The Sean Blog

The “Get Real Work Done” Button

smearp — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:51:55 GMT

If you find yourself living in your inbox, finishing the day with hundreds of e-mails sent and received, but no productive work completed, it would be great if there was a “Get Real Work Done” button in Outlook.

Fortunately there is, although the Outlook team gave it a different name ;)

Under the “Send/Receive” tab, click “Work Offline” and watch your productivity triple! Toggle this button 2-3 times a day (during your pre-planned e-mail triage times) and start to wean yourself from the addiction to checking every interruption that comes your way in real time.

Add it to your Quick Access Toolbar and save yourself two clicks in finding it on the ribbon.

While you’re at it… make sure you shut off those districting notifications for e-mail arrival. It is the first thing I do when I install Outlook!

File –> Options –> Mail

TechEd–Awesome Free Training in HD

smearp — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:39:05 GMT

With summer starting soon (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), work slows down as folks head out for vacation. What better time to kick back and watch a TON of technical content from some of the smartest folks at Microsoft?

I’m not sure when Channel 9 got so awesome, but they have a killer platform. All of the videos are free and are available for streaming in HD, embeddable in HTML5 (via H.264 and WebM format), and downloadable as MP3s, WMVs, and MP4s. Most of the sessions even have the PowerPoint deck available for download.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012

What to watch? You can’t go wrong with any of the following. Post your favorites in the comments!

Mark Russinovich (particularly his sessions on Windows Azure Internals and Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks)
Scott Guthrie
Jeff Woolsey (there are some passionate people at Microsoft, but Jeff is a powerhouse of excitement around Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012)
Jeffrey Snover (the creater of PowerShell and the lead architect of Windows Server 2012)

Tracks:

Office 365 and SharePoint (I particularly enjoyed the session on how we have deployed SharePoint internally at Microsoft)
Windows Client/Server (make sure to watch the Windows PowerShell Crash Course)
Windows Azure
Developer Tools
Exchange & Lync
Management (System Center)
Virtualization
Security & Identity
Databases and Business Intelligence
Architecture & Practices
Languages & Frameworks

Shut Down Windows 8

smearp — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 19:10:27 GMT

I didn’t see this method in Paul Thurrott’s excellent Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Lock, Sign Off, Shut Down, Restart And Sleep article, so I thought I’d share.

A quick way to shut down, restart, or log out of Windows 8 is to click on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and hit Alt + F4. Up pops the following dialogue, which will present you with all the options you could possibly need.

Cheers!

Microsoft Management Summit – Free Recordings

smearp — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:53:09 GMT

If you were not able to make it to MMS, or were unable to clone yourself to attend all the sessions taking place at the same time, fear not! Over 160 sessions across 5 technical tracks are now available at Digital MMS.

http://www.mms-2012.com/digitalmms

You can take a Windows PowerShell crash course from Don Jones, or learn basic or advanced PowerShell with Jeffrey Snover and Travis Jones. (Guess what topic I’m ramping up on these days?)

In addition to the obvious sessions about System Center 2012, there is a ton of content on Deploying Windows 7, monitoring Linux, Virtualization, Windows Intune… You could watch videos 8 hours a day for the next month and still not see everything!

When prioritizing, then, make sure to watch the session from my good friend Iftekhar.

Modifying SharePoint Search Results

smearp — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:45:57 GMT

I have put up a post over on the PTS Blog that shows how to modify SharePoint Search results to include the Document ID in search results. The principles in that post can be used to surface other information that may not be included in the out-of-box search results.

Check it out: SharePoint 2010–Returning Document ID in Search Results

Leave me alone!!! (using Lync to NOT communicate)

smearp — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:15:35 GMT

Ubiquitous connectivity and communication sources are a blessing and a curse. It is amazing that I can speak with my co-worker in Germany and get an answer as if he were sitting right next to me. On the flip side of the coin, my co-workers (and family, and friends) all over the world (or in the cube right behind me) can ~~bug me~~ ask me important questions at a whim.

While I love chatting with folks, sometimes I really need to stop the interruptions so that I can get some work done.

Fortunately, as I use Lync, there are a few features that make it easy to manage who can contact you, and when. Nobody I speak to seems to know these features are available, so I thought I’d share :).

Do Not Disturb

By default, Lync dynamically updates your status based on your calendar. If you are in a meeting, your status will turn red and display “In a Meeting”. If you are away from the computer for 5 minutes, Lync will display “Away”. If you are at your computer and not in a meeting, Lync will show you as “Available”, which is a magnet for interruptions.

