PiqueABoo

In what way? Live@Edu has OLSync albeit with the ILM dependency or is it FIM now? I think the requirement for the latter is annoying and have been tempted to write a Lite AD-> Live@edu syncing app without the passwords, but as you say it's not a huge problem. Hotmail clash: Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't go to work at tax-payers expense in order to spend the day reading some external personal e-mail account, faffing with facebook, miscellaneous forums etc? TLS auth: I think that's a Good Thing[tm]. Here's SMTP Proxy, a little open source app on Codeplex which should solve your problems with any last-century SMTP clients. Don't need and haven't used it though... if you do, then let us know the outcome please.

Think there's a problem with that. I've migrated mailboxes from E2K3 to a tenancy via Live@Edu ECP 'staged' migration (one without any OLSync in sight) talking to local Exchange via the RPC Proxy. IIRC the MS docs said you have to do it differently for Exchange 2010 but the catch was you can't unless you've got Office365 tech rather than Live@Edu. Wasn't really interested in 2K10 though, so may have misinterpreted the MS docs... I've got a few Live@Edu tenancies in a 2K10 EMC. If the above is correct that likely won't help, but I guess it wouldn't take long or hurt to try a move request.

I've used that for long time. Just looked, is it this? get-qadcomputer -IncludeAllProperties | Where-Object { $_.lastlogon -lt (get-date).AddDays(-90) } Saying this feels a little pedantic, I've never used Quest so can't comment on what that does behind the scenes, and it's been ages since I looked at this area so I can't comment on what happens for Server 2008 functional level, but sometimes it's useful to know that... A potential very occasional problem is that the AD attribute "lastLogon" does not replicate. For the most part it doesn't matter, but if that cmdlet only talks to one DC then in some circumstances the lastLogon can be misleading. Comps on site that start up every day might be a day or two out of date, because they logged on to a different DC today. The results for comps that aren't on the network very often can occasionally give a lastLogon that is months older than the value on another machine. If you want the very best result you need to query all DCs and pick the newest lastLogon for any given comp. OldCmp use lastLogonTimstamp which does replicate so you can do this on just one DC, but that attribute doesn't get updated every time a comp logs on - it's a similar concept to the no-refresh interval for DNS scavenging for the same reasons i.e. to prevent replication traffic. But in principle, in the worst case a comp may have logged on up to two weeks more recently than the value in lastLogonTimestamp.

Use the MS App Compatibility Toolkit? Haven't played with that for a long while, but it did work some wonders hooking and redirecting this and that, for apps that didn't like XP.

The key point for all these threads: What does the curriculum look like? No point suggesting [whatever] languages that: a) don't support the programming concepts that are in it, b) languages that aren't one of the official list. -- Ignoring that, script v. programming language is not always clear-cut e.g. I've written one or two jscripts (*.js) that are simultaneously JScript.Net programming language i.e. they will compile via jsc.exe into an *.exe.

Personally, with no sight of a syllabus, I'd have thought it's very much about *principles* at this stage and you want to minimize distractions e.g. the VS Express IDE will turn a lot of the time into into how to use the IDE (using not creating). Notepad++ and [something] sounds OK. My heart wants [something] to be strongly typed C#, but although you don't need the IDE (compile via csc.exe) I suspect folk would still manage to get sucked into the OO aspects and they should come later. My head says *it just doesn't matter* what you pick for a first language, provided it supports the principles you want, or are supposed, to teach. My head also says we'll mostly end up with what is easiest for teacher, as opposed to what it best suited to the aims. Could be wrong, but suspect we're about to spawn another BASIC/VB generation

You do still get some separate Infants and Juniors schools. -- 8GB RAM should be fine, 500GB may be but it depends on the school (and new staff with different storage consumption habits can mess up trends).. what kind of disk usage do you have now? Note I reckon you should allow a minimum 40GB for 2K8 R2 OS inc. page file, few bits of junk you haven't tidied up etc.

