....but that isn't the whole story.
There must have been a problem with this XP Machine for a while, but the Wave 15 upgrade made it stand out.
The problems seemed to stem from a missing certificate which meant that the outlook.com chain was broken. I was getting "The Issuer of this certificate could not be found" on the outlook.com cert both in Outlook and Webmail / IE. In the chain, I found MSIT Machine Auth CA 2 and Microsoft Internet Authority mentioned.
The fix itself was simple in the end, but it did take a lot of searching. Which is why I am putting this here for others.
Download the latest Root Certificate and install in the Trusted Root Certificate Store on your machine.
Link to cert
So, you have a work laptop, or a nicely running non-domain based home network. But alas, you have no home server options anymore...
You are left with the option of installing a Windows Server 2012 Essentials machine (which whilst expensive, really is a great home server option). The problem is, you don't want the machines in your home in a domain, you want them to remain totally independant for many a reason.
Here is a nugget of information that you will love then. When you run the Connect computer wizard (http://nameofserver/connect) you can avoid the domain join bit by simply running this command in an elevated command prompt beforehand:
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\ClientDeployment" /v SkipDomainJoin /t REG_DWORD /d 1
....then, run the wizard and you will get all the good backup and home features without the domain join.
Perfect.
Overnight and today I have been working on Migrating from Windows SBS 2011 Standard server to Windows Server 2012 Essentials with Office 365 Hosted services. The whole process appeared to be going pretty well until this morning when I noticed that Outlook 2010 could not connect to any of our existing internal mailboxes. (Though the ones that were already connected and logged in, remained in).
Obviously, I required access to these mailboxes so that I could perform a manual export of the old mailboxes and import this data to the Office 365 cloud services. Not having this mailbox access was really bad, and started delaying the migration dramatically.
Anyway, what then ensued was a few hours of trying to find the issue. The strange thing was that Outlook Web Access on our SBS 2011 box continued to function, but outlook clients simply would not connect. I looked at DNS, Encryption settings, Internal CAS URL's and all that other normal stuff, but nothing worked.
Then it struck me.... I wondered if the server was no longer a Global Catalog. (The SBS2011 Box).
Sure enough, the Windows Server 2012 Essentials migration process had somewhere along the way turned off the Global Catalog without telling me on my old SBS2011 server. Not a problem UNLESS you have a reboot at some point! (I did). What then happened is that the Microsoft Exchange Address Book Service (something that until today I though unimportant) would not startup unless the server remained as a Global Catalog. I reenabled the SBS2011 machine as a Global Catalog, waited the 5 or so minutes for it to kick up, then started the Microsoft Exchange Address Book service.
The Outlook Clients then connected....
Gaaaaaah! There is 5 hours I wont get back. Hopefully you wont lose them yourself because you read this.
Well, its finally here. Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2012/10/09/windows-server-2012-essentials-released-to-manufacturing-available-for-evaluation-today.aspx
"Hi, I’m Sinead O'Donovan, Director of Program Management on the Windows Server Essentials team.
Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a significant milestone in our efforts to help cloud-enable small businesses and home offices. It is designed to help you protect business data, to allow highly secure access to the information you need from virtually anywhere by using almost any device, and to offer the flexibility to choose which applications and services you want to run on-premises and in the cloud—we have even made it easier than ever before to run Essentials itself in a hosted environment. Excitement about the release of Windows Server 2012 Essentials has been growing. In 8 weeks of public previews, we’ve had more than 23,000 downloads—far surpassing pre-release downloads of past versions.
Today I am pleased to tell you that Windows Server 2012 Essentials has reached the release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone. We are delivering the product to our hardware and ecosystem partners, and it will be generally available in all channels on November 1, with OEM partners shipping server systems by the end of the year.
I would like to encourage you to try Windows Server 2012 Essentials for yourself by visiting the Evaluation Center today to download a trial copy—and if you’re an MSDN or TechNet subscriber, you can download Essentials from those sites as well.
Let me share some quick product highlights with you:
- Enable a dynamic, modern work style with access from your devices by using Remote Web Access (RWA), and take advantage of Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices for a superior experience with rich modern “My Server” apps.
