FREE SharePoint training – Dublin 18th April (08:30 – 15:30)

AvePoint is pleased to present a very special MVP workshop on Thursday, April 18 in Dublin, Ireland on Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and moving to the cloud. This workshop, organized for IT professionals, is intended to empower and train attendees with best practices and important considerations for moving to and leveraging both SharePoint 2013 and the cloud.

Like the rest of the global SharePoint community, the Irish community is abuzz over SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, and it’s easy to feel lost amid all the hype. The promises of increased productivity, better collaboration, massive ROI, the ability to refocus IT to become a business tool rather than one that keeps the lights on, and virtually infinite scalability are all undeniably appealing. This workshop will explain what all of this actually means for Irish organizations.

The workshop will be led by AvePoint Chief Architect and SharePoint MVP Jeremy Thake, who has spoken and written about SharePoint 2013 and the cloud and extensively. The following is an excerpt from an article Jeremy recently penned for Computerworld UK entitled “SharePoint 2013: Preparing for the future”:

“Microsoft SharePoint 2013 will transform the way organisations connect knowledge workers, business processes, and enterprise-wide content worldwide. This means the platform is firmly positioning itself as the ideal technology for organisations to launch vital initiatives - including enterprise content management, web content management, and company-wide social collaboration.”

Throughout the workshop, Jeremy will discuss new features of SharePoint 2013, including enhanced document management capabilities around sharing and contributing content, improved social features, the new app model and marketplace as well as an overhauled search experience for discovery. The workshop will also explain cloud computing represents a major shift happening in the IT world today and give attendees a solid understanding of what the key benefits and limitations of the cloud are as well as how to get started both on-premise and online.

Presentations throughout the workshop include:

· Increasing Productivity for Business Users with SharePoint 2013

· What's New for SharePoint Developers in SharePoint 2013

· But we've only just deployed SharePoint 2010!

· Social Collaboration in SharePoint 2013

· Will Office 365 work on a leap year?

So please come along and hear the real spiel from a SharePoint MVP and Chief Architect who’s been working with SharePoint 2013 since the early betas!

To register, please visit our website today.

Enjoy

FREE half day events in Cork, Galway, Belfast & Dublin

57% of all Windows Servers are running Windows Server 2003, an operating system that will no longer have support after July 14th, 2015.  Come to this session to learn why & how to upgrade to Windows Server 2012.  Presented by Dave Northey (DPE, Microsoft Ireland) & Aidan Finn (Technical Sales Lead, MicroWarehouse).

Topics to be covered will be:

• Upgrading from Small Business Server

• New support for remote working

• Better server administration

• Storage enhancements and cost savings

• Improvements in Active Directory to simplify administration  and change to suit how the business works

When and Where:

Cork 15/04/2013
Radisson Blu Hotel,
Ditchley House,
Little Island Business Park,
Cork
>Click here for directions.

Galway 17/04/2013
The Connacht Hotel,
Dublin Road,
Galway City.
>Click here for directions.

Belfast 19/04/2013
Radisson Blu Hotel,
3 Cromac Place,
Ormeau Road,
BT7 2JB,
>Click here for directions.

Dublin 24/04/2013
Radisson Blu Hotel,
Gold lane,
Dublin.
>Click here for directions.

Please note
All sessions are from 9am - 1pm. A light lunch will be served at 1pm.

See you in April,

FREE in-person event - Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012

Software powers the world – without software, our life would be very different! And right now is a very exciting time to be involved in software development.

Microsoft and Storm Technology will be in Dublin and Belfast with this free seminar, we will show you the new features of Visual Studio 2012 in action – in a real-world project setting.  This roadshow features both how-to demos of Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 capabilities and examples of stunning application experiences for desktop and the web.  This Roadshow is designed to inspire and excite you about the possibilities that developers have today to literally change the world! If you came to the previous Visual Studio launch this will be all new content.

Speakers

Michael Köster is a Visual Studio/ALM and developer technologies specialist, covering Western Europe. He focuses on Microsoft’s application platform technologies and developer tools and speaks regularly at events about topics like SharePoint development, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure, testing and anything related to Visual Studio and TFS.

