Microsoft are hosting a Virtualization Summit 2010 – From the Desktop to the Datacenter on Monday 12 April 2010 at Shepherds Bush Vue Cinema in London.

Can you and your staff only access your e-mail, desk phone and calendars when in the office? Are your staff wasting time sitting in traffic just to meet with potential customers?
We’re facing one of the most challenging business environments in 60 years. But there is a better way to work that allows you to cut costs without affecting customer relationships, and keep in touch wherever you are.

Keep your business connected
Help your business get better connected with advanced communications solutions like Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
By freeing your staff to easily keep in touch with colleagues and customers,
you’ll be able to:

• Reduce travel costs — by setting up meetings online, you can present to customers as if they’re in the room; including showing presentations, amending documents and collaborating on a virtual whiteboard
• Find, communicate and collaborate quickly and easily — by bringing together e-mail, calendaring, voicemail, instant messaging, VoIP, and Web conferencing
• Stay up to date out of the office — with easy access to all of your communications, through your mobile device, Web browser or telephone
• Be more responsive — edit documents and review presentations wherever you are
• Organise meetings faster — by viewing each other’s availability and status
• Prepare for the unexpected — make sure your teams are able to work remotely, in the event of incidents like road closures, rail strikes or floods

Save money — with a complete communications solution throughout your entire business, including voice call management from your desktop and on-site conferencing

Contact enquiries@risual.com today to see how risual can help you.

Exchange 2010 Outlook Web Access now offers integration with OCS R2 in much the same way as Office 2010 (for those of you that have used it), in that you can now see your OCS buddy list. Whilst this can be really useful in Outlook Web Access some of the steps to get this working can be a little tricky and need to be done in a particular order.

Quick note, each of the following steps will need to be completed on all Exchange 2010 CAS Servers in your organisation.

Firstly, download the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Web Service Provider:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CA107AB1-63C8-4C6A-816D-17961393D2B8&displaylang=en

Secondly, if you are running your CAS Servers on Windows 2008 R2 you will need the ‘UcmaRedist.msp’ patch:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B3B02475-150C-41FA-844A-C10A517040F4&displaylang=en

Run the CWAOWASSPMain.msi and install it (default location is C:Web Services Provider Installer).

Copy UcmaRedist.msp to the C:Web Services Provider Installer folder.

You will now need to install the files in that folder in the following order:

vcredist_x64.exe

UcmaRedist.msi

(run an elevated Command prompt (run as Admin))

Browse to C:Web Services Provider Installer folder and install the following:

CWAOWASSP.msi

UcmaRedist.msp

You can now confirm that the installation has completed correctly by browsing to and checking for the following registry key:

HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesMS Exchange OWAInstantMessaging.

If the InstantMessaging key does not exist under MS Exchange OWA then ensure you ran the CWAOWASSP.msi from an elevated command prompt.

Hopefully by this point you will have installed a FQDN Certificate off your internal CA for your CAS Server(s), if not, you will need to. OCS works entirely on Certs and checks the FQDN of the Server(s) you add against the cert that it is operating with – basically, the self-signed certificated that Exchange installs with will not with OCS.

Once you have a cert from your internal CA that matches the FQDN of your Server you will need to launch Exchange Powershell and run the following command:

Get-ExchangeCertificate | fl

Details you will require:

(Keep this screen open as you will need the information from the certificate registered for IIS in the next step.)

Now browse to C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerV14ClientAccessOWA and edit the ‘web.config’ file with notepad.

You will need to complete the following sections:

IMPoolName

IMCertificateIssuer

IMCertificateSerialNumber (this needs to in two octet sets as per below)

example:

Now you need to enable the CAS Server to use OCS for IM, to do this run the following from the Exchange Powershell:

Get-OwaVirtualDirectory | Set-OwaVirtualDirectory –InstantMessagingType OCS

Once the command has completed you will need to perform an ‘IISReset’

Now, connect to your OCS R2 Server and bring up the Front-End properties of the pool and select the Host Authorisation tab. Click Add.

Add the host name as the FQDN of the CAS Server(s) that are being configured for IM (this will be need to be the same as the FQDN certificate registered on the CAS servers for IIS). Tick the boxes for ‘Throttle as Server’ and ‘Treat as Authenticated’.

Once you have restart the OCS R2 Front-End Service it should all be working.

Found this useful link on a blog by the good people at communicationsserverteam.com and thought it was worth a mention.

