In case you weren’t aware, Microsoft have a web forum for support and discussion around NAP. It’s a little sparse at the moment with only 13 topics but once Longhorn Server is released this forum should become more widely used.

Jeff Sigman, the NAP Release Manager at Microsoft, has posted a link to a webcast he did recently for MVPs, which is now available for general viewing. This is quite a long webcast (1h 40m) but it goes into detail about NAP and demonstrates using DHCP or IPSec as an enforcement tool for NAP. It’s well worth checking out if you have the time, but if you don’t, here’s my (really) rough notes to give you an overview of the content:

Via Steve Riley and from the Today Tonight school of journalism comes NAP to be ‘kicked out’ of Vista. Here’s a couple of snippets:

Now that Microsoft have released ISA Server 2006, we have more authentication options available to us. This includes the ability to add two-factor authentication solutions to the existing forms based authentication, traditionally used to authentication against Active Directory only. I have a previous post on how to protect Outlook Web Access with RSA SecurID, which discusses using the RSA Web Agent with IIS and RSA SecurID authentication with ISA Server 2004, however both of those options are a little clunky. Now with ISA Server 2006, we have a more elegant solution that allows us to integrate RSA SecurID directly into the forms authentication method. Assuming ISA Server is a domain member, here’s how to do it.

With the release of Office 2007 not that far away, the new Open XML file formats should be starting to make an appearance in enterprises. By installing the Microsoft Office applications on your Advanced Access Control server you can provide HTML rendering of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to your users (You can also provide access to Visio documents too, but I won’t cover that here). At this stage, this will only cover the current .DOC, .XLS and .PPT file types. By installing the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats you can provide users with access to the new .DOCX, .XLSX and .PPTX. This is a simple process, here’s how to do it:

I upgraded our firewall a couple of days ago from ISA Server 2004 to ISA Server 2006, which went fairly smoothly with the actual setup routine only taking about 5 minutes to complete. However, after the upgrade there were a couple of items required some configuration changes:

Just in the process of upgrading our firewall from ISA Server 2004 to ISA Server 2006. Before I did this, though, I wanted to grab an export of my current config. However toward the end of the export, the management console would report this error:

Here’s a couple of nifty tips for Windows Vista that I’ve learnt this week and wanted to share:

Here’s a quick list of interesting NAP and Domain/Server Isolation related links from Microsoft for September:

I’m not alone in my frustration with Windows Vista (or Windows XP) and the inconsistency in font usage. Fonts are definitely in your face and consistent font usage helps the user distinguish between a UI element and content. David Vronay, Research Manager for Windows User Experience Compliance, has posted a response to a thread that I started on font inconsistency at shell: revealed. Here’s what he had to say on the topic: