Again, with the importance of having a fast connectivity speed to cloud offerings, there are extra links for you to have a more accurate speed details to the cloud.

Use the following appropriate links to do your own speed test based on your Office365 service location:

APAC: http://speedtest.apac.microsoftonline.com/

EMEA: http://speedtest.emea.microsoftonline.com/

US: http://speedtest.microsoftonline.com/

For Lync:

• Amsterdam, NL: http://trippams.online.lync.com
• Blue Ridge, VA: http://trippbl2.online.lync.com
• Dublin, IE: http://trippdb3.online.lync.com
• Hong Kong: http://tripphkn.online.lync.com
• San Antonio, TX: http://trippsn2.online.lync.com
• Singapore: http://trippsg1.online.lync.com

Let me know if this helps!

For a particular customer, internet speed to any local servers (and download from certain overseas servers) is really fast – they are getting full speed that the ISP is offering.

However, to check what speed your internet connectivity is getting from Microsoft Online Services (Yes, for those of you are planning to move to Office365 or is already on Office365), you can check on the speed that you are getting at:

Wait for it…

http://speedtest.microsoftonline.com

(Speed test requires your computer to have Java installed)

So what does it test?

- Download and Upload speed to Microsoft Online Services
- Routes/hops that passes through the ISPs and the latency + packet loss
- Download capacity that it can reach

A sample test result can be viewed here.

Problem:

You are using Quest Notes Migrator for Exchange (NME) to migrate from Lotus Dominos to Exchange Online/Exchange On-premise, and on migrating the user accounts, new emails are no longer entering Lotus Dominos.

Problem Statement:

You want to have a copy of the new email stored in Lotus Dominos and have a copy forwarded to Exchange Online/Exchange On-premise.

Solution:

To be exact, there is no solution to this, as Quest NME tool doesn’t allow the support to have a copy left on the Lotus Dominos before forwarding it to Exchange Online/Exchange on-premise.

However it might be possible (correct me if I’m wrong) to configure Lotus Dominos directly to leave a copy before forwarding it, if NME tool modifies Lotus Dominos parameters directly.

Recently I was doing an email migration from Exchange On-premise to Office365, and the customer’s environment is not suitable to use Dirsync.

This means that I will need to export the X500 address from my local Active Directory and import it into Office365.

Here is the brief steps if you are facing this issue:

Export the LegacyExchangeDN and mail field in your AD:
1. In your DC server, run Command Prompt
2. Run the command:
csvde -f c:\sample.csv -l legacyexchangedn,mail

Now, with that .csv file, make sure that it has a “mail” and “legacyexchangedn” under the heading. See my attached sample file: sample CSV with LegacyExchangeDN

Import the legacyexchangedn/X500 into Office365/Exchange Online using PowerShell:

1. Connect to Exchange Online. using PowerShell
2. Run the command:

Import-CSV C:\sample.csv | foreach {

$user=Get-Mailbox $_.mail
$user.EmailAddresses+=”X500:”+$_.legacyExchangeDN
Set-Mailbox $_.mail -EmailAddresses $user.EmailAddresses

}

To check if the address has been added:
Get-Mailbox $user | FL emailaddresses

When setting up Office365/Exchange 2010, it is very common to assist the customer to create distribution groups.

This is my way to script it to speed up the creation of the distribution groups:.

1. Create a CSV file for each distribution group. For my case, I have _AllStaff.CSV created. See below link for the sample of the file.

_AllStaff

2. Use Powershell and run the following:

$name=”AllStaff”

(The above should be the filename of your CSV file).

New-DistributionGroup -Name “_All Staff” -alias $name -primarysmtpaddress $name@abc.com -memberdepartrestriction closed

(Modify the bold items to the right Distribution Group name and domain name)

Import-csv “D:\$name.csv” | foreach {add-distributiongroupmember -identity $name@abc.com -member $_.EmailAddress}

(Point the location to the CSV file, and also specify the correct distribution group name)

What’s your way in creating the distribution group?

If your customer has an environment that can’t setup Dirsync (perhaps they are not on Windows Server 2003 DC and above), and you would want to create users manually, here is what you should do:

1. Create a CSV and use Administrative Portal | Users | Add Bulk Users to import the users.

2. Export the X500 addresses from Exchange 2003 server (You can refer to this link on how to do it).

3. Import the X500 addresses that you have exported from your local Exchange 2003 to Office365. You will have to do the following in Exchange Online Powershell:

$foo = get-mailbox jabez
$foo.emailaddresses += “X400:C=Malaysia;DC=domain;DC=com”
$foo | set-mailbox

If you are doing a temporary co-existence without using the recommended approach (Exchange 2010 Hybrid), you may also want to:

1. Create mail-enabled users with external email addresses to @tenant.onmicrosoft.com. If you have 100 Exchange on-premise users, then you will have to create 100 extra mail-enabled users that points to the @tenant.onmicrosoft.com email account.

2. Create a forwarding from the Exchange on-premise to Office365

Q: What is the minimum size for the quorum disk for a Microsoft Cluster?

A: 500MB

(Sorry for the short post. From now onwards, I will be using this blog to post short important notes regarding Microsoft technologies. But might still have long winded posts once in a blue moon)

Environment:

IIS Servers in a DMZ Zone, configured in a Workgroup.

Clustered File Servers in the corporate network, in a Domain environment.

All servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2.

Problem:

When IIS web app tries to access the clustered file server hosted in the domain, it shows Access Denied.

Path to Solution:

On running Procmon.exe, w3wp.exe shows that it is trying to authenticate using whichever account. So I check my IIS Config and make sure that it is using an account which has rights to access the cluster file server in the domain.

