IT Book Report: “The Definitive Guide to Building a Windows Server 2008 Infrastruture” 10 months in the making, this e-book is finally released in its final form. Now in sharing the role of author and in this case reviewer as well, this review will obviously have some bias. But with that said, I can tell you that this book is your definitive guide

Get Don’s VBScript books for $10 (Limited Time) ScriptingOutpost.com (run by SAPIEN) is clearly seeing PowerShell as the wave of the future - but if you're still working with VBScript, you can pick up one of my VBScript-related books for $10 while supplies last. Titles include Advanced VBScript for Windows Administrators, VBScript WMI and ADSI Unleashed, and Windows

IT Book Report: Mastering System Center Operations Manager 2007 Over the past few weeks I've been finishing up a video training series for CBT Nuggets on System Center Operations Manager 2007. As a reference for that training project, I selected this book from the Sybex Mastering Series. While not necessarily intended to be a reference work, it provided a

IT Book Report: Operations Benefits of Email Archiving We all know now that email contains quite possibly the most critical data in our organizations today, but it can also be the company's biggest consumer of disk space and Tylenol for the administrator. Do you feel that you really know the legal and technical ramifications of keeping all that

IT Book Report: Deploying and Administering Windows Vista Bible First impressions of this "bible" are very good. Â In fact, this excellent guide is like getting three books in one. The entire first half of the book discusses the cumbersome processes associated with rapidly deploying Windows Vista to multiple computers in your environment. Â Once the authors have nailed

IT Book Report: Windows Administration Resource Kit: Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals  Back at Tech Ed a few months ago I picked up a copy of Dan Holme's new bookWindows Administration Resource Kit: Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals. I was immediately attracted to its somewhat different solutions-focused approach to common tasks that many environments find themselves needing to improve. Unlike a

IT Book Report: Mid-Market Storage Management and Virtualization Ever wonder exactly what data in your IT organization is really worth saving? Â Along those lines, ever wonder about the criticality of your business data, what mechanisms make best sense for backing it up, and how long you've got to get it back on-line after a failure? Of course,

IT Book Report: Administering Server Core Since my first sneak peek at it, I was convinced that Server Core would become a popular and useful tool in administrators' arsenals; I knew that the challenge, however, would be the many administrators with minimal command-line experience. Setting up Server Core is definitely a different beast than regular Win2008,

IT Book Report: Privileged Accounts and Administrator Rights I've blogged and podcasted before about this excellent three-part Essentials Series on Eliminating Administrator Rights. (I can call it "excellent"... I wrote it!) Sponsored by BeyondTrust, this series talks about the problems virtually all IT organizations face with being forced to hand out admin rights to people who shouldn't really