Further to a question that got asked the other night and as a follow up to the Group Policy chat last SBS User Group meeting..

Below is an example of an ADM template that I used for the GP talks.. the layout is fairly standard – but once you create one.. the rest are easy!

The only “trick” as such is ensuring that you save it as a .adm file and that you remember you have to import it into any GPO that you want to use it in.

The premise behind using these things is that you can use it to create your own Group Policy Settings.. anything that can be changed in the registry you can change this way – you just need to know the key.

CLASS MACHINE

CATEGORY "Microsoft Custom ADM Entries"

POLICY "Automatic Logon"

KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\winlogon"

PART "What is the name of the User?" EDITTEXT

VALUENAME "autoadminlogon"

END PART

PART "What is the User's password?" EDITTEXT

VALUENAME "defaultpassword"

END PART

END POLICY

END CATEGORY

Cheers

Kyle

On Tuesday night I joined Jeff Alexander and Paul Woods from Microsoft Australia to present on Windows Vista and Office 2007. The group was made up of the SBS User Group and the Brisbane Infrastructure Group.

The idea was to present part of the Innovations 2006 tour that went to Sydney and Melbourne. Jeff presented on security in Vista, Paul did an overview of Office 2007 and I did a preso on Delpoying Windows Vista.

The slides from the night are on Jeff’s blog. http://blogs.technet.com/jeffa36/ The Deployment slide deck is currently available – the rest are coming soon he tells me!

The main thing that came out of the deployment presentation was that at the moment only about 25% of the audience had even considered having a managed environment – the thing with deployments is that there is a lot of short term pain for a massive long term gain. Use the tools that are available – things like Microsoft’s BDD tools (http://www.microsoft.com/deployment) is a great start to moving down the deployment path.

With a fully managed environment the first part is getting the desktops out there.. but then follow that up with a well planned out and organized Group Policy!

Dick Carlson – a Microsoft Product manager who manages content and technical training delivery and who is our MS honcho for the labs has been working on a video of the QA process.. this is the first of those videos, he assures me that more are to come.

http://dickcarl.spaces.msn.com/Blog/cns!5BAC93BD76AA97A6!501.entry?owner=1

Welcome to Boston – we are currently in the middle of setup for the Hands On Labs – with 115 labs and 8 MCT’s testing them to ensure that the content works and that the manuals are complete.

The setup for QA week went well, basically we arrived on Thursday morning and the setup of all the rooms and machines was complete by Saturday afternoon – we are at the Microsoft offices in Waltham (pronounced Wall-tham) on the outskirts of Boston.

The learning that we have done for previous shows means that things have gone smoothly (touching a wooden object so as not to curse ourselves!) and the meticulous planning has certainly helped in ensuring that everything and everybody is in the right place at the right time.

On a semi related note – I found today an interesting blog about TechEd - http://teched06.blogspot.com/2006/06/keynote-staging-sneak-peak.html about the Keynote - apart from the actual presenters that will be here there is a mention on the setup of the stage area – in there it is mentioned about the screens – basically to get the screens as bright as they do there is about 4 projectors that shine onto the same screen – but to make this work about 8-10 hours of effort is required to ensure that the projector images are all exactly lined up – cool huh?

I was looking around through Office 2007 last night and discovered the feature to be able to post directly from Office 2007 to the MSN Spaces (and yes – there is others that are available).

Which means that I am typing and publishing this from this from within Word 2007. Cool idea eh? If you are wanting to do the same – select new, Blog Entry from the Office menus – the first time you do that you will get an setup screen to configure – pretty straight forward and works well.

Once again Spider Consulting will be attending TechEd USA – this year being held in Boston – the amount of planning for the Hands on Labs area this year has been amazing – we have been working on ideas, structure, deployments, etc since the close of business last year.

For me the best thing about TechEd is always the networking – the opportunity to meet, talk and interact with people in the industry – to be able to talk with Product Managers and of course the parties do break it up a bit.

This will be my 4^th TechEd and I can honestly say that I have never had issues justifying my costs of attending – especially with the Australian TechEds- I have always got enough contacts and business out of attending to more than justify the costs.

Wow! - Teched US is massive - this has been a major amount of work for the team but the Hands on Labs are rocking!

The Launchpad has been knocking people's socks off and the proctors have been making happy people! - All the proctors this year have are MCT's and it has been making a huge impression - lots of really knowledgable people in Black shirts wandering around helping attendees where ever they can - awesome!

The room we are in has 800 machines and is so big it takes about 3 min to walk from one end to the other.. sweet!

iF YOU ARE IN COME AND SAY HI... If you are back in Australia - make sure you come to the Gold Coast for Teched Australia - we are bringing the labs with us.. so again.. drop in and say hi!

I will be one of the lead proctors with TechEd US in Orlando this year looking after the Hands On Labs.. so if you are there.. make sure you come and say hi.

I will also be writing about the goings on while I am there..

Again in class this week I mentioned a couple of useful links that I have collected...

It is only a small list at the moment but it will grow.

http://www.spiderconsulting.com.au/Sharepoint.zip

You will need to save the link zip and then open it up using MMC.exe - let me know if you have any issues.

In most of my classes I get asked about exams - normally about the ones that are attached to the course that I am training!!

And I have a number of hints that I pass on (after doing a large number of exams - MS, Citrix, Comptia and Novell) that go across all of the exams that I have done.

1. Read the question - sounds silly but not so silly when you are in the heat of an exam

2. Read the answers - again obvious - but after you have read the question then read ALL of the answers before deciding which one is the correct one

3. Read the question again - just to make sure that the nswer you have picked is the answer to the question that was asked!

4. If you have no idea what the answer is then discount the ones that are obviously wrong - at least then you stand a better chance.

5. If you are stuck on a question - mark it and come back (depending on the exam - this only applies if it is not an adaptive exam - they do not allow reversing!)

6. Calm down - before you sign into the exam get yourself calmed - you do not have to start the exam straight away. Use the first couple of minutes to scribble out some hints to yourself on the provided paper

7. Study! - make sure you have gone to the vendor's website and you know what they are testing - the infomation that you get in the courseware may not be all that is tested - so you need to do a bit of research.

Above all - set yourself a goal - give yourself some time to study and then do the exam - but set a date for the exam - then you have something to work towards.

Today I had a couple of questions that came up that did throw me - but after searching I have found an answer to one of them - the other I am still working on.

Q. In the "assign to" selection box of Issues (and it will be the same with tasks) does the list include non-current users and not include all current users of the Sharepoint Site?

A. The users that are listed in the "assign to" box are all users that have accessed the Team Site - in this case we had created a Sub-Site and found that the list carried through. This list will include old users and will not include new users who have not accessed the Team Site

Q. How do you import a list of contacts into WSS Contacts if you do not have Outlook but do have the list as a CSV file?

A. - This is actually not too hard... but I needed someone to point me in the right direction - thanks to Penny C 

1. Create a contacts list

2. click Export to spreadsheet. This results in a linked list.

3. Open the CSV in Excel, get the columns in the right order

4. Copy from the csv worksheet to the contacts link list
worksheet.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/registry_edits.htm

 A collection of reg hacks for various different requirements.

 As always… if you make changes in the registry you risk breaking your machine – so make a back up first!