[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Enrico Toro, Senior Product Manager from Windows Server Marketing]
Congratulations to the Office 365 (O365) team for reaching their general availability milestone on Tuesday.
Office 365 provides its subscribers with great value and functionality by giving them a convenient solution to access professional grade email, documents, contacts, and calendars. It includes a full collaboration suite and offers familiar tools make it easy to connect and work with others.
We shared the same product philosophy of providing value and functionality when we designed Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Essentials for businesses that do not have a server and find that a traditional server is too much for their needs. With this release, we want to give our customers a first server that provides core functionality and a better infrastructure.
What’s really exciting is that you can use SBS 2011 Essentials with O365. This means you can run the core infrastructure you need on-premise and work with online services such as O365 for collaboration and line of business (LOB) application support.
Together, SBS Essentials and O365 help improve employee productivity and business efficiency by merging the network security and data safety that the server provides, with the no-hassle, flexible productivity tools that the online suite provides.
Better IT means more time to focus on your core business, as David Whitener, of David Whitener Inc, experienced. In his words, “Now that we can depend on Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials for backups and a Microsoft cloud-based service for reliable e-mail, we can focus on building our reputation for great customer service.”
But this is not the whole story. This fall we will make available the Office 365 Integration Module for SBS Essentials; this module will provide customers with additional functionality to combine these two products without increasing complexity.
The integration module will enable small businesses to simply administer their users both local and cloud in one single place, for instance adding all local users into Office 365 and effortlessly using a single custom domain name for both SBSS 2011 Essentials and Office 365.
To learn the details on how a small business can take advantage of O365 and SBS 2011 Essentials working together watch the following videos:
So do not wait any longer, download the trial versions of SBS 2011 Essentials and Office 365 and discover how the two products work together help small businesses grow, and if you are a partner sign up with the Microsoft Cloud Essentials Pack and gain for Office 365 for a year for free.
The Windows Small Business Server Migration Portal has just been released to Technet and provides single point of entry where a multitude of SBS migration resources can be found (including whitepapers, BPA downloads, wikis and community links). If you are planning to migrate to SBS 2008, SBS 2011 Standard or SBS 2011 Essentials, please use this site as your very first stop for up-to-date and official documentation. To learn more, visit the Windows Small Business Server Documentation blog or begin using the portal site itself.
[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Michael Leworthy from Windows Server Marketing]
Today I am pleased to announce the Release Candidate of the Windows Server Solutions Phone Connector for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (aka Integrating Windows Phone 7 with your SBS 2011 Essentials Server)
The purpose of this Add-in is to enable Remote Server Management tasks for SBS 2011 Essentials including
Alerts
After you complete the authentication steps with the server that you are trying to connect to, an alerts listing is the first panorama item that the application launches into. This feature brings the Alert Viewer that you know from the server, to the phone.
If an alert is displayed white, it is active and included in the alert count. If an alert is dimmed, that means the alert is disabled, and it is not included in the alert count. Any alert item can be clicked to view the full alert text just as on a computer. Contextual menu options include enabling or disabling an alert, and performing a repair action if one was assigned to this alert.
Users
The user-panorama item performs basic user management tasks, including:
If you disable a user account, that is a reversible action. The moment a user account gets disabled, it causes the same effect as it would if you disable it by using the dashboard. The user’s access to Remote Web Access, the phone application, and any server resources is turned off.
Devices
“Devices” is a panorama item that lets you:
Live Tile Support
If you pin the application to the home screen of your Windows Phone 7, you will be able to see a variety of at-a-glance information without launching into the application. An opt-in using the settings menu is required.
The at-a-glance information includes:
The Windows Phone 7 application requires both a server sided add-in to be installed on the SBS 2011 Essentials Server, as well as Windows 7 Phone application downloadable via marketplace.
For further information, and access to the downloads to start testing today please visit the http://connect.microsoft.com/sbs site. Please note this is a release candidate and as such is for testing purposes only.
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Shawn Sullivan from Commercial Technical Support]
Since the introduction of Exchange 2010 SP1, any spaces in the “Name” property of an accepted domain that is marked as default will invalidate that accepted domain for several methods of remote client access. The Exchange Team blogged about this issue back in September 2010. The following list of symptoms is taken from that post:
“This message has not been downloaded from the server. “
Admins may see the following event logged in the Application Event Log on Exchange 2010 CAS Server:
“Watson report about to be sent for process id: 1234, with parameters: E12, c-RTL-AMD64, 14.01.0218.011, AirSync, MSExchange ActiveSync, Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.InboundConversionOptions.CheckImceaDomain, UnexpectedCondition:ArgumentException, 4321, 14.01.0218.015.”
“An unexpected error occurred and your request couldn't be handled. Exception type: System.ArgumentException, Exception message: imceaDomain must be a valid domain name.”
“ERR Server Unavailable. 21; RpcC=6; Excpt=imceaDomain must be a valid domain name”
Additionally, we have seen mail submission via ActiveSync from certain Andriod devices fail due to this issue. A sample IIS log from a recent case we had illustrates this:
Cmd=SendMail&SaveInSent=T&User=USER&DeviceId=HTCAnd99117a4d&DeviceType=inc&Log=V121_LdapC7_LdapL31_RpcC15_RpcL13_Ers1_Cpo19752_Fet19998_Pk968703648_Error:System.ArgumentException_As:AllowedG_Mbx:SERVER.domain.local_Dc:SERVER.domain.local_Throttle0_Budget:(D)Conn%3a1%2cHangingConn%3a0%2cAD%3a%24null%2f%24null%2f1%25%2cCAS%3a%24null%2f%24null%2f1%25%2cAB%3a%24null%2f%24null%2f0%25%2cRPC%3a%24null%2f%24null%2f1%25%2cFC%3a1000%2f0%2cPolicy%3aDefaultThrottlingPolicy%5Ff2a26ef6-3e69-4abb-808b-964ab376209b%2cNorm%5bResources%3a(Mdb)Mailbox+Database(Health%3a-1%25%2cHistLoad%3a0)%2c(DC)SERVER.domain.local(Health%3a-1%25%2cHistLoad%3a0)%2c%5d_ 443 domain\USER xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Android-EAS/0.1 500 0 0 20144
The “Name” property is simply the display name given to the accepted domain object. During Exchange 2010 setup, an accepted domain is automatically created that covers the internal DNS domain namespace, with the “Name” property populated accordingly (domain.local), and is marked as default.
On SBS 2011, an accepted domain called “Windows SBS External Domain” is created for the public SMTP domain namespace that is chosen when the Internet Address Management Wizard is run. This is not an issue, since this accepted domain is not made default. However, we have been seeing an increasing number of cases coming in where customers are making this accepted domain default, and therefore run into the issue. In fact, you do not need to assign a default accepted domain unless you are interoperating with a non-Exchange email server within the same organization, and the vast majority of SBS customers run a pure Exchange environment (third-party spam filtering hosts are not considered to be in the same Exchange organization, think Lotus Notes instead).
If you have assigned the “Windows SBS External Domain” as the default accepted domain, you can avoid these issues by simply reversing this change and making and accepted domain without a space default:
If all of the accepted domain names have spaces, you can follow the resolution from the aforementioned post under the section “iPhone, OWA Premium and POP3 & IMAP4 issues due to invalid accepted domain”.
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Event Dates:
Learn more about this exciting event and register here.