Category: 1488

As Gartner advices to upgrade to Windows 8.1 when you’ve deployed Windows 8 throughout your organization, it’s useful to look at the way Windows 8.1 impacts your current networking infrastructure, your deployment methods and your management philosophies. Although, I’ve already covered a big Group Policy change earlier in this series. (Part 10: Group Policy Caching), … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 14, Logon Script Delay"

Microsoft has made big strides on making Windows 8.1 an efficient platform to use, both for people migrating from Windows 7 (and previous versions of Windows) to Windows 8.1 and for those migrating from the original version of Windows 8. As a frequent presenter, I really like one of the new Windows 8.1 features, that … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 13, Quiet hours"

Last year, I posted Three useful ways to get started with Group Policy in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. With the release of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 last month, it’s time to look at managing Microsoft’s latest and greatest Operating Systems: Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 offer a lot … Continue reading "Get started with managing Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 through Group Policies"

Since Windows 8, Microsoft is moving its developer ecosystem to write apps for The New Interface, formerly known as Metro. With their immersive, scaled appearances and touch optimization, these apps can be used for a wide variety of experiences. Alas, the kiosk experience for apps in The New Interface was not one of these experiences … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 12, Assigned Access"

Managing a complex networking infrastructure can be as challenging as upgrading it to the latest version. While some organizations have adopted jump servers to allow admins to effectively manage their Windows Servers, other organizations rely on the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). Now, with Microsoft’s new dynamic release schedule, it has become easier to upgrade … Continue reading "Managing your Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2-based networking infrastructure with the Windows 8.1 RSAT"

As Windows 8.1 was released yesterday, I started upgrading the devices I use as my daily drivers in my extended Bring-Your-Own experiment and my lab environment. Also, I added an older system to prove a colleague Windows 8.1 does, in fact, run on 8 year old hardware:

In a flurry of product releases, Microsoft released Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 today.

When Microsoft builds an Operating System (OS), it has to build it to last. Windows XP endured a continuing blast of malware for the last 13 years. In particular, Internet Explorer 6 has seen a lot of vulnerabilities and saw the start of people moving away from Internet Explorer to the likes of Google’s Chrome … Continue reading "Is your organization ready for Windows 8.1? Part 11, Internet Explorer Enhanced Protected Mode"

I’ve written before on Active Directory-based Activation. This new activation method allows domain-joined Windows 8 clients, Windows 8.1 clients, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2-based member servers to be activated and deactivated automatically based on their domain membership. I’m very fond of this feature. However, for many enterprise organizations, Active Directory-based Activation is … Continue reading "KnowledgeBase: Update adds support for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 clients to Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012 KMS hosts"

On November 29th, several Dutch user groups, like Hyper-V.nu, System Center User Group, Windows Azure User Group, Dutch PowerShell User Group, PASS (SQL) and the Windows Management User Group join forces to present the Experts Live event.