Microsoft - Aidan Finn, IT Pro

Microsoft News Summary – 30 July 2014

The big news here for MSFT techies are the releases of update rollups for SysCtr 2012 SP1 and SysCtr 2012 R2. Please wait 1 month before deploying to avoid the inevitable issues (history indicates that I am probably right) and use that time to carefully review the installation instructions.

Using PowerShell to Provision Member Servers in Microsoft Azure: How to provision a new member server using a couple of simple commands.
Getting Started with Azure Automation: Automation Assets: What is says on the tin.
New Office 365 admin tools: You can now receive Office 365 service communications in Microsoft System Center by importing the newly available Office 365 Management Pack. And you can integrate Office 365 service communications into your monitoring systems and tools by interfacing with the Office 365 Service Communications API.
How to Setup a Microsoft Azure Virtual Network: This article show you how to setup a Microsoft Azure virtual network and talk about the new Azure point-to-site and site-to-site VPN.
Microsoft Azure Growing Faster than Amazon, IBM, and Google in Cloud Services: A news article I did on Petri.com that also covers Azure in Open Licensing.
Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
System Center Management Pack for Office 365: Monitor O365 using OpsMgr/SCOM. Through Operations Manager, datacenter admins can monitor the health of their Office 365 subscriptions and provide alerts when subscribed services may be experiencing an outage.
System Center 2012 R2 Management Pack for Virtual Machine Manger Host and Virtual Machine Dashboards: Two new dashboards focused on visualizing resource consumption of virtualization hosts and VMs.
Best Practices for Task Sequences in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager R2: Create and manage SCCM 2012 R2 task sequences using Microsoft best practices.
Avoiding IP Blacklisting with Azure Web Sites: In a multi-tenant environment where customers share a number of IP addresses, it’s not uncommon to have malicious content on a site or two. In some case they may be result of compromise and in other cases this may be intentional. Either way, this can lead to one or more shared IP addresses getting added to the lists of the various black list services that exist on the web. Once a shared IP is blacklisted, this would typically affect innocent sites as well.
Analyst: Cloud Backup Services Should Be a Consideration: Organizations should strategically consider using public cloud services for backup and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios, according to a Tuesday Forrester Research webinar that was sponsored by Microsoft.
MICROSOFT: The (US) Government Has A Sneaky Way Of Forcing Tech Companies To Turn Over Your Emails: Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday night that the company will fight a tactic used by the U.S. government to force tech companies to turn over customers’ emails stored on remote servers.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Scripting,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Office 365,Networking,System Center,ConfigMgr,Configuration Manager,Operations Manager,OpsMgr,Deployment,Backup,Microsoft

Microsoft News Summary – 28 July 2014

It was a quiet weekend. Note a useful scripts for health checking a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) by Jose Barreto.

How to Reserve Public Virtual IP Addresses in Microsoft Azure: Using the new feature to reserve a public IP for your cloud service – recommended!
Microsoft Working on Hotfix for Windows Server 2003 Migration Problem: Users sometimes aren’t able to log into their machines under this scenario because of a mismatch between the encryption types used by Kerberos in the two servers.
PowerShell script for Storage Cluster Health Test published to the TechNet Script Center: Storage PM, Jose Barreto, published a PowerShell script to check the health and capacity of a Storage Cluster based on Windows Server 2012 R2 Scale-Out File Servers.
How the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 script checks for Storage Cluster health: How the above script by Jose Barreto works.
Xbox-Produced “Atari: Game Over” Documentary Gets First Trailer: Microsoft has released a trailer for Atari: Game Over, the first part of its documentary series Signal to Noise (out this Fall, despite the closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios).

Technorati Tags: Azure,Networking,Windows Server 2003,Windows Server 2012 R2,PowerShell,Scripting,Scale-Out File Server,Storage,Storage Spaces,Failover Clustering,Hardware

Microsoft News Summary – 24 July 2014

Very little for you today:

Provision Domain Controllers in Azure using PowerShell: Learn how to provision domain controllers in Microsoft Azure using PowerShell with a single click of the mouse.
Proximal Data AutoCache Review: My review of this cool product for Petri.com.
New ExpressRoute locations and partners: Growth coming in the USA, Europe, and Asia.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Active Directory,PowerShell,Scripting,Storage,Networking,Cloud,Cloud Computing

Microsoft News Summary – 23 July 2014

Overnight Microsoft news is dominated by their Q4 2014 (MSFT financial year is July-June and just started FY 2015) returns.

