As you might be aware, every Microsoft server product has the requirement to be manageable through PowerShell and System Center. The PowerShell requirement is formulated as part of the Common Engineering Criteria (CEC). With PowerShell available as a version 3 product (and part of Windows Server 2012) it’s time to see how the teams, responsible ...

Today, Microsoft has released a document, detailing the Best Practices for Securing Active Directory Domain Services. The document contains 22 best practice recommendations to assist organizations in enhancing the security of their Active Directory installations. By implementing these recommendations, organizations will be able to identify and ...

In the past years, I’ve found many systems and many errors. Today, I’m sharing behavior in Microsoft Windows Server that had me frown and chuckle. A bug in Active Directory code I’ve been grateful for, since it illustrates the nature of software. Note: This behavior has not been publicized in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase (yet). In the ...

On October 6, 2011 I wrote about the updated Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center. Then, it was updated to version 6.0.7670.0. Today, I want to point you to another big update for the Active Directory Domain Services Management Pack for System Center: the 6.0.8070.0 update About System Center Operations Manager With ...

In many organizations, Active Directory is the identity and access corner stone to their networking environments. No wonder then, organizations want extended control and auditing on admins and their whereabouts. Many 3rd party solutions exist to help organizations achieve these goals, but most of them rely on a system where Domain Controllers ...

I’ve written before on Active Directory-based Activation. This new activation method allows domain-joined Windows 8 clients and Windows Server 2012-based member servers to be activated and deactivated automatically based on their domain membership. I’m very fond of this feature. However, for many enterprise organizations, Active Directory-based ...

For 84% of all organizations, Active Directory is the cornerstone of their networking infrastructure. Heavy investments in Active Directory technologies have enabled them to achieve authentication, authorization, auditing and centralized management goals, by leveraging Domain Controllers, PKI, Rights Management Services, Federation and Group ...

Below are the Active Directory-related KnowledgeBase articles, released and updated in between March 1 2012 and March 31 2012:    New KnowledgeBase articles 2680976 Troubleshooting Active Directory operations that fail with error - 8204 ERROR_DS_NO_SUCH_OBJECT As the title suggests, Error 8240 (0x2030) means ...

With the release of System Center 2012, admins at large organization can now take advantage of the many monitoring, alerting, backup, restore, automation and remediation capabilities of this new suite. The advanced automation capabilities in System Center are delivered through System Center Orchestrator. You might know this product as Opalis, the ...

Five months ago, I wrote a blogpost on the latest update on the System Center Active Directory Monitoring Pack (version 6.0.7670.0). Today, hot on the heels of the System Center 2012 release, I’m going to tell you about an update on that release. (version 6.0.7822.0) About System Center Operations Manager With Microsoft System Center ...