Problem:

You have a customer. They are on Exchange on-premise. You want to implement Office 365 with Exchange hybrid. What is the Exchange Server versions that is supported in a Hybrid mode?

Answer:

Note:
1 Blocked in Exchange 2013 setup 2 Tenant upgrade notification provided in Exchange Management Console 3 Requires at least one on-premises Exchange 2010 SP2 server 4 Requires at least one on-premises Exchange 2010 SP3 server 5 Requires at least one on-premises Exchange 2013 CU1 or greater server

Recently I was doing an email migration from Exchange On-premise to Office365, and the customer’s environment is not suitable to use Dirsync.

This means that I will need to export the X500 address from my local Active Directory and import it into Office365.

Here is the brief steps if you are facing this issue:

Export the LegacyExchangeDN and mail field in your AD:
1. In your DC server, run Command Prompt
2. Run the command:
csvde -f c:\sample.csv -l legacyexchangedn,mail

Now, with that .csv file, make sure that it has a “mail” and “legacyexchangedn” under the heading. See my attached sample file: sample CSV with LegacyExchangeDN

Import the legacyexchangedn/X500 into Office365/Exchange Online using PowerShell:

1. Connect to Exchange Online. using PowerShell
2. Run the command:

Import-CSV C:\sample.csv | foreach {

$user=Get-Mailbox $_.mail
$user.EmailAddresses+=”X500:”+$_.legacyExchangeDN
Set-Mailbox $_.mail -EmailAddresses $user.EmailAddresses

}

To check if the address has been added:
Get-Mailbox $user | FL emailaddresses

Environment:

IIS Servers in a DMZ Zone, configured in a Workgroup.

Clustered File Servers in the corporate network, in a Domain environment.

All servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2.

Problem:

When IIS web app tries to access the clustered file server hosted in the domain, it shows Access Denied.

Path to Solution:

On running Procmon.exe, w3wp.exe shows that it is trying to authenticate using whichever account. So I check my IIS Config and make sure that it is using an account which has rights to access the cluster file server in the domain.

Solution 1 – Ensure that your IIS is configured correctly with a user account that has the access rights to the cluster file server.

Specify the correct user account under Identity in the Advanced Setting

Select the Application Pool that this web application should use.

If the above does not solve the problem, please continue with Solution 2.

Solution 2 – Ensure that the username and password is the same between the domain server and the Workgroup IIS Server

If my clustered file server is using the following name:

User: domain\webapp
Password: Pa$$w0rd

Then my Workgroup IIS Server should have a local user created with the following name:

User: IISSERVER\webapp
Password: Pa$$w0rd

(IISSERVER is the name of the IIS Server)

(Make sure that all of your IIS Servers have the same username and password created as well)

Solution 3 – Use ICACLS.EXE to provide the rights to the clustered files

Now that you have the same user created on both server (Domain and Workgroup), we will have to use ICACLS.exe to provide the permission (No, using the GUI does not work):

1. Map the shared cluster to Y: Drive

2. Open Command Prompt and execute the following:

icacls y:\SHAREDFOLDER /grant WEBAPP:(OI)(CI)RXW /T

(Replace the SHAREDFOLDER to the folder that your web application needs to access; Replace the WEBAPP with the username that you created in Solution 2)

Hope this helps someone out there!

Folks! Good news for the consumers of Windows, and bad news for anti virus vendors.

In the next version of Windows 8, anti virus application will be integrated together with Windows Defender, which is used to block spyware and protect from slow performance due to certain applications. However, Windows Defender will be extended to include anti virus in Windows 8.

This would potentially means that, there is not necessary to purchase and install a third party anti virus software like Norton, McAfee or Sophos anti virus.

In the Windows XP and older era, consumers and businesses would purchase firewall applications for all PCs, until Windows XP SP2 introduces both incoming and outgoing monitoring, purchasing firewall application becomes an optional item for enterprise customers.

With integrated anti virus in Windows 8, would this further decrease the profit and growth of major security vendors out there?

What’s your thoughts?

Background:
Lync for Android and iOS were launched recently. However, automatic sign in does not work for Lync/Lync Online (Office365).

Problem:
Using Lync client on PC and Mac, it signs in fine; however, when trying to sign onto Lync using Lync Server or Lync Online, it fails to sign on.

Solution:
As part of setting up the domain in Office365, it is missing a few CNAME records for Lync.

