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FIM R2 Book available for Pre-Order

Kent — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:55:24 +0000

I am getting really close to finalize my FIM R2 Book! It can now be pre-ordered from http://aka.ms/FIMR2Book. Many thanks to everyone at Pack Publishing, great job!

TechDays in Sweden

Kent — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:47:36 +0000

Today TechDays starts in Sweden. Great stuff covering Nextperience will be presented. I will not make any presentations this year but many of my MEET friends will.

Just look at the list below and realize many of them will be available for sessions and discussions at TechDays in Örebro in next few days. Don’t miss it!

UAG Security Bulletin MS12-026

Kent — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:42:02 +0000

Today Microsoft released a Security Bulletin for UAG, this Bulletin is rated Important. As with all other UAG updates, these packages are not pushed out via Windows Update/Microsoft Update or any of the other automated patching mechanisms, this is because of the special order that needs to be followed for array deployments (array manager first and then rest of the nodes). Following are the relevant links:

MS12-026: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/MS12-026
Master KB 2663860: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2663860
KB 2649261 for UAG SP1: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2649261
KB 2649262 for UAG SP1 Update 1: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2649262

FIM 2010 Update Rollup 2

Kent — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 06:57:17 +0000

FIM 2010 Update Rollup 2 will go live on Microsoft Update today, February 28 at 10 am Pacific time. In addition to including all servicing changes made since RTM, this rollup:

Adds support for the new Extensible Connectivity Management Agent 2.0 (ECMA 2) framework
Addresses a possible performance issue for installations with many dynamic groups or criteria-based sets whose membership criteria include several conditions
Reverts a change in the previous hotfix release that treated SQL wildcard characters as literals
Addresses a number of other issues.

Especially interesting is the reappearing support for wildcards. Hotfix rollup 2520954 removed support for using the following characters as SQL wildcard characters in queries, in dynamic group filters, and in set filters:

Underscore (_)
Percent (%)
Opening bracket ([)

The functionality was used by many of my customers preventing them from updating their FIM. This hotfix reverts the earlier change.

For details, see KB2635086

Microsoft Showcase – UAG

Kent — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:44:57 +0000

Magnus Lindkvist, Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft Sweden and I talk (in Swedish) about UAG in this Microsoft Showcase movie.

If you have trouble watching the Silverlight movie below try this WMV version.

Hopefully more movies will published in the future, I will also try to convince MS that English subtitles would be nice to have, or maybe I will find time to record some in English.

Isaac Asimov – Foundation Universe

Kent — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:27:41 +0000

One of my favorite writers is Isaac Asimov. I am at the moment in the process of re-reading the complete series of books included in the Foundation Universe series (15 books). I am reading them in the order as suggested by Asimov himself before he passed away.

For thoose of you that do not know who Asimov is, or what the Foundation series are. I would like to point out the fact that the Foundation series was awarded the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966 in competition with the well known Lord of the Rings series written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Below is a list of the books and the order to read them. The table contains the order no, the year the book was published, the name of the book and some comments.

1	1982	The Complete Robot	Collection of thirty-one robot short stories written between 1939 and 1977.
2	1954	The Caves of Steel	This is the first of the robot novels.
3	1957	The Naked Sun	The second robot novel.
4	1983	The Robots of Dawn	The third robot novel. Hugo Award nominee, 1984. Locus Award nominee, 1984
5	1985	Robots and Empire	The fourth robot novel. Locus Award nominee, 1986
6	1951	The Stars, Like Dust	This is the first of the Empire novels.
7	1952	The Currents of Space	The second Empire novel.
8	1950	Pebble in the Sky	The third Empire novel, however, it was Asimov’s first full novel to be published.
9	1988	Prelude to Foundation	This is the first Foundation novel. Locus Award nominee, 1989
10	1993	Forward the Foundation	The second Foundation novel (although it was the last written by Asimov himself).
11	1951	Foundation	The third Foundation novel. Actually, it is a collection of four stories, originally published between 1942 and 1944, plus an introductory section written for the book in 1949. Published, slightly abridged, as part of an Ace Double paperback, D-110, with the title “The 1000-Year Plan”, in 1955.
12	1952	Foundation and Empire	The fourth Foundation novel, made up of two stories, originally published in 1945. Published with the title ‘The Man Who Upset the Universe’ as a 35c Ace paperback, D-125, in about 1952.
13	1953	Second Foundation	The fifth Foundation novel, made up of two stories, originally published in 1948 and 1949.
14	1982	Foundation’s Edge	The sixth Foundation novel. Nebula Award nominee, 1982. Hugo Award winner, 1983. Locus Award winner, 1983
15	1986	Foundation and Earth	The seventh Foundation novel. Locus Award nominee, 1987

Hope you will enjoy reading this series as much as I am.

QA Gate Improved in FIM 2010 R2

Kent — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:16:25 +0000

Customers using the Self-Service Password Reset feature of FIM 2010 have reported some concerns that users do not answer the “security” questions seriously. They might answer “A” for all questions for example, just to get rid of being required to register for SSPR. In R2 this behaviour can be prevented!

Look at the screenshot below from FIM 2010 R2 RC released yesterday.

QA Gate in FIM 2010 R2

In the new QA gate you can force the users to not having the same answers to two questions and also define a regular expression that the answers need to satisfy.

In my opinion this will increase the number of users who will answer the questions seriously!

ISA 2006 Service Uptime 479 Days!

Kent — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:16:55 +0000

I have one ISA 2006 still in production. It’s job is to run the site-to-site VPN connection between my remote backup site in Bollnäs and my main site in Söderhamn. It has now been running for more than 479 days and I do not see any reason for it to not continue running for many days to come.

ISA Service Uptime 479 days

One might think that I should patch this guy once in a while. But this is in my opionion a good example of… If it aint broken don’t fix it!.

The only allowed traffic in this ISA is the site-to-site VPN connecting my remote backup site to my main office. I don’t in this case feel that this ISA is insecure.

Installing TMG SP2 on UAG

Kent — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:18:33 +0000

I get a lot of questions from my customers if they should install TMG SP2 on their UAG server. The short answer is Yes. The longer answer is…

The answer from Microsoft when asking about TMG SP2 support on UAG was… “Tested and fully supported coexistence of UAG SP1 and UAG SP1 UP1 with TMG SP2“. So you have to have UAG SP1 or higher before you install TMG SP2.

But what about the new Update1 to UAG SP1? Well if you plan to add both TMG SP2 and UAG SP1 Update1 to your UAG, the recommended install order is to first install the TMG SP2 and then Update 1 for UAG SP1.

Troubleshooting in FIM 2010 R2

Kent — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:58:11 +0000

Anyone working with FIM today have at some point been forced to do some troubleshooting. In FIM 2010 R2 troubleshooting is made much easier. Let me show you an example.

In current version of FIM when ever an error occured while processing a request we would see the following screen.

FIM 2010 - Error Message

It doesn’t give much of a hint on what went wrong. In FIM 2010 R2 error messages has been enhanced throughout the whole product to make error tracking easier.

If we look at the new error message I get in FIM 2010 R2 it looks something like this.

FIM 2010 R2 - Error Message

Take a special note to the Correlation Id that is introduced in FIM 2010 R2. This Id will be found also in Event Viewer if you need to drill down and find the correlated error event. If the error comes from a custom workflow you have designed it will show the error message thrown by your code.

If the FIM Portal is used for self-service of some kind you will also appreciate the copy to clipboard and send email functionality the user will get directly from the error screen.

This is just one example on how the R2 release of FIM 2010 will make your life, as FIM admin, easier.