TEAMAS

This week I visited the Google offices near Tottenham Court Road to see how businesses are using the Google Apps Platform. The event was run by a company called Netpremacy.   They have an offering called AppsCare which is specifically designed for helping companies move from a hosted Exchange or Lotus environment to a fully hosted Google Apps environment. Google being Google, the offices couldn't be a simple affair!   They have huge shagpile carpets of the Google Chrome icon and a very industrial effect in the Seminar room the event was held in. Anyway, enough of the fancy dan stuff, how was the day? Well it was great, hugely thought provoking and left me questioning a lot of decisions we as Systems Administrators, Engineers and Architects generally make. I generally like the Google offering, I use Gmail and have recently purchased 100GB of Google Drive space when they announced their huge price cuts. http://lifehacker.com/prices-for-monthly-google-drive-storag

Recently I have been running a proof of concept for XenDesktop 7.1 for my company. This has been really interesting, especially around the XenApp integration into the new architecture. I created a Windows 7 template which I had planned to give to my PoC users. We have spent a lot of time on making sure that every little bit of the Windows UI is tailored for our users in our production environment, so I wanted to ensure the Windows 7 environment was as similar as possible. It seems I am spending a lot of time in GPMC.msc (group policy management console) at the moment! Just before releasing this to our users I noticed that the screensaver wasn't kicking in. We set this to ensure that their desktop session is locked for security purposes. I checked all of the policies and they were spot on??? I even tried setting this manually in the HKCU registry...but nothing? So after exhausted this avenue I did a bit of a Google search. I found that this is a known issue in XenDe