Tips N Tricks

Various Tips and Tricks

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Office 365 Workshop Links – December 2017

Posted on 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”

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Install DFSRDIAG On Windows 2012 R2 and Windows 2016

Posted on 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”

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

Posted on 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”

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Script To Check Exchange NTFS Cluster Size

Posted on 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”

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Office 365 Workshop Links – May 2017

Posted on 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”

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Unable To Access OWA or Office 365 Portal On Servers

Posted on 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”

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Quick Tip Windows 10 – Unable To Stop Device Notification

Posted on 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...

Eject, Eject, Eject !

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

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The Case of: Outlook Destroying Desktops

Posted on by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

As the name of the post implies, something was terribly wrong with Outlook.  Or so it appeared.

This was a visit to a customer with poor user experience running Outlook 2016 on Windows 7.  The level of impact was clear long before I even stepped on site.  Management were under the impression that Outlook was crippling their desktops and blocking other business critical applications from working.  T… Read the rest “The Case of: Outlook Destroying Desktops”

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Load Balancing WAP In Azure RM

Posted on by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

In the previous post Load Balancing Azure AD FS Services  we looked at using Azure RM to deploy and load balance AD FS services.  This is the follow-up post to deploy the Web Application Proxy (WAP) servers and its associated load balancer into the DMZ.

In this post we will focus upon the highlighted area in the below diagram.  The additional components were previously deployed, for details please … Read the rest “Load Balancing WAP In Azure RM”

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Testing AD FS Signon Page – An Error Occurred

Posted on by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT]

There are many causes for receiving errors when signing onto AD FS.  However some are more genuine than others.  This is a quick tip to check that you are on the right track before diving into the details and potentially spending time troubleshooting when in fact nothing is wrong.  Just lately, for some reason I’m seeing this more frequently.  That has prompted the draft from last October to be fi… Read the rest “Testing AD FS Signon Page – An Error Occurred”