So, I'm back home from a great trip to Seattle, Washington, US. The MVP Summit 2008 was a cool experience with lots of info and room for dialog with the product teams at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond.

We had some awesome talks on the future of Group Policy and I would really like to share it with you, but because of Non-Disclosure Agreements 'n' stuff I can't really say anything - yet.

Seattle is a very interesting city with a lot of great restaurants, nice architecture and friendly people. I had 2½ day to spend after the summit and even though I was missing my family Seattle took great care of me :)

Anyway, I hope to go back there next year - better prepared for jetlag (which basically means I'll travel a few days before the event next time) - but, that all depends on how much time I get to share information with you guys/girls out there... No sharing, no MVP award - that's the rule ya' know ;-)

Thanx to the GP team and the other MVPs for a great experience!

.

Yup, a wish came through - I'm now an MVP!

Receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award is a great honor and much appreciated - thank you.

Sharing Rocks - Information wants to be free!

Time to get a beer :-)

.

Welcome to "The Quest for the Holy Desktop WMI Filter”, this is a global search for what you could call "The Perfect Desktop WMI Filter". A WMI filter which, by using WMI Query Language (WQL), should be able to spot DESKTOP computers only. It should be a general query - meaning it should be possible to use the filter in most Active Directory environments around the globe for Group Policy filtering.

So, what is a desktop really? Well, actually in this case we'll say it's the opposite of a laptop. Hmm, then what is a laptop? Easy enough: a computer with a battery! We've got the WMI filter for finding laptops already:

Select * from Win32_Battery  - don't you just love the simplicity in this query?

This filter will make a computer with a battery respond back with "TRUE" (because the WMI class instance is present), meaning a GPO with this filter will apply to computers with batteries. Simple right? And you might think it's easy to just "turn it around" to find desktops, like:

Select * From Win32_Battery Where Availability != 2
  or
Select

On January 24 MVP:Security Jesper Johansson posted a very good blog entry, "Do Vista Users Need Fewer Security Patches Than XP Users?", about Windows XP vs. Windows Vista security. This was in reply to the "One Year Vulnerability Report" by Jeff Jones (who is the Director of Security at Microsoft).

It’s VERY interesting reading  showing how strong Vista is - oh, and Jesper takes that even further comparing IE7 and Firefox patching. Cool stuff.

Enjoy!

.

I would like to congratulate 4 of our Authors for being re-awarded their MVP status.

• Joseph Bittman - Awarded for work in the field of Windows Server System - Data Protection Manager
• Jabez Ming Teik Gan - Awarded for work in the field of Windows Server System - File System/Storage
• Kristan Kenny - Awarded for work in the field of Windows Shell/User
• Kam Hung (Ken Lin) - Awarded for work as a Visual Developer - Visual Basic

These 4 people are active beta testers and always strive to be the best at what they do!

Well done you 4-Keep up the good work

Hi,

Microsoft MVP, Jeremy Moskowitz, has 2 video interviews out there… Check them out:

Part 1 & Part 2

_