The Office Maven had now released a completely new version of Windows Home Server Outlook add-in with full support for Microsoft’s new Outlook 2010. WHS Outlook is a Windows Home Server add-in that integrates the Microsoft Outlook software with the Windows Home Server Console application – but wait, there’s actually alot more to it.
WHS Outlook allows a single installation of Microsoft Outlook to be shared by up to 10 different client PC’s via the Windows Home Server Console (remember user CALs to stay legal etc). Using the Remote Access features of Windows Home Server, you can even gain full access to all of your Microsoft Outlook e-mail, contacts, calendar, etc. from anywhere in the world.
WHS Outlook can automatically setup your Windows Home Server as a WebDAV server allowing you to publish and consume Outlook calendars as Internet Calendars directly on your very own Windows Home Server. Second, WHS Outlook now supports SharePoint site integration allowing you to use SharePoint's "Connect to Outlook" feature from within WHS Outlook so that you can access all of your SharePoint Lists (i.e. shared calendars, contacts, tasks, etc.) from within Outlook. WHS Outlook takes care of all the dirty details for you behind-the-scenes allowing you to focus on getting your work done instead of having to spend time configuring your home server.
For more information: Calendar Sharing in WHS Outlook - Part 1: WebDAV Publishing & Internet Calendars
This feature of WHS Outlook has been completely rewritten to provide better integration with Outlook 2007 and 2010 (it works with Outlook 2002 and 2003 as well). When accessing the "Send Attachment (to client)" command from any e-mail message that contains attachments, you are now presented with a dialog box that lists out all of the e-mail message's attachments allowing you to select which of the attachments you would like to send over to your client computer:
The "Sounds" command brings up the standard "Sounds and Audio Device Properties" Control Panel applet (opened up to its Sounds tab) allowing you to add, remove, or change the sounds being used by WHS Outlook.
When running WHS Outlook via the WHS Console it now re-sizes to fill the entire size of the Condole window giving you even more room to work in Outlook within the limited confines of the Console.
To date, most Windows Home Server add-ins fit into the administrative and media-centric user-interaction space. WHS Outlook differs that it actively provides a productivity platform. WHS Outlook offers a wealth of new and improved functionality but the first thing you’ll notice about WHS Outlook (when used with Microsoft’s new Outlook 2010 software) is the new and much smoother user interface and overall seamless integration.
The new version of WHS Outlook works with Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, and 2002. However, the new calendar sharing features will only work with the newer Outlook 2010 and 2007 versions.
A quick one - I recommend anyone about to deploy FPE to take a look at the new PFE 2010 capacity planning tool to ensure you have correct capacity (memory and CPU) on the server roles before going live!
It can be downloaded here
Recently, the Bing Search team announced a new service that’s a mashup of the Bing search engine and Twitter: BingTweets. Through a partnership with Federated Media and Twitter, the site integrates real-time search results from the micro-blogging service with the traditional results from the Bing “decision” engine.
When you go to BingTweets, you’ll see two separate sections on the site – a larger window on the right for Bing searches and a thinner sidebar on the left where Twitter search results appear. To begin a search, you simply type your query in the Bing search box just as you would when performing a typical search. Once your results appear, you’ll notice that the Tweets column is updated too with Twitter search results containing your keyword or search terms.
Even better, the Twitter search results update in real-time! The tweets in the sidebar are constantly in motion as new results are posted to the service, so you don’t have to refresh the page or column to see the latest. That’s already a notch above Twitter’s own engine at search.twitter.com where you’re forced to click the “refresh” link when new tweets are available.
BingTweets manages to top Twitter’s “trending topics” section, too. Twitter’s trends section features a handful of the top words, phrases, and hashtags being posted on Twitter – often getting diluted with spammy marketing hashtags and other silly tags a group of folks thought it would be fun to promote. BingTweets does trends a little differently…and arguably better, if you ask me.
They’ve divided the trends into different categories like People, Places, and Products as well as a “Popular Now” category, which is more like Twitter’s own trends. Also, the topics within each section are presented in a tag cloud style so hotter topics with more tweets are larger and fading topics with less tweets are smaller. This is useful for knowing exactly which topics are trending up and down.
It’s interesting to compare BingTweets with Twitter trends, too, since they don’t feature quite the same info. For example, the hashtag #iranelection is still showing as a trending topic on Twitter but it wasn’t on BingTweets. Alternately, BingTweets featured two variations of “All Star Game” (last night’s big Major League Baseball event) but Twitter does not.
