2013-12-23 · 09:15

Office 365 beta exams: a few thoughts

Last week I took the beta versions of the two MCSA exams for Office 365: 71-346 is Managing Office 365 Identities and Requirements and 71-347 is Enabling Office 365 Services. I thought it might be useful to write up a few NDA-safe notes on the exams and the topics they cover. Keep in mind that the questions on the beta exam are there because they’re being tested; the objective domains (ODs), or areas of knowledge being tested, won’t change but the specific questions probably will as the beta identifies “bad” questions (those that everyone gets right or everyone gets wrong are immediately suspect!) The Microsoft exam development process is really complicated; to summarize, by the time the exams hit beta, the knowledge areas to be tested are set in stone but the questions themselves can be modified, or thrown out, based on beta exam feedback.

First, be forewarned that there are no formal study materials for these exams. I hear that Office 365 Admin Inside Out from MS Press is decent, but haven’t read it yet. Be prepared to do a lot of binging to look up specific things that you want to know how to do.

Second, the absolute best way to prepare for the exam is to sign up for a trial Office 365 E3/E4 tenant and make sure that you know how to do everything mentioned in the exam objectives in both PowerShell and the GUI. This is baloney, and it has been a hot topic of debate in the MVP community. IMHO there is little value in asking an examinee to show that they know how to do something in PS which is trivial to do in the GUI, especially if it’s a one-time task like setting up Azure RMS. Nonetheless, that’s the requirement.

For 346, specific things you should probably know include:

  • How to add a new tenant, from scratch. This includes choosing a region (and what effect that has), setting the domain purpose, and confirming domain ownership.
  • How to configure DNS records and firewall settings: SRV, CNAME, and MX records, what they point to, etc.
  • How to design ADFS: how to size it, when to use SQL Server instead of WID, and so on. Note that actually doing HA or DR with ADFS is not one of the topics listed in the OD, but you’ll need to know how to do it anyway. The ADFS 2.0 documentation content map is very helpful here.
  • How to administer (parts of) ADFS, including installing it (prerequisites too) on both Windows 2008 and 2012 (but not R2), controlling filtering, and managing dirsync. I have heard that there are questions in the pool that cover ADFS 3.0 but don’t know if that’s true.
  • How you’d conduct a pilot, including how to use connected accounts and mail forwarding.
  • What the different administrative roles in 365 are for and what they can do, including how to manage delegated admins.
  • How to provision / license users through the 365 Admin Center.
  • Basic account management through PowerShell: creating users, modifying their properties, licensing them, etc. Nothing too exotic; I expect most Exchange and Lync admins can do these types of things now without difficulty.
  • How to provision, enable, and administer AD RMS, a surprisingly cool technology that Brian Reid has written about at length already.
  • What the mail flow/message hygiene reports are and what you can do with them
  • How to do daily admin tasks: checking service health, using the RSS feeds, opening service tickets, etc.
  • Troubleshooting using the Remote Connectivity Analyzer and MOSDAL

347 is a little more of a mixed bag because it contains both admin-level material similar to ODs in 346 plus a smorgasbord of other stuff. The most important thing to know here: you must know how to do stuff with SharePoint Online. Out of the 53 questions on my beta exam, 12 of them (22.6%) were related to SPO.  Given that about 0.5% of my actual knowledge relates to SPO, that was a problem. I don’t use it, and I haven’t worked on the SPO-related parts of any deployments for Dell customers, so I was unprepared. Don’t be like me. Be prepared to demonstrate that you know:

  • All about Click-to-Run, including how it differs from MSI installations, how you customize what gets installed, how the installs themselves work, etc.
  • All about Office Telemetry. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Its inclusion in these exams seems a bit odd, since I suspect you’d see people running it before deploying Office 2013 on-prem too. It’s been a while since I was directly involved in the world of desktop deployment, though, so maybe everyone but me knows about them.
  • How to manage SPO site collections, including how to share and unshared them, set quotas, etc.
  • How to provision (including how to license) Excel and Visio Services
  • How to manage proxy, reply-to/default addresses, resource mailboxes, external contacts, and groups in Exchange— standard stuff for working Exchange admins.
  • How to work with archiving policies on both Exchange and Lync, including integration with Exchange 2013’s in-place hold mechanism
  • How to set up Lync settings for external access, including visibility of presence and per-user access to PIC

Again, you need to know how to do these things in both PowerShell and the GUI, despite the fact that many of the tasks in the ODs will be things you do once (or maybe quarterly, at most).