:: It used to work for kids via their Live@Edu account.. .. but not any more, or at least not obviously.

For fans of the recent ICT->Computer Science story, here's download page for the promised Royal Society report: Shutdown or Restart?

Useful. Know lots about most of the other, but not that GPP feature.. didn't know you could do that.

Powershell, run and then read the output from: get-help Set-OwaMailboxPolicy Don't want to force themes so haven't tried, but there are theme attributes alongside useful stuff I have tinkered with. This kind of thing might work: Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy-DefaultMailboxPlan -DefaultTheme 1 -ThemeSelectionEnabled $false Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy-GalDisabledMailboxPlan -DefaultTheme 1 -ThemeSelectionEnabled $false You might not want to do it to both policies and you'll have to play to figure out which theme is number 1, which is 2 etc.. and adjust the commands to the number you want.

OK, but I was angling at reasons why adding data on X, Y & Z would be beneficial in terms of your 'workflow' etc. I'm not saying anything is absolutely right or wrong, just interested in how folk are doing things. In this case I assume "student id" is a key to some MIS system record, and rather then put that in the Live@Edu record I'd probably want to put the Live@Edu mail address in the MIS record. But maybe you can't easily get to an MIS record via a mail address or, my assumption is wrong or something.

Hmm... you can use WMI, but... You obviously need a new OU off the root for your Win7 boxes. Keep machine and user GPOs separate. Link a machine GPO that applies to all Win7 boxes and sets loopback processing (replace), also link some security filtered user GPOs for whatever you want for different categories of user, ditto if you have different categories of machine (alternatively if arrange them in sub-OUs with different machine GPOs linked to them). No need to block inheritance unless you think inheriting GPO: Default Domain will hurt (settings in mine wouldn't). I've never done this (loopback replace + security filtering), but it's what I'd try first in preference to WMI. If no one points out an obvious hole, then just give it a go with one test Win 7 and satisfy yourself about what GPOs hit it etc.

Formal announcement of a known initiative isn't it? For instance County ICT folk did a course specifically about the implications with added VS VB a couple of months ago. Suspect it will all end up as a political *nix [+whatever] vs. MS + VB thing, which is sad coz I don't think the real world is best represented by either. PS: It's aleady doomed: Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language. My emphasis. Spent a log time full-time s/w engineering stuff that worked and never felt the need, or found anything remotely like a need to write a programming language. The kind of folk who did were the ones I resented coz they always wrote the most ambitious, bloated, unpragmatic and ultimately seriously broken code.

OK, but (for instance) have you seen what happens when you throw dotNet at something like ILSpy? World away from EXE->x86 disassembly i.e. it's often near-identical to the source code, and probably has much better layout/formatting. Software Escrow. Don't know about Capita, but having worked where that was contractually required sometimes (to agreed standards) it was essentially backups tapes and some bits of paper work saying where the code was, what you needed to build it etc.. New to the code devs would have had serious trouble for ages, think the basic premise is you get the code from Escrow and pay devs from the just-broken company some serious rates to play with it... and probably have them mostly play with data take-off i.e. getting your stuff out of there prepped for another system.

That's my favourite question, although I'd add: Is it included in the price? Do you want them to? In addition to the vendor protecting their IP angle, it can be used to help hide security sins and I'm not sure that's a Good Thing[tm].

Will take you word for it coz I know little about that side of things, but it's a teensy bit disturbing given the significant cost of IT provision to contemplate that: a) One or more governors weren't at least slightly interested in that significant expenditure, school routinely budgeting for it etc. b) Head/whoever didn't mention that suddenly, magically, they wouldn't need to spend tens of thousands of pounds in the next few years to refresh all their IT kit. IOW dog that didn't bark stuff... shouldn't someone know (possibly too late mind) because of the *absence* of IT funding problems on some agenda or other?

Didn't get around to checking it out, but I thought this was what the SDK MS released a while back was about?

