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:

I’m sure the use of adding .ICA files to web servers to launch published applications from Presentation Server doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it’s still useful for adding a link to an application on an intranet site. After adding a .ICA file to IIS6, however, users may receive a file not found error:

Having issues getting Word 2007 to register your blog provider? You may receive the following error message when attempting to add a blog account to Word:

I’ve put together a diagram detailing the flow of IP traffic between the different components of an Access Gateway with Advanced Access Control implementation. This is designed to give everyone involved in implementation of the Access Gateway an understanding of each component and the communication required between each host. This diagram details these components:

This one is in reply to Long’s post, but to be fair I know he’s all for UAC. Windows Vista finally introduces some real security improvements to the Windows operating system that have been long overdue. The product is still in beta, however people are already up in arms about how ‘intrusive’ UAC is. Why is it that Linux and MacOS users understand why it’s not a good idea to run with administrative privileges and Windows users don’t? *