Microsoft Montage is a web-based application that takes your search terms and transforms them into a magazine-style page. The web application came out of Microsoft’s Fuse Labs and went live in the middle of November. Montage pulls information from Bing including news, images, twitter trends, maps, and videos. It also lets you customize your content by pulling information from an RSS feed, twitter account, or images and video from a specific URL.

Renaming computers is not a tough task since you have joined one to a domain, it can be handled easily from the GUI, but domain controllers are something more sensible, especially when renaming them. When you rename a domain controller, you must ensure that there will be no interruption in the ability of clients to locate or authenticate to the renamed domain controller, except when the domain controller is restarted.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 offers you several tools to install or remove roles, roles services and features from your server. I want to expose the use of two of them; the oldest one Server Manager command-line and the Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Server Manager that is available on the most recent edition of Microsoft’s server operative system. First of all you need to know that Microsoft has deprecated the first one on Windows Server 2008 R2 edition because Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Server Manager offer some significant advantages:

When dealing with Windows deployments on large complex environments, tools like Windows Automated Kit (AIK), Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and Microsoft Deployment Tools (MDT) should be part of your basic toolkit. If you have dealt with that, you should know that boot.WIM images doesn’t have all necessary drivers to let Microsoft Windows Setup do its job and deploy the configured installation image. If you fall into this situation the message below will pop-up on your screen:

These days I’m dealing with Windows Deployment Services for Windows server 2008. We need to migrate near 300 desktops and laptops to Windows 7. We are migrating from Windows XP and this doesn’t allow us to directly upgrade. We need to re-deploy Windows on every single computer in our environment. On TechNet’s Windows 7 Upgrade and Migration Guide you can read:_ “The Upgrade option is available in Windows 7 Setup for some computers running Windows Vista®, but it is not available for Windows XP”_

According to Microsoft, you cannot install native 64-bit Office 2010 on computers that have 32-bit Office applications and third-party add-ins installed. You must uninstall the 32-bit Office applications and add-ins before you can install 64-bit Office 2010. If you have 32-bit third-party Office applications and add-ins that are required for users, you can install the default option, which is 32-bit Office 2010 (WOW64 installation) on computers that run supported 64-bit editions of Windows.

Continuing with that post, and hoping that you have enjoyed the previous part, today I’m writing about the last 3 mandatory points to step in after its installation (please note that all actions below require you to be logged as Administrator or with enough admin rights). Get the most of your OS (Update Windows) Although Windows 7 is a recent operating system, Microsoft has already distributed approximately 100 updates for it.

Windows 7 is, for most people, the best operating system launched by Microsoft in the last years. Launched October 22nd of 2009, has increased by 23% the benefits of Microsoft Windows division from last year. Have sold 175 million copies, which represents about 639,000 every day (7 copies per second). Although to a lesser extent, Windows 7 also requires careful attention after installation. So, here you have 6 mandatory points to step in after its installation (please note that all actions below require you to be logged as Administrator or with enough admin rights).

Distributed File System (DFS) is a technology introduced by Microsoft as add-on on Windows NT 4.1 and then included as standard component on all Windows 2000 server editions. It is a set of client and server services that allow an organization using Microsoft Windows servers to organize many distributed SMB file shares into a distributed file system. DFS provides location transparency and redundancy to improve data availability in the face of failure or heavy load by allowing shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, or DFS root.

Shadow Copy (or Volume Snapshot Service, VSS) is a technology that was initially introduced on Windows XP to let NTBackup tool to take non-persistent snapshots of application locked files to get them backed up. Creation of persistent snapshots (the ones not being deleted after a reboot) was introduced with Windows Server 2003 and used to create periodic incremental snapshots of data or deltas (differences) of changed files over time, allowing to store up to 64 snapshots.