Back at Tech Ed a few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Dan Holme's new book Windows Administration Resource Kit: Productivity Solutions for IT Professionals. I was immediately attracted to its somewhat different solutions-focused approach to common tasks that many environments find themselves needing to improve.

Unlike a lot of IT books that strive to provide you with detailed information about how to accomplish a task, this book focuses more so on the why. Dan identifies ten solution subcollections, which are compilations of techniques that can be used to improve how you deal with common IT tasks. Those subcollections, which I list below the fold, focus on activity groupings like "Managing User Data and Settings", and "Active Directory Delegation and Administrative Lock Down".

Within each of those subcollections are lists upon lists of best practices, learned through Dan and others through countless hours of on-site consulting engagements. These best practices help you take some of the manual steps out of common Windows administration tasks and move to a more stable, more controlled, and more automated processing of those activities.

For example, within the subcollection "Active Directory Delegation and Administrative Lock Down" are best practices associated with customizing the Delegation of Control wizard, customizing permissions available in AD's ACL Editor interface, and how to best evaluate and report on AD permissions. For each of these is an explanation of the problem, why you should consider a better and/or more automated solution, and various "best" ways to implement it. For some, multiple solutions are provided, such as a GUI-based and command line-based process.

All-in-all the result turns out pretty good. I'm impressed with the layout of the solutions, and how each is activity-focused. And, I like how highly manual organizations can take this book and use it to immediately implement better change control and automation within their organization (hence the "Resource Kit" moniker). The only thing it lacks are more detail about the individual commands, but this information is best left to other more traditional IT books focused on those scripting langugaes or command structure.

In the end, if you're an organization looking for a book on best practices, this might be the one for you. Get more info on the book as well as links to purchase at: http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/11297.aspx

Click past the fold for the ten solution collections talked about in the book...