So, a couple of things changed and I decided I would continue to post to this blog.  Firstly, Blogger updated its interface, it's now much more inviting to use. Secondly, it clearly shows you how many visits you are getting and I can see that quite a few people are visiting this blog, thank you for doing so! I'm going to continue to use my Wordpress blog to post interesting things I find on the web and use this blog to talk about technical tasks and solving IT problems!

I've been experimenting with both blogger and wordpress over the last few days.  I've decided to use wordpress as my non-technical blog for things like photos and blogger as my technical blog for things like troubleshooting articles. My wordpress blog is here: Howard Simpson blog

Use the  Microsoft DNS audit and documentation tool  XIA Configuration to audit and document your Microsoft DNS servers including information about conditional forwarders, host settings, forward and reverse lookup zones, server settings and trust points. Learn more about XIA Configuration > Download a free 30-day trial >

I started using Google+ last week, so far I've been quite impressed, the quality of content posted by some of the people I follow has been really good, it tends to be less personal and more informative. For anyone interested in following me, my page is here:  google.co.uk/+howardsimpson

Use the  VMware documentation tool  XIA Configuration to automatically document you vCenter, vSphere, and ESX configuration including virtual machines, hosts, distributed switches, resource pools, clusters, datastores and more. The software includes a change tracking feature which is a powerful way to monitor change within a virtual environment. It can detect changes to an ESX host or expose incorrectly configured virtual machines and security vulnerabilities. Download Free 30-Day Trial > Learn more >

XIA Configuration is an IT documentation tool which documents and audits your IT infrastructure configuration. It automatically creates an inventory of all the systems on a network and saves you time and money by automating tasks that would take days to perform manually such as generating professional documentation, keeping track of changes, and running reports to query your environments. View this page to see some IT infrastructure documentation examples  generated using XIA Configuration's PDF output feature. XIA Configuration has a growing list of capabilities for many major technologies.  Find out more about recently added features by visiting the CENTREL Solutions news page .

I've talked about XIA Configuration in a  previous post .  Today, I want to tell you that XIA Configuration can also be used as an  IIS documentation tool .  It can automatically document your IIS server configuration on Windows Server 2003 (IIS 6), Windows Server 2008 (IIS 7), Windows Server 2008 R2 (IIS 7.5) and above including your Web Sites, Application Pools and Applications configured within the IIS Server. The reporting feature allows you to audit the configuration of all your IIS servers at once. XIA Configuration can also be used to generate a relationship map such as this: Download Free 30-Day Trial > Learn more >

Welcome to my blog.  In my first post I want to write a few words about some of the capabilities of a network documentation tool called XIA Configuration Server.  These are just some of the technologies that it can automatically document.  In the future, I will post about the other server roles that it supports. Please click the links for more info: Document Active Directory Automatically document multiple Microsoft Active Directory domains and Group Policy settings from a single server. Document SQL Server Automatically document your SQL Server instances, including detailed information about databases, tables and stored procedures. Document Microsoft Exchange Automatically audit your Exchange Organisation infrastructure from Exchange 2000 to 2013 including Exchange Servers, address lists, storage groups and mailbox stores. Download Free 30-Day Trial > Learn more >