A few customers have experienced some issues converting their ISA MSDE logs to text format using Microsofts MSDEToText.vbs script for ISA 2006. We've therefore created a modified version of the script that creates compatible log files for WebSpy software.
I was conducting a demonstration the other day on how to use a few tricks in WebSpy Vantage to filter out noise and clutter from web reports. If you have ever looked through the raw list of web sites visited by people in your organization, I'm sure you know what I mean. Watching a single video on YouTube will probably generate a list of about three to five sites such as lax-v41.lax.youtube.com, www.youtube.com, img.youtube.com, and so on. Your list of top sites also probably contains hits to ad servers and tracking servers, such as doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com and imrworldwide.com. All this clutter gets in the way of determining what sites were 'intentionally' visited.
I'm happy to announce the release of Vantage 2.2! All three products in the Vantage range (Premium, Giga and Ultimate) have been update with the following features: Multi-processing, Improved report styles, Updated Aliases and Profiles, Storage Repair Utility, Save / Open Tasks. Obviously, the multi-processing feature is the big one! Many of you (Vantage customers) have been running Vantage on multi-core or multi-cpu machines and just dying for Vantage to grab hold of the CPUs and make them work. You should be happy with this new build.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog regarding Microsoft's upcoming Beta 3 release of Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) which will be replacing Microsoft ISA server. Well, it's now been released and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.
It sounds like Threat Management Gateway (TMG), the new re-branded version of ISA Server, has been a popular topic at this years TechEd event in the US. According to the latest blog from TMG's Product Unit Manager, David B. Cross, Beta 3 will be released in the next couple of weeks. As for the full release, David says that they are still on track for Q4 this calendar year.
Imagine you've just spent the last six months setting up storages, aliases, profiles, scheduled tasks and so on, and you need to migrate all this to another machine. Of course you could go to the Aliases screen and click 'Save Aliases', then go to the new machine and click 'Open Aliases', and repeat for every setting you want to move across. But there is an easier way.
We've been doing some work of late to make Vantage take advantage of multi-cpu and multi-core processors. It looks like we've improved the performance of importing more than one log file by around 50%, and the most common reporting scenarios by around 30%. Before we release this build into the wild, I'd like to give it as much field testing as possible. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of this build...
We’ve issued a bunch of auto updates for nearly all WebSpy products today Of particular note is a fix to the Vantage range: · Fix: Improved partition matching when filtering by a date range This will benefit you if you're running reports with a date range filter such as last week or yesterday (which is pretty much everyone), and are using the default storage partitioning scheme of "Date" (again... pretty much everyone).
Today I've been poking at Microsoft Exchange 2007 tracking logs, asking them the very simple question of 'How many emails have I sent?'. Unforunately, Exchange 2007 tracking logs are not used to simple questions, and are likely to return a complicated and / or misleading answer. But the confusion it seems, all comes down to definitions. Once you understand these definintions, things start to make a bit more sense.
We’ve recently added two new features to WebSpy Vantage (all flavours) to deal with a specific issue setting up automated importing tasks using date modifiers in file masks. A common setup is to have a task that creates a storage each month, then a separate task that runs at the end of each day – [...]