Introduction to “The Edge Man”

Hey folks! This is Tom Shinder and I’ve been asked to introduce myself and my Edge Man blog. Some of you might already know me from my days at www.isaserver.org where I covered ISA Server and then TMG for the last ten years. It seemed like it was time for a change, so I joined Microsoft late last year and am now a writer on the UAG team.

However, while I am a writer on the UAG team, my primary focus is on DirectAccess. To this end, I created the “The Edge Man” blog, which is where I publish things about DirectAccess. You can find the Edge Man blog over at http://blogs.technet.com/tomshinder/ My goal is to post there twice a week, although time has been a little tight this month, so I haven’t been keeping up with that schedule. I’ll make it up to you later though.

There are a number of articles there now that you might be interested in. Here’s a list of the current articles:

Why Microsoft DirectAccess Represents a Real Paradigm Shift

Why Split Tunneling is Not a Security Issue with DirectAccess

UAG DirectAccess – Don’t Fear the Reaper or IPv6

UAG DirectAccess Group Policy Assignment – Make Sure the Right Policies are Applied

DirectAccess for the Small and Midsized Business

Troubleshooting the “No Usable Certificate(s)” IP-HTTPS Client Error

More on DirectAccess Split Tunneling and Force Tunneling

UAG DirectAccess Server Deployment Scenarios

DirectAccess Client Location Awareness – NRPT Name Resolution

When Good Network Location Servers Go Bad – Preparing Against NLS Failure

What About IPv4 Only Deployments

DirectAccess and Firewalls and NAT

That’s all I have up there right now, but then, I haven’t been at Microsoft that long :)

In addition to the “Edge Man” blog, and the UAG Team Blog, another place where you can find some useful information on UAG DirectAccess is on the new TechNet wiki. If you haven’t heard of the TechNet wiki, then you’re in for a treat. On the wiki, you can search for articles of interest, and those articles can be written by anybody – including you. You can also edit any article on the wiki. For example, suppose I wrote something on UAG DirectAccess and you found a better way of doing it. What you can do on the wiki is edit the article I wrote (or that anybody wrote) and make it better. In that way, the entire IT community works together to make the body of knowledge more accurate and more useful for everyone. Check out the TechNet wiki over at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/  Just do a quick sign up, and you can edit or contribute.

I repost all my blog entries on the wiki, so there’s your change to update my blogs posts and make them better than they were when they were originally published.

I’m looking forward to working with all you UAG DirectAccess admins in the future! Feel free to write to me with any UAG DirectAccess questions – and if you’re deploying DirectAccess now, drop me a note and let me know how the deployment is going and if there’s anything I can do to help you out.

Thanks!

Tom

Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
ISD iX – UAG DirectAccess
Anywhere Access Team (AAT)