- Enjoy peace of mind knowing that your data is well-protected by complementing your on-site backups with Windows Azure Online Backup, as well as utilizing integrated support for the new Windows 8 File History feature.
- Choose the email and collaboration option that’s right for you, whether that’s in the cloud with Office 365 or a hosted service provider, or running on a local server.
- Quickly and easily respond to increasing data capacity needs with support for Storage Spaces, which allows you to create elastic, resilient storage for your files and folders.
- Run the line-of-business applications that you depend on by leveraging our greatly improved application compatibility, now with a single logo certification for all Windows Server 2012 editions.
- Purchase with confidence knowing that your technology investment can easily grow to Windows Server 2012 Standard if the needs of your business grow.
- Deploy today with full support for 19 languages, all releasing simultaneously.
We have seen some great initial press reviews of Windows Server 2012 Essentials, too. For example:
“The right tool for the job… Server Essentials makes client backups so simple that not doing them borders on criminal. Combined with the Microsoft Online Backup service [Windows Azure Online Backup] (and possibly with replication based on Hyper-V), the backup features make for a much more disaster-resistant small network. And the integration with Office 365 and Exchange (but mostly with Office 365) greatly reduces the complexity of user administration.”
- Ars Technica, A server for the rest of us: hands-on with Windows Server 2012 Essentials
“…ideal for a small business or a home office.”
- ZDNet, Windows Server 2012 Essentials: Beta preview
You can find more information on the Windows Server 2012 Essentials product page, and discover deeper technical information on the Windows Server 2012 Essentials TechCenter. If you are a Microsoft Partner, be sure to visit the Microsoft Partner Network and take advantage of the training opportunities we have available, including the upcoming Disti Bootcamps. And, of course, we would like to continue the great dialog we’ve started with you during the previews, so please continue to share your experiences and provide us with your feedback in the Windows Server 2012 Essentials Forum.
Thank you,
Sinead O'Donovan"
Wow!, what a load of hassle just to get some updates onto my Windows 8 RTM machine.
I was getting this error, amongst others, on the Windows 8 Client. Error 80246003. The Update Fix tool did nothing, and many forum posts pointed me to removing the SoftwareDistribution folder (don't do that!) or running through this article (don't do this either).
There are other blogposts, like this that explain fixes, none of which worked for me.
On looking through the logs, I found a line that mentioned that the update services was having problems downloading the EULA txt file from the WSUS server on SBS2011. I am not sure why this would effect the online directly with Microsoft update, but it does.
So, after a little more research, I found this article from Microsoft. It appears to be an update for WSUS that fixes this issue. I downloaded and installed the x64 version on my SBS2011 Standard machine and sure enough… it didn't work…
Then I read the smallprint of the article:
If you have Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 clients that synchronized with WSUS 3SP2 before you applied this update, wait for the update to be applied to the WSUS servers, and then follow these steps:
Net stop wuauserv
rd /s %windir%\softwaredistribution\
Net start wuauserv
OK, I tried this as well… and that didnt work… WTF?
The bottom line
The only way (currently) I can get the Windows 8 machines on my SBS2011 network to update, is to modify the group policy on the server and tell them to update directly from Windows Update.
I then had to run the command above again on the Windows 8 clients.
If I find another way, I will post it here!
For the past couple of days, I have been struggling with a HP printer on Windows 7 that refused, no matter the settings, to print in A3 size from Adobe PDF Reader.
The fix was difficult to find, but easy to implement, here is how:
Go to Printers, Get into the properties of the print.
Click on Advanced tab
Click on the Print Processor button
Set Print processor to winprint, and Default data type to RAW
OK, I have to admit that I obviously completely missed the memo on this. Trust me, if I have then so have a ton of you....
Windows Server Essentials 2012 will allow you to migrate past 25 users and keep (almost) all of the toolsets you need. Taken directly from the Official SBS Blog:
Hi, I’m Cristian Molina, Lead Program Manager on the Windows Server
Essentials team, and today I want to share with you more information
around our growth story for moving past 25 users in Windows Server 2012 Essentials (Essentials).