Should you take the beta exams? It depends, I guess. They cost the same as the “real” exam, and they’re subject to the same “Second Shot” MS program that grants you one retake of a failed exam. So you could sign up and take the beta now for $150, then take the real exam for free if you don’t pass. Based on the state of the exam questions I saw, and the lack of structured training materials, I don’t recommend that you rush to take the exam, though; the real version goes live on 17 February. Until then, your time would probably be better spent setting up a scratch tenant that you can play with, then running through the list of ODs to make sure that you know how to do the things on the list.

I’d be interested in hearing from people who took the exam to see how well you think the exam actually matches up with what Office 365 admins and designers need to know in the real world.

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2013-12-15 · 09:45

MEC and Lync Conference 2014 session list (partly) released

The fine folks in charge of organizing the Microsoft Exchange Conference have released a partial list of the sessions that will be on offer, as well as a list of speakers (oddly enough, the speakers are in alphabetical order by first name… ooops). There are some surprises in the mix, and I expect a few more once the full list of sessions is released in the near future.

First, there’s clearly a heavy emphasis on panel-style discussions: there are no fewer than 8 “Experts Unplugged” sessions featuring product managers from the Exchange team. I’m moderating the UM panel session, which should be a good opportunity for people to have their in-depth UM questions answered by the PMs who own the features in UM. In addition, the support team has a session called “Experts Unplugged: Exchange Top Issues – What are they and does anyone care or listen?” that I can almost guarantee will be worth your time. Amir, Jennifer, Scott, Shawn, Tim, and Nino did a very similar panel at the MVP summit and it was extremely informative— plus they’re a fun bunch to talk to. I expect the other panels to be of equal quality, and the fact that there’s one per track is a good sign that the Exchange team is interested in getting two-way feedback from the community.

Second, there’s a nice mix of topics covered: a number of sessions promise to compare or contrast the on-premises and service environments (I’m particularly looking forward to “Engineers vs Mechanics”), and there seems to be a balance between architectural-focused sessions that explain design principles and sessions focused more narrowly on how to administer, manage, or use features such as RBAC (presented by Bhargav Shukla, who taught RBAC for the late lamented MCM program) and archiving. This balance between explaining why features work a particular way and how to use them was a hallmark of MEC last year, and I’m pleased to see it continuing in the sessions this year.

There are a couple of sessions whose abstracts are missing or incomplete. For example, the “Enterprise Social” session promises to “discuss Social experiences in the MSFT suite beyond e-mail.” I’d bet $5 that this is a code phrase for “talking about Yammer,” but we’ll see. As we get closer to MEC, expect to see more detailed abstracts, as well as additional sessions.

Turning abruptly to Microsoft’s other major unified communications conference: I’m speaking for the first time at Lync Conference (which lacks a catchy acronym so far: I suggest “LyC”, pronounced “like”). The session list is worth a careful review; I don’t know if there are more sessions forthcoming, but the ones that are there focus much more heavily on on-premises topics than the MEC sessions do, and there’s an entire track titled “Business Value” dedicated to helping attendees identify areas where Lync can add value to their environments and then squeeze that value out as rapidly as possible. There is also a “Lync Online” track shown in the track selection pulldown but it shows no sessions right now— I’m sure they’ll appear in the near future. It looks like the content for the developer-focused track will be super technical; it will be interesting to see how the level of detail in those sessions compares to the developer-track session at MEC. I get the sense that there will be more admins-who-are-interested-in-development at MEC and more developers-who-write-code-every-day at LyC, but I could be wrong.

My Lync Conference session is a 300-level look at integration between Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013. It’s nicely complemented by Jens Trier Rasmussen’s 400-level session on the same topic; we’ll be working together to coordinate topics. The Lync Conference also features sessions presented by sponsors; Dell (or, more precisely, Michael Przytula, my boss) will be presenting one. I’ll have more to say about its contents when we get closer to showtime.

I’m looking forward to both shows— meeting with the community is always really energizing, and both shows have a great session lineup. If you haven’t already registered for one or both, you should strongly consider it while early registration is still ongoing. What you learn in a single session can easily save you (or make you) enough money to make the entire trip worthwhile, and the social and community benefits of attending are icing on the cake. See you there!

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2013-12-13 · 07:30

The instrument written exam

As described in FAR 61.65, the FAA requires three categories of things to earn an instrument rating: you have to meet the experience requirements (which includes things like being proficient in English and convincing your instructor to sign you off), you have to pass the practical test, and you have to pass the written exam. I haven’t had much opportunity to fly with my instructor lately, so I’ve been focusing on studying for the written exam, which covers weather, IFR procedures, regulations, how to read IFR charts, and all sorts of other goodies.