You can manually change your status to “Busy” or “Off Work” or “Away”, but know that Lync will keep this status until you manually choose “Reset Status”. Keep this in mind before you set your status to “Away” and leave it that way for 3 weeks. Your boss may wonder why she is paying you ;)

Anyhoo… There is an oft-overlooked and very powerful option that you can choose. “Do Not Disturb”

When this is selected, you can still IM people, but THEY CANNOT DISTURB YOU. They get the following message when they try. If they persist and send, Lync will inform them that the message was not sent.

However… what if you want a few select people (like your boss!) to be able to IM you, while blocking out the rest of the world? Enter unknown-feature part deux:

Privacy Relationships

You can right-click on any contact in your Lync list, and change your privacy relationship. By default, Lync works some magic to figure out your relationship to the person, and grants different rights to that person. Most of your co-workers should be “Colleagues” by default. They will be able to see that you are IN a meeting, but not the details of the meeting. They can also not interrupt your Do Not Disturb.

The “Workgroup” relationship should be reserved for those that you really trust. They can see your meeting titles and can choose to interrupt your Do Not Disturb status. Use this status sparingly.

If you somehow have your ex-girlfriend as a contact in Lync, and they keep contacting you in the middle of the day to reminisce about the days when you were together… you can even use the “Blocked Contacts” relationship. They won’t be able to see your status or contact you.

A pretty table that lays out what a person in each privacy relationship can see (which I shamelessly copied from the Control access to your presence information article on the Office Site) follows :)

Presence Information	External Contacts	Colleagues	Workgroup	Friends and Family
Presence Status	•	•	•	•
Display Name	•	•	•	•
Email Address	•	•	•	•
Title *	•	•	•	•
Work Phone *		•	•	•
Mobile Phone *			•	•
Home Phone *				•
Other Phone				•
Company *	•	•	•	•
Office *	•	•	•	•
SharePoint Site *	•	•	•	•
Meeting Location #			•
Meeting Subject #			•
Free Busy		•	•	•
Working Hours		•	•	•
Location #		•	•	•
Notes (Out-of-Office Note)		•	•	•
Notes (Personal)		•	•	•
Last Active		•	•	•
Personal Photo Web Address	•	•	•	•

Presence information items with an asterisk (*) beside them indicates that if these attributes are defined in the company’s directory service, they are visible to all contacts in your organization, regardless of privacy relationship. They are also visible to external contacts outside your organization (if configured and recognized by your organization’s network).
Presence information items with a pound sign (#) beside them are enabled by default.

File System Limitation

smearp — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:56:18 GMT

Apparently I am only the second person on the internet to hit this error (judging by my Bing search this morning), but I thought I would share the solution in case someone else ever hits it :).

I was attempting to copy a 150 GB VHD file from one Windows Server 2008 R2 server to another, and after approximately 30 minutes, I would get the following error:

Move File

An unexpected error is keeping you from moving the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80070299: The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation.

It turns out that the destination directory that I was copying to had NTFS compression enabled, and directories with NTFS compression enabled will not accept files over a certain size (according to this article on MSDN it is ~30GB: File Compression and Decompression). As the file I was copying was just going to be archived, I disabled NTFS compression, zipped up the file, and copied it over with no problems.

For what it’s worth, although it was not the cause of my problem, I do see that KB 967351 mentions that this error can also be caused by a heavily fragmented hard drive. The article also mentions compression as a potential problem, with 40-90GB as the threshold for errors:

Compressed files are more likely to reach the limit because of the way the files are stored on disk. Compressed files require more extents to describe their layout. Also, decompressing and compressing a file increases fragmentation significantly. The limit can be reached when write operations occur to an already compressed chunk location. The limit can also be reached by a sparse file. This size limit is usually between 40 gigabytes (GB) and 90 GB for a very fragmented file.

Phishing and Modern Browsers

smearp — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:22:42 GMT

I got a rather official-looking phishing e-mail this evening, asking me to verify my Bank of America sitekey. As I do not bank with BOA, this set off some alarm bells. I always make sure to report phishing sites through the handy “Report unsafe website” feature of Internet Explorer 9, so that the site can be added to the SmartScreen Filter.

It turns out that somebody beat me to the punch. Internet Explorer warns me in no uncertain terms that I should not visit this site. This is a warning that even my grandma would not miss.

The same site in Google Chrome?

and Firefox 4?

If there is a place with Chrome or Firefox to submit feedback that a given site is a phishing site, I can’t find it. According to Firefox’s Phishing and Malware Protection site, Firefox 3 and later will warn you if you hit a known phishing site. I don’t see any way for users to add to the Firefox list. If you have any idea how to submit a page to their filter, please add it in the comments.