Article: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2010/01/25/726.aspx

Basically free high-level overview for following features:

• Instant Messaging
• Presence
• Contact Management
• Audio and Video
• Desktop Sharing
• Office Application Integration
• Add a Live Meeting
• Communicator Web Access

You can register for these sessions on the following link:

https://events.livemeeting.com/967/15027/reg.aspx?pc=05

Neil Cruickshanks

After downloading and attempting to install the French language pack for Exchange 2010 UM I was less than pleased to the receive an error:

It took me a few moments to digest what was occurring but after reading the error (always a good start) and looking through the Exchange setup logs ([ERROR] Could not find a part of the path ‘C:SupportUM,Language,Packsfr-FR’), it would appear that if the Language Pack is in a folder that contains spaces it will not install.

If you look at the error above you will note that the spaces in my folder name have been replaced by comma’s ‘,’.

Resolution

Remove the spaces in the folder containing the Language Pack

Neil Cruickshanks

Just a quick post to advise Microsoft has now released a KB to remove the application manifest expiry feature in AD RMS. The reason for this is that this legacy feature was previously used to confirm that applications accessing or creating RMS protected content were to be trusted.

This was done by applications being signed by application signing certs issued by MS. Once the application signing cert expired the application would no longer be trusted to open or create RMS protected content until it was renewed with application updates, which would cause problems and errors between expiring signing certs and application updates!

This can now be controlled by the system administrator rather than by signing certs, administrators can now define applications, or older versions of applications as untrustworthy themselves.

The update to remove this feature is KB979099 where the update can be found for all RMS client operating systems.

Server 2008 AD schema onwards has a very cool feature called fine-grained password policies, these can be a bit arduous to setup, the easiest way that I’ve found to set them up is to create an ldifde answer file and import them using that.  In this example I’m creating a password policy called ServiceAccounts and applying it to the group called ServiceAccounts. 

dn: CN=ServiceAccounts, CN=Password Settings Container,CN=System,DC=robsdesk,DC=com
changetype: add
objectClass: msDS-PasswordSettings
msDS-MaximumPasswordAge:-1728000000000
msDS-MinimumPasswordAge:-864000000000
msDS-MinimumPasswordLength:8
msDS-PasswordHistoryLength:0
msDS-PasswordComplexityEnabled:TRUE
msDS-PasswordReversibleEncryptionEnabled:FALSE
msDS-LockoutObservationWindow:-18000000000
msDS-LockoutDuration:-18000000000
msDS-LockoutThreshold:5
msDS-PasswordSettingsPrecedence:20
msDS-PSOAppliesTo:CN=ServiceAccounts,OU=DomainManagement,DC=robsdesk,DC=com

Execute this command:

Ldifde -i -f pso.ldf

This will create a policy with the following attributes:

• Maximum password age of 2 days
• Minimum password age of 1 day
• Minimum password length of 8 characters
• Password history
• Require complexity
• Store with reversible encryption
• 30 minute lockout observation window
• 30 minute lockout
• Lockout after 5 failures
• Precedence of 20 – like MX records the lowest ‘cost’ comes first.

Make accounts you want to apply the policy to a member of the group.  You can edit the settings in the policy using ADSIEdit by navigating to the Password Settings Container within the System container. 

More detail can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770394(WS.10).aspx

Cheers,

Rob

We came across this issue today, where we were unable to access a Servers ILO due to someone leaving the remote console session open.

The following error was displayed

Remote Console is unavailable. It is already in use by a different client

We needed to access the servers ILO pretty quickly, so we had to end the other users ILO remote control session.

To do this do the following.

1, Go to System Status on the homepage and select diagnostics

2, Now press reset which will reset all connections to the ILO and then enable you to access the remote console on the ILO

Daniel Davies

I came across this issue when trying to upgrade to SQL 2008 sp1, where one of the checks failed and would not allow me to update. The check was  “‘Reboot required ” .

Solution

1, Open Regedit

2, Navigate to HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession Manager

3, Go to the properties of the following DWORD Value “PendingFileRenameOperations”

4, Remove any data in this value (so this is blank)

5, Do the same again for the following keys

HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSet001ControlSessionManager                                                     HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSet002ControlSession Manager

6, Attempt to rerun the checks and all should be ok

Quick post and run but worth bearing in mind, if you’re doing FBA on TMG & are offloading SSL before the TMG box there’s a reasonable chance that you may not have any certificates installed on your TMG server.  If this is the case users will not be able to change their passwords & those with password must be changed at next login will not be able to log in. 

This is because the TMG server needs to be able to open an LDAPS connection to a DC to do the password change, the S in LDAPS stands for secure, no certificate = not secure.  Install certs, reboot & all is well in the world again.