NewImage

The picture above shows a portion of the IFR low chart surrounding David Wayne Hooks Airport in Houston. Yes, the FAA really expects you to know what all that stuff means! Every little symbol and text block has its own particular meaning: minimum en-route altitudes, crossing restrictions, distances, and lots of other things are all encoded into the symbology, and there is a completely different visual language used for diagramming instrument approaches. That’s a shorthand way of saying that there’s a lot of bookwork required to be ready for the test. I’ve been using the Sporty’s IFR course, which is pretty good, along with their test-prep app. I’m re-reading Taylor’s Instrument Flying and working my way through a couple of other books I have. Finally, I am considering taking one of the weekend accelerated ground schools offered by companies such as Aviation Seminars and Rick Yandle, but that requires at least one full weekend of time, plus several hundred dollars— money and time I could be using to fly instead.

Now, time to hit the books again…

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2013-12-06 · 06:52

Android 4.4/KitKat Exchange ActiveSync problems; fixed in 4.4.1?

Apple’s iOS has gotten a deservedly bad reputation for its Exchange ActiveSync implementation. But, to their credit, things seem to be fairly stable with the latest iOS 7.0.4 update. On the other hand, Google seems to have largely gotten a free pass on the quality of its EAS implementation; in fact, for quite some time Android didn’t include EAS functionality, although some individual vendors did. The latest release, 4.4 (or “KitKat”, a particularly nasty type of candy, at least in the US), includes EAS as part of the core OS, but it appears to have some bugs, including at least one that I am still trying to get a good understanding of.

First, there appears to be a problem with client certificate authentication, i.e. it doesn’t work. To Google’s credit, they maintain a public bug-tracking system where everyone can see the bug report and status, at least of this particular bug. Imagine a world where Microsoft and Apple were similarly transparent about bugs in their major products… OK, back to reality; Google of course doesn’t do the same for their proprietary products, just for open-source efforts such as Android. On the other hand, this kind of public reporting lets people show their ignorance; check out this thread, where a couple of engineers for a competing product show that they haven’t read the protocol specs in detail (hint: see this discussion of WindowSize to spot the flaw in their argument).

Anyway, Tony pointed out this particular problem to the Exchange community just before Thanksgiving. Recently I was contacted by a customer who was seeing another widespread KitKat issue: devices persistently pounding the server with EAS Sync commands, over and over and over and… well, you get the idea. Although I haven’t seen a clear cause identified, Google claims to have fixed this problem in the 4.4.1 update (see the reply by Ersher in page 24 of this thread), so the question becomes whether all the users claiming to be affected by this bug have upgraded.

Actually, the question becomes at what point Exchange administrators begin to proactively block new mobile device OS releases! While I’m not quite ready to declare a fatwa on all new device releases, it is beginning to look at though organizations with diverse BYOD populations might be well served to establish some kind of criteria for staging support of new releases. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all offer developer access to new OS releases, often months in advance, so one possibility is to establish a pool of test devices for new OS releases— something which many sites already do with new desktop OS releases. The logistics of working out such a program might be challenging, but I think the effort might be well worth it if it prevents unpleasant surprises caused by device-side EAS misbehavior.

There’s another, perhaps less palatable, option on the horizon. Now that we have OWA for Devices (known colloquially as Mobile OWA, or MOWA, within Microsoft), if you were so inclined you could block all iOS device access and require your users to use MOWA. Since there’s no MOWA version for Android yet (and there may never be; Microsoft hasn’t given any hints), this wouldn’t be a comprehensive solution, and it would likely aggravate users to a high degree… but as improvements in MOWA performance and capability roll out, it might become a more viable option.

(side note: speaking of aggravation, it’s amazing how aggravated Google’s customers get when they don’t receive an official answer from Google in the time frame they expect. At least Google gives official answers in their support forums, something you are unlikely to see happen much in the support fora offered for iOS and Windows Phone!)

One thing I’d like to see emerge is something akin to collaborative spam filtering— when I report a message as spam to my filtering service, that message is filtered for other subscribers too. It seems like BoxTone or another company might be able to offer a subscription service to customers that gives them early alerts to wide-scale problems reported by other customers, such as regional outages in a carrier network or a pattern of sync misbehavior for a specific device family. I know I’d be happy to pay money for a service that would give me early warning of apparent problems with new device software releases— what about you?

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2013-12-05 · 12:25

Microsoft, encryption, and Office 365

So the gloves are starting to come off: Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith wrote a long blog post this morning discussing how Microsoft plans to protect its customers’ data from unlawful interception by “unauthorized government access”. He never specifically mentions NSA, GCHQ, et al, but clearly the Five Eyes partners are who he’s talking about. Many other news outlets have dissected Smith’s post in detail, so I wanted to focus on a couple of lesser-known aspects.

