Windows Power Essentials Tips & Tricks
March 22, 2012 4 Comments
Another question from the forum prompted this post. The question related to disabling offline files for Desktop computers that never left the office after deploying the Win 7 Pro Pack. Read more of this post
March 20, 2012 Leave a comment
A question in the forum came up about how to change the password policy, it seemed that the Dashboard option was greyed out.
As i mentioned in my post about Office 365, in order to allow Password Sync between Essentials and Of365, passwords for users needed to be updated to meet the requirements of the Office 365 service.
This has the unhappy side effect of also blocking you from lowering the requirements if you wish to do so in your environment when you are not using Office 365.
So what do we need to do? Well the answer is simple, remove the Office 365 module.
Firstly open the Dashboard and go to the Office 365 addin tab. You should see an option on the right hand side to Uninstall.
Follow this little wizard through and complete the process.
Next, move to an elevated command prompt, and enter the following. WUSA /UNINSTALL /KB:2569105
You will be asked if you really want to uninstall, and in this case you do.
You should then be prompted to reboot your server.
After a reboot you can then open the Dashboard, go to the Users tab, and click Set the Password Policy, and you should find your slide bar is now working.
The question in the forum related to changing the expiry age from 180 days (the Default) to a different value.
This cannot be done through the Dashboard, even with the Of365 module uninstalled.
You can do this using PowerShell (other ways as well, but i like PowerShell) You can launch the ‘Import System Modules’ shortcut from the QuickLaunch PowerShell icon.
Then run this command to set the expiry to 30 days.
Set-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy –identity sbs.local –MaxPasswordAge “30.00:00:00”
Then run this command to confirm your setting.
Get-ADDefaultDomainPasswordPolicy
If you then go and use the Dashboard to set a different selection for the Password Policy, then it will change the Max Password Age back to it’s default value of 180 days.
March 9, 2012 Leave a comment
In my other post on this subject, i mused over the pro’s and con’s of Installing the SBS Essentials Connector on the PAO Server in an effort to get it to appear in the RWA, to allow remote users to connect to it.
You can relive that magical post right here.
Anyway, being a man, i do a lot of thinking while in the bathroom, and an idea hit me the other day which i tried out.
Read more of this post
March 5, 2012 4 Comments
I have been spending some time answering questions in the SBS Essentials forum over at TechNet recently, and i noticed that there is still a lot of outstanding questions and issues with the Remote Access wizard for SBS Essentials, especially surrounding installing an SSL Certificate.
One of the big headaches comes when you have a domain with one of the ‘supported’ registrars, Enom or GoDaddy. Read more of this post
February 17, 2012 Leave a comment
I recently added my Laptop to my Essentials server, so it would be backed up.
At the time i had 2 partitions a C and a D partition. Whilst reconfiguring my laptop to dual boot Windows 2008 R2 I decided, following a conversation with Tim Barrett, to boot the Windows 2008 install from a VHD, rather than a partition. So i decided to remove that D partition.
After doing this, the Backups kept failing.
January 25, 2012 4 Comments
PowerShell is pretty cool. There does not seem to be much you can’t find out with it, or configure with it.
Not being a developer i struggle to build complex PowerShell scripts
January 23, 2012 Leave a comment
I was working on a Windows XP system last week, and joining it to an SBS Essentials domain, the connector installed with no issues at all. Read more of this post
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