One of the most anticipated announcements from Microsoft was made today (Feb 4, 2014) when Satya Nadella was selected as the third CEO of Microsoft, succeeding Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Satya joined Microsoft 22 years ago.
Bill Gates will serve as Technology Advisor.
Read Steve Ballmer’s email to Microsoft employees on the announcement
Read Satya Nadella’s email to Microsoft employees on his appointment
Best wishes to all!
I recently had a customer running SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007 ask me if they could have the domain name part of a user’s email address displayed with proper capitalization. As an example, instead of Joe@whitehouse.gov they wanted the email address to go out as Joe@WhiteHouse.gov.
This should be easy to do, I thought. So, I went into EMC and changed the spelling of the email to use capitalization, but it would never take hold. It turns out that simply changing the capitalization of the email address is NOT enough for EMC to recognize that a change has been made.
So here are the three steps required:
So, let’s give it a try:
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3
These steps should be applicable to both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010.
You just gotta love the Internet. Just a few quick clicks using your favorite web search engine, and voila, you have your answer!
Case in point: customer calls up to say that they are trying to open up a .MOV video file using Windows Movie Maker. They encounter an error saying that the workstation does not meet minimum requirements.
STEP 1
So, I remote into the Windows 7 workstation, and I see that they have Windows Live Movie Maker on the computer. I do a quick search for “windows movie maker does not meet minimum requirements” and right there on the first page is a YouTube tutorial addressing the issue.
The solution is to install Windows Movie Maker 6.0 (from the Vista era) – but they will run on Windows 7/8 platform. Make note that there are separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the program:
Movie Maker 6.0 (64 bit) Movie Maker 6.0 (32-bit)
STEP 2
After installing the software, I start it up and try to open the .MOV file, only to be told that I am missing a proper CODEC file. Another quick search, and I find another YouTube tutorial addressing this issue:
The solution is to download and install the free K-Lite Codec Pack:
http://www.filehippo.com/download_klite_codec_pack/
After that, the user is able to successfully open and edit MOV files from Windows Movie Maker!
It’s official … on January 27, 2014 Microsoft announced an upcoming name change to their cloud storage service. SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro will soon be known as OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, respectively.
The rebranding of SkyDrive is a result of a trademark case filed last year by British Sky Broadcasting.
Yahoo reported today that usernames and passwords of some of their email customers have been stolen. Read the specifics in this ABC News Wire story.
Unfortunately, this is becoming a daily occurrence, and much like the person who kept yelling “fire”, we are slowly becoming numb to these warnings of security breaches and identity thefts. But we must not let down our guard.
So, what can you do? Here are a few suggestions, and by no means complete:
C’est la vie!
Yes, you heard me right, Microsoft is not the only company that is prone to releasing updates that can cause your computer to crash!
In this case, I received a call from a client today who reported that iTunes suddenly was not working, and would immediately crash when started. He tried to reinstall iTunes, but it went from bad to worse.
It didn’t take long to find that a slew of people (slew = more than I can count) were reporting similar crashes, and it appears to be caused by version 11.1.4 that Apple rolled out at the end of last week (around 22-Jan-2014).
Fortunately, the work involved to fix this was pretty straightforward, but with some minor bumps in the process.
First, a quick summary of the steps required:
Now for the details!
Step 1 – Uninstall iTunes and related components
Apple recommends to remove the following programs in this specific order:
Then reboot your computer
Step 2 – Delete associated Apple program files
You need to confirm that the following folders have been removed. If any are left behind, remove them now:
If you have a 64-bit version of Windows, these are the folders you need to confirm are removed:
NOTE: some files may not delete:
It is possible that you may run into some files or folders that will not delete, because these are programs currently running that are using these files. If that happens to you, here are the steps I used to delete those files:
For the following steps, leave both windows (Command prompt and Task Manager) open!
cd \ cd Program Files (X86) cd Common files cd Apple cd Internet Services del shellstreams64.dll
Now let’s restart the Windows desktop.
Step 3: Download and install iTunes
I think you can handle this part on your own!
But just in case, here’s the link to get you started:
As we enter 2014, there are still plenty of new SBS 2011 servers being installed in offices. SBS 2011 is the last version of Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS) product line. SBS 2011 comes with Exchange, SharePoint and WSUS pre-installed.
If your site also has Windows 8/8.1 computers, you may discover that running Windows Update on those computers may generate an error 800B0001.
Now, if you do your due diligence and search for this error, you will find suggestions that a credential on your Windows 8 computer is corrupt, and that you should run a pair of DISM commands to attempt to repair the situation:
But, in most cases, running these commands will NOT resolve the issue. So what’s causing the error?
Simply put, you are missing a couple of required updates on your SBS 2011 server, updates that resolve the issue of Windows 8/8.1 communicating to the WSUS server:
KB 2720211 – Update for WSUS 3.0 SP2
KB 2734608 – Update for WSUS 3.0 SP2
Let’s say you have an external USB drive, and you need to transfer some files from it to a guest partition running on your Hyper-V 2012 R2 server. What do you do? Well, one solution is to make use of a feature in Windows 2012 Hyper-V called “Enhanced Session Mode Policy”.
So let’s get started!
Preliminary
Enabling Enhanced Session Mode
Start guest VM and connect USB
Several updates and fixes to SBS 2011 and 2012 Essentials were released in the past month, including:
1. UR5 for the Windows Server Solutions BPA :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2908176
2. Update 2 for SBS 2011 Standard’s Migration Preparation Tool :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2908177
3. Update for Essentials 2012’s Migration Preparation Tool:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2908178
4. Update for Health report for Essentials 2012:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35565
LogMeIn posted on their blog site today that the free version of LogMeIn is going away. See: “Changes to LogMeIn Free”
But this should not be a surprise to anyone. LogMeIn has slowly been making changes that indicated that they would move away from their free version.
So, what does one do?
It all depends on your needs.
There are plenty of other solutions.