From the EditorA Warm Welcome to "Inside SharePoint"

As you may recall from last month's Editor's Note, after wishing a fond farewell to The Cable Guy, I mentioned that this issue of TechNet Magazine would feature the debut of a new column. Please give a warm welcome to "Inside SharePoint," a monthly column covering everything an IT pro needs to know about architecting, deploying, securing, maintaining, and supporting a SharePoint infrastructure. As promised, Pav Cherny gets us started back at the beginning with an overview of the key elements of a flexible SharePoint infrastructure. We'll continue next month with coverage of SharePoint site administration. And our offer remains open: if you have specific SharePoint topics you'd like to see covered, drop us a line at tnmag@microsoft.com.

Also in this month's issue, Gil Kirkpatrick returns with an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the Active Directory backup and restore process in Windows Server 2008. In many (if not most) Windows-oriented networks, Active Directory is the authoritative source for identity and access information (which, I think we can all agree, is pretty important stuff). It's also a key infrastructure element of any deployment of Exchange, SharePoint, Configuration Manager ... the list goes on. Yet, when I attended one of Gil's sessions at the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago last month, and he asked how many people in the room had a comprehensive disaster recovery plan for Active Directory, you could count the number of hands raised, well, on one hand. Suffice it to say that everyone should read Gil's article.

On the incredibly remote chance that Active Directory is not your forte, not to worry—there's plenty more here for you. Matt Fontaine introduces us to System Center Mobile Device Manager (a must-have new technology if you're managing Windows Mobile devices in your organization), Pete Zerger walks us through what's new in System Center Essentials SP1, and Jesper Johansson applies the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to IT security. The Scripting Guys are with us, as always, Exchange Queue & A returns, and much more.

Finally, we're working on a project for the spiffy new TechNet Magazine Web site (still found at technetmagazine.com). Some of our favorite authors are developing how-to screencasts—videos that will accompany our articles online to walk you through the content step-by-step. We'd love to hear what topics and technologies you'd most like to see covered with these screencasts. Once again, e-mail us at <tnmag.microsoft.com>. Thanks! —Joshua Hoffman

Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts: Prabu Ambravaneswaran, Anah Cameron, Eric Charran, Stephanie Cheung, Arren Conner, Justin Hall, Dustin Jones, Jessie Li, David Mills, John Nisi, Jeff Patterson, Steve Peschka, Mitch Prince, Michelle Rutzer, and Jim Truher.

© 2008 Microsoft Corporation and CMP Media, LLC. All rights reserved; reproduction in part or in whole without permission is prohibited.