I agree that tackling how folk get away with such a flagrant con (free + victims didn't know they were signing a lease) is the first problem here, although not about "anyone" being vulnerable. Have little sympathy for any Secondary caught by this, but more for the Primary. As a parent I think I want a cheerful/optimistic type of character running a small Primary school where there's more "engagement" with small kids/parents, but suspect that's generally mutually exclusive with the world-weary cynicism you need to defend yourself properly from the sharks. But even then, where were the governors?

That's nicely ambiguous, no way to be sure whether that's combined (with no indication to the distribution on either side) or two independent gigabytes. I suppose it's possible that the overhead for the deleting etc. on the source server is big enough per message, for the growth to still be quite significant e.g. move a few big messages and you don't notice much, but move lots of little ones and they add up. Think you'll have to move an initial few mailboxes and let us know the outcome! Note, I think @sukh's comments (1, 2) about deleting the older transaction logs are sound and vaguely recall doing that somewhere once, wasn't confident enough about that recall to tell you to go ahead and do it though.

Me - was more watchable than I expected, but not quite as good as having Sarah Lund/Sophie Grabol at the centre.

Looks like you can change that with EMC, but it's really not something I care about. Without verifying everything, IIRC the following account creation fields get used in several places like this: CSV "Name" -> AD Name. CN, DisplayName (unless you've also used the optional DisplayName column in the CSV) ECP "Display name" -> AD Name. CN, DisplayName Their use for CN alone tells you why they have be unique in their respective contexts. The ECP behaviour tells you why the MS recipe for CSV import effectively encourages you to stuff a display name in the Name column i.e. it makes it consistent with any mailboxes you create in the ECP. You could have cumulative hours of fun keeping all these and some other name-ish fields perfect and consistent with some strategy or other, but to what end? So long as their windowsliveid/mail address(es) and group memberships are OK I'm happy I can conveniently get to and admin any set of mailboxes I want (in powershell obviously).

Hmm.. think the real story here is probably those annual reports of shortage of Heads and an essentially market-driven lowering of standards in terms of the wit/experience that are acceptable to fill the position. Part of that is doubtless related to the reasons why some folk with obvious capability aren't interested in the manglement track, where of course we all know the job has become increasingly Kafa-esque over the last decade or two. Want better Heads then figure out what's putting off the better people, instead of finding increasingly creative ways to excuse and shore up the mediocre ones.

According to MS where? I'm no expert on what MS do, but in a sane universe you only keep DB *changes* in transaction logs. If I send you a 10MB mail then all of that 10MB needs to go in the log because of all that is added to the DB, but if you then read the mail the only DB changes needed might be some relatively little ones re. metadata e.g. updates to last accessed, whom by, other housekeeping. So my theory is that transaction logs on the target server are going to grow to more or less the combined size of the mailboxes moved there, but the source Exchange 2003 transactions logs will grow at a much smaller rate (metadata changes, post-move deletes etc.) PS: If you do any SMT et al PST exports, tell one or more of them you're doing it - might help avoid any potential future misunderstandings about why you've got copies of the orgs most sensitive mailboxes sat around somewhere.

Eh? On a happy system NtBackup will do exchange-aware backup and truncate logs. -- You never know, but sometimes on a poorly maintained E2K3 server there are truckloads of *IIS* logfiles (from OWA access) that could be deleted to make some space - I've seen boxes with more than 10GB of those. Other than that, I think the OP has talked themselves into a bit of a corner. If the concern is intensive disk I/O crashing the system then doing *anything* is a risk, but Exchange does some serious disk I/O at the best of times and the box is still running so perhaps that risk isn't that huge? Not enough detail/info on the disk problems with that box, but before doing anything else, as insurance I'd probably want to try getting high value mailboxes (e.g. SMT, key admin) backed up to PSTs on an external HDD and would use Exmerge for that... I'd do it cautiously, try one first, then two more, then four.. watch disk space etc.