Finally, a box at the top of the BingTweets page lets you share your search results either through tweeting a link to that BingTweets page or on other social media services via a “Share This” button.
As with everything Bing, the best experience is currently US based (just set your Bing location prefences to United States) however a Europe wide rollout is planned to arrive "shortly"
Watch this space for updates..
"Certainly we’ve seen initial sales be fantastic. The first ten days were bigger than the first ten days of XP or Vista or any other Windows launch that we have done."
http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2010/04/22/etw-storport.aspx
A fantastic new way in Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 to gather information on how your server is performing with your storage…
Greg Smith recently released this very detailed breakdown of Exchange performance when hosted on Server 2008R2 when compaired to Server 2008SP2. The findings are quite simply incredible. Please read on and let me know what you think;
We recently compared the performance of the Exchange 2010 Client Access role supporting Outlook Anywhere users on both Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2, and found that the improvements the Windows Team has made in R2 more than doubles the number of concurrent users a given server can support, assuming CPU is the limiting resource.
Our Client Access Server was an 8-core Xeon server (2L5335 Xeon 4-core processors @2 GHz, a 2007 chip design) running on Windows 2008 R2 with 16 GB of RAM. It was supported by: two servers running the Mailbox role, with 16 databases per server; a Hub Transport server; and an Active Directory server.
Users were simulated from 10 client machines, running Exchange Load Generator 2010, using the Outlook 2007 Cached module and the OutlookAnywhere_100 profile (formerly known as the 'Heavy Profile' - 20 sends and 80 receives per day).
We found the CPU consumed per user (MHz/user) increased linearly on both Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2. However, as shown on the graph below, the slope is 10 times smaller on Windows 2008 R2. The cost of the Exchange processes, dominated by the Microsoft.Exchange.RPCClientAccess.Service process, was independent of operating system.
The Windows RPC/HTTP team has made many performance fixes in R2, so the dramatic improvement compared to Windows 2008 SP2 is expected. Since the improvements are in the operating system, we expect the same improvement with Exchange 2007 SP3.
Since we have an increasing cost/user, to make predictions about the total CAS CPU consumed we fit the data with a parabola. We consider the server 'full' when it runs at 75% total CPU, or in this case when 12 GHz is consumed. From these fits we estimate that on Windows 2008 R2 this server could support about 14,000 Outlook Anywhere Users, compared to about 6,500 on Windows 2008 SP2. Note that this assumes that CPU is the limiting resource on the Client Access Server, and as there is uncertainty in any projection we strongly advise you to run your own tests before putting servers into production.
This operating system comparison was done using Basic Auth. A comparison between Basic and NTLM authentication on Windows 2008 R2 results in a very small 2% reduction in Outlook Anywhere users supported.
The cost per user of the other roles, all running Window2008 SP2, was basically flat above 3,000 users (only data from the CAS R2 Basic Auth runs are included here) so sizing those roles is straightforward.
Similar runs targeting other protocols (Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Internet Mail Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4), Exchange Web Services (Entourage simulation), Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Exchange ActiveSync) showed no differences between the two operating systems. However, if you are supporting Outlook Anywhere users, Windows 2008 R2 is definitely the operating system to use.
These results will be included in an upcoming TechNet whitepaper on Exchange 2010 CAS Guidance.
Well, It’s been well over a year, but we have finally updated the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator to coincide with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Performance Benchmarking Guide whitepaper update.
Take a look at the Updates Tracking page to see what is changed and download the revised version.
The main article has also been updated.
With the release of the new PFDAVAdmin a few weeks ago, some customers started running into an “Ambiguous SID” error when trying to add the Everyone group or Anonymous group in the permissions window. The error looks like this:
When you add a new entity to the permissions window, PFDAVAdmin looks up all objects with that SID to make sure it is unique. However, in some cases it’s actually normal to have more than one object with an ObjectSid that matches the Everyone or Anonymous SID. You should always have one in the configuration context under CN=WellKnown Security Principals, but many environments will also have one in the domain context under CN=Foreign Security Principals. This is when PFDAVAdmin finds two matches for these SIDs, and it chokes.
If you’re getting this error with something other than Everyone or Anonymous, then you can use the following Powershell script to figure out which objects match the SID in question.