First is that Microsoft is promising to use perfect forward secrecy (PFS) when it encrypts communications links. Most link-encryption protocols, including IPsec and SSL, use a key exchange algorithm known as Diffie-Hellman to allow  the two endpoints can agree on a temporary session key by using their longer-term private/public key pairs. The session key is usually  be renegotiated for each conversation. If Eve the eavesdropper or Mallet the man-in-the-middle intercept the communications, they may be able to decrypt it if they can guess or obtain the session key. Without PFS, an attacker who can intercept and record a communication stream now and can guess or obtain the private key of either endpoint can decrypt the stream. Think of this like finding a message in a bottle written in an unknown language, then next year seeing Rosetta Stone begin to offer a course in the language. PFS protects an encrypted communication stream now from future attack by changing the way the session keys are generated and shared. Twitter, Google, and a number of other cloud companies have already deployed PFS (Google, in fact, started in 2011) so it is great to see Microsoft joining in this trend. (A topic for another day: under what conditions can on-premises Exchange and Lync use PFS? Paging Mark Smith…)

Second is that Microsoft is acknowledging that they use data-at-rest encryption, and will be using it more often. Probably more than any other vendor, Microsoft is responsible for democratizing disk encryption by including BitLocker in Windows Vista and its successors, then steadily improving it. (Yes, I know that TrueCrypt and PGP predated BitLocker, but their installed bases are tiny by comparison.) Back in 2011 I wrote about some of the tradeoffs in using BitLocker with Exchange, and I suspected that Microsoft was using BitLocker in their Office 365 data centers, a suspicion that was confirmed recently during a presentation by some of the Office 365 engineering team and, now, by Smith’s post. Having said that, data-at-rest encryption isn’t that wonderful in the context of Office 365 because the risk of an attacker (or even an insider) stealing data by stealing/copying physical disks from an Office 365 data center is already low. There are many layers of physical and procedural security that help keep this risk low, so encrypting the stored data on disk is of relatively low value compared to encrypting the links over which that data travels.

The third aspect is actually something that’s missing from Smith’s post, expressed as one word: Skype. Outlook.com, Office 365, SkyDrive, and Azure are all mentioned specifically as targets for improved encryption, but nothing about Skype? That seems like a telling omission, especially given Microsoft’s lack of prior transparency about interception of Skype communications. Given the PR benefits that the company undoubtedly expects from announcing how they’re going to strengthen security, the fact that Smith was silent on Skype indicates, at least to suspicious folks like me, that for  now they aren’t making any changes. Perhaps the newly-announced transparency centers will provide neutral third parties an opportunity to inspect the Skype source code to verify its integrity.

Finally, keep in mind that nothing discussed in Smith’s post addresses targeted operations where the attacker (or government agency, take your pick) mounts man-in-the-middle attacks (QUANTUM/FOXACID)  or infiltrates malware onto a specific target’s computer. That’s not necessarily a problem that Microsoft can solve on its own.

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2013-12-05 · 11:06

Thursday trivia #104

  • Last week I had a fantastic visit to Louisiana for Thanksgiving, bracketed by perfect flying weather. It was great to see my mom, grandmother, uncles, and cousins.
  • Next week I’m headed to Dell World in Austin, where I’ll get to meet my boss for the first time, help run some nifty hands-on labs, and see a number of family members and long-time friends. I’m also looking forward to Elon Musk’s keynote.
  • It amazes me that PayPal continues to prosper with as many problems as their back-end systems have. For example, my account contains ship-to addresses going back at least four years and there’s no way to remove them except by calling support. Ooops.
  • This article about what it was really like to fly commercially in the 1950s was fascinating. I know that I am much happier with the navigation and communications technology available to modern pilots than I would have been using the 1950s equivalents. 
  • My friend Glenn posted a photo to Facebook of one of Amazon’s new drones labeled “Amazon drones: Skeet Shooting With Prizes”. Yep.

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2013-11-25 · 16:10

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 3 released

I thought it might be fun to write an annotated version of the Exchange team blog post announcing the availability of CU3 for Exchange Server 2013. So here goes…

The Exchange team is announcing today the availability of our most recent quarterly servicing update to Exchange Server 2013.  Cumulative Update 3  for Exchange Server 2013 and updated UM Language Packs are now available on the Microsoft Download Center.  Cumulative Update 3 includes fixes for customer reported issues, minor product enhancements and previously released security bulletins.   A complete list of customer reported issues resolved in Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 3 can be found in Knowledge Base Article KB2892464.

Translation: “We’re getting the hang of this cumulative update model. Notice that we gave you a list of bug fixes in this release, just like y’all asked for last time, although we’re not saying that this is a comprehensive list of every bug fixed in the CU.”

