November • December 2005

Web Administration:Top Ten Ways To Pump Up IIS Performance

If you host one or more Web sites that receive a lot of traffic, IIS performance is important to you. To enhance performance, you could always cluster your IIS servers or buy more bandwidth, but this tends to be a little expensive. Brien M. Posey

Web Administration:Improve Your Web Security With Encryption And Firewall Technologies

If you're like most IT professionals, your work life is an ongoing balancing act in which you aim to adopt the latest technological innovations while keeping your enterprise secure. So you welcome any software that makes the whole Stephen Lamb

Web Administration:How Does Your Web Garden Grow? The ABCs of ASP.NET Deployment

Dino Esposito

Web Administration:Discover the IIS Metabase: Unlock the Details of Your Web Server Configuration

Some of the major changes in IIS 6.0, the latest Web server from Microsoft, are happening in the metabase. In IIS 4.0 and IIS 5.0, the metabase, which functions as a hierarchical storage facility for configuration information and schema, Randy Muller

Patch Management:Next-Generation Patch Management: Introducing Windows Server Update Services

Vulnerability assessment and remediation can be a time-consuming task. However, it’s an important one that every company, big and small, needs to focus attention on. As the Jason Leznek

Patch Management:A Hands-On Guide to Hands-Off Updates with WSUS

An essential, though sometimes time-consuming, task for protecting your computing environment is to keep systems current with the latest software updates and patches. To help streamline this process, Microsoft recently released Jeremy Moskowitz

Patch Management:Maximize the Power of SMS with New Tools for Managing Updates

Bob Lawler

Microsoft Office:Office Gone Wild? You May Not Have Lost That File After All

Joshua Trupin

Microsoft Office:Be Prepared: A Guide to SharePoint Disaster Prevention and Recovery

Jeff Centimano

Microsoft Office:Get Better Metrics With New Reporting Tools For SharePoint Portal Server

Eric Brown

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Columns

From the Editor:cc160764(v=msdn.10).md

When we launched TechNet Magazine a year ago, our goal was to serve the needs of the working IT professional. We knew that no matter how long you’ve been working in IT, there’s always something new to learn.

Field Notes:Real Pros Don't Run as Normal User

Real techs think they have got to log in with the rights of a higher power on their system, even to check their e-mail or surf the Web. Ditto for developers, doctors, and everyone else who is convinced their job is important and requires full-blown Administrator privileges.Shelly Bird

Toolbox:New Products for IT Professionals

WinTasks 5.0 Professional, WinTasks 5.0 AdministratorNino Bilic

Utility Spotlight:RunUpdates.cmd

A great deal of time is often invested in determining the best ways to keep an infrastructure current, and rightfully so. In this month’s Utility Spotlight I take a look at a great way to make sure that desktops are as current as possible from the day they are deployed.Joshua Hoffman

SQL Q&A:Monitoring Tools, Memory, and More

Your queries answered by Microsoft IT professionals.Nancy Michell

Post Mortem:Securing a Government Agency with Smart Cards

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD12) requires Federal government agencies to begin utilizing strong, two-factor authentication for physical and logical access to Federal buildings and computer systems.John Morello

How IT Works:How Simple is SMTP?

SMTP, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, carries the electronic mail of the world. While other message transferring systems exist—some more efficient, some better at specific tasks, some privately owned and some public—none have won the widespread public acceptance of the venerable SMTP, first defined in RFC 821, all the way back in 1982.R'ykandar Korra'ti

Security Watch:A guide to Wireless Security

Setting up a wireless network is incredibly easy. There’s no cable to pull, no holes to drill; just plug in your wireless access point (AP), let your wireless connection manager auto-associate, and you’re online.Kathryn Tewson and Steve Riley

BetaBox:First Look at IIS 7.0

When I saw my first demo of IIS 7. 0, I thought "this changes everything. " The new version changes the application’s architecture and introduces some exciting changes that greatly improve the capabilities of IIS.Brett Hill

Scripting:Monad: The Future of Windows Scripting

Managing an office full of Windows®-based servers and workstations has been challenging ever since the early days of Windows networking. While administrators have been using a combination of GUI-based applications, batch files, scripts, and a host of other utilities to get their jobs done, the GUI-based applications have tended to be the de-facto standard on the Windows platform.Thomas Lee

Inside Microsoft.com:Web Site Configuration Management

The Microsoft. com operations team is responsible for some of the busiest IIS-based Web sites on the Internet, including Microsoft. com, Windows® Update, MSDN®, TechNet, Microsoft Downloads, and many more.The Microsoft.com Operations Team

On Site:Is Small Business Server Right For You?

I enjoy writing about problems I’ve actually encountered and resolved in my work. It gives me the opportunity to share the benefit of my experience on a particular topic and allows me to grow as a consultant.Jay Shaw

How IT works:NTFS Permissions

Several years ago I got quite a surprise while fixing the permissions on a client’s file server. One of the users had Write permission on several files and folders in one branch of the directory tree.Richard Civil

TechNet Update:Advancements in SQL Server 2005

As a technology guy at Microsoft, I’m actually excited about this whole SQL Server™ 2005 and Visual Studio® 2005 thing. Now know that there will be plenty of fanfare associated with the release, but fanfare doesn’t help you when you’re in the server room at 2:00 AM trying to do a migration.TechNet Update

Windows Confidential:The Sad Story of the Shell Folders Key

It’s a little known fact that the Shell Folders key exists solely to permit four programs written in 1994 to continue running on the RTM version of Windows® 95.Raymond Chen