Add the following 2 more CNAME records into the DNS of your domain:

If your customer has an environment that can’t setup Dirsync (perhaps they are not on Windows Server 2003 DC and above), and you would want to create users manually, here is what you should do:

1. Create a CSV and use Administrative Portal | Users | Add Bulk Users to import the users.

2. Export the X500 addresses from Exchange 2003 server (You can refer to this link on how to do it).

3. Import the X500 addresses that you have exported from your local Exchange 2003 to Office365. You will have to do the following in Exchange Online Powershell:

$foo = get-mailbox jabez
$foo.emailaddresses += “X400:C=Malaysia;DC=domain;DC=com”
$foo | set-mailbox

If you are doing a temporary co-existence without using the recommended approach (Exchange 2010 Hybrid), you may also want to:

1. Create mail-enabled users with external email addresses to @tenant.onmicrosoft.com. If you have 100 Exchange on-premise users, then you will have to create 100 extra mail-enabled users that points to the @tenant.onmicrosoft.com email account.

2. Create a forwarding from the Exchange on-premise to Office365

If you are just like me, who has a Blackberry with your emails hosted on Office365, this is for you: BES is coming to Office365 very soon!

Details as following:

Oct 2011: Blackberry Business Cloud beta starts
Jan 2012:Blackberry Business Cloud goes public

Are you excited just like me? Read here for more information: http://richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/office-365-blackberry-beta-available/

Microsoft’s been pushing HTML5 hard to developers, giving them another option to develop application on top of Windows. However in my opinion, the HTML5 implementation is still far from being useful. I’ve been developing xaml based apps for quite some time and I have to say that along with expression blend, it’s powerful. Developers will stick with xaml unless they come from a web background. Please don’t get me wrong, I for one agree that the combination of HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 is a must learn for all developers. We should spend time on building HTML5 sites, but not for building Metro apps.

Source: http://channelm.net/blog/2011/09/20/html5-for-metro-just-another-option/

Phew! We’re all back from BUILD and focused on our next milestone. It is fair to say we had an awesome time showing everyone Windows 8 in depth and all of our speakers and Microsoft attendees are unbelievably appreciative for the warm reception you gave the product. We know it is early still–a developer preview–and there are lots of questions. We’re going to be answering them in new posts as we focus on using the Windows Developer Preview (WDP) as a baseline–so if you haven’t been running it, consider it sort of like a prerequisite for many of the blog posts.

Boot is the sort of effort that gets no respect. It is either too long or all the work to make it nice and pleasant hopefully goes unnoticed since you never want to boot your machine. I remember a meeting many years ago where Bill Gates said (paraphrasing) “Boot is a one-line function call that computes a constant yet takes forever: fBoot = SystemBoot()” At the same time it seems like everything boots these days—phones, TVs, cable TV boxes, even my TV remote boots. In building Windows 8, we set out of take advantage of some new technology and revisited some old assumptions to totally rethink the boot experience. We also wanted to make it more accessible and better suited to devices without keyboards. Of course, we also did a lot of work to continue to minimize reboots altogether, but this post is about what happens when you do boot. Billie Sue Chafins authored this post. She is a long time program manager who spent many years on user interface design, and in this release she helped us to focus on the boot experience (in addition to the Metro style app sharing contract which you can learn about from BUILD here).
–Steven

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/20/reengineering-the-windows-boot-experience.aspx

Bing is famous for having a different background picture whenever someone browses to Bing. However today onwards, when browsing to Bing using a HTML5 supported browser, it will show a video in the background.

What do you think? Waste of bandwidth?

Source: Bing Blog at http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/09/23/something-new-on-the-homepage.aspx?form=pgbar1

If you are wondering where can you download the Windows Server 8 Developer Preview, it is only available for MSDN Subscribers for now.

Many are reporting the downloads to be very slow, however, if you have a MSDN subscription that method is reportedly faster right now.

Interestingly, Windows 8 dev preview expires on 3/11/2012 4:59PM. Does this mean we’ll see a beta sooner than we thought?

Windows 8 Developer Preview just launched a few hours back, and here are the links:

Direct links:

• Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) (4.8GB)
• Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64) (3.6GB)
• Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86) (2.8GB)

What are you waiting for? Start the download and give Windows 8 Developer Preview a test drive!

