Office 365 Evangelist

Had an issue a couple days ago with my Microsoft Windows 8 Surface RT tablet. Seems that the updates I installed were not downloaded completely and the install of the updates left my Surface in a frozen state. I could not scroll on the start page or launch any applications. I was also not able to get into Settings to even try to do a restore or refresh of the machine. I did some research and found that during boot up when the circle of dots starts to hold down the power button for 6 seconds. I had to do this 3 times but finally on the next boot it a line stating Entering Recovery mode started. It first tried to repair the OS but that did not work, and then I was able to reset to factory image. This took about 45 minutes but after it was done everything worked fine. I then installed the updates and they installed fine so everything is working fine now.

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:

1. Selected a new Forest and created the Root domain name to match my new public domain registration.

1. Set the Forest and Domain functional level to Server 2012 and selected to add DNS server and set a DSRM password

1. Get a warning about delegation, I wish they would have fixed this as this is a carryover from 2008 R2; Microsoft should not warn this for a new Forest

1. Accepted the NetBIOS name and continued

1. Choose to accept the defaults, this is a lab and would recommend for production you might want to move the folder locations

1. Reviewed all the setting and configuration settings, Below is the output from the “View script” option

1. This is the script that can be saved and re-used for additional automated DC installs

1. After selecting from above, the wizard does a prerequisite check

1. Got some warnings, mainly around DNS, but got an “all prerequisites checked passed successfully, so I moved forward with install

1. Install in progress, notice the warning about Server 2012 AD default security settings
   

1. More progress warnings!
   
2. So I stepped away from my laptop and since the DC promo install automatically reboots the server I missed any further screen shots. I made came back to my VM at a login prompt, but now it defaulted to a domain login for the DC!
   

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!

It has been a busy several days for Microsoft and more busy days on the way. On October 11^th Microsoft announced that the New Office has reached RTM (Release to Manufacturing) milestone. This was not just for the Office 2013 suite of applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc) but for the entire Office family; Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, Lync 2013 and Office 365 vNext (back ended by the 2013 server versions). This is very huge! All these Office components really step up functionality and allow for greater collaboration for the enterprise. Another big benefit of this next wave of products is that all were designed and built with the cloud in mind, meaning better experience for Office 365.

From the link above you can see that Volume License (VL), MSDN and TechNet subscriptions will be able to download the full RTM bits of these products beginning in mid-November with General Availability in Q1 of 2013. Also in the announcement is the information I blogged about recently, that Office 365 will begin getting these new features in the upcoming service updates in November as well. The first thing that existing Office 365 customers will see is new versions on the Office Web Apps.

Microsoft Surface Tablet

This past Tuesday the 16^th Microsoft announces the pricing for the Surface with Windows RT Tablets. Microsoft also opened up the ability to pre-order the Surface with Windows RT. The pricing announced is very competitive with the iPad, the Surface with Windows RT comes in 32GB and 64GB versions. They also have two covers, the Touch and Type, which have keyboards built-in to the cover itself. These covers easily connect to the Surface and provide a great nearly fully functional keyboard that barely adds and size or weight to the overall tablet and also functions a protective cover for the tablet screen when not in use.

So what is Windows RT? We simple put it is Windows 8 that runs on ARM Processors, these are the same type of processors that the majority of other tablet OS’s run on (iPad and Android) as well as smartphones. ARM processors are also somewhat synonyms with System on a Chip (SOC), combine the data, RAM and GPU processing all together. One major benefit of ARM processors is the reduced power demand for these processors so longer life running on batteries is achieved. Windows 8 RT does share much of the code base with its “big brother” Windows 8 Pro, which run on x86 processors by Intel and AMD. The difference between RT and Pro is some functionality. RT will not have windows media player but will have the Office RT products included, but some of the functionality of Office applications will be missing, such as Excel Macros. Here is some good information about the two Office versions. And here is more information about Windows 8 RT.

The Surface with Windows RT is not the only device that will be running Windows 8 RT, Asus, Dell, Lenovo and others have also announced tablets that will run Windows 8 RT.

Microsoft has also announced that a future version of Surface with run Windows 8 Pro as well. Here is a good comparison of the two Surface versions.

Windows Phone 8

Windows Phone 8 launch event is set for October 29^th. This is big event, not only have Nokia, HTC and Samsung announced new phones that will run Windows Phone 8 but the actual operating system itself has been completed redone and is based on the same code as Windows 8 RT. This is huge! This means that now app developers can create an application once and it will run on Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 RT Tablets as well as the full Windows 8 Pro machines. When you really think about it, Windows Phone 7 gave use the “Metro” interface, now called Microsoft Design Style. This new interface and experience how now been adopted by Windows 8 and the Xbox 360. What this means is that all Microsoft interfaces are now using the same interface style, making learning/navigating one product very very very similar to the others. This to me really brings the Microsoft “3 Screens” story, Xbox, Phone and Browser/computer is very true to life now!