John McHale has been practising as ALM and Solutions Consultant with Storm
Technology for well over 4 years. In this time he has had the opportunity to work with a range of organisations from small to large, both nationally and internationally, to support the transformation of IT development functions from cost centres into strategic business units of the organisation.

Topics

• Visual Studio 2012 for Developers. Learn tips and tricks of how Visual Studio 2012 makes you faster and get valuable tips and tricks for speeding up everyday tasks.
• How well do you know your software? From Junior Developer to Senior Architect, understanding and communicating the components of your system and their interactions is vital to successful software projects see how with Visual Studio 2012.
• Move Beyond Development: Learn how Visual Studio 2012 now extends the capabilities of IntelliTrace beyond the development and testing organizations, providing the ability to capture IntelliTrace files running from production servers.

Register

Dublin – 28th March 09:00 – 12:00 Microsoft Building 3, Sandyford Industrial Estate

Belfast – 26th March 14:00 – 17:00 All State Offices, 9 Lanyon Place

Enjoy

8GB USB Memory stick

Before you all say “Me” – there’s a catch or two:

• Firstly you have to have an Irish (North or South) postal address – for me to send it to you.

• Secondly you have to be willing to spend ten minutes of your time doing something for me.

I do have a finite number (more than these six) – so I’ll give them away on a first come – first served basis.

Offer still open to everyone who got one of the last ones I was giving away..

Email me if you’re interested & I’ll let you know what I need in return.

Remote Desktop Services (RDS) & Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Alex Juschin (Microsoft RDS MVP) will be delivering a day of free training on Windows Server 2012 RDS & VDI in Microsoft’s Leopardstown offices on Tuesday 26th March.

Places are limited, so register early.

Details of the event (and the registration page) are here: http://microsoftrdsandvdi.eventbrite.com/#

Introduction to Hyper-V

Microsoft Virtualisation for VMware Professionals

Microsoft Tools for VMware Integration & Migration

The Microsoft Virtual Academy (www.MicrosoftVirtualAcademy.com) training portal offers quick and easy access to presentations, webcasts, whitepapers and other technical content about Microsoft’s Cloud technologies.  It is public, free and you learn at your own pace while earning awards and recognitions, and connecting with over 1 million other IT Pros.

“Introduction to Hyper-V” Jump Start with Symon Perriman and Jeff Woolsey at: https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/tracks/microsoft-virtualization-for-vmware-professionals-jump-start. 

“Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals” Jump Start on the Microsoft Virtual Academy: https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/tracks/microsoft-virtualization-for-vmware-professionals-jump-start.

This eight-hour course delivered by Symon Perriman and Matt McSpirit is designed for IT Pros looking to get up-to-speed with how Microsoft virtualization and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V works and compares with VMware vSphere 5.1.  It’s a team-teaching demo-rich, learning experience.

Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals agenda includes:

1. Introduction & Scalability

2. Storage & Resource Management

3. Security, Multi-Tenancy & Flexibility

4. High-Availability & Resiliency

5. System Center 2012 Introduction & Overview

6. Application Management

7. Cross-Platform Management

8. Foundation, Hybrid Clouds & Costs

On Thursday March 14^th we are presenting the third session in the series,

“Microsoft Tools for VMware Integration & Migration” Jump Start.  Join Symon Perriman and several other presenters to see how VMM, SCOM, Orchestrator and the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) can be used to manage and migrate VMware environments.  Ask your customers to sign up today at: aka.ms/vmtools.

Enjoy,

Backing up your environment to Azure Storage using DPM

Providing reliable backup’s is part of every ITPRO’s daily workload. Some companies have quite complex media cycles that are time consuming to manage. Customers also have the issue of getting tapes offsite for DR and compliance reasons. What if there was another alternative ?

What if I could store my backups in the cloud ?

In this blog post I will cover configuring Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1 to backup and restore with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. For a overview of all of the features please see the following link

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2012/09/07/windows-azure-online-backup.aspx

So what do I need to get Started ?

