Shameless Self-Promotion

There's one topic that I know is on everyone's mind- no, not American Idol- it's "What's new in Auditing in Windows Server 2008?"

Well, funny that you brought that up.  My friend Jesper Johanssen just wrote a new book, the Windows Server 2008 Security Resource Kit, and he invited me to write a chapter about auditing for it, which I did.  So you, dear reader, are getting information straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Anyway I think the book hits store shelves on March the 10th.  A number of distinguished individuals contributed to the book: Susan Bradley, Darren Canavor, Kurt Dillard, Roger Grimes, Brian Komar, Alun Jones and others.

I'd also like to send out special props to my auditing posse: Raghu (who was the primary developer for auditing for Vista & WS08) and Ned (who is the resident guru for auditing in Microsoft Customer Support Services), both of whom made significant contributions.  Raghu introduces the new "special group logon tracking" feature, and Ned contributed a spreadsheet mapping all the events (360-ish) to the policy category and subcategory and giving other key information about each event; this is included on the CD bundled with the book, along with an XML file defining the schema for all the events and event messages.  Ned's also working on getting a version of the spreadsheet available for download from the Microsoft download site.

In other news, the Windows Server 2008 Security Guide is also out, and yes, yours truly contributed in small part to the auditing guidance in there too, although I seem to have been overlooked in the credits (in all fairness my work delta from the Vista Security Guide was really small so maybe it did not meet their "credits bar").

Anyway, download the security guide and buy a copy of the book.  Buy more than one copy of the book, and give copies to your friends and loved ones.  Nothing says "Happy Anniversary, Honey" quite like a book or white paper about computer security.  OK, so maybe I should stick to computer security and stay away from relationship advice.  Flowers work well in my experience.