Interested in learning more about Data Loss Prevention on Office 365 and Exchange 2013, read my article here
Want to apologize to you, my faithful readers, for not being able to get back to my Office 365 Build Out Lab blog series. I have been slammed with work, yes the job that actually pays me J, and have not had a chance to get back to my build out. This weekend has been extremely busy, my company, well I wish it was mine, got a great opportunity to assist a client who went Google and is now wondering why! So I have been working this weekend, between a few breaks and my BRONCOS WIN, on getting everything ready to WOW the client Monday afternoon. I also had to finalize my three presentations for the Cloud and Virtualization Live! Conference, the presentations were due on Friday and thankfully the speaker coordinator allowed me the weekend to complete.
I hope to get back to my build out with Office 365 vNext early this coming week, but I’m not promising anything. Again sorry for the delay, but the wait will be worth it!
With the GA release of Server 2012 and now the ability for TechNet subscriptions to download the RTM versions of Exchange 2013 I am building a new lab for Office 365 vNext to do a full Office 365 Hybrid deployment with Server 2012 and Exchange 2013 and the Customer Preview of Office 365 vNext. My first step was to get a public domain registered, O365VNext.com, and now have a forest/domain created on-premises, the DC is running as a VM in my Windows 8 Hyper-V environment (how very cool it is to be able to enable Hyper-V with Windows 8 and not need to either dual boot to Server 2012 or add anything else to my company laptop is great!). I installed the server VM to host the DC role and then added the Active Directory Directory Services Role. Below are the screen shots to setup a domain with Server 2012:
My new domain in now setup and the DC is functional. I am working on the next step, which is to get the Exchange 2013 Server installed and ready. This will be part 2 of this blog series. Be sure to check back and will continue with the deployment and setup for a full Hybrid Deployment using Exchange 2013 with the Office 365 vNext!
So after some trial and error I was able to move this blog from being hosted on wordpress.com to godaddy.com. Now I know why I work in infrastructure and now a web designer/admin. Thankfully it seems to be up and running and working fine. The only thing I lost was the stats for the site when hosted on wordpress.com. I can live with this, as I just recently hit the 10K hit/read mark so I will just know going forward that I need to add an additional 10K to my stats.
With this move I believe I can now get a Windows Phone 7 app created pretty easily, will work on that next, or ask one of my highly competent consulting brothers (or sisters) to help me with the app!
So if you are reading this you are on the new site so congratulations to you, and me, for ensuring you made it here!
Thanks
So Today, while working and managing four client projects I finalized my domain registrar from WordPress/Automatic to GoDaddy.com. Bad timing as I did this while working projects and then heading out to a crucial client meeting (ok it was a Happy Hour at Earl’s). So when I got home this site was unreachable and t took me a bit to get it back online. I think everything is working fine now, but please let me know if you are having trouble accessing the site (haha, if you are having trouble you won’t see this post)!
Next up is to move the hosting of this site to godaddy.com but will most likely wait until after the inaugural Office 365 International User Group! Please find more information about this User group here: http://home.office365evangelist.com/Pages/Office365UserGroup.aspx Part of the reason I made the transfer of the domain to GoDaddy.com is to allow me to setup the proper SRV DNS settings to host the meeting via Lync Online. The invitation to the group with the Lync info will be out very shortly! Join now to be able to say you were at the first meeting!
Find it pretty cool that is less that five full months this blog site has now recieved over 10,000 hits/views. Hopefully everyone that is coming to this site is finding it helpful and relevant!
Today I got a very nice email from Microsoft; I have been awarded a Microsoft Community Contributor Award for 2012! This recognizes my contributions to the Office 365 Community Forums, http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/default.aspx. This was a very nice surprise this morning and it is nice to know that my assistance to the Office 365 community via the Forums is appreciated!
So for some reason this blog site has seen the most one day hits so far, 162, than any other day! Also with today’s total February now has the most hist for a month and it is just a little over half way done.
Like to see that my blog is being viewed and it makes me want to blog more and help out the Office 365 community even more!
So it was a big week for this blog! Over 500 readers accessed the site this week since I posted my series on Office 365 Hybrid Deployment with Exchange 2010 SP2. This number represents almost a third of the total amount of hits since I launched this blog in the beginning of December 2011! Reviewing the search terms that lead user to my blog and seeing the blog post that are being viewed (WordPress provides great statistics) it is obvious that Office 365 Hybrid deployment information is in high demand! I am hopeful that this information provided here on my blog, and on my mirror blog at http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/smcneill/default.aspx, is helping people. My goal with this blog is to help the Office 365 community, and with over 500 hits this week I get the feeling I am. Time will tell. Please feel free to comment on posts you would like to see, any issues you would like investigated, or any other way I could help you with your Office 365 implementation.
On a personal note, today I took the second of the two Office 365 Microsoft Beta Exams. These exams are, to my knowledge, in beta until early February and then are scheduled to be released fully in March. I took the first exam on Monday. The Monday exam was 70-321, Deploying Office 365. This was not too bad, and I think I did pretty good. My only problem was the SharePoint questions, as I am not a SharePoint admin or expert, but know just enough to be dangerous. The exam today for Office 365 Administration, this was a more difficult test. I attribute the Administering test being more difficult for me is that as a consultant I primarily do more deployments than day-to-day administration. Again the SharePoint questions for the Administration test got me, but also not knowing all the Powershell commands (and I pride myself on being a PowerShell power user) specific for Office 365 administration had me guessing a bit.
Well I should find out in 4-8 weeks how I did on the exams, hopefully I passed both, but if not I will now know what to study more on and be ready to re-take the exams to get my Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) designation for Office 365.
I started writing a new blog post last night to show the results of the Hybrid Wizard in Exchange 2010 SP2 on the on-premises and Office 365 environments. As I was writing it, it started to take on a life of its own. I liked the direction it was/is going and might work it into more of a white paper on Office 365, Hybrid Deployment and Administration. So with that said I still want to do follow-up post to the 3.5 part blog series I did on Office 365 Hybrid Deployment with Exchange 2010 SP2. What I would like is some feedback from you the reader as to what questions do you have after reading the series? what is missing, what needs further explaining? This will help ensure I get the best possible information into the follow-up blog.
Please feel free to comment here or on any of the blogs related to this topic. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.
Thanks!