So my next phone for me is going to be the Nokia 920! My understanding is that this phone will be available from AT&T on November 4^th! Without pricing I am sold, this phone is solid and an excellent upgrade from my current Lumia 900. My only dilemma is how I am going to talk my wife out of her scheduled phone upgrade so I can get the 920 on the two year contract price and also how I talk her into the fact I need a Surface running Windows RT as well. Please send me suggestions and hints on how I get my new toys while maintaining my marriage! J

Last week in Toronto was the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). While I did not attend in person, I watched the majority of the Keynotes via the Digital WPC site. My company, Catapult Systems, was well represented at the conference and our sales, marketing, and executive do a tremendous job of ensuring that they make our Microsoft contacts feel like MVP’s at their own conference. The Catapult team does a great job meeting with the key Microsoft people during this week and ensuring Microsoft knows we are “The Microsoft Consulting Company”.

At WPC 12, Catapult was named the Worldwide Systems Management Partner of the year! This is a very nice feather in the cap! Catapult has been award Partner of the year four times for several categories. Catapult is a great company, a great Microsoft partner and I am very happy and proud to work for them. Here is a link to an article from the Redmond Partner Channel Magazine touting Catapult as the 7^th most competent Microsoft partners in the world, 3^rd in the US! http://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/07/01/microsofts-most-competent-partners.aspx

Back to the WPC 12 recap, the entire conference contained very positive news overall for Microsoft for Partners. Microsoft greatly values their partners and this is the time they show their love! One big announcement for the Office 365 platform is that Microsoft will now allow partners to fully re-sell and bill customers for Office 365 (The Office 365 Open Program). This has been something that many of the partners that work with SMB (Small and Mid-Sized Business) clients. I think this is probably good for the SMB partners and customers, but for Enterprise clients and Partners I do not see the fit. For one it will require a consultant company like Catapult to take on the burden of billing and collections from the clients and still being responsible to pay the up-stream bill from Microsoft. Also most Enterprise clients are not going to fully out-source the entire IT services. An SMB client might want to totally get out of the IT business and this is the benefit to the SMB partners, they can bundle into the direct billing pricing some managed services to fully take over the IT department for the client. There are other reasons why direct billing might not work or be available to Enterprise clients but I apologize I cannot divulge at this time due to my MVP and Catapult NDA agreements.

One other great announcement for partners around Office 365 revolves around Partner of Record (POR) fees. A little background, a Microsoft partner like say Catapult, which is a Cloud Accelerate Partner, and does the implementation for Office 365 is able to be set by the client as the POR the Partner receive points on the client’s license revenue from Microsoft. Prior to the announcement at WPC, a Partner received 18% of the license revenue the first year and 6% for the subsequent years. What Microsoft announced at WPC is that the first year Partner revenue is increasing based on the size of the client deployment. For deployments over 150 seats the first year revenue is increasing to 20%, 500 plus seats to 22% and 2,500 plus seats to 23%. This is a very good deal, it incentivizes the Partners to chase and work with larger clients for Office 365!

Microsoft has stated that they feel Office 365 will eclipse SharePoint as the fastest growing offers in the history of Microsoft! This is huge, and this means that Microsoft is taking the gloves off in the fight for the cloud versus Google (if you haven’t seen it, SlingRock, a Catapult company, created this great Video to explain the difference between Google Apps and Office 365). Basically Microsoft has put the Cloud as the number 1 priority for the upcoming fiscal 2013 year with Office 365 and Azure in the public cloud and Server 2012 and System Center (which can also manage Public Cloud) in the private cloud space!

Oh and did I mention the new Windows 8 client, which will be RTM in early August so customers on an EA agreement will be able to download it then. For the general consumers, Windows 8 (and hopefully Office 2013) will be available in October. With Windows 8 client, Windows Phone 8, and the Wave 15 (SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 next versions) this coming year, Microsoft has one, if not the, biggest launches/refreshes even! This coupled with the recent launch of Systems Center 2012 products and SQL 2012 basically means that almost every product in the Microsoft suite has be completely redesigned and launched within a calendar year!

And one more thing, Windows Azure, the service that now allows virtual machines to run in the cloud! I am working on setting up my entire lab within Windows Azure and will be blogging about this!