We would like to call attention to an important fix in Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 3 which impacts customers who rely upon Backup and Recovery mechanisms to protect Exchange data.  Cumulative Update 3 includes a fix for an issue which may randomly prevent a backup dataset taken from Exchange Server 2013 from restoring correctly.  Customers who rely on Backup and Recovery in their day-to-day operations are encouraged to deploy Cumulative Update 3 and initiate backups of their data to ensure that data contained in backups may be restored correctly.  More information on this fix is available in KB2888315.

Translation: “Backups are sooooo 2005. Why are you even doing them instead of using Exchange native data protection? DAGs and JBOD, baby. Just make sure you have at least 3 database copies. But if you are, well, take another backup right quick to make sure you can restore later.” [ Note that I am manfully resisting the urge to ask how this issue slipped through testing. –PR]

In addition to the customer reported fixes in Cumulative Update 3, the following new enhancements and improvements to existing functionality have also been added for Exchange Server 2013 customers:

  • Usability improvements when adding members to new and existing groups in the Exchange Administration Console
  • Online RMS available for use by non-cloud based Exchange eployments
  • Improved admin audit log experience
  • Windows 8.1/IE11 no longer require the use of OWA Light

Translation: “Who doesn’t like new features?  We promised to deliver new features on-premises, and we did, so yay us! However, notice how we avoided saying ‘on-premises’, instead using the clumsy ‘non-cloud based’ term instead.”

More information on these topics can be found in our What’s New in Exchange Server 2013, Release Notes and product documentation available on TechNet. Cumulative Update 3 includes Exchange related updates to Active Directory schema and configuration.  For information on extending schema and configuring the active directory please review the appropriate TechNet documentation.   Also, to prevent installation issues you should ensure that the Windows PowerShell Script Execution Policy is set to “Unrestricted” on the server being upgraded or installed.  To verify the policy settings, run the Get-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet from PowerShell on the machine being upgraded.  If the policies are NOT set to Unrestricted you should use the resolution steps in KB981474 to adjust the settings.

Translation: “Because we love you and want you to be happy, we’ve included a schema update to keep your Active Directory looking shiny and fresh. Remember, we can push schema updates in CUs now. Sorry if this means your organizational change control process means you have to delay installing the CU for months while you wait for the change to be assessed and approved.”

Our next update for Exchange Server 2013, Cumulative Update 4, will be released as Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1.  Customers who are accustomed to deploying Cumulative Updates should consider Service Pack 1 to be equivalent to Cumulative Update 4 and deploy as normal.

Translation: “CU4 will be so awesome that it’s really a service pack, if you like service packs, but if you don’t, then it’s not. Because every CU can include both features and fixes now, we have lots of flexibility to choose when to deploy features. Part of the reason we changed the servicing model was to get people away from the ‘wait for SP1’ attitude, so if SP1 is really just CU4, that helps show there’s no reason to wait.”

Reminder:  Customers in hybrid deployments where Exchange is deployed in-house and in the cloud, or who are using Exchange Online Archiving with their in-house Exchange deployment are required to maintain currency on Cumulative Update releases.

Translation: “Surprise! Since you can’t control what release your Office 365 tenant is running, if you’re in hybrid mode (or want to be), you now must commit to remaining on the current CU. If that’s a problem because of schema changes, well, good luck with that. I suppose if enough people complain we might start pre-announcing which CUs will contain schema changes so you can plan ahead.”

Overall, I’m looking forward to seeing CU3 be widely deployed. It seems to be a stable and solid release based on my experience with it. The new features will be welcome, and I am heartened to see the team continuing to hit their release cadence.

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2013-11-21 · 10:59

MVP Summit wrap-up

I’ve just returned from the 2013 edition of the mostly-annual Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. I say “mostly-annual” because Microsoft normally holds a Summit about every 12 months. The previous event was only 9 months ago, but for various logistical and product lifecycle-related reasons, they decided to return to the tradition of holding the event towards the end of the calendar year.

This year’s Summit was probably the best that I’ve attended in terms of both logistics and engagement from the product groups, at least for the sessions I attended. The transportation, housing, and events all ran very smoothly, with few delays and plenty of the delicious oversized cookies usually served in the afternoons. The product group mixer, which is an opportunity for each group of MVPs to mingle with various folks from their product teams, was nicely organized and well attended. I met a few Exchange MVPs I didn’t already know (such as Germany’s Norbert Klenner, Ratish Nair from India, and Damian Scoles from the US, a first-year MVP) and was able to spend time with many that I have known for a while, including Michael van Horenbeeck (whom Tony had previously christened “Michael van Hybrid”), Jeff Guillet, Michel de Rooij, Jason Sherry, my Santiago homeboy Jorge Patricio Diaz Guzman, Magnus Björk (now known as “Magnus Availability” after asking one too many questions about Managed Availability), J. Peter Bruzzese (who for some reason doesn’t yet have a snappy nickname; I am thinking that maybe “Mailbox Pete” would fit?), Siegfried Weber, Serkan Varoglu, and too many others to list.