# Find-Sid.ps1 # # The purpose of this script is to find all objects that have a # given SID in objectSid, sidHistory, or msExchMasterAccountSid. # # Syntax: # # .\Find-Sid <sid> # # Example: # # .\Find-Sid S-1-1-0
param([string]$sidString)
$gcRootDSE = [ADSI]"GC://RootDSE" $gcRoot = [ADSI]("GC://" + $gcRootDSE.dnsHostName)
$sid = new-object System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier($sidString) [byte[]]$sidBytes = ,0 * $sid.BinaryLength $sid.GetBinaryForm($sidBytes, 0)
$byteString = "" for ($x = 0; $x -lt $sidBytes.Length; $x++) { $byteString = $byteString + "\" + $sidBytes[$x].ToString("X2") }
$filter = "(|(objectSid=" + $byteString + ")(sidHistory=" + $byteString + ")(msExchMasterAccountSid=" + $byteString + "))" $searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($gcRoot, $filter, @("distinguishedName"), [System.DirectoryServices.SearchScope]::Subtree) $results = $searcher.FindAll()
"Matching objects:" foreach ($result in $results) { $result.Properties["distinguishedname"] }
So, this post is completely off topic but worth sharing as it seems to be a very popular topic right now and good, reliable tips are hard to find in this area :)
There are over 5 million people doing it and today a book is launched to help many more follow in their footsteps. We’re talking about ‘Working 5 to 9’ which involves holding down a day job and building a business at nights and weekends. The book’s author, Emma Jones, offers eight steps showing how you can do the same. Don’t give up the day job (just yet) start by ‘Working 5 to 9’ If you are in a job but not sure for how much longer, or wanting to turn a skill/hobby/passion into a way of making some extra cash, then you’re a perfect candidate for becoming a 5 to 9’er. This is the name I apply to the millions of entrepreneurial people who are employee/mum/student by day and working on building a business, in their spare time. It’s a great way to become your own boss as you give yourself time to build confidence – and the all-important cashflow. Here’s how to get started: Find an idea – in the book I offer 50 ideas for businesses you can start in your spare time and they range from book publisher to personal trainer, toymaker to rare breed pig farmer, and all else in between. Come up with an idea that is a) connected to your hobby/passion/skill or b) fills a gap in the market or c) is something you see someone else doing and think you can do better yourself. Make a plan – with your idea in mind, make a plan. It need only cover four pages or so to include your idea, how you’re going to promote the business, ways of getting your product or service to market and the financials that show a profit at the end of the day. There’s a template in the book for a basic business plan that will help you draft this. Promote thyself! – promote the business and watch sales roll in. Issue a press release, host an event, enter an award and have profiles on well-populated platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Your marketing will set you up as an expert in your field, and in the book I show how you can do this without spending a single penny. Make the most of technology – the book carries a good number of tips on this topic. Have the business work whilst you’re at work with a website that attracts an audience and makes it clear and easy to buy. Time is your most important asset when working 5 to 9 so make the most of it by using web-based email systems, time tracking software and Sky+ to ensure you catch up with all your favourite shows! Create space – have space in the house that is reserved as your office/work area and adorn it with furnishings and items that increase productivity; a vision board, decent sound system, and a sturdy desk and chair. Tell the boss – so long as you’re not doing anything that is in competition to your day job (and out of all the 60 profiled 5 to 9’ers in my book, not one of them was) then it is wise to tell your boss you’re earning outside office hours. In the book I outline how to go about this conversation and conclude that most employers see working 5 to 9 as a good thing as you are gaining new skills, with the employer realising the benefits, without having to pay for the training. Tell the taxman – we have a duty to inform the tax man of activities within three months of trading. Registration is straightforward and the book will guide you if you’re at the point of considering whether you should set up as a sole trader, partnership or limited company. It also shows how to keep the tax bill as low as possible by claiming business and homeworking expenses. Do what you do best and outsource the rest – a strategy that applies throughout your business life, from starting up to growing into a full time venture. Stick to the activity you know best and get help from others in areas such as accounting, admin, sales, fulfilment, PR and marketing. Keep in touch with partners using free or low-cost tools such as Basecamp, Huddle, Glasscubes or Tinychat and the business will run smoothly, and profitably. As well as 50 ideas for businesses you can start in your spare time, the book profiles 60 successful 5 to 9’ers. All of them speak about how exciting (and busy!) life has become since they started their part time venture; I hope you will read their stories and be inspired – and then take the tips and advice to become your own boss, in your own time. Visit www.working5to9.co.uk to learn more about ‘Working 5 to 9 – how to start a successful business in your spare time’ Emma Jones is founder of Enterprise Nation, a business expert, and author of ‘Spare Room Start Up’ and ‘Working 5 to 9’.
