Solution Accelerators, Hacking and SBSC in the UK

Its a busy Friday, lots of things to talk about. SBSC is coming to the UK, hackers are already exploiting holes reported in August’s security bulletins released on Tuesday and there is now a solution accelerator for really large deployments. Even if you’ll never deploy XP to 15,000 desktops these documents are very interesting so give them a few minutes.

Hacking
If you have not patched your systems on Tuesday, the Microsoft Internet Explorer holes are already being attacked. This is why it is important to have a good patching system in place or at least turn on Automatic Updates so that your clients and computers can stay up to date without your explicit action. In the world of 0-day security exploits, the fact that it took three days to produce a public exploit is somewhat shocking, but a blessing in disguise. Patch your systems immediately. Believe it or not, people compromise security for fun as our friend Dogbert points out:

Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment Enterprise Edition
Steven Bink is reporting the release of: The Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) follows the best practices of a multinational bank with more than 15,000 employees on five continents using multiple data centers. This solution shows how both Zero Touch and Lite Touch deployments are performed in that organization. Zero Touch contains two components:
* Zero Touch Install (ZTI). The ZTI component makes extensive use of the Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 Operating System Deployment (OSD) Feature Pack to allow customers in large and geographically dispersed organizations to perform new machine setup and machine replacement for users to be migrated to a new machine, without having to touch the target box.
* Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP). The ZTP component allows businesses to move to a managed, self-service provisioning portal that allows delegates to perform common provisioning tasks, such as password resets, e-mail provisioning, and elective application installation. ZTP requires the use of SMS 2003. The Enterprise Edition provides complete guidance for ZTP using Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004. ZTP provides a base to reliably provision enterprise or hosted commercial services and applications, resulting in reduced administrator intervention during the provisioning phase.

Download it here.

SBSC in the UK
Microsoft Small Business Specialist program that launched in USA at WWPC has been a great success so far and now our UK friends are getting it too. Their program is set to launch on Monday, August 15, 2005 and this site has more information on it: www.sbsbpi.co.uk. This seems to be very similar to US’s Small Business Community Channel so if you’re in the UK and smallbiz its a good time to check these sites out.

More info from Susanne Dansey about SBSBPI web site:
The purpose of the site is to allow proactive Microsoft SBS resellers in the UK to keep in contact when they can’t otherwise meet up and chat. A special section has been dedicated to qualified Small Business Partners to share information and to catch up with the latest developments generated by the pilot reseller team and by Microsoft. The rest of the forum is available as a touch point for everyone.