SYNACK

They still don't care enough about NZ to offer the same deal so I don't care enough about them to bother finding out more about them. Ruckus all the way!!! you get your very own controller to which means your not crippled by loosing an internet connection.

I have been reasonably quiet about this but I thought I should post it for informative purposes. The NZ MoE has in their limitless stupidity decided to take all the schools pay rolls stuff off the NZ company that was managing it fine and invested millions and years in some dirty cloud application built by a dodgey Australian company that even the Australian's won't use. I imagine that several of the MoE people ended up with new golf clubs or cars to make that happen. At any rate after four to five years of development and a trial run where they admitted to not listening to any of the feedback they launched it. After several months of it actually running their 'software' is still managing to pay people in lots of minutes instead of hours, ie. 7 minutes a day or days instead of hours. This epic mess up is spectacular from a software point of view in that they must have actually written people's jobs into the software in order to stuff up this badly. There are situations where reliving teachers are being paied $10k for a days work and cleaners are being paid $3.50 for a week. That is if they pay them at all, each week there can be 20% or more of the staff of each and every school that is paid wrongly or not at all. Couple this with hour wait times to call their support desk to get things sorted and their habit of storing things like sick leave in two separate places. Problem reports that get sent from CMS to CMS to the point that you get up to five different case numbers which is the only information they provide as to what it is in relation to. They also continuously loose or simply don't read email and will reply to an email (with the documents still attached) requesting those same documents. Finding a single fault with those documents, printing them out and posting them back six weeks later with a post-it note on it requesting a slightly different number. It is stunningly epicly bad and out idiot government is stuck in a ten year contract with these dropkicks. They have been largely panned in the NZ media but I think they actually need to be shamed in the international media to actually do something, this farce has been on going for more than three months. The system at fault is http://www.novopay.govt.nz/default.aspx The idiots who made it are Talent2 Global Here are some of the stories about it's fail: No-pay Novopay has to front up » The Gisborne Herald | Gisborne's latest News, Sport, Family Notices, Photos and Events Novopay: No compensation, more errors - National - NZ Herald News Talent2 blames Novopay Teacher Pay Problems On Teething... | Stuff.co.nz Novopay | The National Business Review Anyone not in NZ count yourselves lucky that your pay is not tied up in this system and that you don't have to try and sweep up the pieces after the weekly cataclysm.

Thanks, I added the remaining slides that I had access to The event description was here https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032541112&flag=3

Session 4 Anywhere Productivity Deck.pptx Session 5 Windows 8 Apps Deck.pptx Session 6 Recovery and Security Deck.pptx Session 7 Closing Deck.pptx

Well the day rapped up at about 4:30 with question time and some messing about with some Surface RT devices and a Surface Pro. I did like the RT, very polished and robust, that camera perspective stuff is really cool, the xbox controller integration is quite cool too. The Pro was impressive but a bit fat and heavy for my liking. The type cover was very nice and the touch cover was cool but I was not too sure about the fabric texture of it, I'm sure I could get used to it but it was a bit rough. Very responsive though. Throughout the devices performed well even while connected to the projector. I'm still in contact with the presenter about the options to deploy Metro apps and layouts and will post back any extra information I get.

Windows Intune - 20GB of Asure storage for your Apps, can manage Windows RT, iOS and Android. Uses built in management tools in iOS, ActiveSync hooks in Android and installable clients for older desktop OSs. Pushes Corporate App Portal to phones, can push iOS apps. Intune up to v4, two updates a year, subscription based. Aucklands Internet is still rubbish, one room of 40 PCs doing low level RDP is too much for it Windows2Go demonstration: Password on stick, DirectAccess and old laptop = work PC. Mounts with local drive offline to keep dodgyness off work images. Windows Store disabled by default as you only get 5 device licences for metro apps Tollerant to the key being pulled out, will pause for 60 seconds and shutdown if it is not put back in to the same port. Session 3 Access to Windows Deck.pptx Hyper-V only checks for SLAT when it is first installed. Hyper-V for Pro upwards http://companystore.codeplex.com - easy sideloading. Windows RT cursor does not flash because it messes with the ARM tick clock, supports multifactor auth, remoteapp, SSL VPN etc.

The answer was, as long as there is demand, about a third of the market is still 32bit and the new slates using the Atom chipsets are all 32bit so for the foreseeable future so as not to shoot themselves in the foot. The features like DirectAccess are considered domain features as you need to be connected to the domain to use them, they are mostly partitioned like that - with only a little saleing on top (my view). Probably yes, they are working a lot on the inplace upgrade method so an upgrade is as simple as a patch so Blue would be a downloadable thing that could either upgrade or install but this is not entirely clear yet. Unknown, apparently there has been some playing around with that but no clear indication of if and when was given.

Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 do not yet share the same store but they are working on it, it is apparently on it's way. Intermission: Food was alright muffins, fruit kebabs and bacon and egg wrap segments with inedible string. Session 2 Deployment Deck.pptx Infrastructure prep: Metro store apps does not support WPAD, needs to be done differently (expansion to come hopefully) Windows 8 KMS is stored in Server 2012 AD removing the need for a separate KMS server and infrastructure. SCCM2007 won't do Win8 which makes coexistence with older infrastructures difficult, 7 and 8 work well together though. 8 needs SCCM 2012 SP1. There will be a checklist from MS of infrastructure steps to support it released eventually. Windows ADK for deployment stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/installation/downloads/Pages/Windows-8-ADK.aspx#fbid=TOCjn66z061 - one of the tools can moniter sites users go to for compatibility. MDT 2012 Update 1 is the necessary MDT for 8. Interesting Quote: 'Users are smarter that you think they are' - oh the stories which disprove that. The USMT now just marks the areas where documents are so it does not have to copy it off to do the upgrade making it stupidly quicker. (only 7 to 8, uses hardlinks, only works with standard image and no platform change so x64 to x64) There will no longer be service packs... not for 8 or 2012 or any of the newer ones. In place upgrades will be more common and easier, feeds into the Windows Blue idea, yearly new OS with no app breakage etc. New WinPE4 makes imaging faster, even using MDT2012 Update one, apparently takes image time for a 2GB image from 15min down to 10min. Apparently 40% improvement even with old images. Deploy without decrypting, ie nuking over a bitlocker install it can keep the encryption on from 7 through an upgrade to 8. (MDT feature) PE4 supports UEFI. UEFI only supports FAT32 so 4GB file limits, this means splitting WIMs if using a basic single partition USB key. Boot logos, the Windows one is replaced by the vendor logo grabbed from UEFI so that the vendors were happy, W8 certified machines needed to post within 2 seconds or four with a magnetic disk, this wound up the vendors hence persisting their logo through so they could advertise longer without increasing boot time and making OEMs unhappy. I have to say that paying attention to EduGeek has meant that I knew more than half of this stuff before showing up. Sysprep kills off any metro apps when it is run, they also disappear when going Windows2Go. Single instance storage for metro apps but availability is handled by a certificate which is per user. Provisioning is pushing apps via MDT, up to 24 apps as part of autoattend.xml to sideload, you can control their position on the start screen. Is as part of image. Sideload through Intune, SCCM, EnterpriseStore (codeplex). Sideloading dev keys only last for 30 days and apps sideloaded that way stop working after that time. Enterprise comes with it though as part of SA so with a schools agreement and x86 tablets you're golden. UEFI uses GPT, unlimited partitions, supports both 32 and 64 bit but not both on the same hardware, it does not use BCD, that is stored in the UEFI. By default there are four partitions WinRE, system, MSR and Windows. Again boot only happens off a FAT volume, the MSR which just had a basic bootloader. LUNCH!!! Got a voucher to choose where to eat within a block - sweet.

Here are the first two slideshows: Session 0 Opening Deck.pptx Session 1 Overview Deck.pptx No questions yet? I'm surprised. Apparently there are ways to have metro reset and to define how it shows up the first time, I'm hanging out for that They are apparently working on something for kiosk type operation, in other words making it remotely bearable for a network. No backup in Windows 8, do have file history, per file automated backup, can point to a network location or external media, still works on a time basis rather than on write. Full image backup they recommend imagex. File history is not on by default but is configurable by GPO. Even does it offline and caches for when it is back online with the backup location. Storage Spaces, virtualised storage so you can pool a bunch of drives, you can even choose to add mirroring all under a combined space. This feature is included in Server 2012 as well but with less UI.

Proceedings were halted for an impromptu firedrill brought to us by the H&S Nazis from 45 Queen St. Apparently there was a touch version of Windows 3.11, who knew.

Bitlocker only encrypts the sections that are written to then does the empty sections in the background unlike 7 that does the whole lot in one long go. Group policy is apparently more able to apply on the fly rather than just at logon and startup. 8 Pro has bitlocker 8 Enterprise is needed for Branchcache and DirectAccess.

First post for this thread, basically I'm at a MS event all about Windows 8 and will try to post stuff I find valuable to this thread as I go. If anyone has any questions they want asked I'll see if I can slot them in. Will post as many of the PowerPoints as I am able.

Will it run windows backup, that is usually a good test of it's actual filesystem support. The other thing is its support for smb2 and now smb3 so that you don't have to switch off all the client side security like it's 1998. If your actually using many of the modern features many nas units simply won't cut it as they rely on linux implementations of old protocols. This is why I prefer iscsi block and leaving the complicated stuff to a windows server that understands it all natively, it can end up saving a lot of hassel.

It is about the same, they are both unsubstantiated claims but with Macs this is demonstratinly false. As far as I know they have not built this thing yet.

Hey, don't mock my ping time, that's what I used to get to the old edugeek server.

In place upgrade then transfer maybe

That and the control rods did not go all the way down so could not slow a cascading reaction.

Exchange dropped it as their method was resource heavy, suprise, suprise from the Exchange team. They might pick it up if the server os or more importantly the sql team do a better job of it.

Tkip is less secure, heavier on waps as it is usually not hardware accellerated and is more of a hack of 11g rather than fully supported. I don't think it is even supported under n speeds. AES is better to use if at all possible.

Comparatively a coal plant is exploding all the time slowly throughout its lifespan spewing radiation and co2. A nuclear plant just goes all at once if at all. Micro reactors based on newer tech are quicker to build, safer and more efficient. Politics will sabotage progress as always though.

They take less of a cut than Apple, it could be worse.

You still get updates through the free silver service.

The problem with nuclear power is he tech they are using is from the 50s. More modern methods are safer and less wassteful.

Wind up the security as high as it will go on the devices, if needs be have separate SSIDs with different authentication methods so that you can use decent encryption on devices which can. WEP is cracked and will give you comparably little protection, WPA with TKIP is compromisable and anything that supports WPS is compromised. WPA with AES or better WPA2 are alright at this stage. You should probably look at ditching or upgrading stuff that can't support WPA at the least if you want a somewhat decent level of security. If you don't have such skills in house and there is not a suitable person that can get up to speed it may be best to get the people who installed or supplied the wireless gear to come in and help you set it up.

Doubtful, it has a separate KMS just like 2010 so it almost certainly requires a separate reset.