My good friend and fellow SBS MVP’er, Boon Tee, has released the first book published on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials. This Administrator’s Guide is available as an e-book only.
You can read more about the book and order it online here: http://adminguide.ws2012e.us
You can also download a sample of his book here: http://www.powerbiz.net.au/files/BookSample.pdf
Jeff Middleton is founder of IT Pro Experts and creator of the Swing Migration methodology and tool kit. He has just announced new updates to his kits.
http://itproexperts.com/blog/platform-migration-project-solutions-matrix/
I have successfully used Jeff’s Swing Migration for years to upgrade customers from older versions of SBS to the newer Microsoft platforms (SBS 2008, SBS 2011, Windows Server Essentials 2012). His methodology also applies to standard Windows and Exchange server migrations.
An article on KW Support & Consulting LLC was published in the Brandon edition of The Tampa Tribune on Wednesday January 16th, 2013.
Dana Epp, a fellow Microsoft MVP, has a webinar scheduled for Wednesday January 16th. His company, Scorpion Software, provides secure password management solutions.
Here is a personal (video) invitation from Dana:
On Saturday January 12, 2013 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a recommendation to disable Java, based on vulnerabilities reported in this CERT (http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/625617).
Update: on Monday January 14th, Oracle released a security patch (Java 7 Update 11) to address these vulnerabilities.
I just received a letter from Microsoft indicating that I have been renewed as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for the Small Business Server (SBS) product for the 10th consecutive year.
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2013 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Small Business Server technical communities during the past year.
This one was truly a surprise, considering that my level of active participation in the SBS technical community was virtually non-existent for the first half of the year as I recovered from congestive heart failure. I’m thankful to those involved with the decision to renew my status as an MVP.
Every year I say that I am truly honored with the selection, and that is the simple truth. I’m honored to be associated with a great group of fellow MVP’s that are more than that – they are my good friends and family. I value their wise business advice as well as their technical expertise. Their encouragement to me and my wife during this last year with my health issues has been extraordinary.
I also wish to remember one of our MVP’s, Eriq Neale, who passed away in June after a long fought battle with cancer. He was a fellow guitar-player like me, and enjoyed life, family and his God with equal fervor and zeal.
Microsoft announced today on their SkyDrive blog site that Live Mesh will be officially retired on February 13, 2013.
http://blogs.windows.com/skydrive/b/skydrive/archive/2012/12/13/update-on-windows-live-mesh.aspx
SkyDrive continues to be enhanced with apps for Windows, Windows Phone, Android, iPhone, iPad and Xbox 360, and is deeply integrated with Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT.
My good friend, and fellow MVP’er, Andy (Handy Andy) Goodman, nails the issue with SBS and Software Assurance (SA) in his blog post.
http://blog.sbs-rocks.com/2012/11/sbs-sa-make-good-is-not-microsoft-should-be-ashamed-of-itself/
I informed my customers that as of 9:00pm EST, I am being advised that “the Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle data centers are now processing messages at close to normal speed.”
That is good news. Tests that I have been running for the last few hours are indicating that things are slowly improving. Although it may take several more hours for full resolution, I am now hopeful that there will be no need to implement a backup solution to redirect mail delivery.
Most of my customers are using GFI’s MaxMail solution to provide virus and spam filtering, as well as email continuity and archiving.
Today, a customer called to report issues with sending and receiving emails. I was able to successfully connect to the server remotely, but incoming and outgoing email seemed to be at a stand still, but with no warnings or errors. I rebooted Exchange on this SBS 2008 server, with no improvement.
I then used MXToolBox to check out the status of the domain and test SMTP delivery. Voila! It reported an error in connecting to GFI’s intermediate IP addresses!
I then called GFI Support, and the pre-recorded message informed me that I was not the only one with this issue. I also learned that GFI does have a specific URL for Blog status monitoring of GFI MAX: http://status.gfimax.com
And here is what they are reporting:
Our engineers have been systematically assessing all of the centralized components of our service in North America, including our configuration databases, the greylisting service, our various spam and virus filtering engines, network responsiveness between datacenters, and other elements that could be causing the very slow response times of our filters.
The likely culprit from our testing is the centralized asset storage servers, which are responding more slowly than usual by nearly an order of magnitude. The engineers are investigating this in detail to determine what is causing multiple asset stores in multiple datacenters to be so affected.