Solution 1 – Ensure that your IIS is configured correctly with a user account that has the access rights to the cluster file server.

Specify the correct user account under Identity in the Advanced Setting

Select the Application Pool that this web application should use.

If the above does not solve the problem, please continue with Solution 2.

Solution 2 – Ensure that the username and password is the same between the domain server and the Workgroup IIS Server

If my clustered file server is using the following name:

User: domain\webapp
Password: Pa$$w0rd

Then my Workgroup IIS Server should have a local user created with the following name:

User: IISSERVER\webapp
Password: Pa$$w0rd

(IISSERVER is the name of the IIS Server)

(Make sure that all of your IIS Servers have the same username and password created as well)

Solution 3 – Use ICACLS.EXE to provide the rights to the clustered files

Now that you have the same user created on both server (Domain and Workgroup), we will have to use ICACLS.exe to provide the permission (No, using the GUI does not work):

1. Map the shared cluster to Y: Drive

2. Open Command Prompt and execute the following:

icacls y:\SHAREDFOLDER /grant WEBAPP:(OI)(CI)RXW /T

(Replace the SHAREDFOLDER to the folder that your web application needs to access; Replace the WEBAPP with the username that you created in Solution 2)

Hope this helps someone out there!

Background:
Lync for Android and iOS were launched recently. However, automatic sign in does not work for Lync/Lync Online (Office365).

Problem:
Using Lync client on PC and Mac, it signs in fine; however, when trying to sign onto Lync using Lync Server or Lync Online, it fails to sign on.

Solution:
As part of setting up the domain in Office365, it is missing a few CNAME records for Lync.

Add the following 2 more CNAME records into the DNS of your domain:

I stumbled across a quirky issue today which was causing scheduled TFSBuild jobs to fail with the following error: “Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host”. When executing the build definition manually I could not reproduce the issue; the build would run through without any errors.

After a bit of searching it turns out there is a small bug in IIS 7.5 (introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2) which prevents TFS downloading files larger than 2MB over a slow network connection; IIS will expire the idle connection time-out and disconnect mid-transfer.

Installing KB981898 from Microsoft Support will fix this bug and allow TFS builds to run-through without any issues.

-Patrick

If you are just like me, who has a Blackberry with your emails hosted on Office365, this is for you: BES is coming to Office365 very soon!

Details as following:

Oct 2011: Blackberry Business Cloud beta starts
Jan 2012:Blackberry Business Cloud goes public

Are you excited just like me? Read here for more information: http://richfrombechtle.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/office-365-blackberry-beta-available/

With the release of Windows Phone Seven Mango (7.1) the other day I was really keen to get it installed as soon as possible on my HTC Trophy. Unfortunately my carrier had not yet approved it (and to the best of my knowledge; still hasn’t). Fortunately the WP7 no-do download trick still works and it allowed me to download and install Mango before it was approved by my carrier.

Essentially this trick prevents the Zune software from checking if my mobile carrier has approved my phone (IMEI?) for the update.

Note: This trick does not work with all devices – e.g. the Samsung Omnia is still yet to get approved at a top level.

1. Start Zune
2. Turn off Data connection and Wifi on the Phone
3. Connect the Phone with the PC (USB)
4. Start the update search in Zune
5. About 3 seconds later, disconnect your PC from the internet (Turn WLAN off/Disable your network adaptor).
6. Zune finds “MANGO”-Update. Press OK.
7. Connect to the internet again and install the update

Good Luck.

Microsoft’s been pushing HTML5 hard to developers, giving them another option to develop application on top of Windows. However in my opinion, the HTML5 implementation is still far from being useful. I’ve been developing xaml based apps for quite some time and I have to say that along with expression blend, it’s powerful. Developers will stick with xaml unless they come from a web background. Please don’t get me wrong, I for one agree that the combination of HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 is a must learn for all developers. We should spend time on building HTML5 sites, but not for building Metro apps.

Source: http://channelm.net/blog/2011/09/20/html5-for-metro-just-another-option/

Phew! We’re all back from BUILD and focused on our next milestone. It is fair to say we had an awesome time showing everyone Windows 8 in depth and all of our speakers and Microsoft attendees are unbelievably appreciative for the warm reception you gave the product. We know it is early still–a developer preview–and there are lots of questions. We’re going to be answering them in new posts as we focus on using the Windows Developer Preview (WDP) as a baseline–so if you haven’t been running it, consider it sort of like a prerequisite for many of the blog posts.

Boot is the sort of effort that gets no respect. It is either too long or all the work to make it nice and pleasant hopefully goes unnoticed since you never want to boot your machine. I remember a meeting many years ago where Bill Gates said (paraphrasing) “Boot is a one-line function call that computes a constant yet takes forever: fBoot = SystemBoot()” At the same time it seems like everything boots these days—phones, TVs, cable TV boxes, even my TV remote boots. In building Windows 8, we set out of take advantage of some new technology and revisited some old assumptions to totally rethink the boot experience. We also wanted to make it more accessible and better suited to devices without keyboards. Of course, we also did a lot of work to continue to minimize reboots altogether, but this post is about what happens when you do boot. Billie Sue Chafins authored this post. She is a long time program manager who spent many years on user interface design, and in this release she helped us to focus on the boot experience (in addition to the Metro style app sharing contract which you can learn about from BUILD here).
–Steven

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/20/reengineering-the-windows-boot-experience.aspx

Bing is famous for having a different background picture whenever someone browses to Bing. However today onwards, when browsing to Bing using a HTML5 supported browser, it will show a video in the background.

What do you think? Waste of bandwidth?

Source: Bing Blog at http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/09/23/something-new-on-the-homepage.aspx?form=pgbar1