The session content was generally excellent. Overall, the Exchange team did a solid job of both telling us about upcoming changes and improvements and asking for our feedback. There is a lot of exciting stuff coming in the recently-announced Service Pack 1, and from both the formal and informal discussions it seems clear that the product group has a clear vision of where they want to invest effort— product quality being one of the key investment areas— as they deliver new capabilities. Many of the sessions were held in a panel format that allowed full and frank discussion between MVPs— always an opinionated bunch— and the people responsible for designing and building Exchange.

Although the content was all 100% NDA, I think it will probably be OK with the NDA police if I close by saying that Navin Chand and the rest of the Exchange team have some exceptionally cool things planned for MEC that they will be talking about in the not too distant future. If you haven’t already registered I would give very serious consideration to doing so. Navin told me that there are more than 180 session slots available during MEC— compare this to fewer than 40 session slots allocated to Lync and Exchange together at a typical TechEd and you can see just how much more material will be available at MEC. What kind of material? Well, the Lync Conference team announced their session selections this week, and their conference is in February. If one were to extrapolate, one might assume that MEC will be announcing their sessions in January-ish given that the event is in April, so I think we’ll be finding out relatively soon. (Note that I don’t know the real dates, even under NDA, so this is just a SWAG).  

My thanks to all the people at “big Microsoft” and in the Exchange and Lync product groups who worked to get content together for this year’s Summit. They set a very high bar for future events.

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2013-11-21 · 04:30

Thursday trivia #103

  • This was a big week! I spent the first part of the week in Redmond for the annual Microsoft MVP Summit. It was amazing— great content (all under NDA, at least for now) and a wonderful chance to catch up with my MVP peers. While there, I found out that my session proposal for the 2014 Lync Conference was accepted, so I’ll be presenting to an audience from what Jeff Guillet has started calling the “Skype Pro” community.
  • I’m also going to be working in the hands-on labs at Dell World. No word yet on whether I’ll get to take Michael and Elon Musk out for BBQ but it will be neat to catch up with family, friends, and coworkers in Austin.
  • Just bought John Ewing’s Concise Guide to IFR. I’m looking forward to reading it. I haven’t spent as much time studying for my instrument written as I need to, so I grabbed the Sporty’s Study Buddy app as well.
  • I sold my Surface Pro because I had planned to take advantage of an MVP discount on the Surface Pro 2 that Microsoft was going to offer at the Summit… then they withdrew the offer. I can’t decide if I want to buy a Surface Pro 2 or a Dell Venue 11 Pro; they seem similar in specs in most respects. The original Surface Pro was a great device for me but if I can get an employee discount on the Venue 11 Pro that might tip the balance in its favor. (I also like that the Surface line is starting to grow an ecosystem of accessories, too.)
  • Weather permitting, I’ll be flying to Louisiana for Thanksgiving, probably with a side trip to Texas. Have airplane, will travel…
  • This is very well said: weightlifting gives you the serenity of the iron. I certainly find that when I am lifting or running (not as much for cycling, meaning I’m probably not doing it with enough intensity) that it clears my mind wonderfully well.

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2013-11-20 · 13:18

Exchange 2013 SP1 coming in early 2014

Microsoft today announced that Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2013 is coming in “early 2014”. The announcement has a few interesting nuances:

  • The Edge Server role is coming back. Not by popular demand, as far as I can tell; I presume this is being introduced to pacify a few large, noisy customers who are using Edge, because I haven’t seen any signs that customers are demanding it. I would not expect to see significant feature improvements or investments in this role, either in SP1 or going forward.
  • S/MIME for OWA support is coming. This has been known for some time; as yet we don’t know the specific details of which browsers will be supported.
  • SP1 will require a schema update. I will have more to say about this in the very near future.

Interestingly, SP1 is essentially CU4: it is applied in the same way as other CUs, and if you skip SP1 and install CU5 later on, you’ll get all the fixes and features included in SP1. The Lync team is doing the same thing with their CUs; the old rule that only service packs could include new features is dead and buried.

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2013-11-19 · 11:14

iOS 7 Exchange ActiveSync problems revisited

Back in September I posted an article about a problem that occurred when synchronizing iOS 7 devices against Exchange 2010 SP2. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but Microsoft has released a KB article and accompanying hotfix that describe the symptoms precisely.

