Alpesh Nakar's Blog

Using OCS and Lync Together

Alpesh — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 06:59:00 PDT

Ok so you have signed for Office 365 and would like to use Lync on your work laptop, but your company has not moved to Lync OR you have Lync for work but cannot add people outside of your organization and you would like to use your personal Lync, then what options do you have? This is part of my Office 365 blog post series

No worries, you can have OCS/Lync or Lync/Lync work in tandem. This is what I have on my work laptop

What I did was to install Windows XP Mode and configure Lync /Office 2010, the works you know in XP and I was all sorted!

Download Windows XP Mode and off you go!

Note: Assuming your OS is Windows 7

Using OCS and Lync Together was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Migrating from BPOS Mailbox to Office 365

Alpesh — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:59:00 PDT

What a pain! (Kind of, till I found out why the pain and how to work around that)

I was using Microsoft BPOS since last couple of months for some of my active domains with limited users and last month, I planned to move them over to Office 365.

Microsoft have a BPOS to Office 365 transition web site, which is pretty useless. Useless since it does not have any tools or guidance that I could use to make a smooth transition. Thankfully I hadn’t started using SharePoint in BPOS, so migrating data from BPOS (SharePoint) to Office 365 (SharePoint) is one less headache to take care of… very glad, given the pain I went through to migrate from BPOS to Office 365 for 3 users mailbox and behind the scenes with DNS, etc.

Create users on generic domain (*.onmicrosoft.com)
Add your own domain name to Office 365
Initiate the verification process (txt method preferred) (At Domain Name Registrar)
Resolve issue that you cannot have domain in BPOS and Office365 -
- In BPOS change default domain for all users to generic bpos domain *.microsoftonline.com
- In BPOS delete the domain name
- Call up BPOS / FOPE team(s) to make sure the company domain is deleted
Login in Office365 portal again and complete the domain verification process
Add/Edit DNS entries for MX records, SRV Records (At Domain Name Registrar)
- Note: It does not matter what plan you will be using Small Business or Enterprise. [In forthcoming post I will explain about DNS and Office 365]
Edit user properties from generic domain (*.onmicrosoft.com) to your domain

That’s it, you can send and receive your emails with Office 365.

Hold on, what about my emails/calendar/contacts from BPOS?

Leaving any of third-party products out of the equation, this is what I did

Setup Outlook with your BPOS email account (Using Microsoft Online Services Sign-In application)Export all of the mail data into a .PST file.

Once you have exported the .PST, configure Outlook to with your Office 365 email address username@companydomain.whatever.

Import the .PST with the Import Wizard and this will sync all of your data back to Office 365.

That’s the only way to migrate! Yes you will need to do this for each user… what a pain, but that’s the only way for you to migrate, unless you choose to wait for BPOS team to transition you.

I have couple of other Office 365 blog posts scheduled to go live in the weeks to come…

Why can’t I sign in to Lync?

Using OCS and Lync at the same time

… that’s just a teaser… I have couple of short posts lined up… stay tuned.

Migrating from BPOS Mailbox to Office 365 was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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PowerShell Script To Change Managed Account Password

Alpesh — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 06:59:00 PDT

Of all days in the week, on Sunday [August 21, 2011] I decided to tease my SharePoint 2010 development environment! I decided to change all the SharePoint 2010 Service Account(s)password.

Thank you Microsoft for introducing the managed accounts, else I would be clicking away for a long time, having to go through each application pool to change the password (map this scenario to MOSS 2007 or WSSv3). With managed accounts associated with application pools, it was a matter of changing the password for the managed account and it would ‘cascade’ down…

If you have seen my re-imaging VMs on the fly series, you would have seen that I am not using one service account in my SharePoint virtual development environment!

To update the password from the Central Administration GUI > Security > General Security > Configure Managed Accounts and click edit on the relevant managed account and then select Change password now and then select Use existing password. Enter the password that was entered in AD and click OK.

However, in a situation where I had 5 farms and 8 managed accounts per farm, it would mean I would be clicking 40 times at least to get this job done… ( not accounting for the clicks listed in the steps above )

So, I decided to get my hands dirty with PowerShell! Here is the script to use an ‘existing password’ from the active directory (after it has been changed in the ADS) for my managed account that I am using for all my demo web applications

#Set Execution Policy
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -force

#Import SharePoint Module
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -EA silentlycontinue

$m = Get-SPManagedAccount -Identity “sharepoint\sa-spcontent”

Set-SPManagedAccount -Identity $m -ExistingPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString “pass@word2″ -AsPlainText -force) –confirm

iisreset

PowerShell experts, your feedback will be highly appreciated!

This script got the job done, but if there are better ways of doing this, suggestions welcome.

PowerShell Script To Change Managed Account Password was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Why Office 365?

Alpesh — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:59:00 PDT

Why not? To continue on our series on Office 365 and then you can decide if you want to move to Office 365 or not.

In the previous post, we introduced the concept of the ‘in the cloud’ offering from Microsoft namely Office 365 and what is the offering under the banner of Office 365.

The next question that may pop is “Why Office 365?”