One
of the major pieces of feedback about the previous version, Windows
Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, was that after a customer had
grown beyond the 25-user limit, they had to migrate to Windows Server
Standard. After the migration, key Windows SBS-specific features that
they had come to depend on (such as client backup, Remote Web Access,
and the Dashboard) were no longer available. We wanted to address this
issue in Windows Server 2012 Essentials, so now we enable customers to
do an in-place license transition to Windows Server 2012 Standard.
The process for performing the transition is documented on the TechNet page, Transition from Windows Server 2012 Essentials to Windows Server 2012 Standard.
Customers need to purchase a copy of Windows Server 2012 Standard, and
because Essentials does not have any client access licenses (CALs), they
will also need to purchase the appropriate number of Windows Server
2012 CALs for their environment (these can be either Per User or Per
Device CALs, but Per User CALs are more common). For example, if an
organization with 26 users is performing the transition, they will need
26 Windows Server 2012 Per User CALs to be license-compliant.
After
you have transitioned to Windows Server 2012 Standard, the Windows
Server 2012 Essentials limits are removed, including restrictions on
user accounts, number of devices, the Hyper-V role, and Active
Directory. Instead, you will be subject to the limits and restrictions
of Windows Server 2012 Standard. The Essentials features will still be
there with the exception of the media features, which no longer work due
to technical limitations. The removal of media functionality means that
media features in other parts of the Essentials experience will be
removed (for example, the ability to access media via Remote Web Access,
media settings in the Dashboard).
After an in-place license
transition to Windows Server 2012 Standard, the Windows Server 2012
Essentials features can support up to 75 user accounts and 75 devices.
Note that there are no restrictions placed on the number of users and
devices that can be added to a Windows Server 2012 Standard environment.
For the Essentials features to function properly, the Windows Server
2012 roles and the features they depend on must not be removed or
reconfigured, such as the Active Directory Domain Services role, the Web
Server role, or others. Our goal is for Essentials features to work
after the in-place transition for up to 75 user accounts and 75 devices.
We used this goal to help scope our testing effort as well as our
support statement. Customers can, of course, make any number of changes
to their systems, but we had to strike a balance here of enabling
customers to grow while also having a stable and supported system.
In
the event that you grow beyond 75 user accounts or 75 devices, or you
want to move to a different solution for specific pieces of Windows
Server 2012 Essentials functionality, the Essentials features can then
be turned off, which is also documented on the TechNet page. After the
Essentials features are turned off, it is not possible to turn them back
on.
Summary
Windows Server 2012 Essentials enables
customers to grow beyond 25 users by doing an in-place license
transition to Windows Server 2012 Standard. After making this
transition, you will be able to continue using Essentials features with
the exception of media features. Essentials features are supported for
up to 75 users and 75 devices. If you grow beyond 75 or want to change
the configuration of the server, we recommend that you turn off
Essentials features.
If you haven’t already, please download the beta and give us feedback via the Windows Server 2012 Beta Essentials forum. We’d love to hear from you!
SkyDrive is a pretty awesome file sharing and sync tool available for free from Microsoft.
With Windows 8 around the corner, this and the new Outlook.com mail service are going to be more and more popular. Anyway, I recently replaced Dropbox and Sugarsync with Skydrive mainly because I am sure that this service from Microsoft is better and will be far more popular with the masses ongoing….
But I had one problem, related to people Sharing their SkyDrive account with me. No matter what, when they shared it would show up on the web app – but not on the iphone app.
If you too are missing folders in the “Shared with me” section of the SkyDrive iPhone app, then you might want to take a look at this thread on the Microsoft Answers forum. As you can see, for me the fix strangely enough was to change my Microsoft Account from the @hotmail.com domain to the @outlook.com domain and relogon.
Weird… but a workaround fix all the same!
EDIT: Microsoft have informed me on the thread that this is not a fix, but on the three tests I have done it has fixed it each time. Take from that what you will :)
Well, I was mid draft of a really long blog post about the quite astonishing announcement from the Small Business Server team, when yesterday I got the legs taken out from under me again by this announcement from the Microsoft Game Studios.