I also got an odd report from a large enterprise customer; they had several hundred iOS 7.0.2 devices, all on Verizon in one specific region, that were having synchronization problems. The issue here turned out to be a network configuration issue on Verizon’s network that required some action from them to fix.

Now you’re probably starting to see the value in solutions like those from BoxTone…

 

 

 

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2013-11-15 · 06:00

My introduction to night instrument flying

There’s something particularly special about flying at night. As the air cools, it tends to calm, and on a clear night the visibility is stunning.

Sadly, I hadn’t flown at night since leaving California. After moving here, I ran afoul of RAFA’s requirement for night checkouts. See, the FAA has its own set of requirements about what’s known as “night currency.” In order to legally fly with passengers at night, you must have completed at least 3 takeoffs and landings at night during the preceding 90 days. On top of that RAFA requires that you have a RAFA instructor check your night flying technique out. This is immensely complicated by the fact that the Redstone Arsenal airfield currently doesn’t have any working lights, so getting checked out requires moving your plane to Huntsville while it’s light, then putting it back the next day. I just hadn’t been able to get an instructor and an airplane together at the same time, so my FAA currency had lapsed too.

Luckily last Friday I was able to solve that problem. Caroline, one of the RAFA instructors, had posted a picture on Facebook of a night flight she did with a student, and I commented on it, so she responded and told me to let her know when I wanted to fly at night. Challenge accepted! I booked the trusty club 182 for the evening, but it was down with a transponder failure, so I ended up in a 172 with Caroline and her friend Norma, who came along just for fun. Rather than a typical night requalification— 3 circuits around the traffic pattern— we decided to get some instrument practice. After taking off from Huntsville, I put on the foggles and flew us to Cullman,where I did a not-terrible job of flying the GPS approach to runway 20. (More on the various types of approaches and what they mean in a future post). Then I flew us back to Huntsville, where I flew the instrument landing system (ILS) approach to runway 36R. That was much more challenging, I thought, in part because we were getting radar vectors from the controller (a fancy way of saying that he was assigning us headings to fly to line us up with the approach course). After my approach, Caroline flew one while I acted as safety pilot, then I flew another approach and we called it a night (well, except for an excellent dinner, but that’s not really aviation-related).

Nightflight

Norma took this picture upon landing on 36R at Huntsville

Flying instrument approaches at night is no different than flying them during the day: the airplane doesn’t know it’s night, and you’re either flying in clouds or using a view-limiting device that keeps you from seeing outside in any event, so you stay focused on the instruments and fly the approach. Despite the fact that there shouldn’t be a difference, I really enjoyed the night approaches and look forward to doing it again… and again and again, since getting really good at instrument landings is kinda the whole point of getting your instrument rating.

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2013-11-04 · 21:34

The future of importing large quantities of Exchange data to Office 365?

It wouldn’t be accurate to say “you can’t”, but Microsoft doesn’t make it easy.

Whether you’re moving mailboxes or PST data to Office 365, your imports are throttled; that is, Microsoft imposes a limit on how fast you can move information into their data centers. The exact speed of your import process will vary according to a variety of factors, including what protocol (IMAP4, MAPI, or EWS) you’re using, what migration tool you’re using, and how many concurrent threads it can spin up, how busy the data center you’re importing into is, and the mix of item sizes in the mailboxes or PSTs you’re importing.

The problem with this throttling is that it’s largely opaque. Although Microsoft publishes “observed data,” my own observations have shown that migration throughput can vary widely based on these factors and a bunch of others besides, possibly including the phase of the moon and whether you have recently said anything disparaging about Microsoft anywhere on the Internet.

Recently I had a customer who wanted to migrate 30TB of PST data to Exchange Online Personal Archives. While this might sound ridiculous, it makes perfect sense given that Office 365 E4 plans include an unlimited-size Personal Archive for each mailbox. That’s a hard deal to beat… if you can figure out how to get the data in. At one point, in a fit of frustration we asked Microsoft whether we could just send them a bunch of disk drives containing the PSTs. “Of course not,” they said (with “silly boy” being the unspoken coda to that phrase). But it turns out that Azure is now providing bulk import of data by sending disks to them: the Windows Azure Import/Export Service is now in preview. With any luck, we’ll see a similar service from Office 365 in the not-too-distant future. And when it happens, remember, Andy Tanenbaum had the idea first.

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2013-10-31 · 08:39

Thursday trivia #102

Whew. Back from Chile and trying to catch up. Entropy always increases.

  • Upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mac OS X Mavericks (which I still think is a clumsy name) yesterday. So far I don’t notice any major differences in my workflow but I haven’t really had time to explore.
  • If you’re an Exchange designer or architect, I’d appreciate your response to this short survey on Exchange site designs.
  • Burn down the farm? That’s a radical approach.
  • It takes a special kind of crazy— the good kind— to build your own fully functional Boeing 767 simulator.
  • I’m starting to get more and more excited about the release of the Xbox One.
  • From the “industry on parade” department: here’s a really interesting analysis of how Apple builds the new Mac Pro. I have no need for one, but they sure are purty. 
  • Because ROCKETS.

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2013-10-29 · 06:06

Sunday surprise in Santiago

I purposefully didn’t plan much for this weekend; I had a quiet day yesterday, with a bit of shopping and a Spanish-subtitled horror movie, and I planned to spend part of the day working. My coworker was eager to get out and see a bit more of the city, so we ended up spending the day exploring– and it was quite a day!

Like many other cities, Santiago has a tourist bus service called Turistik that runs a circular route around the city. You get on the bus, get off wherever you want, and linger at each stop, or not, as you see fit. We decided to use the bus to get around, so we paid CLP$20.000 (see what I did there? about US$40) for an all-day pass, then caught the bus right in front of the hotel. It first stopped at Parque Arauco, a very large and verrrrry upscale outdoor mall where I had dinner and my movie last night. If you’ve been to Redmond Town Center, Levis Commons, or Fallen Timbers, you’ll get the idea (except that Parque Arauco has a car dealership too, so take that, yanquis!) We stayed on the bus and went to Cerro de San Cristobal, where we’d planned to hike the trail to the top. Unfortunately, as we found out after a long walk to the trailhead, the trail on the side of the hill where we were was closed, so we ended up taking the funicular to the top instead rather than hiking around the hill to the other trailhead. The weather was still fairly overcast, but there was a very refreshing breeze on the top of the hill, and the haze wasn’t as bad as it was last weekend when I was there.

After a short walk around Bellavista, we caught the bus again to Mercado Central(the Central Market), an indoor market that combines several large restaurants (we had lunch at Donde Augusto, which was excellent), a fish market, fruit and vegetable stands, etc. It’s completely touristy but was still pretty interesting.

 

From there we walked to Plaza de Armas, which contains the central cathedral of Santiago, the main post office, and several other major buildings. They were setting up for a concert of some kind, so the square was crowded and busy.

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The Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago

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a Rapa Nui-inspired statue in Plaza de Armas

Most of the museums and other public facilities were closed, so we didn’t get to do much of the traditional tourist stuff. We walked back to the Mercado and caught the bus again; when it stopped opposite Cerro Santa Lucia, Dave said “hey, that place looks neat; let’s go check it out.”

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the fountain in the courtyard

The whole hill is layered with stone staircases and various structures, including several small gardens, a church built in 1872 by Benjamin Vicuna McKenna, and two forts originally built for defense of the city. The views from the top of the hill are spectacular, too.

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Pedro de Valdivia, first governor of Chile

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city view from the top of Santa Lucia; you can actually see mountains in this one

As we were exploring, we could hear what sounded like a marching band off in the middle distance– a little unusual, given that they were playing an assortment of songs including movie themes. They didn’t seem to actually be marching, though. We made our way back down toward the street and I noticed something unusual: there was a medium-sized crowd of people thronging the street, and at a nearby underpass there were big arches of purple and white balloons. We watched for a few minutes and watched as a group of dancers in what I presume was traditional Incan dress (given that their jackets said “Atahualpas de Paramonga”, preceded by a group of drummers, danced their way up the street.

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A dancer; not shown: non-traditional tennis shoes

As the dancers moved down the street a larger group came into view, carrying a large, flower-bedecked bier and preceded by a group of women in what looked like purple habits. The women were walking backwards and swinging censers, producing a cloud of smoke such as I haven’t seen since the last concert I went to at Shoreline.

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a mysterious object borne through the streets

As they passed, I was able to read the sign on the nearest corner of the bier and learned that the bier was carried by members of Hermandad del Señor de Los Milagros, or the Brotherhood of the Lord of Miracles. We had lucked into part of the annual procession honoring the Lord of Miracles, which takes place on the last Sunday in October. The tradition started in Peru but has spread worldwide. As the procession neared the underpass, the waiting spectators dumped glitter and balloons on the celebrants below, who gleefully stomped on the balloons to pop them.

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fire in the hole

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I was able to capture a balloon intact.. before stomping on it

After the procession left, we walked back to the bus stop, but the bus was long gone. We walked for about a mile and a half until we found a cab, then headed back to the hotel, where I passed a quiet night working on slides for the webcast I did yesterday.  All in all, it was a day very well spent, and it was fun for a change to go prowling around the city with someone instead of kicking it solo. Thanks, Dave!

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