• DPM 2012 SP1 running on Windows Server 2012
• An Azure Storage Subscription (details on how to register below)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831761.aspx

How do I know if DPM 2012 SP1 is already installed ?

In the DPM console choose the About DPM Icon.

Once you have registered for the Azure Storage Subscription you will be able to download and install the Azure Storage Agent from the Azure Storage portal.

To use the Agent we have to supply a user Account to connect with. This can be done with the Azure Active Directory portal.

Click the + icon to add a new user and fill out the details

Add the newly created user to the Global Administrators role

Go back to your DPM 2012 SP1 console and from the Management section click on the Register icon.

Provide the account details you have just registered

If you use a Proxy Server to connect to the internet configure it here

On this screen we can configure bandwidth throttling. We can configure different bandwidth settings for Work Hours and out of hours.

In this screen we will be configuring the Recovery Folder. This will be used as a staging space during Recovery.

Next we supply a 16 character Passphrase used to encrypt the data onsite prior to storing in the Azure cloud.

It is imperative that this password is kept safe. If the DPM server has to be rebuilt or there is a disaster, this Passphrase must be re-entered to get access to your backup data. Microsoft staff will not be able to help you recover this data if this Passphrase is lost.

You should now be finished configuring the Online Backup Agent.

Back in the DPM console you can create a new protection group for Azure Online protection or as in this example I will be adding it to an existing protection group.

Choose the protection group and click on Add online protection.

Specify the objects you would like to protect online.

Specify your online protection goals

Once complete review the changes and choose update group.

Your protection group will now backup to Azure Cloud storage Services based on your Protection Goals.

Or: How you can use Powershell to create virtual machines! 

With a few keystroke you can create a virtual machine and attach an existing VHD(X) file to it! I usually look for the fastest and easiest way to get things done. Always manually rebuilding my lab was tiresome and demotivating so I started to look at different possible solutions. The first possible solution for me was experimenting with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which was brilliant! But it still took to long to install a VM and still too much effort (I'm lazy :))! So the second step for me was to create a number of VHDX files and use those to deploy the virtual machines resulting in the code in the script below.

The script uses powershell to ask you what kind of OS you want to deploy, creates a directory, the virtual machine and attaches the VHDX which is sitting pretty having received a sysprep after installation (and updates :)). To use the code below you will have to have your execution policy set to unrestricted (set-executionpolicy unrestricted) and preferably change the variables to point at your VHD(X) files.

More scripts can be found at the script library!

Code:

function Run-As

{

# Use Check Switch to check if admin

param([Switch]$Check)

$IsAdmin = ([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal]
[Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()`

).IsInRole([Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole] "Administrator")

if ($Check) { return $IsAdmin }

if ($MyInvocation.ScriptName -ne "")

{

if (-not $IsAdmin)

{

try

{

$arg = "-file `"$($MyInvocation.ScriptName)`""

Start-Process "$psHome\powershell.exe" -Verb Runas -ArgumentList $arg
-ErrorAction 'stop'

}

catch

{

Write-Warning "Error - Failed to restart script with runas"

break

}

exit # Quit this session of powershell

}

}

else

{

Write-Warning "Error - Script must be saved as a .ps1 file first"

break

}

write-host "Script Running As Administrator" -foregroundcolor red

Write-host ""

}

#Defining Variables. Change these patch to your own!

$2008R2STD = "D:\Base VHD\2k8R2std.vhdx"

$2008R2ENT = "D:\Base VHD\2k8R2ent.vhdx"

$2008R2DC = "D:\Base VHD\2k8r2dc.vhdx"

$2012STD = "D:\Base VHD\2012std.vhdx"

$2012ENT = "D:\Base VHD\2012ent.vhdx"

#Launching run-as function

Run-as

#Cleaning screen

cls

# Offer choice in which OS to deploy

Do {

Write-host

Write-host "Wich operating system would you like to deploy?" -foregroundcolor
Green

Write-host "1. 2008 R2 Standard" -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-host "2. 2008 R2 Enterprise" -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-host "3. 2008 R2 Datacenter" -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-host "4. 2012 Standard" -foregroundcolor Yellow

