The Ten Things to Do First for Windows 7
When you run your thumb down the list of new features and improvements in Windows 7 (see the feature comparison chart at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare), you’re bound to wonder how you’re going to get your arms around all that new technology so that you can deliver it to your users without too much disruption.
Following are 10 steps that can help you accomplish that goal.
1. Get to know Windows 7 on a first-name basis.
Obviously, the first step is to gain personal experience. And that means more than just puttering around in the lab. Install Windows 7 on every workstation in your organization and on the machine you use at home for remote-access trouble calls. Force yourself to find ways to make everything work.
Most tools for managing Windows servers from Windows 7 are included in the Windows 7 Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), which must be downloaded separately. At this writing, the final RSAT package hasn’t been finalized. The release candidate is available at here.
Don’t be surprised when your Administrative Tools folder doesn’t get populated immediately after you install the RSAT package. The RSAT tools come in the form of a Windows Feature set that must be separately enabled using the Programs and Features applet in the Control Panel. See Figure 1 for an example. For an unknown (but, I’m sure, entirely valid) reason, you must separately click each feature to select it. The parent check blocks don’t automatically select their children.
The Active Directory RSAT tools will work with Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 domain controllers, although some features, such as the Active Directory Recycle Bin, require Windows Server 2008 R2 functionality level.
Managing Exchange 2003 from a Windows 7 workstation isn’t quite so straightforward: The Exchange System Manager (ESM) console that comes with the Exchange 2003 installation CD doesn’t run on Windows 7. There’s a special version of ESM designed for Vista that you can download from here. This console will run fine under Windows 7, but the installer makes a specific check for Vista (Windows version 6.0.0) that fails on Windows 7. You can use a free Microsoft tool called Orca to modify the MSI file to remove or modify the version check. Orca comes as part of the Windows Installer SDK; download instructions are at here. However, I think you’ll find it much simpler to load ESM in XP Mode. More on that later.
2. Learn Windows PowerShell.
It’s safe to say that the single most important skill a Windows administrator will need in the coming years is proficiency with Windows PowerShell. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 both have Windows PowerShell version 2 baked into the operating system and it’s enabled by default. You should plan on installing Windows PowerShell v2 on your remaining servers and desktops so that you can use one script technology to manage your entire fleet. (Note that you won’t be able to install PowerShell v2 on Exchange 2007 servers or workstations. These machines require PowerShell v1.1. But even v1.1 gives you access to a wide range of functionality.)
Even if you’re a die-hard GUI administrator who hasn’t opened a command prompt since Y2K, you’ll find that most new GUI tools from Microsoft are now taking the form of graphical front ends on top of Windows PowerShell cmdlets. Many of these tools will tell you the underlying command string if you know where to look for it. That’s an easy way to see how the cmdlets work.
Many great Windows PowerShell references are available, including the outstanding book “Windows PowerShell in Action” (Manning Publications, 2007), written by Bruce Payette, a member of the Microsoft Windows PowerShell team. A new edition is forthcoming; you can pay a few dollars to read the early chapters, reserve a copy when it’s released and get an e-book of the first edition at the publisher’s Web site, manning. Also check out “Windows PowerShell Pocket Reference” (O’Reilly Media Inc., 2009) by Lee Holmes, another Windows PowerShell team member. And visit the Windows PowerShell team blog at blogs.msdn. There, you’ll find one of the most interactive developer teams on the planet. Every word on this blog is worth reading. Twice.
You can use these AD cmdlets to manage domains running Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, but you’ll first need to install the AD Management Gateway Service (also known as AD Web Services, or ADWS) on at least one domain controller. At this writing, ADWS is in beta; it can be downloaded from connect.microsoft.com.
The ADWS service requires Windows Server 2003 SP2 (regular or R2) or Windows Server 2008 plain or SP2. You’ll need to install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (here) and a hotfix (here) that enables support for the Web service flag in Netlogon. (The hotfix is baked into Windows Server 2008 SP2.)
If you work in one of those organizations where getting changes approved for domain controllers takes a lot of time and effort, and you’d like to start using Windows PowerShell to manage Active Directory while you still have your youth and vitality, take a look at the free Active Directory cmdlets from Quest at quest.com.
3. Plow through licensing.
If your organization didn’t deploy Vista, you may not be familiar with the latest volume-activation requirements in Windows. If you’re an admin in an enterprise with more than 25 desktops and/or five servers, if your organization takes advantage of a volume-license program such as an Enterprise Agreement or Select Agreement, and if you purchase Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate (or you upgrade to those versions as part of Software Assurance), you should do the following: Print out a short stack of Volume Activation documents from here, pour yourself a few ounces of a bold Tuscan wine and start studying.
When you eventually declare yourself completely confused, download an excellent webcast by product manager Kim Griffiths, who does a great job of explaining the program’s nuances. You’ll find the webcast at here.
In brief, to deploy Windows 7 desktops using volume licenses, you’ll probably need to install a Key Management Server (KMS). I say “probably” because you may not have enough machines in your organization to support KMS activation. A KMS won’t begin doling out activation approvals until it receives requests from at least 25 desktops and/or five servers. That’s to prevent unscrupulous vendors from using the same volume-license key for multiple small clients. Once activated, a client must reactivate every six months. Despite what you may have read elsewhere, there’s no reduced functionality mode in Windows 7. If the activation key expires, the desktop background simply goes black and a notification balloon states that the operating system isn’t genuine.