What a Disaster
Seriously, the two key products that I have loved and specialised in over the past 15 Years? (more for Flight Sim) are to be gone. In the case of Flight… gone again….
The really sad part is that, from what I can see is that in both cases it is a direct result of Microsoft simply ignoring its customers and ploughing on regardless. Many MVP's, end users, even internal staff of Microsoft have – i know – been hounding Microsoft about its mistakes with these products in recent releases and they have simply fallen on with deaf ears. Its really, REALLY, sad.
I am not so worried about Microsoft Flight Simulator and Microsoft Flight. The reality is that FSX is a product that is still pretty good to this day, and with the fact that third party developers have a platform to work on that is not changing they are doing some pretty amazing things. Check out what PMDG are doing for a small example of great development work!
When it comes to Small Business Server and its regression into the new Windows Server 2012 product range… this worries me more. While I have no problem at all with the push Microsoft are making to cloud services, I do have real issue when they do it without much thought of the small businesses out there that want the wizards of SBS, but are over 25 users. Microsoft need to standardise the toolset that is available in SBS (now Windows Server 2012 Essentials) and make it available all the way up the product line if a client wants to grow past Essentials limitations on users or devices.
EDIT: I take the above back. Contrary to what I was led to believe, there is a migration path that keeps (most) of the toolset). Read here
I also have real issue with Microsoft simply “brushing off” the requirements of small businesses worldwide that DO need an internal mail solution. Not everyone can get high speed broadband worldwide (unbelievable I know) and those people will simply now look for a non-Microsoft alternative…. which brings me on to my next point…
I have never before seen quite so much push in the community for people to look for Microsoft alternatives. Its already clear that out of about every 5 desktops we sell now, 2 are Apple. I am also seeing customers requesting linux or simply NAS storage solutions again, which is a worrying trend… (not for me… but for Microsoft).
MVP
My renewal cycle for the MVP program of which I have been an awardee for 10 years, is coming up. I hope that Microsoft will be keeping the SBS MVP product grouping for one more year while the dust settles…. from there we shall see what happens. But the sad part is that I somehow now wonder…
Does any of the feedback us MVP's give back matter anymore Microsoft?
Worth pointing out to my readers that are interested in Microsoft Flight this excellent and frank interview that Tom Allensworth had with Joshua Howard, the Team lead of Microsoft Flight.
Well worth the read.
SBS Essentials 2011 is a great product, and one that we are selling a lot more of to our client base.
Normally migrations from SBS2003 to SBS2011 Essentials are relatively painless, but I had a case recently where after the migration was partially complete, we could not use the SBS2011 Essentials Add user wizard, which kept failing with this message:
You may also notice that the Server folders move wizard fails to function, reporting that it cannot stop the storage service…
If you are seeing these symptoms, then you may well have done the right thing and followed the online documentation which at time of writing is incorrect. Currently Microsoft tell you to at step 5 transfer the Global Catalog, and then change the DNS server to the loopback address of 127.0.0.1
This is absolutely wrong and should not be changed until after step 9 where you have demoted the old domain controller.
Without going into the nitty gritty of the whole thing, essentially the SBSe Console service relies on the Active Directory DC, and if you do change it to the loopback before demoting the old server you will end up with the error above and various other issues.
So, for the moment, until the documentation is changed, make sure not to make this mistake…… which just cost me over 5 hours on the phone 
(Posting this while tired, so excuse any spelling mistakes etc)
Well, here is something that I saw at the MVP summit but was under NDA on, which was just lifted for this Flight Announcement a moment ago!
Microsoft Flight have announced the very very excellent Alaska downloadable content pack that will be available for Microsoft Flight sometime in the future. I have to say that what I saw of this at the Game Studios simply amazed me, and it will amaze you too! The content is over 1.2 Million square miles of amazing scenery, with new missions and new aircraft!!!