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a new Windows 7 slate, which is why I
was so interested to check out the brand-new Samsung Series 7 Slate PC, which
Samsung debuted today at the IFA conference in Germany. Samsung was cool enough
to give me sneak-preview of the Series 7 about a month before today’s launch, so
what you’re reading today are my thoughts on the almost-finished version. My
unit came with a full-voltage second-generation Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM
and a lightning-fast 64GB SSD. When it hits store shelves in early October
you’ll be able to get one for $1299. There will also be a model with the same
specs,minus the Bluetooth keyboard and dock (more on that later) for $1099, and
a full-loaded version with a 128GB SSD  for $1349.

Look and Feel

The Samsung Series 7, much like the ASUS EP121 that I looked at a few months back,
is a pure-slate device. It’s super thin and light, measuring only 13mm thick and
weighing in at just a hair over 2lbs. Like all Samsung products it’s solid
without being bulky and well balanced without being heavy. It’s 11.6” across and
sports a 16:9 aspect ratio with a 1366 x 768 HD resolution, which puts it on-par
with most 11-13” widescreen laptops. It’s responsive and comfortable to use in
widescreen mode, and that extra screen width comes in very handy when browsing
the web in landscape mode.

In the box with my Series 7 came three accessories – a dock that has a
headphone jack, HDMI out and USB, a Bluetooth keyboard (which Samsung
thoughtfully made exactly the same width as the PC, so when you carry them
together they just “fit”) and a WACOM intelligent pen for taking notes. The
inclusion of these accessories makes the Series 7 extremely versatile and
equally good as a portable slate and a desktop PC. I used the PC as a pure touch
device when watching video and browsing the web (making use of the on-screen
keyboard when I needed to type in URLs), as a tablet-with-pen when scribbling
down notes in OneNote in meetings and brainstorming sessions, and as a docked
PC-with-keyboard when at my desk. The latter two modes were my favorites – I
found the pen very responsive and fluid and the “docked” setup as good as a
traditional laptop when sitting at my desk. The Bluetooth keyboard connects
almost instantly so there’s no annoying lag between when you fire up the PC and
when you can get to work.

All together, the PC plus all of the accessories and power cord weigh less
than 4lbs, making it an ideal travel companion. For comparison that’s a few
ounces less as my Lenovo ThinkPad X220, and about the same weight as my Toshiba
Portege R830.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft announced this week that it will begin providing on-demand access to the full versions of retail video games. That means titles like BioShock (6 Ggigabytes) and Mass Effect (7 GB) can be downloaded through the Xbox Live online gaming service, which has more than 17 million members. The growth of these type of bandwidth-draining services has been a major driver in Microsoft’s decision to build its own content delivery network.

This news is hot on the heels of the planned purchase of a new Chicago Data-center worth 185 Million.

Jeff Cohen, the general manager of Microsoft’s Edge Computing Network, discussed the company’s content delivery infrastructure in his May 11 keynote at the first Content Delivery Summit. Cohen said video delivery accounted for just 10 percent of Microsoft’s content delivery in 2007, but has since grown to 40 percent, consuming as much bandwidth as the company’s “large file” downloads of software and security updates.

“The content is exploding,” Cohen said at the event, part of Streaming Media East. But the barrier to entry for the CDN market is steep. ”It takes a huge amount of capital to get into this space, even for Microsoft.”

That’s why Microsoft uses its Edge Content Network to deliver about 40 percent of the content on its network, while farming out the remaining 60 percent to existing CDN partners including Akamai (AKAM), Limelight Networks (LLNW), Level 3 (LVLT) and ChinaCache.

Microsoft, in a mysterious move, have offered anyone with a valid shipping address in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, a free TechNet Professional subscription.

As Neowin points out, it may well not be for absolutely everyone, but it does appear to be so. Confirmation will be needed from Microsoft but as of yet, they are not commenting on this. Still, if it works for you, you will have access to a wealth of Office, Windows and Dynamics software for three months for absolutely nothing.

Once you make your way through the online “ordering” process, you will receive an email confirmation shortly afterwards. This will provide you with download links and your access information to begin downloading.

Hmmph looks like the rest of us miss out.

This post was retrieved from Zack W’s blog @ http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration (check it out)- hopefully he dosen’t mind 😛

[Update]: Ars Technica is reporting that this offer may not be for one year as first thought, but only three months. Never-the-less, it’s best to get in early and make the most of this while you can.

[Update 2]: It appears as though there are errors in requesting keys and we are hearing that this offer may have been limited to a select few rather than public. Microsoft has not officially responded to requests for comment. (Neowin)

Check out Kristan Keeny’s Site for latest update