

The ribbon is also everywhere. It is contextual, customizable, even removable…but out of the box - it’s there, it’s everywhere!

Tag! Your It! You can tag pretty much anything (documents, blog posts, images, people’s MySite, etc…) Your tags automatically aggregate on your MySite. And yes - there are now OOB tag cloud web parts.

Excel 2010 and Excel Services

• No need to name ranges or define parameters if you want to make areas of the worksheet “editable” in an EWA web part. Plus, in an EWA web part, you can change cell values right in the grid. No more of that parameter box over on the right side of the web part.
• Many of the EWA restrictions from the prior version have been removed (spreadsheets with….. embedded images are ok, query tables are ok, macros are ok, VBA code is OK, etc…)
• Sparklines (little micro charts mainly for trend analysis) and Slicers (yet another filtering option with Excel) are pretty cool. The screen cap below hardly does them justice, but displays a little bit of what they’re about.
• You don’t need a pivot table in order to construct a pivot chart. You can just create a pivot chart straight from the data!

Finding What You Want…Search Improvements

drum roll please……YES! There is now a wildcard search baked in! (Was that cheer louder than when the Phillies made it to the World Series??)

• The relevance algorithm is more configurable in the UI. In other words, you now have a lot more than just keywords, best bets, and site promotion/demotion that you can tweak in order to improve (or wreak havoc upon) your search results.
• There are some aspects of semantic search in the FAST product. Microsoft demoed searching from a dashboard page by moving sliders around inside of a chart web part. Different products (along with their details) would surface below the chart, based on where the sliders were placed. The sliders were ostensibly sending different values (price, reorder levels, etc) to the connected data, and then returning query results based on the filtering. Don’t know if that description makes any sense or not, but it was cool when I saw it

People Search:

•  
  • Phonetic name matching and nickname matching for people search. e.g. “jon coughman” finds “Jonathan kaufman”  “shartam mikellsen” finds “kjartan mikkelsen”
  • Query suggestions mined from search logs
  • Self Search – to drive people to participate content. Vanity search and you have richer options to manage how to improve your personal search profile

Ok, so that’s what we’ve uncovered so far from our travels to Las Vegas and the SharePoint Conference.  I’ll be pulling some additional information together over the next few weeks so stay tuned for more updates!

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Hello Pittsburgh!! Are you ready to get exposed? Check out this upcoming event — SharePoint Exposed — a complimentary live demo of the product by our SharePoint gurus. That’s right, we are bringing our “sold out in Philly” event to Pittsburgh on October 29th.

Learn how SharePoint 2007 can help your organization increase efficiency and productivity!

How would you like to….

• Cut costs directly affecting your bottom line
• Enable your workforce to be more productive
• Allow more content control through your organization
• Transform organizational information into transferable knowledge
• Turn unstructured data into findable usable knowledge
• Connect people with information and expertise
• Streamline business processes
• Allow real time visibility into business critical data

For additional information and to register visit click the button

We also have a Project Server Exposed event the same day.

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Ok Pittsburgh, “yins” got your Steelers now get “Exposed” to Project Server!

Springhouse Education and Consulting Services along with Softmart will be presenting a half-day summit covering MS Project, Project Server 2007 and Portfolio Server.

You will see how to:

• Better forecast and manage cost variances with technology tools
• View and Communicate across project plans, programs and portfolios
• Leverage Microsoft SharePoint Services to manage workflows and collaborate across your Project teams

For additional information and to register visit click the button

We also have a SharePoint 2007 Exposed event the same day.

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So you created an organization chart in Visio using the Organization Chart template. Now the boss needs a spreadsheet of how many people report to each department head. You do not have to recreate the wheel! Visio will do this for you.

There are reports in Visio that export directly to Excel. With no additional data in your organization chart other than the name of the person, you can send this information to Excel.

Go to: Data / Reports….

This displays reports within Visio that are based off the Organization Chart format (or from whatever template your drawing was created).

I selected the Organization Chart Report. It then asks what software you wish to export to. I selected Excel.

(Note: I did hide rows on this report where the Number of direct reports was zero)

Without having to create the spreadsheet on your own, the data was quickly compiled and ready to publish.

If you want to learn some other tips regarding Visio or other topics, Springhouse offers 1 hour free seminars, called ILearn. Go to www.springhouse.com/ilearn to see our current listing of lunch time seminars or browse our website (www.springhouse.com) to see our other training and consulting services.

