Essential Guides

Download the latest IT administration and management Essential Guides from Windows IT Pro. Find a quick reference guide on a specific IT topic.

Architecting the Best Service Desk Solution for Your Organization by ScriptLogic

In this paper, written by John Savill, you will learn the key capabilities that are vital to a successful Service Desk solution, the importance of integration with monitoring solutions and enabling user self-service through web based portals and email based requests.

The Essential Guide to Optimizing Windows Server Workloads by Cisco

Read this Essential Guide to learn some of the ways in which IT shops today can benefit from the increased control, manageability, performance, and cost-benefits afforded by a more strategic, and synergistic, approach to systems management by means of using smarter infrastructure and components.

The Essential Guide to Least Privilege: A Use Case-Based Approach by Viewfinity

This Essential Guide explains what tools administrators and users can use in Windows today to honor least privilege. It also looks at how third-party applications can complement the least-privilege controls embedded in Windows to further lock down access to the Windows platform and its resources.

The Essential Guide to Desktop Virtualization by Citrix

In this Essential Guide, you’ll learn how Desktop Virtualization provides a double win for the enterprise.

The Essential Guide to Lossless iSCSI by Brocade, Hitachi Data Systems

This essential guide will arm you with that knowledge and you’ll be well positioned to assess your current iSCSI infrastructure, evaluate lossless iSCSI products, and engineer an iSCSI SAN infrastructure that will make it possible to implement high-class benefits that are traditionally only available with its FC cousin.

The Essential Guide to Gathering SQL Server Knowledge by Red Gate

In this essential guide, sponsored by Redgate, the areas that are most important for monitoring SQL Server will be discussed in depth.

The Essential Guide to Virtualizing Desktops and Applications by Quest Software

This Quest Essential Guide talks about these technologies and how they now enable centralized administration for convenient management, security, backup, and restoration.

The Essential Guide to Client Backup for Windows 7 by Iron Mountain

This essential guide, sponsored by Iron Mountain, will tell you some of the best practices for evaluating client backup technologies.

The Essential Guide to Microsoft Virtualization by EMC

This essential guide, sponsored by EMC, will show you what you can do to implement a secure and agile Virtualization environment.

The Essential Guide to Successful SharePoint Implementation by EMC

This essential guide discusses what challenges may arise and how to overcome them to successfully plan and architect a SharePoint implementation.

The Essential Guide to an NDS-to-Active Directory Migration by Quest Software

With the release of Windows Server 2008 and the latest iteration of Active Directory, many enterprise IT departments have decided that Active Directory is a sufficiently mature and proven technology and that the time has come to move from their current networking environment.

The Essential Guide: System Management Moves to the Cloud by Viewfinity

The SMB market (500 to 3,000 desktops), can greatly benefit from a comprehensive systems management program. But finding a way to implement such a program without breaking the budget can be daunting. This guide will help you with this process.

Exchange 2010: The Future of Messaging by Microsoft

What does the future of messaging hold? Exchange Server MVP Paul Robichaux spells it out in this series of three articles.

The Essential Guide to Mission-Critical Microsoft SQL Server by EMC

Microsoft® SQL Server® is one of the leading RDBMS Enterprise software applications on the market regardless of database size or performance requirements.

ASP.NET MVC (model view controller) and Custom HTTP Handlers by Syncfusion

Industry expert Dino Esposito walks through the essentials of ASP.NET MVC and how it offers an alternate programming model compared to Web Forms but shares the same runtime environment. Additionally, this guide covers how ASP.NET MVC contrasts classic Web Forms requests with HTTP handlers and discusses some of the intricacies you might face when hosting custom HTTP handlers in an ASP.NET MVC application.

A Guide to Migrating Public Folders to SharePoint by AvePoint

This guide to migrating public folders to SharePoint Server, brought to you by Windows IT Pro and AvePoint, will provide a general overview of the process that will help you plan, design, and carryout your migration with as few problems and pitfalls as possible.

