Recently Microsoft has released a tool to visualize your technicle AD design with the help of Visio. This can be very handy, especially for documenting your AD environment.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=cb42fc06-50c7-47ed-a65c-862661742764&displayLang=en

Microsoft has announced the product lineup for the new Office version for Mac users. Office 2008 for Mac will include Word 2008, Excel 2008, Powerpoint 2008 and Entourage 2008.

There will be 3 versions of office available namely:
- Office 2008 for Mac
- Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition which will include Microsoft Expression Media
- Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition which is a basic version which does not include support for Exchange connectivity.

The retail prices in the US for these three products are US$399, $499 and $149 respectively.

Microsoft has announed the release date for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL 2008. The release date in the US is 27 February 2008.

Server 2008 RC0 is also now available to download by following a simple registration process on:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/default.mspx

They say that knowledge is power, therefore the more knowledge you have over your server farm you have the more powerful you are as an administrator. Correct? Well I think so anyway!

We all know there are loads of tools out there for monitoring your Windows Server environment. I’ve used several of these tools including the likes of server monitor professional, gfi server monitor, activeXperts, serverwatch and even configuring MRTG graphs to report performance stats from perfmon log files. Today I stumbled across a piece of monitoring software that is really easy to use, cheap, quick to configure and is overall a really decent bit of software. The software is called Server Monitor Pro and was created by a company called Power Admin (PA).

How many times have you had users call you up complaining that they cannot launch a Citrix session because they already have 1 running, yet they swear blind they closed it correctly? Speaking for myself it happens all the time!

More often than not the reason for this behaviour is because the application which the user was using calls another application which does not close correctly when the published application is running causing the session to remain active.

Citrix published the resolution to this in a kb article some time back, here it is.