If you have a Windows Phone 8 device, you can get your hands on the new Windows Phone 8.1 preview for free if you sign up for a developer account.

Use the following instructions to update your device!

Important notes

There are a few key items that you must understand before you update your phone:

• After you install a preview update, you may void any warranty from your mobile operator and OEM.
• A preview update only includes the Microsoft portion of the update; mobile operator and OEM driver updates will be available when the official update for your phone is available.
• You cannot revert or return to a prior operating system release version after you have updated your phone to a preview update. We will move you forward to a "released state," but we cannot take you back to a prior "released state."
• This process will take between 30-90 minutes (depending on network bandwidth) during which your phone will not be usable, please schedule accordingly
• Make sure you plug your phone into a charger or are fully charged before starting

Sign up for a Developer Preview Account

Note: Perform these steps on any computer, these do not have to be done on your Windows Phone

Install Preview for Developers onto Your Windows Phone Device

Note: Perform these steps on your Windows Phone

More information on Windows Phone 8.1

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/features-8-1

I received this extremely sad news this morning. I have been a part of the MCM/MCSM community for 5 years now and have made many friends, both attending and instructing at MCSM:Messaging. I am sure I am not the only one, but I will certainly miss this community and the many friends that I have made.

Termination E-mail Message in Full

We are contacting you to let you know we are making a change to the Microsoft Certified Master, Microsoft Certified Solutions Master, and Microsoft Certified Architect certifications. As technology changes so do Microsoft certifications and as such, we are continuing to evolve the Microsoft certification program. Microsoft will no longer offer Masters and Architect level training rotations and will be retiring the Masters level certification exams as of October 1, 2013. The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there's a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program.

As a Microsoft Certified Master, Microsoft Certified Solutions Master, or Microsoft Certified Architect, you have earned one of the highest certifications available through the Microsoft Certification program. Although individuals will no longer be able to earn these certifications, you will continue to hold the credential and you will not be required to recertify your credential in the future. You will continue to have access to the logos through the MCP site, and your certifications will continue to show in the appropriate section of your transcript, according to Microsoft technology retirement dates. If you are a Charter Member, you will continue to hold the Charter Member designation on your transcript.

Also as a Microsoft Certified Master, Microsoft Certified Solutions Master, or Microsoft Certified Architect, you are a member of an exclusive, highly technical community and you've told us this community is one of the biggest benefits of your certification. We encourage you to stay connected with your peers through the main community distribution lists. Although we won't be adding more people to this community, you continue to be a valued member of it. Over time, Microsoft plans to transition the distribution lists to the community, and, with your consent, will include your information so that it can continue to be a valuable resource for your ongoing technical discussions.

Within the coming weeks, you will receive invitations to an updated community site. This community site will require you to sign in with a Microsoft Account and will replace the need for a Microsoft Partner account as is required today. From this site, you will be able to manage service requests for the Masters and Architects communities – such as ordering welcome kits and managing your contact information for the distribution lists and directory - and accessing training rotation and other community content (if applicable).

If you have not ordered your Welcome Kit, the last day to do so is October 31, 2013. To order your Welcome Kit, please contact the Advanced Cert team at advcert@microsoft.com.

We thank you for your commitment to Microsoft technologies.

So, there you have it - no more Master - bad times L

So, firstly an apology for the lack of posts recently... I always said that if I didn't have anything interesting or useful to post I just wouldn't post, so that's what happened…

Anyway, I have been working with a customer to deploy Outlook Anywhere, we used Greg Taylors awesome white paper on this to get UAG to do the necessary publishing and authentication. This worked fine in my test lab but when we configured in production the clients couldn't connect and received perpetual credential prompts...

We did the usual host of troubleshooting (there is plenty of hocus-pocus on internet forums about OA password prompts!) but basically drew a blank… then someone in the project team noticed that their test Windows 7 machine could connect, but the production Vista machines were failing.

After some head scratching and searching we came across the following KB article…

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2408187/

"Consider the following scenario. You have a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. You configure the computer to use the RPC over HTTP feature to access certain services. In this scenario, the RPC over HTTP module (Rpchttp.dll) may not work correctly. Therefore, the RPC over HTTP connection does not establish successfully. For example, you cannot sign in to Outlook Anywhere or in to Office Communicator. Additionally, you are prompted to provide your user credentials."

So.. We dutifully downloaded and installed this hotfix which resolved the issue J

I wanted to post this here since we don't get to see Vista very often and I was totally unaware of this issue.

I guess it's pretty obvious by now that I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to Exchange and Outlook performance. One area that has always felt like a black box though is migrating data into Office 365 Exchange Online service.

The problem for me was that sometimes I would be able to migrate very quickly and at other times the migration would seem much slower, even though the network availability seemed the same during both times. This made migration planning extremely difficult since it was difficult to actually understand what the constraints actually were… this obviously leads to projects over and under provisioning migration schedule time which is not a good place to be.

There was also much confusion about if Office 365 was throttling some migration types and not others.

Well, I am extremely pleased to say that a guide has been released that discusses many of these questions and also finally shows what throttling policies are being applied to which migration mechanisms.

This document is a must read for anyone planning an Office 365 migration to Exchange Online

http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/183/t/45466.aspx

I want to start this blog by apologising for the lack of posts recently… this is mostly due to me not having anything interesting to say and not wanting this blog to be watered down with irrelevant nonsense… that and working on stuff that I can't talk about yet…

Anyway, one thing that I can talk about is the Exchange Client Network Bandwidth calculator that was released a few months ago on the Exchange Team Blog

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/03/09/exchange-client-network-bandwidth-calculator-beta2.aspx

Why do I mention this when the post title clearly talks about Outlook 2011 and Offline Address Book Download? Well… I have been working with Outlook 2011 this week to derive the network bandwidth formulae required for the calculator and one thing caused me to get stuck... how could I predict OAB download usage for Outlook 2011 when I couldn't see a way to force a full OAB sync?

As it turns out you can force a full OAB sync on Outlook 2011, it's just not exposed in the GUI…

If we open a terminal and take a look inside ~/Library/Caches/Outlook/Main Identity/1/Download we can see the OAB.XML file that has been downloaded from our Exchange server.

To trigger a full OAB file download following these steps.

1. Fully exit Outlook 2011
2. Remove the ~/Library/Caches/Outlook/Main Identity directory
3. Restart Outlook 2011

NOTE: One thing worth pointing out here is that "Main Identity" refers to the primary account that was configured for Outlook 2011 – if you are working with a different account you need to change the paths accordingly, otherwise you will remove the OAB file from the wrong account!

Once this directory has been removed, re-start Outlook 2011 which will re-create the Main Identity directory for you, however it may take up to 15 minutes before the OAB download is triggered.

Hopefully this helps someone else out there.