Microsoft Reports Positive Q4 Earnings: Cloud services grew 44%, and beat overall revenue expectations. Shares are now at $44.83 each – after a decade of around $25 under Ballmer. Mary Jo Foley has a better breakdown here.
Windows 8.1 Update 2 Rumored To Appear on August 12: "Update 2" which is probably going to be called "August 2014 update for …" is rumoured to be out next month as another "service pack". It should also be released for WS2012 R2.
Microsoft Fixes Flawed ISOs of SQL Server 2012 SP2: Microsoft indicated late last week that it has fixed a problem with SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 that may have affected some of its TechNet or MSDN subscribers. Woops!
SPLA – Back to Basics: Understand hosting/leasing licensing. This is a must-know if building on top of Azure.
Microsoft Partners – Activating Your Azure Benefits (Free Stuff!): This short video will show you how to activate your benefits for free monthly credits as well as some resources that can help you get started.
How to link Azure RemoteApp to an existing VNET: Now we’re talking – enable remote/latent network access to legacy apps hosted in Azure.
Stop Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines in Parallel using PowerShell: A critical must-know IMO.
Why Blade Servers are the Wrong Choice: An article I wrote for Petri.com based on lots of problems I’ve seen or heard about.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Windows 8.1,Windows Server 2012 R2,SQL,Licensing,Azure,RDS,Hardware

Microsoft News Summary – 21 July 2014

Not much news floating about. But the first two items in my summary makes me worry about Microsoft. V- staff (contractors) are going to be blocked from network access intermittently, making them redundant, and baldy needed human testers are being made redundant.

Microsoft imposes restrictions on ‘external staff,’ limits their network and business access: This is the sort of bull$h1t that happens when HR people are allowed into meetings or to make decisions. They should be restricted to rubber stamping employment contracts.
Operating systems group chief Myerson’s memo to the troops: I have no idea why MSFT is cutting testers when testing quality has been dropping. We need less automation and more human involvement.
Microsoft Azure RemoteApp – You can now create cloud deployments with your own template image: You can now create a cloud deployment using your own template image.
Controlling SMB Multichannel in Windows Server 2012 R2: A post by me on Petri.com.
Lenovo gives up on small-screen Windows tablets in US market: Premium 8" Windows tablets not selling in the USA. Small is about cheap. And small requires quantity and quality native apps.
Record number of DDoS attacks in first half of 2014: A new report examining distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the first half of 2014 has shown that incidents are increasing exponentially at 20Gbps.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Azure,RDS,Storage,Networking,Windows Server 2012 R2,Hardware,Security

Microsoft Making 18,000 Employees Redundant

As expected, Satya Nadella announced the redundancy of 18,000 employees from Microsoft. 13,000 of those will go in the next 6 months. 12,500 will go from the Nokia businesses. And after that, it appears that Redmond (MSFT HQ) will be hit heavily. It appears that non-core businesses will be targeted, such as Xbox Entertainment Studios.

Nadella has talked about making Microsoft more agile by removing layers of decision making, i.e. management. That’s important to be able to operate at the speeds that cloud sprint development requires. It also sounds like another reorganisation is taking place; Nadella doesn’t appear to like what Ballmer did before he left. Much of this is to undo the silos between teams in the same groups that should be working closer together.

I have also read that a lot of v- contractors will be let go. This is unfortunate – these are people on very short contracts who are often filling in very important positions that a manager has not had budget for hiring a full time employee.

Hopefully, Microsoft will not be letting go the necessary people that keep the core businesses going. I know how shitty it is to be made redundant, even from a very profitable company. Best of luck to all involved.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft

Isn’t It Time For Lync To Make Way For Skype?

We wondered what Microsoft would do with Lync and Skype back in 2011 when Microsoft made the surprise acquisition of the Luxembourg company. There was a clear divide. Lync was a bulky on-premises corporate tool with phone system aspirations. Skype was a cloud-based consumer product that offered phone services in addition to voice, video and IM.

Skype went on to kill of Live (MSN) Messenger for IM – and unfortunately Skype’s chat has since not improved itself to keep up with what Messenger was as an IM tool. And Skype has other awful behaviours, particularly if you own multiple devices – such as showing you online when you are not, ringing on one device even though you have answered on another, and so on.

Lync went online (phone system availability is limited by country/partner) as a part of Office 365. And other than that, it’s not really improved much.

We did get an integration, somewhat between the 2 disparate MSFT communications tools; a Skype user can chat with a Lync user.

