IT

The planning tool provides you prescriptive guidance to get you started with planning your Office Communications Server 2007 topology. The tool asks you a series of interview questions about the features that you are interested in, as well as information about your organization.

Based on the answers you provide, the planning tool draws out a recommended topology based on Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 User Model that has been tested.

Read a nice writeup and short tutorial of the tool here.

Download the tool from here.

Check out ShadowExplorer - A very handy tool to browse your system's shadow copies in a point-and-click GUI fashion.

If you are a command line junkie like me, you will appreciate this download from Microsoft that details all the available commands in Server 2003, Vista and Server 2008.

The official description is below:
The Windows command-line tools are used to perform various tasks related to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.You can use the command reference to familiarize yourself with new and enhanced command-line tools, to learn about the command shell, and to automate command-line tasks by using batch files or scripting tools.

Read an excellent write up on why logon scripts might stall under Vista. It is due to a design decision that I don't necessarily agree with.

The most important nugget of information from the post is below:

It is possible to disable boxing for programs initiated from the Startup folder or the Run key in the Registry.

To accomplish this, the following registry key must be changed:
Key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\DelayedApps
Value: Delay_Sec = 0 (default value = 60)

Changing the value is a bit hard because the key is owned by TrustedInstaller and Administrators only have Read access to the key. To overcome this hurdle you must first take ownership of the key.
Unfortunately programs initiated from logon scripts defined in Group Policy are not affected by this key.

Make sure not to blindly cut and paste that into your registry - please read the article above that explains it all.

It is as easy as checking HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SystemInformation\SystemProductName to see if it contains the string Virtual. There are also some other system call tricks, like revealing if the OS is a Server Core, located here.

It looks like, if you wanted to, you could gather most of the information with PowerShell too. It looks pretty straightforward.

I don’t have one personally, but I might soon at this price.

Out of Stock online but available in-store, it seems.

Why are these cool?

You can integrate it with Office Communicator and Windows Live Messenger.

Direct link to the integration components can be found here - most likely not on the provided CD.