This is, as with many of my other posts, mainly a reminder to myself to remember something cool I once stumbled across. More than once I have had to search high and low to remember this site, it is cool but not something you need every day. This site offers many different server, user and other management solutions, common for all is that they are integrated as webserver services – thus you can delegate management (Provision) assignments (server management, user management, self service and what not) to AD users without escalating their AD rights..  An example, you can assign “Joe the plumber” (a regular Domain User) rights to reset passwords for all the other Plumbers in his department – thus freeing help-desk personnel to do more important assignments. How it works, well it’s fairly simple actually – the solution/product run on a web-server, here a service account has “Domain Admin” rights (or lower if required) and can thus perform the various tasks that users ask it to do via the web-interface – the solution/product (web-application) then manages who can do what and furthermore logs all that is done and by whom. The site offer several 30 day free evaluation versions some of which will even work as free versions (limitations apply) after the 30 days. The solutions are used by numerous large companies (NASA, Sony and GE Capital just to mention a few) so it cannot be completely off. See more here; http://www.manageengine.com/products/ad-manager/index.html Other tools in the same product range; http://www.quest.com/active-directory/ A YouTube web-cast of Quest’s solution (1 hour); A YouTube video intro to AD Manager Plus (not super good nor official, but it may give you some idea); Microsoft is also about to release solutions that can perform some of these tasks; http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager/sm-end-user.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials/sce-overview.aspx

I just stumbled across this nice little free util, it’s sort of a taskmanager for your Hyper-V server..

Cool it’s free, however I’m slightly sceptical when it comes to the performance it reports – I feel my server should be under a more heavy load – but hey I’ll give it a spin and see how I like it.

get it here;
http://www.manageengine.com/free-hyperv-performance-monitor/download.html

I have been trying to recall the name of this little addon to Outlook for ages now, a few of my friends really need this to keep a valid backup of their Outlook PST file..  Fianlly I rediscovered it..

The problem is that some use online backup services, and once they start windows they launch Outlook – subsequently the online backup is unable to ‘lock’ their PST file and their Outlook data file newer gets backed up..

This little add on will a specified intervals create a backup copy which will obviously not be ‘locked’ as an open file and can thus be backed up without issues.

Hopefully the Outlook 2010 version will become available soon?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8b081f3a-b7d0-4b16-b8af-5a6322f4fd01

By applying the fix below it should be possible to make the older versions work with Outlook 2010;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2030523