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 , ,

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

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 , , , ,

Configuring a Raspberry Pi as a Dashboard display

May 12, 2016 by 3 Comments

raspberry-pi-logoA while ago my TV died. I say it died, my wife called to say it had a funny blank line running through it, and rather than investigate I took it as a signal that the Universe wanted me to buy a new TV, and you can’t argue with the power of the Universe.

As it turns out there was nothing wrong with it, but who wants to keep a seven year old TV when you can upgrade to a 40” Smart TV with Netflix and Wi-Fi built-in?

Anyway, this led to me having a spare TV, and as my wife ‘wanted that thing out of the house’ I was left with no choice but to take it to the office.

Paul, the owner at IT Authority, then wanted to know ‘what that thing’ was doing in his office. Not wanting to reveal my secret plan to install an Xbox into the office, I said I had donated it to put on the wall to display our dashboards.

Honestly looking back I don’t know where that idea came from, but I was stuck with the task of making it work.

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Filed under General, Tips & Tricks

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