Don’t give up the day job (just yet) start by ‘Working 5 to 9’
If you are in a job but not sure for how much longer, or wanting to turn a skill/hobby/passion into a way of making some extra cash, then you’re a perfect candidate for becoming a 5 to 9’er. This is the name I apply to the millions of entrepreneurial people who are employee/mum/student by day and working on building a business, in their spare time. It’s a great way to become your own boss as you give yourself time to build confidence – and the all-important cashflow. Here’s how to get started:
Find an idea – in the book I offer 50 ideas for businesses you can start in your spare time and they range from book publisher to personal trainer, toymaker to rare breed pig farmer, and all else in between. Come up with an idea that is a) connected to your hobby/passion/skill or b) fills a gap in the market or c) is something you see someone else doing and think you can do better yourself.
Make a plan – with your idea in mind, make a plan. It need only cover four pages or so to include your idea, how you’re going to promote the business, ways of getting your product or service to market and the financials that show a profit at the end of the day. There’s a template in the book for a basic business plan that will help you draft this.
Promote thyself! – promote the business and watch sales roll in. Issue a press release, host an event, enter an award and have profiles on well-populated platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Your marketing will set you up as an expert in your field, and in the book I show how you can do this without spending a single penny.
Make the most of technology – the book carries a good number of tips on this topic. Have the business work whilst you’re at work with a website that attracts an audience and makes it clear and easy to buy. Time is your most important asset when working 5 to 9 so make the most of it by using web-based email systems, time tracking software and Sky+ to ensure you catch up with all your favourite shows!
Create space – have space in the house that is reserved as your office/work area and adorn it with furnishings and items that increase productivity; a vision board, decent sound system, and a sturdy desk and chair.
Tell the boss – so long as you’re not doing anything that is in competition to your day job (and out of all the 60 profiled 5 to 9’ers in my book, not one of them was) then it is wise to tell your boss you’re earning outside office hours. In the book I outline how to go about this conversation and conclude that most employers see working 5 to 9 as a good thing as you are gaining new skills, with the employer realising the benefits, without having to pay for the training.
Tell the taxman – we have a duty to inform the tax man of activities within three months of trading. Registration is straightforward and the book will guide you if you’re at the point of considering whether you should set up as a sole trader, partnership or limited company. It also shows how to keep the tax bill as low as possible by claiming business and homeworking expenses.
Do what you do best and outsource the rest – a strategy that applies throughout your business life, from starting up to growing into a full time venture. Stick to the activity you know best and get help from others in areas such as accounting, admin, sales, fulfilment, PR and marketing. Keep in touch with partners using free or low-cost tools such as Basecamp, Huddle, Glasscubes or Tinychat and the business will run smoothly, and profitably.
As well as 50 ideas for businesses you can start in your spare time, the book profiles 60 successful 5 to 9’ers. All of them speak about how exciting (and busy!) life has become since they started their part time venture; I hope you will read their stories and be inspired – and then take the tips and advice to become your own boss, in your own time.
Visit www.working5to9.co.uk to learn more about ‘Working 5 to 9 – how to start a successful business in your spare time’
Emma Jones is founder of Enterprise Nation, a business expert, and author of ‘Spare Room Start Up’ and ‘Working 5 to 9’.
The hype-v BPA is now available for download from the Microsoft Download Site, linked here
But what is it? How do you use it? And why should you care?
The Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer is a tool that will scan your Hyper-V server and let you know if there are any common best practices that you are not following. To use it you just need to download and install the update (from the above link) and then open Server Manager.
When you select the entry for Hyper-V under the Roles node you should see a new section called Best Practice Analyzer:
Here you can select to scan the Hyper-V role and see how you are going against common best practices.
While this might sound boring – I have found this tool to be quite useful. When I ran it on my server at home it alerted me to the fact that I had a virtual machine where I had not updated the integration components to the latest version.
One other neat feature of the Best Practice Analyzer is the ability to exclude results. This way you can remove best practices that you do not believe apply to your environment – so you will not have to deal with a large number of unnecessary errors / warnings.
