Entries tagged with customer story - TechNet Edge

Vista deployment project using MDT

extreme — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:01:00 GMT

Ron Kasbohm, director of technology services for Township High School, tells us about their environment, reasons they decided to move from XP to Vista, challenges they encountered, benefits gained, and also a demo of how they deployed Vista using the Microsoft Desktop Toolkit (MDT) utilizing the Light Touch Interface.

Here’s how it breaks down:

[0:35] Initial motivation to roll out Vista

[0:54] Challenges & solutions they had in deploying Vista - Active X controller & "Approved Servers" in Vista Point and Print Security (whitepaper)

[1:54] How often they get UAC prompts

[2:25] Benefits of using Vista now in their environment

[3:24] – How they deployed Vista in their environment
Ron walks through their usage of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), including: the desktop deployment workbench, the PXE boot image, and Light Touch interface (LTI).

Visit the Springboard Series for Windows Vista on TechNet for expert advice, open and honest feature articles, technical guidance, links to tools and training, and community resources

Visit the TechNet Desktop Deployment homepage (Includes MDT download & info)

Virtualization in Malaysia

AdamBomb — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:01:00 GMT

Earlier this year, Maria Green met with LB Tee in Malaysia to talk about a recent success story he had with one of his customers.
The customer, Morison ASQ, had an urgent need to get some broken functionality restored in their environment, and Tee suggested they use Microsoft virtualization to get systems deployed rapidly.
As you'll see in the interview, the project was very successfull, and was completed in under 3 weeks, with most uses unaware that their servers were now virtual.

SQL 2005 to 2008 upgrade with IDUR

extreme — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:40:00 GMT

Joakim Westin is the IT Manager at IDUR. Their company helps many of the large companies in Sweden manage, administer, and audit their pensions. Joakim explains why they decided to move from SQL 2005 to 2008, describes the basic SQL infrastructure they are using, mentions why they like using IIS7 over IIS6, and tells us some of their plans for the future. In the process of moving from SQL 2005 to 2008, they had no issues to report.

Learn more about or download SQL 2008

Windows Vista at Carbocloro Brazil

AdamBomb — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:40:00 GMT

Carbocloro is a chemical producer in Sao Paolo Brazil. When they deployed Vista, they saw both performance and security improvements to their infrastructure. The Vista deployment allowed them to implement company wide standards for desktop updates and management. They were able to move from seven deployment images to just one.
In this video Alaor da Silva talks about some of the challenges and processes that went into their Vista deployment, as well as the benefits and problems they were able to solve.

Office Communications Server and Unified Communications at Ultragestion

AdamBomb — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:52:00 GMT

Christian Aguilera is an IT consultant for Ultragestion in Santiago Chile. In this video, he talks about how their Unified Communications deployment, including OCS 2007, was so successful in their division of the company, it's being rolled out to the entire company across multiple countries.

He talks a little about the infrastructure, the challenges they faced, and changing user behavior around how calls are handled.

Virtualization customer story in Belgium

extreme — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Philippe Van Hoe is the head IT advisor for GO and starts off by talking about:

Plans for their organization
2:50 Mission as an IT organization
3:39 Why did they choose Microsoft software over open source

At 4:30 - Bart Bultinck is a systems engineer and consultant at Integrate, who has helped implement some of the IT plans GO has.

5:02 - What was their motivation to virtualize the environment
5:50 - Configuration
6:37 - Tools used to migrate from physical to virtual
8:49 - Why they choose virtual server over VMWare
9:30 - What the future holds for their environment

At 10:22, Bart whiteboards about a networking problem they had on moving a virtual machine from one host to another. Bart explains how to use VLANs and virtual networking to resolve this issue.

IIS and Powershell

AdamBomb — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:01:00 GMT

Rimantas Malinaukas is a Solution Architect for Propensity International in Sydney, Australia. Our own Jeff Alexander sat down with him to talk about a recent project where they built a solution on a pre-release of IIS7 and used Powershell to save the day when they discovered an issue in the product.
It's a great story about offering Software as a Service and a hosted solution.

SQL 2008 Virtualization and Consolidation with Charley Hanania

extreme — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Charley Hanania is a Senior Database Specialist, working as the Production Product Owner of the MS SQL Server platform at UBS. Charley talks a little about how SQL 2008 will help to resolve some key enterprise database challenges. He talks about Policy Based Management (PBM, formerly known as DMF), resource governor, consolidation and virtualization of SQL Server.

Some other topics he talks about:

Considerations to think about when going from SQL 2005 to 2008
Data compression helping with IO for consolidation and virtualization

At 2:48 we do a whiteboard session with Charley on database consolidation and virtualization in the environment. He also gives us insight into what implications SQL 2005 versus SQL 2008 have in this scenario.

Some useful links from Charley:

Application Virtualization - real world experience

AdamBomb — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Earlier this year, Microsoft hosted a summit for MVP's. I was able to sit down with Nelson Ruest and his partner to talk about some of their experiences in deploying Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) in production.

