The other issues that I have also encountered include the Windows Home Server connector monitor flags the fact that my av is out of date or turned off when the computer is rebooted – this lasts for about 20 to 30 seconds. The instructions to provide feedback are also missing on the connect website (which was not very helpful). However log files can be generated by running “mpcmdrun -getfiles” from the Microsoft Security Client\Antimalware directory within program files.

Fixed – Right click option to scan files missing in Microsoft Security Essentials Beta was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

After a few minutes of digging I found an entry on tek-tips (a site I don’t like to use due to the popups and nag screens) but in this case the answer worked. From Roadki11′s posting on tek-tips.com:-

Cause:
Seems to be something with importing IE security settings.

Solution:
Edit install.ins inside: {GUID of Policy}\user\MICROSOFT\IEAK

[Security Imports]
ImportSecZones=1

Set it back to “0″

Using gpmc I obtained the guid of the policy by right clicking the policy and choosing properties then I connected to c:\WINDOWS\SYSVOL\sysvol\domain\Policies\{guid}\user\Microsoft\ieak
First I made a backup and then edited install.ins, set ImportSecZones to 0 and was then able to edit the policy in gpmc.
Hopefully the background information and the instructions on how to connect to the correct file helps others.
Whilst you are in the gpmc make sure you go down to Group Policy Objects, right click, Backup All, select a location, enter the date and time stamp for the description and back those policies up. Document where the backups are stored so that if you need to restore them they are easily accessible – even on another computer.
I’ve now added the backup to our checkup and system documentation instructions so at a minimum we will have monthly backups of the group policies and a documented location for where this information is kept. In an ideal world, printing off the settings would also be a good way to document the information too.

Fixed – Group Policy settings show “An error occurred while generating report: An unknown error occurred while the HTML report was being created.” was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

I’m not sure why Microsoft can’t give this price in the original web page and say to contact your normal reseller for more information.
Once the order has been placed there are more hoops to go through to get the data sent to Microsoft. The data can apparently be ftp’d to Microsoft – I’m hoping this is actually secure ftp – but as most users are going to have many Mb’s or Gb’s of data the normal scenario is to put the data onto a USB drive. I was pleased and also surprised to see they support Truecrypt. For more details of the process, continue to read the rest of the entry.

1. After the SKU is purchased, provide the customer the instruction/information below.
2. Exchange Hosted Archive Historical Data Load, R9.2:
3. Message Types: Email messages, with or without attachments can be loaded. Calendar items, Notes, Tasks, and Contacts are not supported at this time. Calendar items (meeting invites, accepts, declines) can be present within the PST files, but they will not be loaded unless they are in email message format.
4. Instant messages which are not in email message format will also not be loaded. Bloomberg messages which are in email format will typically load, as will Blackberry messages sent through your mail server.
5. File Format: All historical mail should be in PST format. The recommended maximum size per PST is 2GB. The folder structure within the PST file is not important. Please do not password-protect the PST files (see encryption, below).

Multiple Archive Customers:
If your organization has multiple hosted archives, the data within each PST should pertain to a single archive. You can submit data for multiple archives so long as the PST files are segregated into clearly identified parent folders, with a mapping file for each.

Media:
Data to be loaded should be copied to a desk-top style USB hard drive. For small amounts of data, USB memory sticks may be used. Use of pocket USB media is discouraged, as some types do not mount properly to our servers. We can also set up a secure FTP site for small amounts of data. Once you have a ticket created with support, email bettijo@microsoft.com with the ticket number, asking for this to be set up.

Data Encryption:
If you wish to encrypt your data, please use TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org). It is freeware, and a good tutorial is available on their website.

Mapping file:
In order to map internal Exchange addresses to SMTP addresses, a mapping file is needed. This can easily be created using the ‘csvde.exe’ utility.

To generate a mapping file:
Open a command prompt. (Click Start, click Run, type Cmd, and then click OK.) At the command prompt, type or copy and paste the following and press enter (please substitute your primary domain name for ‘customer_name-map-file’: C:\> csvde -l “mail,legacyExchangeDN” -r “(objectClass=user)” -f customer_name-map-file.csv

• The resulting file should look like this, one user per line:
• DN,legacyExchangeDN,mail “CN=Courtney Carson,OU=USERS,OU=REDMOND,DC=contoso,DC=com”,/o=contoso/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=CCarson,Courtney.Carson@contoso.com
• “CN=CarmelMcNulty,OU=USERS,OU=REDMOND,DC=contoso,DC=com”,/o=contoso/ou=First AdministrativeGroup/cn=Recipients/cn=COReilly,carmel.mcnulty@contoso.com
• “CN=Chris Reddy,OU=USERS,OU=REDMOND,DC=contoso,DC=com”,/o=contoso/ou=First AdministrativeGroup/cn=Recipients/cn=CReddy,Chris.Reddy@contoso.com
• “CN=Chris Manz,OU=USERS,OU=REDMOND,DC=contoso,DC=com”,/o=contoso/ou=First AdministrativeGroup/cn=Recipients/cn=CManz,Chris.Manz@contoso.com

Please include the mapping file on the USB media, along with the PST files.

Licensing Requirements for Historical Data Load:
HDL SKUs must have been purchased to cover the amount of data being loaded. See your Microsoft

Account or Partner Account representative for information and pricing. Once the HDL order is processed, a support request (ticket) for the HDL will be generated. The order activations team will assign the ticket to our Bulk Data Services group. You will be contacted by a Bulk Data Services team member to discuss your HDL.

Your best resource for further information around this will be to reach out to our Online Services Team at 866-676-6546.

Cost for bulk uploading to Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Archive was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

Click Start, click Network, click Network and Sharing Center, and then click Manage Network Connections.

