The “Secret” to Share Point Drop Boxes
G’day, just a little Sharepoint info for you today. We heavily use MOSS in our education environment and one thing that makes it very very useful is the ability of our students to be able to submit work online so that their teachers can receive and mark their work. Now I know there are quite a number of educational facilities here in Melbourne who have Sharepoint / MOSS installed and use it as an intranet solution. By doing this you can take it up a level.
The secret behind this is the use of Custom Lists and Item Level Permissions. What we need to do is create a custom list, so from the Site Actions Menu click Create, from the Custom List column click on Custom List. Give your list a name and click the Create Button.
Your List is now created, so next we go to Settings > List Settings and click on the Advanced Settings under the General Settings heading.
This will take you to the advanced settings page and reveil the “Secret”. Item-Level Permissions. The settings we want to take a look at and adjust here are Read Access and Edit Access, make the changes to Only Their Own for both settings. This means that when a student uploads a document they will only be able to see their own and only be able to edit their own.
I give Staff Members Full Control over these lists so they are able to see All the Documents that are submitted.
Photo Credit – Licht~~~~’s
Setting Default Printers with Group Policy Preferences
Had an interesting question from a reader in response to setting a default printer with Group Policy Preferences that I thought I would share.
Question was:
If you set a user general default printer like the main office copier but also set a location printer preference like the library copier using the loop back policy will it over ride the general default printer preference?
Do I merge or replace?
Read the rest of this entry »
Using Group Policy Prefernces to Map Drives
The other day I wrote an article on how I use Group Policy Preferences to Deploy Printers and Set the Default Printer. Today I wanted to share with you how I go about mapping network drives to particular users based on their AD DS Group Memberships. In days gone by this was don via a vbs login in script, but let me show you how this can be done via GPP.
Simple scenario, we have a group of Media students that need a drive mapped to a different “Media Backup Server”, so what I have done is put these students into and Active Directory Group called “Media Students”.
So in my Students GPO I simply went to User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Drive Maps
The One Reason You Should Use Group Policy Preferences
The job of deploying printers and setting default printers has been quite simply a pain in the butt. Well automating the default printer has been anyway. Now if you are like me and work in an educational environment where there are computer labs, left right and center, libraries, staff notebooks (separated on different campuses), student notebooks etc etc and users all wanting to print to specific printers and of course people not wanting to select the correct one from a list of printers then read on.
Use Group Policy Preferences !!!
In the past I have used the Print Management Console to deploy the printers via Group Policy, now that did work very well, but there was still the “overlooked” problem of being able to set the default printer. To get around this what I used to do was to name the computers in a certain way and then have a vbs script that would get the name of the printer and then set the default based on the computer name.
I was reading an article by GPO Guru Derek Melber about the new Group Policy Preferences that come with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista and thought I would explore this option.
To start off your client will need the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions both XP and Vista Clients need these. Now you can manually download these and install via a computer startup script via Group Policy or if you have a WSUS Server then you can make this “Feature Pack” available via Windows Updates (this is the option I took, less work!).
Now that you have the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions installed on the clients, you can go ahead and play with the GPO’s. If you open up the Group Policy Management snap in and edit a GPO object you will see “Preferences”
What’s Being Talked About on the Windows 2008 Server Front?
I noticed on Twitter that @winobs who runs the WindowsObserver.com website posts Google Alerts for Windows 7 on his site, so I thought I might do the same thing except for Windows Server 2008. So here they are (in no order of preference).
Microsoft updates Windows 7 SDK beta
Ars Technica – Boston,MA,USA
The Windows SDK beta for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 has been
updated. Developers, what are you waiting for? By Emil Protalinski | Last
updated …
See all stories on this topic:
Q. How can I mount a virtual hard disk (VHD) file in Windows 7 or …
Windows IT Pro – Loveland,CO,USA
A. Diskpart and Disk Manager in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 have native
VHD support and can be used to create and mount vhd files. …
See all stories on this topic:
32-bit support optional for Server 2008 R2 Server Core
Ars Technica – Boston,MA,USA
32-bit support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core will have to be
installed manually since this is the first 64-bit-only operating system
that Microsoft …
See all stories on this topic:
IE8 in Windows 7, and IE7 in Vista SP2 – Download Critical Patches
Softpedia – Bucharest,Romania
… Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008, for the
IE8 Beta build in Windows 7 pre-Beta and in Windows Server 2008 R2
pre-Beta, …
See all stories on this topic:
WLAN AutoConfig Service Failed To Start
Just a quick one today, I had a client come to me this morning with their Lenovo R61 notebook with Vista as the OS, complaining that they couldn’t get their wireless connection working. After a clean reboot the Error Dialog box that cam up said “Error Code: 1747 WLAN AutoConfig service failed to start”. So I tried to open up Event Viewer to have a look and that failed to load as well stating that the Windows Event Log Service failed to start.