Trivadis and SQL Server 2008 Customer story

extreme — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Meinrad Weiss is a principal consultant at Trivadis AG and Microsoft MSDN Regional Director Switzerland who among other things conduct database migration, like for example from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008. In this video, he tells us:

- Advantages they have seen with SQL 2008 analysis services over SQL 2005

- Some benefits of SQL 2008 reporting services (such as up to 10 times faster performance on certain queries)

- Highlights improvements in the relational database with SQL 2008

- Things to look out for when implementing filestreams

SQL 2008 has hit RTM!

Learn more about SQL 2008

Server 2008 and Active Directory snapshot software at QBranch

extreme — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Joachim Nasslander, Solution specialist at QBranch in Sweden, starts off by telling us about their own company's ~50 server and ~5,000 customer server environment which has been running Windows Server 2008 since 2006.

At 02:27 Fredrik Lindstrom, Developer at QBranch, tells us about active directory snapshot software he wrote to compare the snapshot versions and restore deleted objects and their values in AD. He tells us about some of the limitations and plans for the program moving forward.

At 4:06 Fredrik gives us a demo of the software.

You can download Fredrik's program here:
http://lindstrom.nullsession.com/?page_id=11

Learn more about Server 2008
Learn more about AD snapshots

Vista zero touch deployment at New Horizons Belfast

extreme — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Alan McBurney discusses how and why New Horizons deployed Vista SP1 in their environment using SCCM 2007. Previously they were using ghost to push out XP images and now they are much happier with SCCM 2007, WDS, and Vista SP1.

At 7:00 min - check out the tips & tricks section. Here he shows how he fixed some of the access denied errors he was having and also some useful PXE boot configuration options to change in the SCCM console. After this, he gives us a demo of what happens after the PXE boot and points out how to view the SCCM log file to troubleshoot scheduled tasks.

Some of the resources Alan used for this project:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/syllabi/6451afinal.mspx
http://www.deploymentforum.com/
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/configmgr/default.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/
http://myitforum.com/
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/socal/archive/2008/03/20/the_2D00_deployment_2D00_guys_2D00_configmgr_2D00_2007_2D00_and_2D00_microsoft_2D00_deployment_2D00_toolkit_2D00_video_2D00_walkthrough.aspx www.itpromomentum.com/

Powershell and Exchange with Desmond Lee

extreme — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Desmond Lee shows us how he deployed PowerShell as part of an Exchange 2003 migration strategy in a complex global Active Directory environment. He also demonstrates how to extend PowerShell with PowerGadgets to crunch the raw data and transform it into great looking reports, indispensable for managing and monitoring the operational health of the systems.

At 7:00, Desmond gives us a demo of their solution

Desmond's Blog
Microsoft Powershell homepage

System Center Operations Manager and the Brazilian Post Office

AdamBomb — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:02:00 GMT

Breiner Queiroz is a Senior Systems Analyst for the Post Office in Sao Paolo Brazil. In this video, he talks about his experience deploying Operations Manager. He talks about the challenges of getting a project like OpsMan deployed on a limited budget, and working with a new technology.

Jean-Philippe on Vista deployment

rodney.buike — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Jean-Philippe Breton is the Lead Deployment Manager for Alphamosaik, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He and his team recently lead a 10,000 seat deployment of Vista with SP1 for a major Canadian transportation company with offices around the globe. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jean-Philippe about how tools like the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit simplified the deployment and some things learned along the way.

Loke Kit Kai on Hyper-V

AdamBomb — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

I met Loke Kit Kai when he was visiting Redmond for the MVP summit last month. He'd been looking at several virtualization solutions that he could use to build a lab environment. Kit Kai has a good story to share about how Hyper-V has helped him build an environment that he and his colleagues could use to learn new technologies, so I got him to sit down with me for a few minutes to talk about his experience with the product.

Customer project using Sharepoint 2007 and DPM 2007

extreme — Fri, 16 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

John Knightly tells us about a project he started at the company (name kept private) he works for in Phoenix using Sharepoint for implementing change control, bug tracking, and for the company's default internal homepage. As part of the solution, he also started using DPM to backup everything up. He tells us about what went well, what didn't go well, and gives some technical tips if someone else is interested in doing something similar.

Here's the key links John needed to get Sharepoint backing up with DPM:
Protected Computer Software Prerequisites
How to Protect SharePoint Products and Technologies with DPM 2007
Sharepoint Backup and Restore Resources (from Sharepoint team blog)
Installing Protection Agents behind a Firewall

Also, you need to download this patch which unfortunately requires a reboot, as does the DPM agent install. If you are running Virtual Server 05 R2, this patch will break things if your virtual host OS is on multiple subnets unless virtual server 2005 r2 sp1 is installed 1^st!

This is a new type of content we're trying out on TechNet Edge - real, unfiltered, unbiased, IT Pro customer stories which give you technical information on their projects using the latest MS technologies... Please let us know what you think!