Anyway, I thought it would be a good thing to post it here because as of writing this news is not yet on the microsoftflight.com site, but is over on their facebook fanpage which you really should sign up to to get quick and current news from the team.
Its been a while! I skipped the last two summits, and as I approach the end of this one I wonder why I allowed that to happen. In this short week I am always amazed as to just how much my brain can absorb the drink knowledge that is available!
This year's highlights for me so far have been, in no particular order:
The launch of the Windows 8 Community Preview around the globe, and learning about the amazing new features that are coming as part of the desktop and server operating system. Bill Laing's blog summarises well.
Of course, I cannot say what that means for SBS, I am under a NDA that means that Microsoft are allowed to take me out with their evil laser beam machine (yeah they have one in building 43).
Tim Barrett, nogeekleftbehind.com has been the perfect manwife for me this week. I had to pair up with someone and thankfully I picked someone with a sense of humour that can only be surpassed by my own ;) This week Tim spent much of his time cooking and cleaning for our room, while I beat him. He also seems to always be available with camera right at the moment I chose to do something silly, and push it straight up to the twitter cloud. @timbarrett and @nickwhittome if you are interested in our shenanigans.
The Microsoft Flight Team also launched while I was here, and it was great to get over to the studios to see the amazing things they are doing. It was also great to finally meet Jon Masterson, aka Scruffyduck of fsdeveloper.com whom I have known for years but never actually met! Of course, reliable Adrian Woods – tech art lead for flight was his usual friendly self, and someone that I have not managed to see in over 4 years!
Most importantly (sorry guys) I also met the new Community PM for Microsoft Flight, Jessica Price. Someone who is doing some amazing things on the Flight team! Jessica was a breath of fresh air for me, someone who is obviously passionate about community and community efforts. I will leave my thoughts on Flight to another post, but in summary, its just going to get better and better and better! Go and download it for FREE here if you don't believe me…
Kevin Beares – Not too much to say here, other than I forget how much I miss our meet up's and brain storming sessions over copious amounts of alcohol, where we solve most worldly and Microsoft matters.
The SBS MVP's – Each and every time I find myself in a room with these people, I always feel like the dumbest person in the room. Its all about surrounding yourself with clever people right? On a sidenote, there are certain SBS MVP's that couldn't make it this year for various reasons, I miss you guys and hopefully we will catchup by other methods.
Qwest Field / CenturyLink Field last night for our closing party was pretty amazing. I can only compare it Thomond Park Stadium in Limerick, but bigger…. much much bigger.
It was quite an experience to get onto the field after much of the other MVP's had left, stand their and kick a dropkick! Kevin Beares (being so out of shape) had real trouble keeping up with my nimble sidestepping and moves. All good fun!
In summary this was a fun yet technically fulfilling week, which I do not intend missing if I am lucky enough to be renewed for the 11th year in October. That said, there is nothing quite like the thoughts of getting home to see my wife and twin kids, who I have been away from for the first time ever (the kids that is, the wife likes me to leave as much as possible).
Nick – The Naked MVP – Whittome
I have just read this excellent article on the new Microsoft Flight product soon to release to beta. Well worth the read.
http://flyawaysimulation.com/news/4317/microsoft-flight-behind-scenes-at-microsoft-studios/
Yeah, me too! It happens when you actually setup two accounts in Outlook 2010 to connect to Office 365 outlook.com servers. It does NOT happen if you open a second mailbox under the first primary one, but less people do that on Outlook 2010.
Apparently the fix is coming in Office 365 when they upgrade the servers to Exchange 2010 SP2, but I have heard that even then this may not work. The guys on @Office365 twitter account are aware of this, and I have a case open on it they are directly referring to.
The fix I stole from this thread (Brendan Erofeev thanks!), but I wanted to make it a bit clearer.
Essentially, the problem is that the Windows Credential manager is unable to save credentials for two Microsoft Outlook configured proxies. That means that one of your accounts will always prompt you and become disconnected in Outlook. The hack, until Microsoft fix this is as simple as creating a hosts entry to the same IP of your servers proxy and setting that in Outlook. Here is a step by step:
- Open Outlook. Click File, Account Settings, Account Settings….
