Weekend musings of an enterprise blogger

There are times when you get flooded with interesting things to write about, but they may be brief bullets of tech gossip, interesting new releases, promising technology, and so forth. Each point in itself would not warrant its own entry, but together they’re a very powerful collection indeed.

For starters, I recently wrote a post about the CLI and the importance of becoming more familiar with it. I focused on Server Core in the column and, after toying with Server Core for a while, I felt it was something a person could pick up overnight. That fantasy ended when I received a copy of the book Administering Windows Server 2008 Server Core, published by Sybex and written by John Paul Mueller. This 600+ page monster of a book is filled with amazing aspects to Server Core that I had never heard of, including using all the commands, creating BAT files, and working with scripts, registry hacks, and much more. It gets my thumbs up.

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Another thumbs up for books is Greg Shields’ Windows Server 2008: What’s New, What’s Changed. For those of you who already know Server, this is a quick way to be caught up to speed on the new features. Greg has a style that is both informative and humorous at the same time. Greg has recently posted some news about his recent move to TechNet magazine (congratulations to Greg on that — although we will miss his articles in Redmond Magazine). You can still catch Greg’s podcast with Don Jones here, along with insightful articles.

On a personal note, for those of you who have been reading my Exchange posts, if you want some free education on Exchange 2007 you should check out my site at www.exclusivelyexchange.com for a collection of free screencasts. We recently added a few new features like ClipNotes, Closed Captioning, and an Exam. More clips are coming, so stay tuned for that.

One hardware note that I don’t want to forget to mention is the long-awaited Alienware Curved Monitor that I recently caught a glimpse of (although still not released). I personally love using their systems (Alienware gives me a new laptop to work with every few months, and I use it when speaking at conferences.) I’m looking forward to the new Alienware Curved Monitor that you can see a video of here.

On another hardware note, Excito has just released its second version of the Bubba server. Bubba II is a Linux server that plugs right into your network and can begin to handle some of the services that you might be loading your Windows servers down with right now. It can serve as a firewall, router, mail server, Web server, and more. You can read about the Bubba II here.

So. That is my weekend update. No politics, no economic commentary, no gas price discussion: just technology.