But in this era when Microsoft says that we are using 1 account and 1 (or many) device to span both work and play, do we really want two chat tools with two very different experiences?

In my opinion, Skype offers a superior experience to Lync. I’ve always found the Lync client and experience to be a bit ropey. How many of us have been in Lync events and spent an age waiting for PowerPoint decks to appear, demos to load, or been asked by moderators to flash status if we can/cannot hear. How many of us have had to restart because Lync audio isn’t working? I never get that with Skype.

And look at where the development investment is going. Skype Translate is a genuinely valuable business feature, enabling people who speak different languages to communicate, albeit with some minor hiccups in the sneak previews.

Skype Translate in action at WPC 2014

I would be fine with the Lync client going away in favour of Skype. I would do the following:

Enable Skype clients to be joined (via policy or sign-up) to a Lync service for control – business still needs control
Fix the ringing/status issues of Skype
Drop the Lync client as it exists
Enable 2 profiles in Skype – work and personal, so a user can opt out of work communications outside of hours

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Lync

Microsoft News Summary – 17 July 2014

This week’s Microsoft news has been dominated by the cryptic letter by Satya Nadella and the pending (and obviously required) layoffs after the completion Nokia acquisition. Let’s stick to the techie stuff:

Windows Azure Pack – Active Directory Design Choices: A post on design considerations for Active Directory in a Windows Azure Pack environment.
Azure Site Recovery adds InMage Scout to Its Portfolio for Any Virtual and Physical Workload Disaster Recovery: Microsoft recently acquired InMage to expand the services of ASR. InMage’s flagship product Scout (to replicate VMware or even on physical servers) is now available as a limited period free trial from the Azure Site Recovery management portal.
Step-by-Step: RemoteApp Hybrid Deployment–Part 2: Completing a previous post.
An update to enable an automatic update from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1: This article describes an update that enables Windows RT to update to Windows RT 8.1 and that enables Window 8 to update to Windows 8.1. See the prerequisites before you install the update.
VNet-to-VNet VPNs in Microsoft Azure: A post of mine on Petri.com
Create and Configure a File Share using Azure Files: Using the new Azure Files feature.
Managing SMB Multichannel in SMB 3.0: What is SMB Multichannel and how does it select NICs to use?
Cisco Doubles Down on Data Center with Microsoft: Cisco announced a multi-year sales and go-to-market agreement with Microsoft designed to modernize data centers through the delivery and acceleration of integrated solutions including Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS), Cisco Nexus® switching and Microsoft Cloud OS solutions including Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server and Microsoft Azure.

Technorati Tags: WAP,Azure,DR,Hyper-V,Hybrid Cloud,Cloud,Cloud Computing,RDS,Windows 8,Windows 8.1,Networking,Security,Storage,Windows Server 2012,Windows Server 2012 R2

Great Article By Ed Bott On Satya Nadella’s Recent Letter

Ed Bott of ZDNet recently posted an analysis of a staff letter that was publicly posted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. I recommend that you read this article because it is quite revealing. There are two pieces that caught my attention: the use of the words “experience” and “world”.

Microsoft’s biggest failing is in user experience. It always has been. Take an Apple iPad and an Apple TV. I bet you can stream media easily enough. Now take a Microsoft Home Server and an Xbox, or a Windows 8.1 tablet and an XBox and try the same thing. I bet you have to go googling, and even then, it works once and never again. And it’s no surprise that my article on Windows 8.x tablets auto-dimming is a big hitter for me! It’s the little things, the lack of continuity in solutions that is lacking.

Microsoft, from Redmond through to subsidiaries, has a problem: they focus on products (engineering or sales scorecards) instead of solutions. That needs to change for enterprise and consumer products.

I have been sick and tired of Microsoft releasing products/services/features for the USA or “big 7” countries only. Whether it was mobile apps, products, features … they get marketed and shoved down our throats as must haves, including by uneducated employees in non-included countries, and the damned thing might only be available in the USA, e.g. Zune. And that’s why I coined the term “The Curse of Zune” #TheCurseOfZune. The latest one to piss me off is Kinect voice control in Xbox One; the product is sold my Microsoft in Ireland, but if I follow the EULA, I cannot use voice control. I had voice control on my Xbox 360, but I can only have it on the One by violating the EULA and setting my regional settings to UK or USA. Why Microsoft voluntarily shrinks their market is beyond silliness. Apple is a smaller company will a smaller distribution channel, and they have a bigger reach than Microsoft for all their products. Stupid is as stupid does.

Hopefully Nadella will change these things.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft