Office365 and SBS Essentials

Here’s a couple of good videos that gives you an overview of how Office365 will work with SBS Essentials.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVQz3KufpwQ

This first video shows you how you can manually set up the integration between SBS Essentials and Office365. At the moment, this is the option you’ll have to use until the Office Integration Module (OIM) for Office365 becomes available.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4O4LZ6UFEg

This video shows you the current (pre-release) Office Integration Module (OIM). It has some nice features and integrates nicely with SBS Essentials. Importantly, it doesn’t provide any AD synchronization, it simply allows you to easily administrator Office365 from the SBS Essentials console.

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http://www.youtube.com/v/k2-dVLwYraU?hl=en&hd=1“;” alt=””>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2-dVLwYraU

This video shows you how to integrate your custom domain with SBS Essentials. You will note that the Office365 servers need to become your DNS name servers. This means you’ll have to use Office365 to edit or add any records you have for your domain. The video shows the example of setting up the remote access URL on Office365.

If you are planning to install SBS Essentials and integrate it with Office365 then I’d suggest you take a few moments to have a look at each of these videos, after which you should have a much better idea of how it all integrated together.

Easy way to install common software

I recently came across the following site:

http://ninite.com/

What it allows via a web site is basically the ability to select from a number of common software programs (browsers, utilities etc). It then creates a single executable you can download and deploy on the local machine and it will install all those applications automatically for you.

The other good things is that it is totally automated and you don’t end up with any add on toolbars or ‘commercial-ware’.

A single executable makes it pretty easy to roll out common software in a networked environment.

Essential viewing

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/98beda61-34b9-4827-b711-075c6c98c946

On of the things that I’m currently hanging out to see is how SBS 2011 Essentials integrates with Office365. The above video which is part of a number of training on SBS 2011 Essentials I reckon is really worth a closer look because it provides an important insight into not only the Office365 integration but also the swag of other addins that are coming soon. The rest of the training can be found here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/04/12/content-content-and-more-content-part-1.aspx

Why is this important? It demonstrates to me that Microsoft is committed to making SBS 2011 Essentials a relevant product for the market but it also demonstrates to me that they GET what is happening out there with technology. What do I mean by this? I mean that fact that world is all about apps now rather than web sites. Many products are delivered directly via their totally encapsulated ‘application’ without the need for the browser. The app manages everything from installation to management and even updating. This is exactly the model Microsoft appears to be going down with the addins for SBS 2011 Essentials.

I also like the look of the Windows 7 Phone integration which allows plenty of directly control of your network right from a mobile device. Now of course all of this is blue sky mining until it becomes available but if you are interested in how SBS 2011 Essentials will connect to the cloud and how easy it appears that is going to be then I’d recommend you take a moment and have a look at this video.

Humming to the tune

I attending a hands on training course for Windows Intune this week. Firstly, what is Windows Intune? Well, according to the marketing blurb:

The Windows Intune cloud service delivers management and security capabilities through a single Web-based console so you can keep your computers and users operating at peak performance from anywhere. Give your users the best Windows experience with Windows 7 Enterprise or standardize your PCs on the Windows version of your choice.

It is basically a cloud based security and management subscription service from Microsoft that also includes a Windows 7 Enterprise license. This allows you to manage the security updates for a desktop, maintain anti-virus/malware, as well provide remote support. This is all done via a subscription of about $13 per PC per month.

One of the benefits that Windows Intune provides is the ability to aggregate a number of different PC’s into a single console. This would allow an IT Service provide to manage and maintain a number of clients PC’s all from a single web console without the need to invest in their own infrastructure.

There has been plenty of noise from IT Service providers who already have these features via other third part suppliers that Windows Intune is not worth their time and effort (as evidenced in the low turn out for my course). On that score I beg to differ.

Firstly, Windows Intune allows customers to nominate a partner or record. This means that any business so nominated receives a small ongoing commission. Secondly, no other third party management software I know of comes with a Windows 7 Enterprise license. This license allows the user (provided they maintain their subscription) to always upgrade to the latest version of Windows. This is an excellent method to ensure that customers are up to date with their operating system as well as generating migration and upgrade revenue for the service providers.

Windows Intune is certainly not as feature rich as other third party applications already in the market but remember that this is only a version one product from Microsoft. If you want to understand the potential of this product then you only have to look at the onsite monitoring Microsoft already has with the likes of System Center. If Microsoft can deliver this type of solution via a hosted cloud subscription, including a Windows OS license, then it will certainly be a strong player in the market in my opinion.

At this stage I have rolled out Windows Intune to my families PC’s and it is working quite well. I can easily see the machines, their status, security level and what software they have installed. I am interested to see when the next patch Tuesday rolls around how easily I can deploy updates to the machines but it looks very straight forward.

I like what I’m seeing in Windows Intune so far and I am very hopeful for the quick enhancement of this product. Hopefully at the next release they can integrate it with on site Windows Update Services to allow patches to be delivered from a central on site repository. However, as long as the product keep improving I am confident that it is great solution to add to my arsenal.

Exam results

Yeah! I passed the Microsoft Exam 70-169 – Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, Configuring and here’s my badge to prove it!

I wonder whether they’ll be having a separate one for SBS 2011 Essentials? I would assume they’ll be having them for Office365 (although there was none for BPOS to my knowledge)? I need to get around to doing the SharePoint 2010 exams as well so always plenty more qualifications to work towards. Never hurts to keep your skills updated.

A new machine

I’ve recently purchased a new laptop after my old one (7 years of dedicated service) lost a portion of the LCD screen. Fear not! It has been moved onto other tasks with an external monitor but I’d though I’d take the opportunity to run your through my setup process for the new beastie.

1. Power the machine on and let it completely finish installing all its software.

2. Reboot the machine to a Storagecraft boot DVD and take an image of the machine before anything further. You can do this before the machine even powers up to Windows but as you’ll see in the next step I’ll create another backup that will allow me to return the device to delivery state.

3. I boot back into the machine and use the manufacturer supplied Recovery Manager to create a set of recovery media. In this case it meant 7 DVD’s. So now I can get it back via an image as well as back to delivery state via the recovery media.

4. I now upgrade the version of Windows from Home Premium to Ultimate to allow all the Windows professional bits needed. I’ll also uninstall all the manufacturer crap that has been installed and make the machine as lean as possible.

5. I then use Truecrypt to do a encrypt all the hard disks on the machine. Sure I could do this with Windows Bit Locker but I believe that encryption should be open source. I don’t trust an algorithm that is proprietary. This now means that if the laptop gets stolen the information on there is safe, even if the disks are removed and inserted into another machine. Be warned, full drive encryption can take a long time to complete but Truecrypt allows you to pause and restart the encryption process at any point.

6. I install the latest version of Office Professional. In this case Office 2010 Professional Plus. I also install SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2007 (which are both free downloads). SharePoint Designer 2010 will only work with the latest version of SharePoint Server. Thus you still need SharePoint Designer 2007 when working with Windows SharePoint Server v3 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).

7. I do a Windows Update and change the options to check for all Microsoft updates and in future only prompt me when updates are available. I always keep running this until there are no more updates.

8. The machine came with Windows Security Essentials. Most other AV products are just too bloated and cumbersome. I also however also install Malwarebytes (another free download) and scan my system with this manually once a week at least.

9. I now install a swag of utilities including:

Skype – for free conferencing
Evernote – cloud based digital notebooks (even though I also use OneNote backed onto a hosted SharePoint site as well)
Virtualbox – this allows me to create virtual machines with 64 bit guest (i.e. for creating SharePoint 2010 test machines). I was disappointed to find that Windows XP Mode doesn’t allow 64 bit guests so this is what I now use.
Windows XP mode and Virtual PC – again for virtualization and running an virtual XP machine for backwards compatibility if required.
Window Live Essentials – I use the writer for blogging, messenger and a few other apps here. All free to download and very handy.
Audacity – For editing sound files, especially CIAOPS podcasts.
iTunes – Great for music but there are also plenty of great podcast and free training videos on all subjects here.

10. I install Firebox and Chrome browsers and set Chrome as my default (because it is the fastest). I need all these to test with SharePoint but Chrome is definitely my default browsers these days.

