Yesterday I received an e-mail that I was eligable to register for the beta exam:
“71-688 Managing and Maintaining Windows 8”
The beta exam period runs from Oct 17 – Oct 31 and I will personally take the exam next week. It is free for those who received the beta invite. If you didn’t receive the beta invite,you can still register through the prometric website, but it will not be free. If you want to get access to future beta exams, read one of my previous blog posts.
Normally the preparation guide is published on the microsoft learning website, but apparently they’re experiencing a delay. Therefore the preparation guide has now been posted on the born to learn blog:
http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2012/10/16/where-39-s-the-71-688-prep-guide.aspx
For all people taking the exam, good luck!
Tags: 070-688, 071-688, 70-688, 71-688, Beta, certification, Exam, MCSA, mcsa windows 8, Windows, Windows 8
Today I attended the free “IT Camps Windows Server 2012” event in Eindhoven at Master-it in Eindhoven and I really liked it. It was a real hands-on IT Camp in which they tell you some interesting things about Server 2012, while you are also able to immediately use the technologies you learn about. Ofcourse it’s also a great work to get to know new interesting people.
They also used feedback from previous IT Camps very well. This was very noticeable because now everyone was able to join the hands-on labs. Because of better preparations there was also still plenty of time to explore all assignments and go into more details.
Many thanks to Tony Krijnen and Daniel van Soest from Microsoft for this great event.
There are still IT Camp events planned, but I don’t know if you can still register for them. Check the link below for more information about the event contents, dates and locations:
http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/evenementen/event.aspx?eventid=675&date=20121016&eventtype=TechNet#locations
Tags: Active Directory, AD, Cluster, Clustering, DAC, Dynamic Access Control, Eindhoven, Event, Events, Free, hans-on, Hyper-V, Info Support, IT Camp, IT Camp Windows Server 2012, lab, labs, Master IT, Master IT Training, Powershell, Server Manager, Storage Spaces, The Netherlands, Training, Windows 2012, Windows 2012 Server, Windows Server 2012
As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, Microsoft is working hard to get new and better versions of their software released as soon as possible.
Last week Microsoft announced that the Office 2013 suite reached released to manufacturing (RTM) including:
- Office 2013 for workstations (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, OneNote, Project, Visio)
- Server software (Exchange 2013, Sharepoint 2013, Project 2013, Lync 2013, Visio 2013)
- Cloud versions of the above mentioned software (Office 365).
The availability is dependent on the platform and your licensing type. More information about this can be found here:
http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2012/10/11/office-reaches-rtm.aspx
I have to admit I didn’t expect them to reach RTM status already. I also hope that beta exams won’t be released anytime soon, because then I won’t have enough time to properly prepare 😦
Tags: Access, Access 2013, Cloud, Excel, Excel 2013, Exchange, Exchange 2013, Exchange online, Lync, Lync 2013, Lync online, Lync Server 2013, Microsoft, Office, Office 2013, Office 365, OneNote, OneNote 2013, OneNote MX, online service, Outlook, Outlook 2013, Powerpoint, Powerpoint 2013, Project, Project 2013, Project Online, Project Server 2013, Public Cloud, RTM, Sharepoint, Sharepoint 2013, Sharepoint online, Software, Visio, Visio 2013, Visio Server 2013, Word, Word 2013
In Server 2012, Storage Spaces has been added. It allows you to pool multiple physical disks together (regardless of disk size and connection type) as one big logical disk. For those people familiar with Windows Home Server (WHS), the concept is similar to Drive Extender. For more information read the Storage Spaces FAQ or this blog post.
After the Storage Pool has been created, you can create one or more Storage Spaces (virtual disks) and configure them as either a simple volume, mirror volume or parity (software raid).
Even though this seems great in theory, in reality the write performance on a parity volume is painfully slow at about 25-30 MB/s. Besides the performance, there are also other aspects that you might not appreciate. So before implementing this in a production environment, test it extensively in a testing environment. You can also play around in Microsoft’s virtual labs.
It’s a pity Storage Spaces didn’t meet my expecations, because I was really looking forward to replace my Windows Home Server with Drive Extender. But for now I would recommend sticking with hardware RAID solutions.
