For all those out there who are looking to move some of their services to the cloud, there is an free online resource from Microsoft that will take you though the steps required in order to set up your environment for a move to the cloud:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/hh699847

You only need Silverlight installed and each lab is around 20 to 30 minutes in total. It also covers Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

Used in conjunction with other online documentation answered a lot of questions that I had about setting this up.

Cheers

Paul

We had an issue recently when trying to access an external FTP site. We tried to open the FTP website via Windows Explorer, we typed our credentials in and we got the following error.

The part we are interested in is the “502 Active FTP not allowed” , this is due to the fact that Active FTP is automatically disabled via TMG.

To allow Active FTP in TMG do the Following

1. Open The TMG Management Console
2. Press System and go to the Application Filters tab
3. Right click the FTP Access Filter and press properties
4. Go to the FTP properties tab and select the tick box “Allow active FTP access”

Also do the following on the access rule you created to allow FTP access

1. Right click access rule and choose Configure FTP
2. Uncheck Read Only

You will now be able to access the FTP site

When using the SharePoint command-line tool STSADM, you may receive “Command line error.” even though the syntax is correct:

Solution

Manually type out the command rather than copying/pasting from another application such as Internet Explorer. This is caused by the encoding method, particularly any hyphens in the command. Hyphens and dashes vary between ANSI and UTF-8 encoding.

Microsoft have released an Outlook connector for Facebook , you can get the download from here http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5039&WT.mc_id=rss_alldownloads_all

Instructions to Set up

• Once Installed restart Outlook and you may be prompted by the Outlook Social Connector configuration wizard to connect to Facebook.
  1. Under Social Network Accounts, select Facebook.
  2. For User Name: enter your Facebook email account.
  3. For Password: enter your Facebook password.
  4. Click Connect
  5. Once the connection is successfully completed, click Finish
• If you were not prompted by the Outlook Social Connector configuration wizard, you can still connect to Facebook.
  For Outlook 2010:
  1. On the View tab, in the People Pane group, click People Pane, and then click Account Settings.
  2. Under Social Network Accounts, select Facebook.
  3. For User Name: enter your Facebook email account.
  4. For Password: enter your Facebook password.
  5. Click Connect.
  6. Once the connection is successfully completed, click Finish.

Once Added you will be able to see your friends latest posts, status updates etc from the People pane in Outlook

Microsoft has recently revealed the new file system RsFS. Much more detail can be found at the following blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

In this blog, I am just highlighting some of the key things to take away about ReFS:

• Only Windows Server 8 will include the ReFS
• Windows 8 desktop will continue with NTFS
• ReFS will not be usable as a boot drive, this will come in future versions of Windows
• ReFS cannot be used on removable media devices (USB Disks)
• Failover clustering is supported
• There will be no way to convert an existing NTFS drive to a ReFS. Creating a new ReFS drive and copying data will be the only migration path for moving files onto a ReFS drive.
• Bit locker encryption is supported on ReFS
• Corruptions automatically detected and fixed

Capacity limits of ReFS:

Cheers

Paul

After being on site where the users are currently being upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 we found that a lot of users were struggling with finding some of the basic functions that used in Office 2003 on the new Office 2010.

The following URL will take you to a Microsoft website that will enable users to launch a “virtual” Office 2003 program, find the tool that they used before in the 2003 version and then it will show you exactly where to find it in Office 2010 equivalent:

http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/learn-where-menu-and-toolbar-commands-are-in-office-2010-HA101794130.aspx

Simply click on the guide that you want to open, install Silverlight if not already installed, and then it will open the guide of the program that you selected. In this example we have opened Outlook and want to know where I go in Outlook 2010 to open a new meeting request:

Outlook 2003:

Outlook 2010:

These guides can also be downloaded to the local PC in case the user if offline.

Cheers

Paul

We had a query from a customer recently , asking how you can disable ActiveSync on a Per User and for All Users basis.

You can disable ActiveSync by doing one of the below steps depending on your requirements.

To Disable ActiveSync on an Individual User Basis

1. Open the Exchange Management Console.

2. Under Recipient Configuration, select Mailbox.

3. Select Properties from the action pane or right-click the user’s mailbox, and then click Properties.

4. Click the Mailbox Features tab.

5. Select Exchange ActiveSync

 To Disable for all users

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. (Please Note this must be done on all CAS Servers)

2. Double-click to expand the server name, and then double-click to expand the Application Pools folder.

3. Right-click MSExchangeSyncAppPool, and then click Stop to disable ActiveSync.

Now that TMG 2010 SP2 has been released you may be wondering how you can Slipstream it into your media, so I’m just going to provide you with a quick easy guide below.

First of all we are going to extract the TMG media by coping the contents of your TMG 2010 DVD/ISO into a folder. (for demonstration purpose i will be placing it into C:\TMG2010Slipstream)

Once you have copied the contents now go ahead and download Forefront TMG 2010 Sp1 , Forefront TMG 2010 SU1 and TMG2010 Sp2.

The first download TMG SP1 will come as a .MSP file named TMG-KB981324-AMD64-ENU.msp, so if we can place that into a folder named TMGSP1 (C:\TMGSP1)

Now its a bit trickier with the next 2 downloads they will come as .exe files , so we will start off with TMG 2010 Software Update 1. Open command prompt map to the location where you have save TMG SP1 U1 and run TMG-KB2288910-amd64-ENU.exe /t C:\TMGSP1SU1 and also do the same for TMG Sp2 TMG-KB2555840-amd64-ENU.exe /t C:\TMGSP2.

Now that we have all the relevant files extracted we will need to slipstream them.

So first of all open command prompt and map to the folder we extracted the TMG media to earlier C:\TMG2010Slipstream and then navigate to the FPC folder inside of there.

So we would run

Cd “C:\TMG2010SlipStream\FPC”

Now we will slipstream the TMG media by running the following commands.

TMG SP1

msiexec /a MS_FPC_Server.msi /p C:\TMGSP1\TMG-KB981324-AMD64-ENU.msp

TMG SP1 Software Update 1

msiexec /a MS_FPC_Server.msi /p C:\TMGSP1SU1\TMG-KB2288910-AMD64-ENU.msp

TMG SP2

msiexec /a MS_FPC_Server.msi /p C:\TMGSP2\TMG-KB2555840-AMD64-ENU.msp

Once you have run those commands you will have the slipstreamed media in the TMG2010Slipstream Folder (C:\TMG2010SlipStream)

We had an issue recently when upgrading TMG 2010 Eval to full blown licensed TMG. To upgrade to TMG Full version we inserted a TMG disk and ran the installation wizard which came back with the following error “The Internal Network is missing. Verify that the Internal Network has been defined”

What the issue turned out to be is that we had installed TMG Sp2 onto the TMG Evaluation which was causing the issues, so what we had to do was Slipstream TMG Sp2 into TMG install files and setup ran fine (I’ll be blogging how to Slipstream TMG SP2 soon)

Here is the location of the mail control panel just in case you cannot see it in the list of control panels that are available:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MLCFG32.CPL
OR
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\MLCFG32.CPL

You can simply copy and paste the lines above into a run box to display the mail setup control panel:

Cheers

Paul