for IT Professionals

Microsoft Skills Week kicks off today and runs through Friday. As part of Skills Week, there will be more than 175 partner-led events in North America designed to help IT professionals and developers develop and validate their skills, network with industry leaders and achieve Microsoft Certified Professional status.

Microsoft Skills Week events will include the following skills development and career assistance programs as part of its offerings:

•Access to Career Assist. An offering through Microsoft Learning’s Second Shot Program. Second Shot gives individuals the opportunity to retake a Microsoft Certified Professional exam for free should they fail. The Career Assist Package gives individuals who register for Second Shot by June 30 the opportunity to purchase a Microsoft E-Learning Collection for $35 (U.S.) — a 90 percent price discount in most cases. The online programs provide specific tools to help users develop technical skills and prepare for Microsoft Certified Professional exams. The discounted collection purchased with the Career Assist Package will be available for 90 days after activation.

•Exam Crams. Quick study sessions to prepare individuals for Microsoft Certification exams.

•Live Meetings. Sessions with Microsoft technical specialists and legendary Microsoft Certified Trainers who will demonstrate technologies to enhance training and answer questions to enable individuals to prepare for examinations.

•Exam discounts. Opportunities to get certified on-site at events while saving up to 40 percent on exam fees.

More information on Microsoft Skills Week and local events is available at http://www.certificationweek.com.

(Info taken from Microsoft Press Release: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-09SkillsWeek09PR.mspx)

If you have been following me on Twitter (which you will see on the bottom right of this page), you will know that I have been attending ComputerWorld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference. (By the way, to see twitter posts relating to the conference, search on #p100)This has been a different kind of conference for me as the focus is the business of IT and not just the technology itself. The conference is in line with my studies, which is working toward a Master’s degree in Management Information Systems.

I have seen some great presentations from various CIO’s. The panel sessions yesterday were very valuable to me. The morning panel session focused on the economy and how it affecting doing IT. I especially like hearing from Viji Murali, Vice President for Information Services and Chief Information Officer, Washington State University and also one of this year’s Premier 100 IT Leaders. Since Ms. Murali is also from a public university, her comments had more relevance to my own environment. It seems that Washington and Florida (as well as most public universities) are all facing the same kind of budget crunch, as state funding dwindles in this economy.

The cloud computing panel yesterday afternoon will be helpful to me as I need to write a paper on the topic for one of my classes. I think the most important point that the panel agreed on was that cloud computing shows promise, but it is still in its embryonic stages. Cloud computing is good for projects that do not require much security.

My highlight from yesterday was a presentation by H. James Dallas. The presentation was entitled “The Need to Lead.” The presentation was Mr. Dallas’ advice to CIO’s based on his years of wisdom. His advice was good for anyone that wants to be a leader in IT.

I just wanted to post a blog update on the conference. I have taken a lot of notes and may try to post some of the ideas that I have recorded in my notes later. I will also publish a summary of today. But for now, back to the conference . . .

I just received the following phishing email message claiming to be from the Windows Live Team. If you receive this email, do not respond to it. Just delete the message.

Some of the indicators that this email is not legitimate include:

• Email address of the sender is a plain hotmail address
• Poor grammar, capitalization, and spacing.
• Asks for  too much personal information (Windows Live would not ask for your password, secret question, secret answer, and date of birth)

Here is the text of the message that I received:

Subject: Important Message Regarding Your Windows Live Account

From: Windows Live Team [zarjah@hotmail.com]

Dear Account User,
              This Email is from Windows Live Team Customer Care and we are sending it to every Windows Live Team Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of  Windows Live Team accounts so we are shutting down some Windows Live Team accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.We are sending you this email to so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account.If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name,password,secret question,secret answer,date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account.Due to the congestion in all Windows Live Team users and removal of all unused Accounts, Windows Live Team will be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.
* YOUR NAME:
*USER NAME:
*E-MAIL ID:
*PASSWORD:
*VERIFY PASSWORD:
*ALTERNATE EMAIL ADDRESS:
*DATE OF BIRTH:
*COUNTRY/TERRITORY:
Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently. We apologize.
Windows Live Team Account Service
Team Admin….

---

Access your email online and on the go with Windows Live Hotmail. Sign up today.

Check out this video from Tina Wood Summerford of Microsoft. This is the first of 30 weekly episodes going into the history of Microsoft.

For an accompanying timeline, you can go to:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/History/The-History-of-Microsoft-1975/

This article will hopefully be the first in a series of book reviews of Microsoft Press titles.

Although I am not a programmer, I was drawn to this title. I manage web sites and I am intrigued by the development process and making the web pages do more than just display static images. The goal of this book is to help aspiring web developers create state of the art web sites.

The book contains thirteen chapters and 304 pages which take the reader from an introduction to the Visual Developer environment to creating a web site, using master pages and server controls, building data driven web sites, and finally deploying the web site. Chapters on HTML, Javascript, and Cascading Style Sheets are also included. Chapters build on previous code examples so you get to see how each part fits in the overall process of creating a web site. Code samples are available on the accompanying CD or web site.

This book is ideal for beginning web developers, hobbyists, or even IT Professionals (like me) wanting to expand their horizons. Since Visual Web Developer Express Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition are a free downloads, the only other thing you would need is access to a Windows server based web site. If you use XP Professional or Vista (Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate editions), Internet Information Services (IIS) is already included and can be used as your local web server for testing.