Tags: drive extender, ICT, Microsoft, raid, Server, storage, storage pools, Storage Spaces, Windows, Windows 2012, Windows 8, windows home server, Windows Server, Windows Server 2012
Op 26 oktober wordt Windows 8 officieel gereleased door Microsoft. Vanaf dat moment zullen nieuwe pc’s en laptops ook standaard uitgeleverd gaan worden met Windows 8. Tevens zullen dan ook Windows 8 (RT) tablets beschikbaar komen. Zowel Microsoft zelf zal tablets verkopen (Microsoft Surface), maar ook andere grote leveranciers zullen hun eigen tablets verkopen. Ook is het de verwachting dat er steeds meer laptops met touchscreen zullen gaan komen.
Het gevolg hiervan is dat Windows 8 qua bediening enorm verandert.
Ik raad daarom ook iedereen aan met interesse in deze nieuwe versie van Windows om de “HCC Windows 8 introductiebijeenkomst” in Urmond bij te wonen:
Datum : Vrijdag 12 oktober 2012
Tijd : 20:00 – 22:00
Locatie: Gemeenschapshuis Pater Kolbe, Graetheidelaan 60, 6129 GH Urmond
Link: http://www.hcc.nl/vereniging/evenement/windows-8-introductietraining-33
Tags: hcc, hcc.nl, introductie, Learning, Training, urmond, Windows, Windows 8, www.hcc.nl
A lot of companies and governments are investing a lot of time and money on limiting / preventing piracy. I believe that despite their efforts there will always be lots of ways to download basically everything from the internet for free.
Also besides downloading, streaming is also becoming more popular. Especially with websites like noobroom.com or popcornered.com where you can stream high quality movies for free.
In my opinion the time and effort spent by companies on limiting / preventing piracy should be invested in continuously coming up with new ways to add value for customers.
I think that the only sustainable paid model is a model like the one spotify uses for music. For those who are unfamiliar with spotify, it basically means that you pay a monthly fee for access to a massive library of media. And just as with spotify, there can be different subscription types and prices for by example streaming full HD content.
What do you think ?
UPDATE 08-10-2012: Spotify isn’t doing that well at the moment apparently: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19355708. I still believe from a customer point of view that this kind of model can work.
Tags: download, internet, Movies, noobroom, piracy, spotify, stream, streaming
Everyone has their favourite web sites they use. These are used for different purposes and some are used more frequently than others.
To organize and share my own favourites / bookmarks, I’ve created a sharepoint list:
http://bjornhouben-web.sharepoint.com/Lists/Links that I will be updating continuously. If you’re unfamiliar with how to filter a sharepoint list, please check my previous post.
Other options to manage your own (personal) favourite web site links include:
- Using the built-in synchronisation with browsers like Firefox or Google Chome.
- Create and use a personalized start page like by example Netvibes and Protopage. These also provide options to include other resources like by example RSS feeds, weather predictions, etc. I am currently using iGoogle, but that will cease to function Q4 2013 unfortunately.
During the creation of my own list I came across kadaza.com and kadaza.nl, which also contains a great collection of categorized web sites. You can choose the main category on the left hand side after which you can further drill down by choosing subcategories on the right side.
I hope it is useful to you and should you have some great sites I’ve missed, please mention them in the comments section.
Tags: bookmark, browser, chrome, custom start page, favorite, favourite, favourites, firefox, google chrome, kadaza, manage, management, mozilla firefox, Netvibes, Protopage, site, start page, web site, website
Context
If you’re anything like me, you’ve created your fair share of user names and passwords over the years and it is likely that many more will be added in the future as well. To complicate things even more, you are probably using multiple different user names and passwords because of different requirements. Possible reasons:
- Username (because your desired username might not meet the requirements or might already be in use. Or because your -email is used as your username)
- Minimum number of characters.
- Maximum number of characters.
- (Specific) special characters required.
- (Specific) special characters not allowed.
- x number of upper case characters
- x number of lower case characters
- x number of digits.
- x number of special characters.
- Password needs to be changed every x days.
Because of the large number of accounts (I have about 200-300 accounts) it is impossible to remember them all. Even though it might be tempting to use (a couple of) the same username and password combinations for logging on, this is not recommended because it is a security risk. When one of the places where you use a specific user/password combination is compromised, all other places where you use this same combination are at risk too. In this post I will try to describe some challenges and what you can do about it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: account, authentication, backup, best practice, best practices, certificate, Dropbox, encryption, Google Drive, keepass, keepass password manager, key, key file, keyfile, license, licenses, management, Microsoft Skydrive, mult-factor, mult-factor authentication, multifactor, multifactor authentication, Password, password generator, Password management, password manager, password recovery, secure, security, serial, serials, Skydrive, synchronization, user account, user name, username
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