Microsoft Finally Building Canadian Data Centres and Region

We were very excited today with Microsoft's announcement that they will be building data centres in Ontario and Quebec, and creating a Canadian region for Azure and Office 365.

This will dramatically expand the potential to help more of our customers move their data to the cloud, while ensuring they meet privacy and regulatory requirements to keep data in Canada.

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be live until 2016, but superb news nonetheless.

They even flew Kevin Turner in to help make the announcement.

Microsoft today announced plans to deliver commercial cloud services from Canada. Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online will be delivered from Toronto and Quebec City in 2016, further strengthening Microsoft’s footprint in Canada’s competitive cloud landscape.

These new locally deployed services will address data residency considerations for Microsoft customers and partners of all shapes and sizes who are embracing cloud computing to transform their businesses, better manage variable workloads and deliver new digital services and experiences to customers and employees. General availability of Azure is anticipated in early 2016, followed by Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online later in 2016

The full press release is available here.

We look forward to helping more Canadian customers migrate to the cloud soon!

Contact us today to get planning!

Living Microsoft in an iPhone World

With the continued struggle of Windows Phone to get any kind of market traction, despite finally being mostly on par functionality wise, most of us in the Microsoft world have switched to using iOS or Android mobile hardware.

Surprisingly, these days, it's actually quite an easy coexistence.

Paul Thurrott recently discussed this very topic in an excellent blog post we recommend

Microsoft + iPhone

What surprised most about this article is just how many applications Microsoft makes for iOS. Well worth a read.

Well Played Microsoft, Well Played

April Fools Day seems to be on an upswing of increasingly clever and complex hoaxes the last few years, and Microsoft was no exception for 2015. 

Beautifully skewering their own naming practices, and particularly Apple's over-the-top design videos, Microsoft released MS-DOS Mobile.  

Today Microsoft launches MS-DOS Mobile, a new OS designed especially for Lumia smartphones.
Microsoft is going back to where productivity started for millions of people, launching a beautifully simple OS.

Today Microsoft launch MS-DOS Mobile, a new OS designed especially for Lumia smartphones. Microsoft are going back to where productivity started for millions of people, launching a beautifully simple OS. The MS-DOS Mobile preview is an essential download for those who remember life before Windows, those who want to go back to BASIC, or even those looking to boot into DOS for the first time.

“Turning our back on graphics was hugely liberating. We’ve dropped the resolution, and in doing so re-discovered our roots.”

The best part of this?  You can actually download and run this thing!  Set Blaster=A220! Oh the memories.

Not to be outdone, the Mountain View folks launched com.google.

Try it yourself.    !desirprus eb thgim ouY

Microsoft: we have a (patching) problem

Since Microsoft created (and mostly perfected) Windows, and then Microsoft Update years ago, followed by standardizing on the now legendary Patch Tuesdays, Enterprise has been able to rely on consistent and quality monthly patches.

Sadly, this appears to have gone off the rails badly in the past few months.  As Exchange consultants we had clearly noted this with a number of Cumulative Updates for the past year or two that were getting released, promptly making a mess of things, and being pulled and re-released sometimes two and three times.  When we're talking software that supports large corporate installations, this has been concerning and unacceptable.  Now the rot appears to have spread across the company.  Clearly the resource shuffling, and loss of many long-term staff at Microsoft is hitting home.  Not only does this make for a tremendous amount of testing and re-work when things go bad, it undermines the years of hard-earned trust in the company very quickly.

We've been complaining for a while, but a recent quick search of the internet shows the wider community is now beating this drum as well.

This has even culminated in an open letter to (thankfully finally  ousted) Steve Ballmer by Susan Bradley of Patchmanagement.org:

"On behalf of everyone in this community, may I respectfully request that you assign someone in a management position to investigate what is going on with quality control with patch testing lately?" 

"This month in particular leaves me deeply disturbed that issues that should have been found before these updates were released are being found by us - your customers - after they are released and we are having to deal with the aftermath,"

"Bottom line, sir, this is unacceptable to all of us in the patching community, and quite frankly, it should be just as unacceptable to you."

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2013/09/11/dear-mr-ballmer-my-email-today.aspx

Here's just a sample of the growing chorus of discontent: 

http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=22661

http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=15507

http://www.zdnet.com/why-all-the-errors-in-microsoft-updates-lately-7000020628/

http://windowsitpro.com/industry/microsoft-better-positioned-support-failed-update-releases-identify-failures-beforehand

Microsoft - PLEASE FIX YOUR PATCHING PROBLEM! 