Write-host "5. 2012 Enterprise" -foregroundcolor Yellow

$deploy = Read-host "Please select an operating system"

if ($deploy -eq "") {write-host "error:Please select and operating system"
-foregroundcolor Red}; if ($deploy -eq $NULL) {write-host "error: Please select
an operating system" -foregroundcolor Red}

write-host

} while ($deploy -eq "" -or $deploy -eq $NULL)

#What should the VM be called

$Name = Read-Host "Enter the Virtual Machine name (Press [Enter] to choose
Srv01)"

if ($Name -eq ""){$Name="Srv01"} ; if ($Name -eq $NULL){$Name="Srv01"}

#how much memory needs to be assigned (static only at this point)

$Memory = Read-Host "Enter the size of the Virtual Machine Memory (Press
[Enter] to choose 2048MB)"

if ($Memory -eq ""){$Memory=2048MB} ; if ($Memory -eq $NULL){$Memory=2048MB}

#Where should the VM be stored

$Location = Read-Host "Enter the location of the Virtual Machine file (Press
[Enter] to choose D:\Virtual Machines)"

if ($Location -eq ""){$Location="D:\Virtual Machines"} ; if ($Location -eq
$NULL){$Location="D:\Virtual Machines"}

#Listing Networks on the host

Write-host

get-vmswitch |select Name, SwitchType

write-host

#Which network should be used

$Network = Read-Host "Enter the name of the Virtual Machine Network (Press
[Enter] to choose External)"

if ($Network -eq ""){$Network="External"} ; if ($Network -eq
$NULL){$Network="External"}

#VM creation starts here

new-vm $Name -path $Location

Switch ($deploy)

{

1 {Copy-Item $2008R2STD $Location\$Name ; add-vmharddiskdrive -vmname $Name
-path $Location\$NaAme\2K8R2std.vhdx}

2 {Copy-Item $2008R2ENT $Location\$Name ; add-vmharddiskdrive -vmname $Name
-path $Location\$Name\2K8R2ent.vhdx}

3 {Copy-Item $2008R2DC $Location\$Name ; add-vmharddiskdrive -vmname $Name
-path $Location\$Name\2K8R2dc.vhdx}

4 {Copy-Item $2012STD $Location\$Name ; add-vmharddiskdrive -vmname $Name
-path $Location\$Name\2012STD.vhdx}

5 {Copy-Item $2012ENT $Location\$Name ; add-vmharddiskdrive -vmname $Name
-path $Location\$Name\2012ENT.vhdx}

}

get-vm $Name | add-vmdvddrive -controllernumber 1

get-vm $Name | set-vmmemory -startupbytes $Memory

get-vm $Name | add-vmnetworkadapter -switchname $Network

# Start the VM.

start-vm $Name

cls

#Success message.

Switch ($deploy)

{

1 {Write-host "Windows 2008 R2 Standard Deployed!" -foregroundcolor Green}

2 {Write-host "Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Deployed!" -foregroundcolor Green}

3 {Write-host "Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter Deployed!" -foregroundcolor Green}

4 {Write-host "Windows 2012 Standard Deployed!" -foregroundcolor Green}

5 {Write-host "Windows 2012 Enterprise Deployed!" -foregroundcolor Green}

}

What are the new Office 2013 editions, who are they targeted at and what do you get?

Lots of great detail on the new Office line-up here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-ie/

This is a great overview:

I suggest you all try Office 365 Home Premium for a month (for free).

Feature by feature comparisons of Hyper-V in both Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012

I just went looking for a decent comparison of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012.  I obviously found this excellent document on download.microsoft.com – but couldn’t find these high-level bullets anywhere.

Hence this post:

Processor and Memory Support

Network

Storage

Manageability

Hyper-V is available as both the FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 and as a role in Windows Server 2012.

If you are virtualising Windows Server workloads (and have licensed them correctly), Hyper-V is completely “free” – so save yourself a lot of money by NOT purchasing an additional virtualisation solution.