Just posted on Born to Learn, the blog from the Microsoft Learning Team, Ken Rosen has pre-announced (official announcement on Friday) the Microsoft Career Assist Offer. The offer is an enhancement to the Second Shot offer. The offer is:

Register for Second Shot starting today and get ANY Microsoft Official E-Learning Collection for only $35 USD!

If you are currently registered for the Second Shot promotion, you will have to re-register to be eligible for the E-Learning offer. The $35 will give you 90 days of access to any E-Learning Collection title. Registration is open now. At the end of registration, when you click on the link to get your voucher, the code for the Career Assist Offer will also be displayed.

As an MCT, I have used Microsoft’s E-Learning. I have found it to be a useful tool to prepare for certification and to learn new technology. E-Learning uses a combination of slides, interactive slides, animations, and virtual labs (YES! a real environment) to teach you what you need to know to use the product and pass the certification. The collections are actually groups of courses, so one collection will keep you busy.

On January 8th, PCMag.com reported that Microsoft announced the public beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).  During the same week, Microsoft also released a public beta of Windows 7, Microsoft’s next desktop operating system.

I just received an email today announcing details for Tech Ed 2009, which will be held in Los Angeles on May 11-15. IT Pros and Developers will once again share a one week event (last year IT Pros and Developers had separate weeks). In addition, all attendees will receive a subscription to TechNet Plus! (a $349 value).

Now through December 31st, Microsoft is offering a $300 discount off the regular conference rate. Conference registration after the discount is $1,895.

To get more information, go to the Tech Ed website.

eWeek, Redmond Magazine (and others) announced this week that Microsoft will be discontinuing support for Windows Live One Care. Although not used in the corporate setting, Live One Care is what I have been using it on my personal laptop for the past 15 months. Live One Care will be sold until June 30, 2009.

Microsoft is not out of the Antivirus business, though. By the end of 2009, Microsoft will release a free antivirus program, code named “Morro.” Yes, that is right, free.

My only concern is that my Live One Care subscription ends on August 2009. Will Morro be available? Will I be a sitting duck for viruses until Morro is released? Or will I have to buy antivirus from another vendor?

The Windows Event viewer can sometimes seem like a blessing and a curse. Sometimes the messages can really help you discover what might be going wrong with the operating system or an application. Then Microsoft began to include hyperlinks that would help us get more information on what the error message was trying to tell us. But most times when you clicked on that hyperlink, all that you get is something to the effect of "Sorry. We don’t know what it means either."

So, I have had my share of disappointments with messages from the event viewer.

However, recently, I got an error message in the event viewer that not only told me what had gone wrong (and in language that I could understand), the message actually told me how to fix the problem. And I did not have to go out to a web page either!

The problem that I had been trying to fix was that some computers on my network were not getting the Group Policy firewall settings that I had recently changed. Some computers were getting the settings, but others, even when using a forced GPUPDATE would still not update the firewall setting.

After weeks of searching, I found myself in the place I should have gone to in the beginning - the Windows Event Viewer of one of my Domain Controllers.

In the File Replication Service event viewer there was an error message related to replication of data between my two Domain Controllers. This would explain my situation. Since the two  domain controllers were out of sync, this domain controller had the older firewall settings. Some of my computers were getting their updates using the older settings from this domain controller.

Now normally I would then have to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base to figure out how to solve this. But read the details of this error message (isn’t it pure poetry?)

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    NtFrs
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    13568
Date:        9/12/2008
Time:        3:13:07 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    Domain Controller
Description:
The File Replication Service has detected that the replica set "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)" is in JRNL_WRAP_ERROR.
Replica set name is    : "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)"
Replica root path is   : "c:\windows\sysvol\domain"
Replica root volume is : "\\.\C:"
A Replica set hits JRNL_WRAP_ERROR when the record that it is trying to read from the NTFS USN journal is not found.  This can occur because of one of the following reasons.
[1] Volume "\\.\C:" has been formatted.
[2] The NTFS USN journal on volume "\\.\C:" has been deleted.
[3] The NTFS USN journal on volume "\\.\C:" has been truncated. Chkdsk can truncate the journal if it finds corrupt entries at the end of the journal.
[4] File Replication Service was not running on this computer for a long time.
[5] File Replication Service could not keep up with the rate of Disk IO activity on "\\.\C:".
 Setting the "Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore" registry parameter to 1 will cause the following recovery steps to be taken to automatically recover from this error state.
[1] At the first poll, which will occur in 5 minutes, this computer will be deleted from the replica set. If you do not want to wait 5 minutes, then run "net stop ntfrs" followed by "net start ntfrs" to restart the File Replication Service.
[2] At the poll following the deletion this computer will be re-added to the replica set. The re-addition will trigger a full tree sync for the replica set.
WARNING: During the recovery process data in the replica tree may be unavailable. You should reset the registry parameter described above to 0 to prevent automatic recovery from making the data unexpectedly unavailable if this error condition occurs again.
To change this registry parameter, run regedit.
Click on Start, Run and type regedit.
Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
Click down the key path:
   "System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtFrs\Parameters"
Double click on the value name
   "Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore"
and update the value.
If the value name is not present you may add it with the New->DWORD Value function under the Edit Menu item. Type the value name exactly as shown above.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

It’s just amazing! The solution is in the error message details!

After I performed the steps outlined in the error message, all of my clients now have the proper firewall settings.

This is error documentation at its best!

So, my recommendation from this experience is this. If you are having a problem with Group Policy settings not being applied to all of your clients, check the File Replication Service Event log on all of your domain controllers for any error messages.  Who knows, it may give you the solution to your problems.