For Chrome, they have a web page (http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/) that will allow you to report a phishing site, but I don’t see any option to do so directly in the browser (unless Tools –> Report an Issue is the official way, in the same place as “Page Formatting and Layout” or “Synced Preferences”).

Long story short… if you would like your friends and family to avoid phishing and malware sites, IE 9 is the way to go :)

Scripting a SharePoint 2010 install with Powershell

smearp — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:44:19 GMT

Clicking “next” “next” on an installer is sooo 2007. If you stand up and take down SharePoint 2010 farms on a frequent basis (for development or test servers), or you want to be able to quickly do so (maybe for disaster recovery), you have two options.

1) Read through the documentation and figure it out on your own: Install SharePoint Server 2010 by using Windows PowerShell

2) Use the SharePoint 2010 Developer Workstation Easy Setup Script (and modify it for your needs)

3) Use the awesome whizbang killer AutoSPInstaller scripts on Codeplex: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/

This project consists of PowerShell scripts, an XML input file, and a standard windows batch file (to kick off the process) which together provide a quick and near-unattended installation and initial config (Service Apps, My Sites) of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Works on both Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 (x64 only of course).

Perfect for repeated Virtual Machine-based installs/tear-downs, etc., but also great for production installs where you want to guarantee consistency and minimize data entry glitches. The immediate value is for installing and configuring the first/only server in a farm, but also supports using server-specific input files when running the script on subsequent servers (with parameters - e.g. for the service apps - set according to your desired topology).

"But doesn't SharePoint 2010 have a nice wizard now that does all this for me??" - Yes, and it's a huge improvement over what was available in MOSS 2007. However if you've ever seen the 'DBA nightmare' left behind on your SQL server after the Farm Configuration Wizard has completed (GUID'ed databases with inconsistent naming, etc.):

...then you'll see the value in having consistently-named but automatically-created databases:

The scripted process will:

Re-launch itself in an elevated process to deal with User Access Control
Check whether the target server is running Windows 2008 or 2008 R2
Prompt you to enter ~~all~~ most (in progress) service accounts, passwords and the farm passphrase, unless you opt to just specify them in the SetInputs.xml
Automatically download and install platform-specific pre-requisites (e.g. IIS, .Net Framework) using the SP2010 Prerequisiteinstaller.exe. You can also pre-download all the prerequisites/hotfixes using this script, then specify <OfflineInstall>1</OfflineInstall> in your SetInputs.xml instead of having Prerequisiteinstaller try to download fixes at script runtime.
Optionally disable some unnecessary Windows services
Install the SP2010 binaries using an (optionally, server-specific) config.xml for input
Create the Farm (Config & Central Admin content databases, Central Admin site, help collections, etc.)
Optionally configure and start many SharePoint services and service applications; currently the script can provision:
- User Profile Service Application
- User Profile Synchronization Service
- Metadata Service Application
- SharePoint Foundation User Code Service
- State Service Application
- WSS Usage Application
- PowerPivot Service Application (Note: For this one, you'd need to first install your farm, then install the PowerPivot component for SQL2008 R2, then re-run the script with <CreatePowerPivot> set to 1)
- Secure Store Service
- Search Query And Site Settings Service
- Enterprise Search Service Application
- Web Analytics Service Application
Create the main Portal web app and site collection (will try to provision and/or assign a certificate, too - all you need is an https://-based URL in the input XML)
Create/configure your My Sites web app and site collection (will also try to provision and/or assign a certificate if you have an https://-based URL in the Input XML)
Launch IE to display the Farm Configuration Wizard, Portal and My Sites, and view the results of your hard work (just in time for your return from lunch)
Log all activity to a file on the current user's desktop, and pop open the log file for review when finished.

Get it here: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com/

Windows 7 Deployment Options for Small and Midsize Businesses

smearp — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:59:48 GMT

The Microsoft Download Center has a neat poster (available in PDF, Visio, and XPS formats) walking through the advantages, limitations, and requirements for the different deployment options available to small and midsize businesses planning on a deployment of Windows 7.

Explore the different options for deploying Windows 7 in a small or midsize organization. This print-ready poster from the Springboard Series for Windows 7 features an overview of each method, details on advantages and limitations, basic requirements, and helpful links to additional tools and guidance. You'll also find a helpful step-by-step overview of the Windows 7 deployment process.

Get the poster here: Windows 7 Deployment Options for Small and Midsize Businesses

While you’re at it, swing by the Windows 7: Small and Midsize Business Corner for more information, walkthroughs, and video tutorials on each Windows 7 deployment option.