Unfortunately Manage Network Connections is actually called Change Adapter Settings. If you click this, the rest of the instructions make sense.

I’ve added a comment to the Technet article – hopefully it will get changed. The documentation is also incorrect in the BPA itself.  If anyone knows how to log a service request with microsoft to get the documentation changed then please let me know.

Fixed – “Manage Network Connections” is missing in network section of control panel of Windows 2008 R2 was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

This post will be updated as I work through the solutions – Troubleshooting consists of disabling plugins and then re-enabling them one at a time  – a very  time consuming process.

Typical – now I can’t reproduce the error! Seeing as though the page does actually exist I think I’m just going to not worry about it

Page Not Found when publishing a WordPress post was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

New post about SpeedyFox uploaded to FriendsInTech was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

We’ve had several requests from clients to host their email in the cloud using services like google apps or Microsoft Hosted Exchange. Our first deployments were with google apps due to the lower cost per year, but as we’ve found out the support from Google is severely lacking.  We had a peculiar issue where one users email sent through outlook would get marked as spam all the time, yet if they used the gmail web interface and sent exactly the same content the mail would get sent with no problems.  The service that marks the destination mail as spam is postini – now owned by Google so it should really be a simple matter of turning over the problem to Google to investigate. Unfortunately Google’s response so our request was basically “thanks – if we feel like getting back to you, we might do – in a couple of days”.   As it turned out, the issue was resolved by deleting the google sync profile and recreating it again.

Contrast this to a Microsoft issue which started off as a pre-sales technical call to get a user id setup and ended up with the gtlv owa issue I blogged about earlier. I had several calls from Microsoft within an hour to work on the issue. They worked really hard to ensure my problems were solved and it almost felt like they were harassing me as they kept following up for a status even though I’d told them a couple of times that I was happy for the case to be closed – I even got a call at 5pm on Saturday afternoon from support – something I’ve not experienced (at least from a end user experience!)

So, after singing Microsoft’s praises – the gotcha.  Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange service has a directory sync service that synchronises AD information to the cloud ready for newly created users and distribution lists to appear in the hosted exchange environment. Unfortunately, according to the Directory Synchronization prerequisites the server needs to be running 32bit AND not be a domain controller.   Unfortunately for small companies just starting out from a peer to peer network and getting their first server (but don’t want SBS2008 for some reason), this first server is very likely to be 64bit (crazy not to nowadays) and also a domain controller – possibly/probably even THE domain controller. Installing a 32bit member server is totally out of the question.   It’s not *that* big a deal as all the information can be created online, but it’s twice the amount of data entry along with the possibility of typos but also every AD change of membership and user creation/deletion now needs to be duplicated online.  For large organizations this is not going to be a problem as they’ll likely have extra servers lying around, but for small businesses this is very unlikely. For very large organizations (ie Universities hosting mail through live.edu) it seems that the AD sync program actually requires extra software functionality with the Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) package (however I’m not too familiar with these details just yet)

This is the second flaw in Microsoft’s online feature list that extols the virtues of Microsoft vs Google that I’ve found – Active Directory synchronization is not always possible and the other is the benefit of not having to download an application to synchronize data from outlook to the cloud/google – fair enough a client doesn’t have to be downloaded for that application but instead a single signon client needs to be downloaded to prevent the various Microsoft apps asking for the password multiple times. I did think that was the whole point of the “save password” option is for in the outlook and browser applications!

I was also really surprised that the Exchange online is not running Exchange2010 – the Outlook Web App is so much nicer in 2010 compared to 2007 – as I run Outlook 2010 at home and Exchange2010 in the office I’m spoilt (but I still need Office 2010 on the work laptop – thats hopefully coming real soon)

BPOS active Directory Synchronization does not work on 64bit or domain controllers. was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

After many emails to the very patient support tech at Microsoft (as I would reply and then send an email to let him know if the reply worked or not) we escalated the ticket and I got back the following resolution.

1. type regedit on command prompt or run
2. go to: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
3. create TabProcGrowth (string or dword) and set the value to 0

This solution worked for me.  From what I can see at the ie8blog this has the side effect of reducing the protectedmode protection and I think the browser tabs use the same process rather than running in seperate processes.  This is a slight downside, but I doubt many users will care – they’re more than happy to have OWA working.

Fixed – ‘gtLV’ is null or not an object when replying to an email from OWA was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

For some reason I then decided to do another check for wireless update and sure enough, there was another wireless update. Considering the blackberry state couldn’t get much worse I downloaded the new update and voila – gmail was available again. If this happens again, go to Options, Advanced Options, Wireless Update, Check for Updates. I’m now running v4.5.0.186

So far I’ve not seen much difference but yesterday I did see the option to enhance the call quality whilst on a call (but seeing as though I saw this when trying to work out why neither of us on a call could hear each other I don’t think the button really helped!)

The other difference I’ve noticed is that pushing 1 for Voicemail no longer worked and instead the phone asks me to assign a shortcut for the w key. The solution for this is to delete the empty speed dial entry for w and then reboot by pulling the battery out.

Gmail unavailable for a Blackberry 8830 – fixed was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!

Hello and I’ll give you a call. I’m today and I don’t know if you’re not possible we can. Hey Erin, it’s about when you can. You’ve been sent. That’s 9 that meeting. I think. Okay, okay. Give me a well hi.

I thought it was amusing, but Mum should know better than to call at 9am on a Saturday – it’s my only chance for a lie in so it’s unlikely I’ll be awake to answer the phone

I have donated the voicemail to google to assist in their transcription efforts.

Google voice transcriptions was originally posted at Absoblogginlutely!