Happy new year everybody! We are starting 2011 battling with Windows Deployment Services, Windows 7 and the Out Of the Box Experience (OOBE); and what an experience!. Just after preparing our image and capturing it we are not able to log in anymore; apparently something has went wrong during the system prepare process and OOBE is unable to finish computer’s setup. A message stating Windows could not finish configuring the system.

If you have some time don’t miss two interesting tools from Microsoft. Deep Zoom is an implementation of the open source technology, provided by Microsoft, for use in for image viewing applications. It allows users to pan around and zoom in a large, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed and/or only at the resolution it is displayed at.

One of the most attractive data retention features that Microsoft has released with Microsoft Exchange 2010 has been named Personal Archives. It has been designed to regain control over archived mail inside an organization. How? allowing users to store messages in an archive mailbox accessible through Microsoft Office 2010 or Microsoft Office Outlook Web App. So, Microsoft has decided to set expiration date for Personal Storage Table (.pst) files because Personal Archives lets reduce unmanaged files, decrease .

Did you know that Microsoft is offering through MSDN a series of free virtual labs? Quickly evaluate products through a series of guided, hands-on labs which can be completed in 90 minutes or less. The best part is, the MSDN Virtual Labs don’t require any installation and are available to you immediately for free. You just need to register with a Windows Live ID account. You have a quite interesting wide range of possibilities:

These days we’ve been dealing with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 (we are practicing for 71-664: TS: Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Configuring beta exam). We are trying to deploy it on a single server with other Microsoft products to see possible compatibility issues and this raised when installing it on a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller. We got stacked on the Microsoft SQL Express 2008 portion that installs the database engine and instance where the Central Management Store database should be located (holds user data for all Enterprise Edition servers within a pool).

Oh, oh, oh Merry Christmas !… Today we will see the most basic installation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Due infrastructure limitations and since this server is being build for third party product testing purposes, we will run our installation on a domain controller . Let me say, that this is not supported by Microsoft as it can be read on Exchange 2010 System Requirements.

Microsoft has released exam 71-169 TS: Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, Configuring on its Beta stage for those IT professionals whom would like to take it at no cost. Registration period started December 13th and beta exam period will run from December 22nd, 2011 to January 14th, 2011. If the beta exam is passed, the exam credit will be added to candidate’s transcript and he will not need to take the exam in its released form.

Microsoft has recently released the new Windows Live Plug-ins website where tons of existing and new plug-ins can be downloaded for free. Windows Live Writer, has the biggest repository with more than 177 plug-ins available for download. Photo Gallery and Movie Maker have some as well. Don’t miss the opportunity to improve your favorite blogging tool with some capabilities at no cost !! Check it on the link below: Windows Live Plug-ins

In the past I have exposed how to deal with DFS service, moving replicated folders. Today I want to expose how manually decommission a namespace root server when it is no longer available. In our case it has been due a renaming process that we’ve lost contact with the server, and consequently we have not been able to correctly disable/delete it from the DFS management console. When the DFS namespace servers cannot be contacted your last chance is to remove manually the namespace server; replacing it or re-adding it with correct data.

Every company with branch offices should consider the use of DFS (replicated or not) to maintain a consistent shares structure and data availability across all locations. With DFS Namespaces technology, you can group shared folders located on different servers by transparently connecting them to one or more namespaces. That namespaces are hosted on namespace servers, usually member servers or domain controllers. Today I’ve searched around trying to get some guidance with Event ID 4098 combined with error code 0x80070034 You were not connected because a duplicate name exists on the network.