So go grab it and try it out on your Hyper-V server!
Im often asked about logging levels in Exchange and to be fair to my customers, when I'm not asked I will always turn the tables and start the discussion. Logging is an important troubleshooting step, and when implimented correctly can also become a powerful pro-active mechanism to help identify issues before they become show stoppers.
In Exchange 2003:
There are two options to increase the Logging levels in Exchange 2003.
Option 1:
Over the Exchange System Manager, the highest level of logging can be set to “Maximum” which means Level 5.
Open Exchange System Manager – Administrative Group - Server Properties – Diagnostics Logging, select the desired component and select one of the Logging levels:
Option 2:
Over the Registry, the highest level of logging can be set to 7 (debug):
The settings have to be done under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-> System-> CurrentControlSet-> Services->
And from here the desired component has to be selected and a value of 7 inserted.
Here is an example of enabling the Logging for the Transport component:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-> System-> CurrentControlSet-> Services-> <MSExchangeTransport -> Diagnostics
Right clicking any of the Keys and select “Modify”
Inserting the value 7 and clicking OK brings the Logging to the highest level that the logging can be set.
Note: After the Logging is increased, slow performance issues might appear on a server, therefore it is recommended to increase the Application Log size to 16 MB, otherwise the log might be rewritten.
Note: Increasing the Logging will bring the server to also log many additional errors which do no have anything to do with the initial issue, but these errors can most of the times be ignored.
==============================================================================
Increasing the Logging on an Exchange 2007 and/or an Exchange 2010 Server:
On an Exchange 2007/2010 Server there are 3 ways to increase the logging:
Increase the Logging using a Powershell command.
Open the Exchange Management Shell (Start, All Programs, Microsoft Exchange Server).
Running the Get-EventLogLevel command shows a list with all Logging components and their current level. By default the logging level is on : ”Lowest”
To increase the logging for a specific component the following command has to run:
Get-EventLogLevel COMPONENT |Set-EventLoglevel -Level High.
For example the command “Get-EventLogLevel MSExchangeIS |Set-EventLoglevel -Level High” increases the logging for “MSExchangeIS”
Here is an example of increasing the logging for the Replication:
Set-EventLogLevel –Level High| Where-Object {$_.identity -like "MSExchangeIS\9001 Public*Replication*"}
Identity EventLevel -------- ---------- MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication DS Updates High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Incoming Messages High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Outgoing Messages High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication NDRs High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Site Folders High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Expiry High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Conflicts High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Backfill High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication Errors High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Replication General High MSExchangeIS\9001 Public\Local Replication High
Increasing the Logging over the Registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
Select the desired component and set the value of 7.
For Example increasing the value for “Send As”:
Option 3:
Increasing the logging using the Exchange Management Console (In Exchange 2007 this is available only for SP2 or later)
Open the Exchange Management Console – Server Configuration, right click the server and select Manage Diagnostic Logging Properties as shown below:
Select the desired component and place it on the necessary level.
Telnet is a well known reliable protocol to communicate with different network hosts.It provides a bidirectional interactive communication facility between two hosts. If you want to use the Telnet application in Windows 7 then please note that it is not enabled by default. To enable it, you will have to go through the following steps.
First of all click Start, and choose the Control Panel option, now choose the program option from here.
Here locate and choose the Turn Windows features on or off option under the Programs and Features category.
The Windows Feature dialogue box will be launched, from here you can manage many of the features in Windows . You will see two options here, Telnet Client (connects to remote computer by using Telnet protocol) and Telnet Server (allows others to connect to your computer by using the Telnet protocol ), enable whichever option that you need. For contacting Exchange you only need the client.
Click the OK button and that’s it. Use this TechNet article to send an email using Telnet, always very useful when troubleshooting.
The following article will provide a summary on common issues in Exchange 2010 deployment in the Enterprise. The information in this article consists of my own experience and official Microsoft knowledgebase articles. Due to the fact that your Exchange environments will all vary, please read the information carefully and test the suggestions from this article - in a lab that can demonstrate the current Exchange infrastructure.
The blogs will be is divided into the following chapters:
General issues in Exchange 2010 deployment.
Best practices in Exchange 2010 deployment.
Common issues in Exchange 2007 migration to Exchange 2010.
Common issues in Exchange 2003 migration to Exchange 2010.
This is a 'Live List" that I will be adding to as I see issues arise in this area;