Thursday, October 25, 2012

Exchange 2013 Storage, High Availability and Site Resilience

Here is an excellent slide on Exchange 2013 Storage, High Availability and Site Resilience.

Some of the key features are as follows.

Passive copy DB on 2013 consumes 50% of the iops of the iops required for an active copy.


Autoreseed - Can use spare disks. Periodically scan for failed and suspended copies, check pre-requisites,allocate remap a spare, start the seed, verify health, alert admin about failed disk.

Data Center Failover can be automated.
  

Office 365 Support for Windows Server 2012




I recently installed an ADFS Server farm on Windows Server 2012 but when I tried to federate to Office365 via the Microsoft Onlien Services Powershell Module it would not work!

The reason for the error is that in ADFS 2012 the cmdlets are surfaced by a module instead of a snapin, and the MSOnline cmdlets are hardcoded to load the old snapin which was available in ADFS 2.0. You can work around this issue by creating your own reference in the registry to the ADFS module as a snapin.

To do so, copy and paste the items below into notepad and save them as a .reg file and then execute.



Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellSnapIns\Microsoft.Adfs.PowerShell]
"ApplicationBase"="C:\\Windows\\ADFS"
"Version"="6.2.9200.0"
"AssemblyName"="Microsoft.IdentityServer.PowerShell, Version=6.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
"Description"="This powershell snap-in contains cmdlets used to manage Microsoft Identity Server resources."
"PowerShellVersion"="1.0"
"ModuleName"="C:\\Windows\\ADFS\\Microsoft.IdentityServer.PowerShell.dll"
"Vendor"="Microsoft"

You can now use Windows Server 2012 for Single Sign on to Office365 :)

Please note :  This solution is not supported by Microsoft. It is my understanding that a new Microsoft online services powershell module will be available for download when the new Office365 is generally available in Q1 of next year.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Office365 MCITP Training Resource 70-321,70-323


To obtain and Office365 MCITP , You need to pass the following 2 exams.

Exam 70-321: Deploying Office365
Exam 70-323: Administrating Office365

There is plenty of documentation from Microsoft describing the different modular components of Office365 , I always keep them on my laptop or Skydrive as I can easily access them to refresh my memory on all the different components. When all of the documentation is together , it amounts to quite a lot and could be confusing as to where to start to studying for the Office365 MCITP.

So I thought I would post this blog with the most relevant resources to help people pass the exam and better understand Office365.
Office 365 PDF eBook: Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime


Office 365 for Enterprise : Service Description


70-321 /323 Jumpstart Videos 

Collection 10954: 70-323: Administering Office 365 (e learning course)

Office 365 for the IT Pro - Exchange Online Microsoft Virtual Academy

Office 365 for the IT Pro - Exchange Online Virtual Academy

Office 365 for the IT Pro - Lync Online, SharePoint Online & Deployment Virtual Academy

Office 365 for the IT Pro - Platform Virtual Academy

I have found the Jumpstart videos and the virtual academy to be the best. Also if you have an opportunity to setup an Exchange Hybrid in a lab it will really help.