In my opinion, there is no competition for Office 365. Simply nothing. If you start looking at some of the freebies or alternatives, it is not justified at all – since no one offers what Office 365 offers – namely

Office Web Apps – Office Suite of Applications in the cloud
Exchange Online - Email and Calendar – in the cloud with Microsoft Exchange 2010
SharePoint Online – In the cloud using SharePoint! PLUS create your web site with SharePoint Online and you can have a presence in minutes!
Lync – Connect, message and meet virtually using Lync Online
Office 2010 Professional Plus – licensed per user, pay by the month [plan dependent]

Can there be any comparison? I won’t even get ‘fruits’ in this equation if you know what I mean…

The benefits to move to the cloud with Office 365 are far too many to list here, but if we look at a high level overview, take either Exchange or SharePoint on premise – design, deployment, maintenance and upgrade overheads your head and wallet will go for a spin!

I’ll take SharePoint as a micro case study…. without going into the detailed planning, design, deployment ….

I’ll skip the planning, design stages of the project – because you need to do that even if you are moving to the cloud, else it will be more messier then on-premise deployment.

So getting down to the deployment, after planning and design stage – it’s very easy to get started with SharePoint Online as compared to SharePoint On-Premise! It’s as easy as signing up for the service, provision the site collection(s) / sites (as per the design), add users (pay as you go for the users accessing the services) and off you go… all these in couple of hours, subject to a very well documented plan and design is in place.

Compute the time and costs involved in the case of

Procuring and commissioning the hardware
Deployment
Maintenance

Compare this with getting started with the online solution

Sign up
Add Users ( I am not taking the federated route here, to keep it simple)
Assign Licenses for Services
Provision site collections / sites

You literally don’t have to worry about scalability, reliability and the infrastructure overheads! It’s all Microsoft’s headache now! If it breaches SLA, you get credit for the same!

Sure, online solution does not offer everything just yet and you could go in for a hybrid solution or wait …

Check out some of the external resources that will clear out the ‘cloud’ of doubt as to “Why Office 365?”

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216887/Why_We_Chose_Exchange_Online_Not_Google_Apps
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/socal-sam/archive/2011/05/12/google-docs-openoffice-versus-office-365.aspx
http://www.lookscloudy.com/2011/05/good-luck-google-docs
http://www.itproportal.com/2011/06/07/office-365-sky-view/

Most geeks I know, have already signed for the small business plan offered in Office 365 – costs $6.00 per month and the value for money well spent is in

Office Web Apps – Office Suite of Applications in the cloud
Exchange Online – Email and Calendar – in the cloud with Microsoft Exchange 2010
SharePoint Online – In the cloud using SharePoint! PLUS create your web site with SharePoint Online and you can have a presence in minutes!
Lync – Connect, message and meet virtually using Lync Online

Sure, you don’t get enterprise features of SharePoint Online, but for $6.00 this is a steal!

I have migrated from BPOS to Office 365 and forthcoming blog posts in a series will help you move to Office 365 from BPOS, because at the time of writing this post, Microsoft don’t have any tools or mechanisms in place to help you move! Stay tuned because I already have scheduled the posts to go live over a span of couple of weeks.

Why Office 365? was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 Session Videos Available

Alpesh — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:00:00 PDT

This year in March, 2011 I presented two sessions at Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 Edition in Bangalore and it was a great to connect with the Indian Tech Community! You can read more about my experience at Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 here and I had shared my conference slides here.

The videos are now available to download and view.

Here is the link to download and view all the session videos and presentations.

And here is the link to download and view two sessions that I presented. [Update: Videos are now available]

Session # 1

SharePoint Designer 2010: Top 10 things to know
Download Video
Part1 | Part2 | Part3

Download Presentation

Session # 2

Backup and Restore for SharePoint 2010: Protecting Mission Critical SharePoint Data with new tools and technologies

Download Video
Part1 | Part2 | Part3

Download Presentation

Microsoft Tech.Ed India 2011 Session Videos Available was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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Applying WIM To VHD

Alpesh — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 03:35:00 PDT

This is a continuation of the series Re Imaging SharePoint VMs on the fly.

Now that you have captured your bootable virtual hard drive that was prepared for SharePoint Installation, you can apply that to another active partition or a virtual hard drive and then install whichever flavour of SharePoint you please!

As seen in the earlier post, capturing a virtual hard drive to create a Windows Image File is time consuming (compared to taking a snapshot in VMWare or Hyper-V) and memory intensive as well, however the advantage is that you can leverage on bare metal power – like having dual boot or multi-boot environment on your laptop.

So let’s apply the Windows Image File to the virtual hard disk or you could this another partition as well.

This completes the series & I hope it has been of value to you.

Applying WIM To VHD was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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SharePoint 2010: Service Pack 1 Feature Recovering Site From Recycle Bin

Alpesh — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:15:32 PDT

Now that SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 is out… I wanted to share one of the features that is going to be much appreciated by SharePoint Administrators and Site Collection Administrators.

No more attaching backups of your content database and powershell to restore the deleted SharePoint site!

Head over to the site collection recycle bin under /AdminRecycleBin.aspx?View=2 and restore.

View 2 is the recycle bin that only site collection administrators have access to and is the ‘bin’ which receives content that is deleted from the end user recycle bin.

In the case of site deleted, it does not go to the end user recycle bin (view=1) but straight to the site collection recycle bin (view=2)

That’s it! You now have your site that can be restored as easily as any other list or library item!

If you’d rather go with PowerShell, you now have some new PowerShell friends to get to know

Get-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Server 2010)

Get-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Remove-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Server 2010)

Remove-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Restore-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Server 2010)

Restore-SPDeletedSite (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Thank you Microsoft SharePoint Team!

SharePoint 2010: Service Pack 1 Feature Recovering Site From Recycle Bin was published on Alpesh Nakar's Blog

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