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 ...

Windows Deployment Services has a long-standing tradition of being part of the Windows Server Operating System. What used to be Remote Installation Services (RIS), became Windows Deployment Services (WDS) in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Windows Deployment Services (WDS) has ties to Active Directory, as I’ve blogged about earlier. In ...

When your organization is looking to implement Windows Server 2012-based Domain Controllers, your Active Directory environment needs to meet certain requirements. Two of these requirements are the domain functional level and forest functional level. In this blogpost I’ll explain the required domain and forest functional levels for the specific ...

A lot of people have an opinion on the Offline Domain Join (ODJ) functionality in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 Active Directory, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but sometimes fact checking is useful for a discussion. To this point, I have captured the top 5 myths on ODJ from discussions ...

When you build test environments regularly, at some point you’ll want to fill your Active Directory quickly. If, for instance, you have a data set with Organizational Units (OUs), user accounts and groups, you’ll want to quickly import this data. If, on the other hand, in your business you’re allowed to use the user information from a production ...

Windows 8 offers many new  features, compared to Windows XP, Windows Vista and even Windows 7. Some of these features are fantastic, but come with a top of the bill hardware price tag. In this blogpost I’ll explain why you’ll need to scour the specifications of your hardware components for these five acronyms: Note: Of course, ...

Windows 8 offers many advantages compared to Windows XP, Windows Vista and even Windows 7. However, to take full advantage of all the new features in Windows 8, the hardware you run it on needs to be equipped with specific hardware. The list below details the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 8-powered desktops, notebooks and tablets in ...

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 ...

It’s never been easier to install pre-release versions of Windows and Windows Server, then with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Downloadable ISO files were abundant and could be used for virtual machines on all major virtualization platforms, ISO files could be burned with a built-in tool in the previous version of Windows (Windows 7) and the ...

Microsoft introduced KnowledgeBase article 2738697 with the title ''The server is not operational'' domain controller configuration error when you configure a server by using Server Manager. Alternatively, they could’ve named this KnowledgeBase article Why you need to domain join proposed Replica Domain Controllers first in Active Directory in ...