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There are lots of different ways you can approach building an enterprise Windows network. Some of these ways are supportable though while others aren't. A supportable network is one you can administer easily and where you can get help from Microsoft Customer Support Services (which was formerly called and still frequently referred to as Product Support Services or PSS). An unsupportable network however is one that has become difficult to administer, and if it gets really bad then CSS may tell you that your only option is to flatten and rebuild everything from scratch.

Clearly it's better to keep your Windows-based network supportable than let it become unsupportable. How do you do that? One way to ensure your network stays supportable is to avoid using undocumented registry hacks. Since the days of Windows 95, users have been poking around in the registry trying to figure out what different keys and values do, and there are tons of articles out there that document registry "secrets" you can supposedly use to make Windows do things that are not directly exposed by standard means such as the Windows UI, the command prompt, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Win32 or .NET APIs. And I've seen lots of enterprises try and leverage some of these "secret" registry hacks for management tools or when building custom applications. Then the next version of Microsoft Windows arrives and the organization upgrades their systems and-yikes!-one of their management tools or custom apps fails because Microsoft has changed the implementation of that particular registry setting or deprecated it. How dare they!



Sorry, but you've shot yourself in your own foot on this one. If Microsoft doesn't document a particular registry setting, there's a good reason for not doing so, and that reason is usually because they don't want enterprises to become reliant upon some registry setting that is likely to change in a future version of Windows. In other words, if it's not officially documented by Microsoft, you shouldn't consider it supported-in which case you use it at your own risk.



My first tip then on building a supportable enterprise is to stay with published configuration settings, and to stay away from trying to tweak undocumented settings on your production networks. There are a lot of ways you can manage Windows-based networks-using UI tools, command-line tools, WMI scripts, Win32 APIs, .NET APIs, even Windows PowerShell-and if you take some time to research things you can usually find a way of doing what you want to do even if you have to do it in a way that is different from what you'd planned (i.e. writing a C# program instead of hacking the registry). You should always go the extra mile and try to find a supported way of implementing the configuration you want to achieve, and stay away from undocumented tweaks that are not guaranteed to be supported in future Windows versions.



I'll share some other tips on building a supportable enterprise in future issues of this newsletter, and if you have your own recommendations on this subject feel free to email me and I'll share your tips with readers.

Building a supportable enterprise, part 2

Building a supportable enterprise, part 3

Building a supportable enterprise, part 4

ITworld.com

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