I think this infographic really demonstrates what an amazing service they deliver…no wonder they get great feedback and customer loyalty…

risual is hiring

• Sales Account Directors
• Microsoft System Center Consultants
• Microsoft SharePoint Consultants
• Support Engineers
For more information and to submit your CV click here

Sales Account Directors

Risual is looking for New Business sales people and Account Managers. Candidates should have a proven sales track record; good solution sales experience and ideally have experience of helping customers to realise return on their investments in Microsoft Core Infrastructure and Business Productivity solutions

Microsoft System Center Consultants

Risual is looking for talented and senior-level consultants with experience deploying Microsoft System Center solutions in enterprise environments. This position is 100% customer facing for project-based work – as such, candidates must possess a high degree of professionalism and exceptional interpersonal and skills in addition to technical aptitude with the products.

The System Centre consultant will be responsible for leading and deploying Microsoft System Center solutions (SCOM, SCCM, SCVMM, SCSM & SCDPM.) at customer environments, from medium-size businesses of approx. 1,000 users to enterprise organisations of 10-100,000 users. The consultant will also lead end user computing refresh projects using Windows 7 and SCCM Operating System Deployment.

Microsoft SharePoint Consultants

To be successful the candidates will need demonstrable experience of completing technical delivery and consulting engagements across different business environments, sectors and sizes. In addition, the SharePoint Consultants should also have excellent and demonstrable experience Designing, Architecting, Implementing and Configuring Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies including:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Office SharePoint Server 2007
• SharePoint Foundation Server
• SharePoint Server 2010
• InfoPath Forms Services
• Excel Services
• Business Connectivity Services
• PerformancePoint Services
• FAST search

Experience with earlier releases of SharePoint and other related Microsoft Technologies such as Office is also highly valued.

Support Engineers

Risual Software Support Services (RSS) provides the focal point for resolution of all technical issues for Risual customers with deployed production environments, based on Risual supported Microsoft technologies. The primary responsibility of this team is to provide excellence in support for all customers with a Risual support contract. The Support Engineer role is 100% Microsoft centric and relies on excellent technical skill, knowledge and understanding, including:

• Provide customer interface for all support queries into Risual
• Co-ordinate and fix all support queries and requests
• Maintain knowledge base for all encountered issues
• Update customers on all stages of support calls, from logging, research, action plan, escalation to resolution
• Publish customer facing technical information such as best practice guides, FAQ’s, etc.
• Provide reports and statistical analysis on issues reported and resolved for use by Risual account management teams and technical teams
• Provide a feedback loop to delivery and consulting teams
• Provide co-ordination of feedback and point of contact for customers and Risual consultants for issues arising during project deployment
• Provide point of contact and administration for Risual in-house IT systems

So you have laptop without a TPM and still want to use Bitlocker? Well you can still use Bitlocker and store the key on a USB key instead. this will give you a secure data encryption solution and will require you to insert a USB key when the machine boots or resumes from hibernation. This is not required when your machine goes to sleep or standby, so is primarily most useful when your laptop is stolen or someone is conducting an offline attack on your disk.

Funnily enough it would protect you from an attack directly on the TPM such as this, but you are still better with than without a TPM.

The steps on a Windows 7 machine are as follows:

Edit GPO

Edit your local Group Policy to enable Bitlocker with a USB key:

Local Computer Policy>Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Bitlocker Drive Encryption>Operating System Drives>Require additional authentication at startup

then edit the policy to enable require boot authentication without a TPM using Bitlocker

And configure to store your key in Active Directory ( a good idea but optional)

Update GPO

Run Gpupdate to cause the policy to apply

Enable Bitlocker

Then Enable Bitlocker in Windows Explorer

Now when I tried this on a USB key the other day i had an un pleasant surprise when I rebooted and my machine wouldn’t boot as it couldn’t find the Bitlocker key.

Turns out out my USB key had a freebie security application on it which made the key unreadable at boot time. Luckily i had enable the 48 bit recovery key and kept it somewhere safe, so I just reformatted the key and then used the manage BitLocker option to recreate the key:

looks like no-one else has mentioned this here so I’ll get in first

The OCS product group have announced an online tool you can use to test your OCS connectivity from the Internet. Nice and useful if you are testing a deployment and don’t have a spare line/3g card fro testing from the outside.

it’s here https://www.testocsconnectivity.com/

Seems to be the week for search related innovation, after Google’s Goggle, etc. MS research announced a really interesting project called entity cube.

http://entitycube.research.microsoft.com/

At the homepage it summarises current hot topics and news

And if you search for someone or an organisation it builds a dynamic page almost like a Wikipedia page about that entity

And even can show a Guanxi map to show the six degrees of separation style results

Forefront Threat management Gateway the successor to ISA server 2006 is now RTM and the eval is available for download form the following link above

Hurrah the CRM Analytics accelerator has been updated to include SQL 2005 definition files. When the R2 release was posted the SQL 2005 RDL’s didn’t work and there was only SQL 2005, well now you can download the SQL 2005  versions too!

Got home from work today and received an email that Office 2010 Beta is available for download from Connect, it is also available on my TechNet and MSDN accounts.

Now to uninstall the tech preview and see what’s new – hopefully things are a little more stable;)

Today Microsoft have made available Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile versions 6 and 6.1 today joining Windows Mobile 6.5 users.

Just go to wm.windowsphone.com on your device and then install the app.

You can also view the available apps for Windows Phone at marketplace.windowsphone.com

There are currently approx 152 apps available today, wonder how long it will take to get to 65k

via the sysinternals website Microsoft have released a new free P2V tool – Disk2VHD which creates a vhd of a machine, using VSS to snapshot the machine while it is running.

While this does not update the HAL and inject drivers you could use it to convert a running Win7 machine to vhd and use it to boot that machine from vhd with little or no fuss or just to create a bootable backup.

you can get it here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-nz/sysinternals/ee656415(en-us).aspx