Happy Birthday to Me…

happybirthday

Dean was threatened by the size of my Giraffe so chose to stay out of shot.

Tomorrow marks a year to the day since i started blogging with any kind of regularity. I had started a blog about four or five times, way back in 2009, and you can read those posts if you trawl all the way back through the archive. I started out with the idea i would produce a normal type of blog, more for my own interest than for any real reason. However i only posted about once every 6 months. I certainly did not set out to build a technical blog full of incredibly awesome free content, but best laid plans and all that…

Anyway, producing the posts for this site has been very enjoyable, I’ve learnt a huge amount about SBS that i think i would not otherwise have learnt, and wanting to write good articles has pushed me to look a lot deeper into the workings of SBS than any normal person would otherwise care to look.

It’s been very rewarding to sit and stare at the site stats bar chart, watching it creep up, knowing that content i have put together is actually drawing people to my site, although not as many of you have donated to Room to Read as i would have liked. You know i could charge for this stuff? ;o)

I just wanted to write a quick hello and goodbye to you all if you are reading this, not just hitting a solution through Google and wandering off again.

A special mention of course to all of my friends in the IT Community, and the SBS MVPs who have helped me at every stage, and without whom i would still be just a Help Desk Technician.

Special Special mention to Tim Barrett who gave me my own island, which i am not sure exactly what he was trying to tell me.

Special Special Special mention to Susan Bradley, who needs no introduction.

Special Special Special Special mention to Ollie, Marina, Andy and Jeff for making the UK leg of the SBS MVP Roadshow a huge amount of fun.

Even specialer mention to anyone i haven’t mentioned.

Extra huge special thanks to my Wife who as we can all see, has a lot to put up with.

Let’s hope i never win an award because the acceptance speech would be excruciating.

Thanks for visiting my site, hopefully it has been valuable to you this last year, and hopefully it can continue to be of value for another year to come.

Microsoft SBS 2011 Essentials & Windows Phone 7 Add-in

sbsessSome time ago Microsoft released an Add-in for SBS Essentials that allowed you to control your SBS Essentials Server (as well as a corresponding Add-in for Windows Home Server 2011) by using your Windows Phone 7.

At the time i was not lucky enough to have a WP7 handset, but recently i managed to pick up an HTC Trophy and have a play with the Add-in.

There are two parts to set this up, Read more of this post

Quick Fix : Disable the Microsoft SBS 2011 Essentials Launchpad

sbse-conA lot of people deploying SBS 2011 Essentials seem to have developed a special affection for the Launchpad app. That is to say they seek to disable it at the earliest opportunity.

Personally on my deployments i have only disabled it on the users request, Read more of this post

Quick Fix: SBS 2008 ‘Sites’ Self Signed Certificate Expired

SBS2008Please note this article is not for renewing expired certificates used with remote web access!

I had a call today from a partner IT firm who we work with sometimes that had an issue on an SBS 2008 Server. One of the default SSL Certificates had expired, and in turn knocked out Sage 200 that was installed and running on this server. Sage links into the Default website and some of its operations require an SSL certificate. I wont pretend to understand what or why or even how because what i know about Sage can be written on top of a pin head with a power drill.

However, i did manage to help said partner replace his SSL Certificate and make Sage a happy bunny again.

Firstly i found that on my own SBS 2008 server,

Read more of this post

SBS 2011 Essentials & Microsoft Office 365 Integration

sbse-conAs you may be aware Microsoft have released the Office 365 Integration Module for SBS Essentials to public beta.

If you want to take part in the beta, you can download the software from here.

On December 22nd Microsoft released the module for public download. A finished product. At last. Read the Official SBS Blog post here and Download from here and see what you think!

You can get an overview of what the module will do for you from the above blog post, and i imagine you already have an idea of what the module is designed to do already.

As i have been chronicling  the other major (ish) releases for SBS Essentials, i decided to install the module and see exactly what the almost finished article looks like.

Before you continue i think it only fair to warn you this is a long, long post.

I have split the post into the following sections.

SBS 2011 Standard : Exchange 2010 Single Message Restore

sbsstdDuring a recent SMB MVP Community Roadshow event in Edinburgh, a member of the audience asked us about Email restore in SBS 2011.

Although i knew this could be done, i had never actually done it. So i decided to work out how it was done with SBS 2011.

I found a lot of great resources online that helped me with the process and i have linked to them at the end of this post.

I’m focusing on a situation where we are restoring from a backup, rather than what is available through the Exchange dumpster (aka Recover Deleted Items) although i do cover that briefly below.

Read more of this post

Quick Fix: AFD.sys / AFD Service is missing Windows XP

I had a customer email me yesterday with the following symptoms…

Symptoms

This particular client is located in France, so a site visit is a little tricky. Luckily they had a second computer, and we could talk through Skype. I did some basic connectivity tests like ipconfig, the IP was reported as 0.0.0.0 with a subnet mask of 0.0.0.0. Read more of this post