July Update Rollup KB3172614 and Windows 10

August 5, 2016 by 10 Comments

LEOPARDMicrosoft finally got around to fixing the annoying side effect of Windows 10 release upgrades, which was loosing your Essentials connector.

Hidden away in KB3172614 and after literally months of pressure from Susan Bradley, (because frankly I gave up) we find..

Updated the inbox component in Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials to use the new client connector, so that the inbox component won’t get uninstalled during Windows 10 upgrades.

A simple footnote in the back of KB article hidden downstairs in a filing cabinet behind a door with a sign saying Beware of the Leopard.

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Filed under Essentials, General, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with , ,

Third Tier – Women In IT Scholarship

August 1, 2016 by Leave a comment

ThirdTierMy good friends from Third Tier have launched their very own scholarship program.

For those who don’t know Amy Babinchak or Susan Bradley, they are two of the smartest and hard working people you could ever hope to work alongside and on a personal note two of the kindest people i have ever met.

Why are we doing this? Third Tier is a woman owned business. Back when I wanted to get into IT my aunt gave me the money to get my first certification. This is my way of paying it forward. Although now deceased I think she would be proud of my accomplishments. At Third Tier all of our staff are dedicated community-first IT Professionals and we would love to welcome more people like us into this wonder career choice.

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Manage Multiple Office 365 Tenants from PowerShell

July 28, 2016 by 14 Comments

o365-logo1Yep, another PowerShell themed post.

This is something I cobbled together a few years back, never thought it was worth sharing, but sitting here this evening with nothing much to do decided to write it up.

At it’s core it is not much more than a method of automating entering credentials to your various Office 365 ‘Clients’. I say ‘’clients” because I do not know if that is the correct terminology. If you are the Partner of Record or even if you are supporting more than one tenant on 365 this may be useful to you.

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Free eBook : Office 365 Signature Management

July 14, 2016 by 2 Comments

ExclaimerIf you have been following my blog for any length of time you will no doubt have seen me mention Exclaimer. They are an integral part of the solutions we offer to our clients providing high quality software to centrally manage email branding.

J. Peter Bruzzese has written a new ‘Conversational Geek’ eBook for Exclaimer highlighting their Office 365 Signature Management software, which you can claim for FREE just by clicking this link. Read more of this post

Filed under Exchange, General, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , ,

Quick Fix : WSUS Client Targeting not working

July 12, 2016 by Leave a comment

Just a quick post, I had recently rebuilt a WSUS Server at a client site and, as is normal procedure for me, totally changed how this was setup compared to the previous one.

In the previous server we had groups for each OS, which was fine when we had a mixture of them, but now all clients are on the same OS and having all 200+ machines in a single group made little sense to me.

So I decided to split them up based on machine age (using a WMI filter I could select the different model of PC) So, each model (or group of models) got their own GPO and their own WSUS Group which was great, except client side targeting was not working.

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Filed under General, Quick Fix, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , ,

Essentials Server PCI Compliance and TLS 1.0

July 4, 2016 by 8 Comments

I recently wrote some articles for Third Tier regarding Essentials Servers and TLS 1.0, so if you are looking for guidance on what to do or how to do it, or even what happens when you have found out what to do and then done it. Look no further than the Third Tier blog.

http://www.thirdtier.net/2016/04/what-happens-when-you-disable-tls-1-0/

If you are also interested in SBS 2011 Standard, well then take a look at this.

Filed under Essentials, General, SBS E, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with , ,

Windows 7 VSS Error–Essentials Backups Failed

June 29, 2016 by 1 Comment

WindowsVistaBackupIconThis issue came up on our own internal accounts machine, so it was pretty critical to get it resolved.

Seemingly out of the blue, the machine decided to stop backing up. There was nothing particularly helpful in the logs on the Essentials Server. Checking the logs on the client itself revealed a string of VSS related errors.

I decided to abandon the Client PC backup at this point, because if the underlying cause was VSS, then what we need to do was fix VSS and then this would also fix the client backups. Read more of this post

Filed under Backup, Essentials, General, Tips & Tricks, WSE Tagged with , , , ,

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