So I opened up the Services MMC and tried to manually start the Windows Event Log Service and no luck, didn’t start. SO I did a bit of hunting and found that it could be related to a corrupt Windows Vista TCP/IP Winsock Catalog. So I ran the following command in the command prompt with admin privileges.
netsh winsock reset
What this does is reset the Winsock Catalog to a clean state or default configuration. After a reboot everything was fine.
My First Week of Windows 7
Well I took the plunge and installed my copy of Windows 7 (Beta) on my Toshiba M400 Tablet Notebook last week to see how it stacked up. The install process is very simple and easy to do.
What was interesting to note was that Windows automatically created a 200mb hidden partition which is used to hold the Boot Data Configuration (BCD) and the Windows Recovery Environment and actually only uses 32Mb of the allocated 200Mb. One thing to note here is that it is very hard to remove this partition after it is created and if you do then you risk your computer not booting again!
But if you are like me and wanted to take an image of the machine so that you can put it on another machine to test as well then this “hidden partition” can cause some issues. There are ways to avoid this partition from being created and there is a great article explaining it here..
One of the first things that I was impressed with and was a common comment on Twitter was the speed at which it booted and logged in, much better than Vista in my opinion. The other thing was the task bar. Let’s say you have more than one tab open in Internet Explorer you can hover over the IE Icon in the task bar and have the tabs that you have open appear separately and you can then just click on the one that you want to open (see below)
Another little change which may throw a few people (my clients especially who LOVE change) is that Folders are now called Libraries, so you know have a Document Library, Picture Library etc etc.
Now what I found really cool was you now have the ability to Create and Attach VHD Files through Disk Management, which from an admin point of view is great because you can now attach modify VHD files.
Read the rest of this entry »
For All You Hyper-Vers Out There
Just a quick one, Microsoft have released a White Paper on Windows Server 2008 R2 & Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 – Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture.
If you are using Hyper-V or are considering using it then grab this and have a read. Grab it here…..
If You Use Hyper-V This Is a Must……..
Another day another Hyper-V expierience. This time a good one !!.
After reading Virtual PC guy’s article on the Import and Export feature of Hyper-V I thought I would give this a go. I needed to move 2 Exchange 2007 Servers, one holding the Mailstore Role and the other the Hub Transport Role, from one Hyper-V Server to another. Let me say if you ever need to do this then this way is a MUST.
First shutdown the current Virtual Machine, Select it in the “Virtual Machines” window, then on the right hand side you will see a link that say export. Click that and you will then need to select an Export Path, in my case C:\export. After you click OK a folder will be created inside that export folder and it will be the same name as the Virtual Machine that you are exporting.
Read the rest of this entry »
Virtualize Your Exchange Edge Server
OK Here we go back in the swing of things and the first server I am going to “Virtualize” is an Exchange 2007 Server that holds the Edge Server Role. After Reading this article it all seemed fairly straight forward. How wrong I was !!! Here is what I did that led me to this unwanted ERROR “The Exchange Server is in an inconsistant state” when I was trying to install the Edge Transport Role on the new Hyper-V Virtual Server.
The first thing that needed to be done was an export of the current server configuration using, as Microsoft calls it, “cloned configuration tasks”. There is a folder located in the install directory of Exchange, generally C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ called “Scripts”. Inside there are 2 Powershell Scripts that you will need.
They are ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 and ImportEdgeConfig.ps1.
To capture the configuration we need to run the ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 script in the Exchange Management Shell like so:
./ExportEdgeConfig -CloneConfigData:”C:\CloneConfigData.xml”
NOTE: Make Sure you run the Exchange Management Shell as Administrator (right click > Run As Administrator)
Read the rest of this entry »