- Double click on the first account, click on more settings, the Connection Tab, then Exchange Proxy Settings Button. Write down the server name in the “Use this URL to my proxy server for Exchange:“
- Cancel out of the above account. Keep note of the proxy server you just wrote down. Lets pretend yours is msprd001.outlook.com (it will be different than this!).
- Next open up your hosts file on your PC. (If you need to know where this is, click here).
- Open up a Command Prompt on your PC. Type nslookup msprd001.outlook.com and you will be given back an IP address for this server. (Obviously, replace the server name above with the one YOU wrote down earlier). Take note of this IP. Lets pretend its 79.140.100.105 – again, it wont be, this is just pretend ;)
- Now, in your hosts file, add a line that says (remember, use YOUR IP you wrote down):
79.140.100.105 spoofproxy.outlook.com
and another entry
127.0.0.1 autodiscover.youroffice365domainname.com
(The 127 address is so that Outlook does not rediscover the corrected settings again from Microsoft).
- Pause for a moment, and take in what we are doing here…. We are creating a false and spoof DNS name “spoofproxy.outlook.com” for the same IP address of your actual servers proxy. This will mean we can use this proxy in the second account in outlook and Windows will save your password and all will work properly.
- So, again, follow the pretty path in the image I spent hours creating on step 2 above…. but this time do it on the second office365 account in outlook. When you get to the last step of the arrows, you change the name there, and only there, to spoofproxy.outlook.com
- Lastly, and importantly, you need to add a loopback IP for autodiscover to the hosts file.
- If you followed this correctly, you should now restart outlook and have two working accounts.
Good luck!
If your computer self combusts, explodes or in some other way disintegrates, you cannot hold me or anyone at NTES responsible!
Most people say that I act like a child.... but Microsoft always make me come over all excited when I hear about beta releases of Microsoft Flight (Simulator).
I have to say, it seems like only yesterday I was ranting at the MVP summit to Steve Balmer about the companies decision to axe the team making Flight Simulator, so many people loved the product. It has also been an odd one from a MVP perspective, because soon after (the year after this picture was taken) they got rid of all the Games for Windows MVP's. This, I thought odd considering they had announced then that they were "working on a new project" which we now know as Microsoft Flight.
Since then, its been lockdown! I can only presume there is some really big reason for that... My simple guess is that the team working on the product did not from one month to the next if they would be kept and they didn't want to announce or show anything without knowing for sure it was going to happen this time. (FSX was a marketing disaster on this front).
I also worry that there will never again be Games for Windows MVP's. This is of no direct concern to me, as I of course am a Small Business Server MVP and am in my 10th year in the program. But I do hope that they engage with MVP potentials around the globe again after the product is released as it would be a shame not to have that two way interaction with the team and the "end user" ongoing. I do note that this year's MVP summit has no events planned or product representation from the Games for Windows teams.... its a shame.
Anyway, we must push those thoughts aside... if I keep going on, I might not be accepted to the beta! That would be a disaster!
Oooooooooh, I can't wait!
I had meant to copy this over to my blog last week! We have had a few sites with this issue, so the more people with this information the better. Taken straight from The Official SBS Blog.
Copy Below:
Issue Description and Symptoms:
Last Tuesday (9/13/2011), KB2494001 “MS11-074: Description of the security update for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010: September 13, 2011” was released to Microsoft Update.
By default, the update will be automatically approved for installation on SBS 2011 Standard. However it will still require administrative action to be installed.
As with all SharePoint Foundation 2010 updates, you must complete the update process by running psconfig after the update is installed. If your server is not yet running SP1 for Windows SharePoint Foundation and you do not run psconfig after installing this update you may encounter the issues described in http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/07/06/potential-issues-after-installing-sharepoint-foundation-2010-sp1.aspx. The most common issue is that SBS backups start failing.
The symptoms and behavior are described here in more detail:
Resolution:
To resolve this issue you must run psconfig as described in this blog:
- Open an Administrative command prompt.