If you have fewer than the required number of devices for a KMS, you can obtain a Multiple Activation Key (MAK) that’s stocked with activation allocations based on the number of volume licenses you purchase, plus a fudge factor that allows you to add machines between true-ups. An MAK key is authenticated by a Microsoft hosted service, so you’ll need Internet access following the OS installation.
A change introduced with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 now allows virtual machines to count against the KMS minimum for activation. This helps to boost your device count if you’re a small shop that uses lots of virtual desktops and servers.
If you already have a KMS for Vista and Windows Server 2008, you’ll be able to download an update for activating Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines.
4. Focus on strategic improvements.
Once you’re familiar with system administration using Windows 7 tools and you’ve set up the technology to activate your desktops, it’s time to start planning for deployment to end users. The most important thing to do at this point and I know you don’t want to hear this is to hold a meeting.
Steady … steady. Stay with me. This will be a different sort of meeting. You’re going to gather all your IT cousins who have been working with Windows 7. Not just architects. Not just desktop folks. Not just the server team or help-desk technicians or internal developers or project managers. You want representatives from every team. Think of it as an ecumenical council. Make it an all-day affair. Tell all potential attendees that only the cool kids will be on this bus, so they certainly don’t want to miss out.
Do yourself a favor before the meeting: Arm yourself with numbers. That’s because, at some point, somebody is bound to say: “We really should put together an enterprise application catalog that we can use to do our compatibility testing. And can all our machines really run Windows 7?” Then the group will spend an hour or two talking about how to assemble the catalog or why it can’t be done or how John on the desktop team already has a spreadsheet with that information but he hasn’t refreshed it in a while and it doesn’t include the machines in Europe, the Middle East and Africa—and so forth and so on.
5. Expand the deployment scope.
Some of the best features in Windows 7 may require a few changes to your infrastructure. For example: High on my list of favorite features is the combination of Federated Search and Libraries in the new Explorer shell. These work together to provide a centralized and flexible view of distributed data.
The key to using Federated Search is finding or building connectors to Web-based data repositories. A connector is a set of configuration items inside an .OSDX file. These items point at a Web site and describe how to handle the content. Here’s an example of a Bing connector:
?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
opensearchdescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/”
xmlns:ms-ose=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/”>shortname>Bing
description>Bing in Windows 7.
url type=”application/rss+xml”
template=”http://api.bing.com/rss.aspx?source=web&query=
{searchTerms}&format=rss”/>url type=”text/html” template=”http://www.bing.com/search?q={searchTerms}”/>
/opensearchdescription>
When you right-click an .OSDX file, Explorer shows a Create Search Connector option in the property menu. Click it and the connector gets added to the list of items under Favorites. Initiate a search of the connector by highlighting it and typing terms into the search field in the upper-right corner of the Explorer window. In a few seconds, Explorer populates the results pane.
Connectors are simple to build. Convince your internal developers to put a few together for your intranet servers (company portal, SharePoint farm and so on). Point them at the long list of sample connectors at SevenForums (here), a massively useful independent site for all things Windows 7-ish. Distribute these connectors to your users using your standard package deployment tools. You can then use them to build a standard view of your distributed Web data.
Although Federated Search can handle Web site content well enough, organizations tend to struggle when it comes to delving into the terabytes upon terabytes of files sitting on file servers. This means that users who have only the vaguest notions of drive mappings and network data storage may need to spend hours sifting through their W: drives trying to find, for instance, the reports they wrote last month.
That’s where Libraries come into play. Libraries aggregate files from a variety of sources into searchable objects. The default libraries in Windows 7 include the usual assortment of personal data types and locations—Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos—and it’s simple to expand this list to include server-based repositories. Just right-click, select New Library and add a UNC path to a shared folder.
One catch: The target folder must be indexed. On Windows Server 2008 and higher, install the File Services role. Then, under Role Services, install the Windows Search Service. On Windows Server 2003 SP2 servers, install Windows Search 4.0, a free download from here. In addition, due to a limitation in the Search interface, you won’t be able to specify DFS paths even if the ultimate target of a DFS folder is an indexed file server.
There’s no command-line utility for creating libraries and, at this writing, no Windows PowerShell cmdlets, either. The Windows 7 SDK includes tools for working with libraries programmatically, so it won’t be long before little utilities begin appearing. Keep an eye out for them.
One note about the default action of Libraries: Explorer displays Libraries in the Common File Dialog to enable users to save files to a Library by dragging and dropping. If you have multiple links under a library, one of them must be configured as the default target.
this article part 2
Tags: activation key, command prompt, Control, download, functionality, Library, Microsoft, Support, Tutorial, Virtual, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 7 SDK, Windows Server, Windows Server 2008
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The Ten Things to Do First for Windows 7 – Part 2 | PC Tips on 28 Oct 2009 at 3:57 pm #
[...] The first part of this article are here. [...]