11. Now I install Lastpass which contains all my web site passwords via the cloud. Not only will it automatically fill them in for sites you visit regularly but it will also generate and remember secure passwords for new sites. Thus every new web site I sign up has a unique secure password. If you haven’t looked at Lastpass I recommend you do as it also integrates will all browsers and mobile devices.

12. I’ll install the Delicious browser add ons that allow me to bookmark and share my sites with the world (and any other machine I have via the cloud).

13. Next comes Camtasia Studio which allows me to create my video tutorials and presentations.

14. The Storagecraft desktop edition is install to allow me to take image backups of my whole machine for easy restoration.

15. To keep track of my time on the machine I install the Recuetime and Wakoopa agents.

16. To manage my Twitter feeds I install TwInbox.

17. To allow me to create PDF’s I’ll install PDFCreator.

18. I’ll do a defrag to line everything up that just been installed since hopefully not too much should be shifting around.

19. I’ll reboot and go into the BIOS and enable the password boot option. This means I have to put two passwords in at boot time, the BIOS password the hard disk encryption password. The BIOS password adds to security and allows me to easily shut the machine off if I turned it on by accident. It also allows me to insert a DVD if I need to boot from it rather than simply booting to the hard disk immediately.

20. I also change the boot order in the machine so it boots from the DVD first, which I’ll need if I have to do a recovery.

21. I then run Spinrite in full maintenance mode to check the hard disk and make sure there aren’t any bad sectors lurking about. Generally if a hard disk fails it is going to fail in the first few weeks so using Spinrite allows be to detect this early on the piece before I get too much further. I could do this before I start install all the above software but usually by now I am sick of computers and need a break so I leave Spinrite to do its work. Be warned that depending on the size of your hard disks this could take quite a while.

There still a few more tweaks and installs that I’ll do before I’m 100% complete but that’s the list of all the major stuff before the data even hits the machine.

When it’s all done I do a final Microsoft Update and a Storagecraft image and I’m good to go. Sure it takes a long while to set up but my last machine is still going after 7 years and I would like this one to last even longer, so I’m happy to invest the time up front getting things right.

I’d love to hear what ‘standard’ stuff you install on your machines. Let me know via (director@ciaops.com).

Me and virtualization

I have been an avid user of virtualization for many years. Initially I started out with Virtual PC on the desktop to accommodate all the operating systems I had to support. These days I use Hyper-V to run both production and test machines. In this post I want to mention a very specific use I have and how I recently benefited from the machine being virtual.

Apart from all the technology I run a business day to day. This means I have to do my accounts and pay tax. I have done this via electronic submission for many years. As soon as I was given the opportunity by the Tax Department to use electronic submission I did and over the years I have had very little problem. The one major problem came about when I had to shift the software to a new machine. The issue had more to do with obtaining new digital certificates than it did changing hardware. However, none the less it was painful.

After that experience I decided to virtualize the machine. Why? Firstly, it meant that I could fairly easily transport the machine between host hardware systems without needing to reinstall. It meant that I could minimize what software I had on the machine (effectively just the electronic submission software). It meant that I could run it up as needed, make my submission to the tax office, update the machine, take a snapshot, back up the machine and then have it ready for next time. If I ever had issues during a submission I could easily rollback to the last snapshot and start afresh.

Now times move on and once again I was faced with an update to the electronic submission software. I installed it but was having issues updating it via the Internet. Because the machine was virtualized I could test just about every aspect of the machine without fear of ‘losing’ anything. After exhausting my meagre brain I contacted the nice people at the tax office technical support area for assistance. They got me to do all sorts of things to no avail. Again, because I had a virtual machine I could try any request they threw at me and return the machine to the original clean state. Another very handy aspect of virtual technology is that I could ‘freeze’ the machine in any state. This means when they called I could quickly have the machine running without the need to physically boot it up in exactly the same state I left it in.

After finally getting to level 3 support I was given a solution that works just fine. So now I have updated my virtual machine, taken a snapshot and shut it down ready for when I have to actually do my submission.

The take-aways? If you haven’t played with virtualization then you really should, on the desktop and the server. Rather than piling everything on a single desktop PC have a think about creating a ‘clean’ virtual machine that you use for specific tasks (maybe internet banking?). I think virtualization is great solution to some of life’s little ‘incompatibilities’!