- Change directory to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN
- Run PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures
SBS 2011 Standard UR1 Improvement:
Since Windows SharePoint Foundation 2011, included in SBS 2011 Standard, is the first version that requires psconfig to be launched manually we expect that this is an issue that will linger for the foreseeable future.
To address this issue we have introduced a new feature in SBS 2011 UR1. SBS 2011 Standard Rollup Update 1 was released yesterday (9/15/2011) and when installed, it adds warnings in the console and the desktop that will help identify this situation and provide documentation on how to recover.
After installing the rollup, a new scheduled task will be created; this task is set to run every day at 1:15am.
This task scans the event logs to see if the SharePoint Health Monitor that is scheduled to run at 12:00am has detected a situation that requires the databases to be upgraded using psconfig.
When the issue is detected, a Domain Wide group policy that is created by the UR is enabled to show the message on logon to any Domain Admin login on to any domain workstation. When is no longer detected, the User configuration settings are disabled.
When the issue is active, this is what a domain administrator will see when logging on:
Note: this message will only be cleared after the issue is resolved and the schedule task runs again that night. If needed, you can re-run the scheduled task in Task Manager, under Microsoft\Windows\Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard.
The task writes a log called WSSPsconfigurationNotification.log in C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\logs.
We also have the more traditional console alert, if configured, an email will be sent when this alert is detected.
The alerts point to Kb2580174 Receiving SharePoint Health Analyzer alerts in SBS 2011 Standard
Today we were setting up a customer with SBS Essentials. They had a few XP machines that needed to join the SBS Essentials network.
Oddly, they failed after they joined the domain, but tried to install the client connector software.
On looking in the logs in:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Server\Logs
I found this line:
ClientSetup: Could not ensure NetTcpPortSharing service is Running:
I then checked the services and sure enough the .NET framework 4 service had completely hung. Killing the service did nothing and restarting also failed.
Eventually, I ended up having to use a completely horrible and unsupported fix…. which was as follows:
Kill the service:
Then go into:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation
Copy SMSSvcHost.exe and SMSSvcHost.exe.config from that location.
Then go to:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319
Backup the two files above mentioned in THIS folder (or rename). Then copy the files from above to here. The service that is hanging will then start correctly.
Then, your Connect computer wizard will run perfectly!
I had a customer today report that when loading Microsoft Excel 2003 the machine kept prompting for the SKU1CA.CAB file.
That pointed me to this article, which turned out to be a dead end….
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896866
The answer, in fact, was to go into the registry of the local machine and browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Delivery\{GUID}
In here, I changed the CDCache from 2 to 0
On reload of Excel, all was fixed!
Much fanfare, party hats, whistles….. massive advertising…..
Office 365 is here…. but is it?
Right now, as I type this I am on the phone to Microsoft Online Services technical support whom obviously have had completely ZERO, nil, nada training in BPOS to Office 365 migrations. Worse, they are obviously embarrassed about it.
Simple example… I have a small customer of 20 users on BPOS. They want on Office 365 now, and I am trying to initiate the migration request. Reading this page linked directly from Microsoft's own transition pages…
Sign in to the Office 365 portal using the same credentials you used in BPOS and then see Set up your desktop for Office 365. For information about using Lync 2010, see these Lync quick start guides and the Lync section of the Getting started page.
Really? Well I have tried this now with three sets of BPOS user admin accounts and guess what…. you can't logon. Worse, the technical support team don't know why, nor understand that instruction.
I thought then that I might be missing some step, so went back to the Administrator instructions linked from the same Microsoft transition pages where I read this:
For each subscription that you have, make sure that contact details for both the account owner and service administrator are up-to-date.
Monitor these email addresses regularly to check for email communications about transition.
Add @email.microsoftonline.com to your safe senders list to make sure you receive communications from Microsoft Online Services.
Ummm.. ok? What exactly does this mean? I am the admin, and do already monitor these addresses. I am beginning to think that, in fact, Office 365 isn't quite as ready as Microsoft would have you believe for BPOS customers.
Bit of a #FAIL and very unclear as to what we have to do to initiate our customers migrations. Please fix it Microsoft.
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