Really Microsoft? REALLY? The Outlook "archive mailbox" mess

So Microsoft creates this awesome feature to help users and administrators get out of "PST Hell".   Then - as only Microsoft can do - they completely screw it up with licensing.  AGAIN! 

Why can the licensing and marketing folks never get out of the way of all the great things the product teams do?  This is constantly the downfall of this company.   People will use and enjoy your damn products if you don't make it completely impossible to figure out and buy!

So you go and subscribe to Office 365, or buy Exchange 2010/13 for thousands of dollars.  They proudly come with the "Online Archive" or "Personal Archive" or "Archive Mailbox" feature - or whatever it's being called this week.  It's great - users aren't dealing with the ridiculous old Outlook archiving features, and leaving a trail of forgotten PST files.  Plus, offline caches are not getting jammed up with 5 years of mail. Instead, via a couple of admin settings, mail will silently transfer on the server into a new Archive Mailbox which the user can nicely see and search through Outlook.  Except THEY CAN'T!

Why? Because Microsoft arbitrarily limits this to the "super mega wonder full extra plus editions" of Office.  You know, because only if I work for a Fortune 500 company with enormous licensing power would I want to use a key feature of the product.  A feature that is included with my $6 Office 365 subscription, no less.

Of course, to make it even more confusing - as only Microsoft can - they DO show you the Archive Mailbox in Outlook Web App.  Because that's logical. 

If you have a retail or OEM license of Office 2007, 2010 or 2013 and not a volume license Professional Plus - NO ARCHIVE FOR YOU!

I mean Really Microsoft? Really?

The confusing grid of the day from our friends in Redmond:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/outlook-help/license-requirements-for-personal-archive-and-retention-policies-HA102576659.aspx 

What You Should See:
Credit: Exchangeserverpro.com

Generate custom, self-signed, long-expiry certificates on Windows

We recently were introduced to a great utility that a Microsoft IIS Team employee maintains called SelfSSL7.   This is an upgraded version of the old SelfSSL tool that used to ship as part of the IIS Resource Kit.

Self-signed certificates have a myriad of useful purposes for internal uses in testing and staging environment, but are an awful pain to deal with using the (almost completely lacking) internal tools. 

SelfSSL7 to the rescue! 

Thomas has all the details at his blog below, but in a nutshell you simply download the tool, unzip and run from a command line.

For example, to create a self-signed certificate for a web server with a 5 year expiry and automatically export the whole thing to a PFX file for safe keeping, all while adding it to the local computer store and binding it to an IIS site automatically - simply execute the following at an elevated command prompt:

selfssl7 /k 2048 /v 1825 /x /f c:\SelfSSL7\my-5-year-cert.pfx /i

There is no step 2!

Such a time saver! 

Fix All-User Install Agent Errors on Windows 8

Updated July 2014

We're seeing an increasing trend of the following error displaying upon logon to many of our client's computers running Windows 8.0  Oddly this seems to be happening more on Windows 8 "Core" (what you receive on a consumer system), versus Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise in the corporate environment. 

Windows couldn't connect to the windows all-user install agent service. Please consult your system administrator.

An investigation points to what appears to be some pretty buggy code in this particular service, which handles the installation of AppX (Metro/Tile World/Windows Store) applications. Somehow this service is crashing, and then further getting set to a Disabled state.

Most often, this problem will prevent standard (non-administrator) users from successfully logging on to the computer, or running certain Modern Apps or even Desktop software.

To fix this issue, you must be able to logon as an account that is in the Local Administrators group.  Once logged on as an Admin, resolving the issue is relatively simple. 

Open a Command Prompt As Administrator (this can be done from the Start Screen by searching for CMD, and then right click on the Command Prompt tile and choose Run as Administrator from the App Bar).  Then, execute the following three commands:

sc config AllUserInstallAgent start=demand
net start AllUserInstallAgent
sfc /scannow

The first two commands change the startup type of the required problem service, and the third will check for other corrupt file issues in your Windows installation.  It will take a good while to complete.  When all of the above are finished (whether fully successful or not), you must then instruct Windows 8 to do a FULL shutdown, as on most new computers it performs a hybrid shutdown by default which will not reinitialise all the necessary components.  Again, from the same Administrative Command Prompt type:

shutdown /s /f /t 5 

Turn your computer back on after its shut down fully and the errors should be resolved.  Still no word on an official fix from Microsoft yet.

Also of note, this only seems to affect original Windows 8, and not Windows 8.1.  In fact, this service has been removed completely on Windows 8.1.