250 Hello - Tips N Tricks

1

Quick Tip–How To Easily Open Additional Instance or Elevate Applications

Posted on 16th March 2018 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

This tip is for all the folks out there who want a quick and easy way to open an additional instance of an application which they are running or to elevate an application.

The below tips were captured from a Windows 10 build 1709 machine.

The below should work for most applications – if you find one that does not, please leave a comment.

Additional Instance

In this example we have a cmd prompt o… Read the rest “Quick Tip–How To Easily Open Additional Instance or Elevate Applications”

2

Quick Tip–Easily Accessing Certificate MMC

Posted on 2nd February 2018 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Having to manually open a blank MMC and add in the certificate MMC every time will quickly bore you. I used to then save it onto my desktop as shown below so I would only have to do this once per server. It could also be copied to other servers. The chosen name goes back to TechEd 2002 – don’t ask…

While that is useful for servers you commonly use, what about other servers? What if you work wit… Read the rest “Quick Tip–Easily Accessing Certificate MMC”

1

Unable To Ping Windows Server

Posted on 26th January 2018 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

You have just deployed a shiny new Windows 2012 R2 member server, and joined it to the domain. After the server has restarted you try and ping it from one of the other domain machines, but ping is dropped. You check the Network Location Awareness, as you have been burnt by that before, but that is fine and it can see the AD domain.

In the below example, note that the DNS request was successful. … Read the rest “Unable To Ping Windows Server”

0

Office 365 Workshop Links – December 2017

Posted on 19th December 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

This is a link fest for the items discussed during a recent Office 365 workshop delivered in an unusually tropical Calgary last week. Calgary +12 in December is always a win!!

Posting the links here since they will be available to all of the attendees, and thought that others may also find them useful/interesting.

PowerShell Tips And Tricks

Start with these three articles:

How To Maximize Exchange A… Read the rest “Office 365 Workshop Links – December 2017”

1

Install DFSRDIAG On Windows 2012 R2 and Windows 2016

Posted on 24th November 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Working on multiple versions of Exchange means having multiple different labs. Each lab will have different versions of Exchange, different update levels and also different Active Directory site layouts. They are all required to test and validate different configurations.

These VMs are not always running. As a result, DFS sometimes needs attention if the environment was powered off for an extend… Read the rest “Install DFSRDIAG On Windows 2012 R2 and Windows 2016”

0

Quick Tip–Adding Same ISO DVD Image To All Hyper-V Lab VMs

Posted on 18th August 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

When building out a lab, you might need to attach the same ISO to multiple VMs. In this case I was installing multiple Exchange 2016 severs, and wanted to easily add the same ISO file to each of the VMs.

This was on my Windows 10 laptop which makes quick work of the task since we can use PowerShell.

The VMs to target all have the same naming convention. The VMs for the Exchange 2016 lab start with… Read the rest “Quick Tip–Adding Same ISO DVD Image To All Hyper-V Lab VMs”

0

Script To Check Exchange NTFS Cluster Size

Posted on 21st July 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

An issue came to light when onsite recently with a customer. The design specifications from the Exchange team were not being correctly implemented. In this environment there is a separate Windows team who are responsible for managing the underlying server OS and hardware. They are to follow the prescribed process and steps laid down by the application owner but this was not consistently happeni… Read the rest “Script To Check Exchange NTFS Cluster Size”

0

Office 365 Workshop Links – May 2017

Posted on 5th May 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

This is a link throw-down for the items discussed during a recent Office 365 workshop that I delivered to customers in beautiful Montreal last week.

I’m posting the links here since they will be available to all of the attendees, and thought that others may also find them useful/interesting.

PowerShell Tips And Tricks

Start with these three articles:

How To Maximize Exchange Administrator Productivity… Read the rest “Office 365 Workshop Links – May 2017”

0

Unable To Access OWA or Office 365 Portal On Servers

Posted on 21st April 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

Being unable to open OWA or the Office 365 portal is a common issue in test labs. In these environments there may be a desire to use the browser installed on a lab server to quickly access the Office 365 portal or to test email by using OWA.

This is typically met with the below error:

For the search engines:

We can't sign you in

Your browser is currently set to block JavaScript. You need to allow Jav… Read the rest “Unable To Access OWA or Office 365 Portal On Servers”

0

Quick Tip Windows 10 – Unable To Stop Device Notification

Posted on 14th April 2017 by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

This is one of those little things that make life much, much easier. Imagine the scenario; you go to eject a USB disk drive or USB flash and Windows tells you that it is still in use. How to track down which application is using the drive?

Eject, Eject, Eject

In the below example, the USB flash drive E: will be ejected. Or at least, we will try...

Alas, no! There is a problem ejecting the USB mas… Read the rest “Quick Tip Windows 10 – Unable To Stop Device Notification”