Hope this blog helped you save some time!

~~~Sheri

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Springhouse is bringing it’s Live Demo of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution to the DC/Reston area in September. This is a full day event that will cover MS Project, Project Server 2007 and Portfolio Server.

Those that attend this event will leave with the understanding of the following:

• Better forecast and manage cost variances with technology tools
• View and Communicate across project plans, programs and portfolios
• Leverage Microsoft SharePoint Services to manage workflows and collaborate across your Project teams

You can learn about this event and other events by visiting Springhouse’s Upcoming Events page. Also, Springhouse offers many courses, both instructor-led and remote learning, on Project Management and PMP Certification. Visit Springhouse.com to learn more about our Project Classes.

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Economy woes effecting your wallet or even your business budgets?

Probably.

Seems like everywhere you look or listen you are learning more about the hardships of business and individuals feeling the effects of a poor economy. Take off the stress of these hardships and read the rest of my post and learn about how Springhouse can help lessen the burden on your wallet, purse and even your corporate training budget. We’re hoping for a WIN-WIN situation!

Introducing Tuesday Take Offs

We started a weekly discount program about a month ago to give our customers and students a little extra OFF the costs of select training classes that we post on our website and link it to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. We then tweet a new URL each Tuesday with a promotion code and a listing of scheduled classes that are guaranteed to run for the next two weeks. You’ll have until Friday (4 days) to register for these select courses to receive up to 20% the listed price. (Promotional code cannot be combined with other promotions, discounts, coupons.) So follow SpringhouseEduc on Twitter or become a fan of Springhouse on Facebook to receive these weekly updates!

Some of the classes we currently have listed this week are MS Office courses (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), a few SharePoint classes and an ITIL class. (I’d post the link but it’s for followers and fans of Springhouse, so become one today!)

Training from your Office or Home

You might be thinking…”well I don’t live near Exton, PA (Philadelphia)“. No worries. There no longer is a need to travel for training, we’ve got you covered there as well via Springhouse CONNECT, our Remote Learning System that connects you via the web and phone to our live classroom training and real instructor. Each of our scheduled classes are eligible for Springhouse CONNECT (space permitting) and you have the option of checking a box to indicate your interest during class registration.

You can learn more and register for a class via Springhouse CONNECT today.

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Well, first let me thank everyone for their support and start by saying I did pass the exam 70-680 Windows 7, Configuring.  I did want to take this chance to discuss my experience with the exam. I had previously written about Exam 70-680 Windows 7 Configuring now available.

To begin with, keep in mind that this exam is intended to be a “full” Windows client software exam, and not just an upgrade from Vista or XP.  Therefore, there is the normal collection of questions that you would expect covering items like sharing permissions, installing printers, etc. and I would say that roughly 70% of the questions on my exam could be researched and answered using study materials for the Windows Vista, Configuring exam 70-620.

As far as Windows 7 specific content; If my test is any indication, you want to be very familiar with Internet Explorer 8.  There were 4 (out of 45) questions dealing with new IE8 security features.  For that I recommend working with IE8 and clicking the help on each feature so that you know you have a strong understanding of what each setting does.

I had 5 questions dealing with migration and 2 questions dealing with using the User State Migration Tool.  However, none of my migration questions involved the new DISM tool. They focused on use of Imagex and Windows PE.  That doesn’t mean that DISM wont be involved on each test but it should tell you that migration will probably be addressed on just about every exam.  A lot of the new features questions were more about concepts than specific files paths. For example, in one question would you make a new applocker rule or use the defaults to solve the situation stated.  But I did have one very precise question regarding configuring Branch Cache using a command prompt command.  I still don’t know where I would have gone to research the answer to that one.  But that type of question is to be expected. Just like the one asking how you view the automatically assigned IPv6 address on a client without using ipconfig.  I did know the answer to that but of course the solution takes about 6 more steps than just using ipconfig.

So overall, I would say to anyone looking to take this exam, grab the Sybex or similar book for the exam 70-620 (Vista) and study it well before navigating through the various web sources and white papers regarding Windows 7 if you are new to IT certifications for MS.  If you are already experienced with client software like Windows XP, you are probably best served by taking a class like the 6291 “Upgrading your IT skills from Win xp to Win 7 Beta”.  We actually offer that class at Springhouse and the content is based on the Beta release but still relevant to the RTM version.  Of course that course will most likely be re-named with the Beta tag removed in the near future.

Based on what I have seen so far from our interaction with the IT community, there is a LOT of interest in fast, early adoption of Windows 7 and if you’re an IT pro looking to increase your marketability, Win7 certification could be a real nice addition to your resume.

Good luck on the exam.

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If you have found this blog post you most likely have been, or are currently in the same situation I have been in numerous times — replying to an email that was sent to me with stationary or background colors. Frustrating to say the least!

What happens if the stationary or background color is a dark blue and your “reply” font color is two shades of blue lighter?  It could be any combination of colors, but this is how I have things set up. So this is what things look like:

So here are three quick and simple steps to remove the background color or stationary on a message you are replying to or forwarding:

1. Select the e-mail message, and then click Reply, Reply to All, or Forward.
2. On the Options tab, in the Themes group, click Page Color.
3. Click No Color.

That should do it for you!

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So yesterday I talked about Outlook Email tips, so I decided there were some interesting things to mention about calendaring.

In the Outlook 2007 Email tips blog post I mentioned how to create an appointment from an email.

Here are some of my favorite calendar tips:

1. If you deal with multiple time zones, you can display a total of 2 time zones when in Day or Week view. Right-click on the times that are displayed, select Change Time Zone. The top half of the window displays your time zone. Click the checkbox Show an additional time zone. Fill in the correct time zone and enter the Label of your choice.

2. If you don’t want to receive meeting request responses (possibly because it is a company wide meeting), on the Meeting tab in the Attendee grouping, click on the Responses button, uncheck Request Responses.

3. Send a reminder of the meeting by opening the original meeting, on the Meeting tab in the Attendee grouping, click on the Message to Attendees button, click on Reply to All with Message.

4. If you don’t want to figure out what the date for next Tuesday is, when selecting the date of the meeting, don’t click the down arrow, just type in the field: “next tuesday”!

press enter and…

Other examples: “tomorrow”, “3 weeks from today”, “one month from today”

5. You want to see the next 3 days, not the entire week nor just one day. In the calendar view on the To Do bar, hold down your mouse click and drag across the number of days you want to view.

6. If you deal with other countries that talk about the 33rd week, you can display the week number on your calendar (it will display on both the To Do bar as well as the month view of your calendar). Click on Tools / Options, click on the Calendar Options button, click the checkbox Show week numbers in the Month View and Date Navigator.

Guess those are my top ones for today. Read some of my other blog posts for other tips regarding Outlook, PowerPoint and Word.

Post some of your favorite tips in the comments section.

Have fun creating appointments and meetings!

Sheri

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