The Essential Guide to Exchange Server Consolidation by Unisys

Microsoft has steadily improved the scalability, availability and performance of Exchange Server since its initial release. In many environments, Microsoft’s standard recommendations for sizing and configuring servers work perfectly well. However, there are several additional ways in which you can optimize Exchange architecture designs to reduce cost and increase service levels.

The Essential Guide to SQL Server Consolidation by Unisys

In recent years, application consolidation has been a hot topic within many IT organizations. Why should customers consider database consolidation now? According to industry analysts, companies can typically realize cost savings in the range of 20% by consolidating their database environments.

The Essential Guide to Desktop Virtualization by Unisys

As the cost and labor to keep enterprise desktops secure and productive has increased over recent years, many companies are turning to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to centralize desktop management. In this Essential Guide we’ll provide a technical overview of VDI and show how IT can leverage VDI to gain better flexibility and control while reducing TCO by as much as 30 percent.

The Essential Guide to Optimizing BI by Microsoft

The three major barriers to BI.

The Essential Guide to Optimizing OLTP Performance by Microsoft

Focuses on some of the recent technical advances and best practices that IT organizations can leverage to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to optimizing OLTP capacity.

The Essential Guide to High Performance SQL Server 2008 by Unisys

This guide will address the factors and challenges involved with implementing high performance SQL Server 2008 instances and databases.

The Essential Guide to SQL Server 2005 BI by Dell

In this Essential Guide, we look at how the tools available in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 support Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services.

The Essential Guide to Business Intelligence Reporting: Choosing the Right Tool for the Right Job by Microsoft

Review of frequently used Microsoft tool sets, then introduces you to Microsoft SQL Analysis Services – a powerful, economical, and efficient way to format, display, and interpret your company’s business intelligence data.

The Essential Guide to SQL Server 2005 and 2008 Failover Clustering with Windows Server 2008 by Dell

This article reviews frequently used Microsoft tool sets, then introduces you to Microsoft SQL Analysis Services -– a powerful, economical, and efficient way to format, display, and interpret your company’s business intelligence data.

Virtualization of SQL Server 2008 by Dell

This Essential Guide explores how to plan, deploy and manage a virtualized SQL Server database environment.

The Essential Guide to Windows Server 2008 by Unisys

This essential guide looks at the major user needs that are driving the server market in 2008; server consolidation, application consolidation, database-driven solutions, and business intelligence.

The Essential Guide to Understanding Unified Communications by Dell

If you've been paying attention to Microsoft marketing lately, you've heard a lot about a concept called Unified Communications (UC). I've talked with some people who weren't sure what UC was all about. Is it a new product or line of products? The answer to that question is both simple and complex, but at its core, UC is about Microsoft's recognition that communication plays an important role in the modern workplace.

The Essential Guide to Creating an Environment for Sustaining Compliance by Shavlik Technologies

Before the onslaught of today's security-related mandates most companies were already struggling to deal with their own internal mandates for security and control of their IT infrastructure. Faced with the multiple mandates and looming deadlines it's easy to take a reactive, point-in-time oriented approach.

The Essential Guide to Exchange 2007 Storage Sizing by Dell

This guide explores the fundamental concepts underlying Exchange storage sizing, explore the relationship between storage performance and capacity, and show you which factors you need to consider as you're planning your Exchange 2007 storage deployment.

The Essential Guide to Exchange 2007 Storage Planning & Implementation by Dell

As you prepare to transition to Exchange 2007, you'll find that there are several areas of design and implementation that require a different perspective from previous versions. Storage design is one of these areas; the architectural changes in Exchange 2007 mean that you'll need to approach your Exchange environment with a fresh eye to design the optimum Exchange infrastructure for your needs.

The Essential Guide to Reporting Services Tips & Tricks by 90 Degree

Whether you are a developer tasked with report design or a business user who wants to create your own reports, here are some tips and tricks for easily and efficiently creating valuable, flexible reports that perform well, plus a sampling of some third-party tools you can use to extend SSRS's functionality.

The Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery and Virtualization by CA XOsoft

In this guide, will demonstrate how XOSoft’s WANSync HA application together with VMware ESX Server can be used to provide automatic systems failover on a shared platform and provide the ability to test those systems, in production, to give you the assurance that the data being written to the high availability solution is valid and can be relied upon whenever you need to invoke the disaster recovery.

The Essential Guide to Identity Access in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 by Microsoft

In this Essential Guide, we will focus on the identity and access services Microsoft offers as part of the Windows Server 2003 R2 operating system.

The Essential Guide to Using Network Access Protection to Secure a Windows Longhorn Network by Microsoft

Network Access Protection, a new feature in Windows Longhorn Server, provides a way of ensuring that only clients that have dotted their I's and crossed their T's are able to connect to the organization's network. This article will look at how Network Access Protection policies are configured and will provide a summary of how they are used to keep clients that connect to the network in an appropriate state of health.

The Essential Guide to Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition by Microsoft

Designed for the enterprise-computing environment, Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition delivers on the enterprise class reliability, scalability, and large-scale virtualization needs of the Windows Server user. Datacenter Edition is the most powerful and flexible version of Windows Server.

The Essential Guide to SQL Server Backup and Recovery by Idera

SQL Server 2005 provides four high-availability technologies: failover clustering and database mirroring, both with supported automatic failover; and log shipping and replication, with either manual or custom-coded failover.

The Essential Guide to Jump Starting Your SQL Server Skills by Quest Software

An accessible guide that focuses on getting you up to speed on database design and hierarchy, with sections on Columns and Data Types, creating databases and tables, and using the Query Editor.

Special Report: Perspectives on SQL Server Sprawl by PolyServe

How many new SQL Servers and databases has your company put up in the last year? In the last two years? Don’t know? Can’t count, there are so many? Does it seem like your database inventory is spiraling out of control? Is containing costs becoming a serious challenge? You’re not alone. This Special Report takes a close look at how SQL Server sprawl affects various key people in every organization and provides best practices for preventing server sprawl.

The Essential Guide to SQL Server Management Fundamentals by EMC

If you're new to managing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 you might feel somewhat lost in a world of tables, indexes, stored procedures, queries, and database backup. In this Essential Guide, I‘ll show you the tools you need to manage a SQL Server 2005 system, SQL Server security essentials, and database backup and recovery. With this article under your belt, you'll know enough about SQL Server to perform necessary administrative tasks on a SQL Server 2005 system.

The Essential Guide to 64-Bit Server by AMD

The introduction of 64-bit capabilities for x86 architecture (referred to as x64) and the growing availability of hardware and software for this architecture, have ushered in a new era of 64-bit computing. In this essential guide, you'll learn about running SQL Server on the 64-bit platform.

The Essential Guide to Unified Threat Management by Corrent

In this Essential Guide, we’ll overview Unified Threat Management (UTM) and describe its benefits—as well as some of the gotchas you should watch for. The security industry is going in a great direction with UTM, but UTM is not the best solution for every situation.

The Essential Guide to Table Partitioning and Data Lifecycle Management by EMC

This Essential Guide explains in detail the benefits of the table partitioning features available in SQL Server 2005 and gives IT professionals solid methods to improve maintenance and query performance through the use of these features.

The Essential Guide to Testing Your Disaster Recovery Ability by XOSoft

This Essential Guide describes what to test, how to test it, and what results to expect.

The Essential Guide to Analytic Dashboards by ProClarity

The proliferation of different types of BI tools in the marketplace has understandably contributed to confusion about what constitutes a portal, a dashboard, and a scorecard.

The Essential Guide to Active Directory Management by Quest Software

Read the Essential Guide to Active Directory Management to get the tools that to reduce IT workload, the complexity of managing AD, improve security, and reduce overall costs of implementing and managing Active Directory.

The Essential Guide to Real-Time High Availability for Exchange by XOSoft

This Essential Guide describes what "high availability" really means, then discusses different strategies that you can use to improve your systems' availability and resiliency.

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