This past week I was on vacation with my family in the San Diego, CA area! We stayed at a great beach side resort in La Jolla and spent time at the beach, SeaWorld, Legoland and site seeing in San Diego. SeaWorld was great and I also really enjoyed touring the USS Midway, a US Aircraft Carrier that severed for 47 years and has been turned into a great museum on San Diego Harbor.

While on Vacation, Microsoft announced they are jumping into the tablet hardware race with the Surface, http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/about.aspx. They will have two versions, one running on ARM chips and one on x86 chips. I like the design, especially the keyboard built-in to the cover. Not sure I like then name, and this is because they have had Surface devices that came out a couple years ago touting touch technology, so when I finally saw a tweet about the Surface announcement I was a bit confused.

Seeing some supposed leaks about pricing, http://www.wpcentral.com/nope-we-havent-forgotten-about-surface-tablets Seems that these are ok prices, but I still want to know what processor power and memory available to make a better judgment on the leaked prices. Once way I think Microsoft should delay the deployment of Office for iPad. This is one of the biggest selling points for the Surface tablets over the fruit tablets. By delaying the availability for Office on iPads I believe Microsoft will have a broader adoption for their tablets running Windows 8 and a full Office experience!

The other big news came with the announcement about Windows Phone 8, http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2012/06/20/announcing-windows-phone-8.aspx. I really think having the workstation and the phone running the same kernel is key to the success of both. Now developers can develop one app for both platforms! While I am a bit discouraged about not being able to upgrade my Nokia 900 to the full Windows Phone 8 version, I do like that most generation 1 and 2 phones will get upgraded to Windows Phone 7.8, which will bring a bunch of the UI enhancements to older phones. But really, who am I kidding, once the new phones running Windows Phone 8 are available, I will be buying one. My daughter will most likely inherit my 900 as her “Phone”, she is currently using my original Samsung Focus.

Office 365 International User Group Meeting is this Tuesday, the 26^th at 8pm UTC/GMT. Head over to our website to get a meeting invite to add to your calendar and it includes the Lync Meeting info, http://www.office365union.com/Pages/Calendar.aspx

Here is the planned agenda:

1. Welcome and light discussion (how about we talk Windows 8 both on the desktop/tablet and the phone)
2. Presentation on RiverBed’s WAN acceleration for Cloud Computing – Brett Hill
3. Office 365 Exam Prep discussion
4. Office 365 Support discussion

Hope you can join the meeting and share in the discussions.

And I would like to leave you all with this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBlbnvKmf1g A great video developed by our @SlingRock Marketing sister company. I had some input into this video as part of a large company we are working with doing a comparison between Office 365 and Google Apps!

Friday the 1^st struck and I was cursed my receiving a very bad virus which ended up requiring me to re-build my company laptop. After getting it re-imaged with Windows 7 I made the decision to use the Windows 8 Release Preview that was made available on Thursday as my primary OS. So I did a quick basic setup of my newly imaged Win 7 laptop. I then split the single disk into two partitions. This will allow me to have a dedicated data drive for my data and a fall back to the Win 7 image if needed. I then downloaded the latest Windows 8 Release Preview. I then created a new VHD file, on the data file and followed these instructions to install Window 8 into the VHD, http://www.howtogeek.com/75286/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-and-8-without-re-partitioning-using-vhd/

So for the last 48 hours plus I have been running the latest “beta” release of Window 8 as my primary OS, and I got to say it is great! My laptop does not have a touch screen so it took just a little while to understand the mouse and keyboard shortcuts to navigate between the Metro Start screen and the desktop environment, but now it is second nature. I really do like the new Start/Metro interface and I am pretty comfortable with it. I am betting my ease of transition has been greatly helped by being a Windows Phone 7 user for almost two years. I see a bit of a learning curve for normal end users but it is not that steep! End user are very hard to work with but with some simple training the new Start screen and navigation can be learned and mastered. Also the new world of PC/Tablets are combining and the new hardware being prepped for the full Windows 8 launch will, mostly, be touch ready. Once this hurdle is passed by the end users they will see what I see, a great new OS that can be used to be both a powerful business platform and a great personal platform. Now, well it a few short months, a user can experience a great work/life experience from a single platform.

This will truly bring to life Microsoft’s great vision of the 3 screens, Mobile, Web and Desktop. Now with Windows 8 client and Windows Phone 8 and IE 10; it will enable a user to be very productive over several devices and not have to learn a new interface. Windows 8 brings a great touch experience to the Windows world. This new OS is primed to take over as the one platform for a business and personal use. Metro apps are targeted for the end user personal use (but have some great business use cases) and the desktop experience is still what the business needs!

Take a dive and try out Windows 8!

It has been a busy and big week for Microsoft! I want to again thank all the attendees that participated in the 2^nd Office 365 International User Group Meeting, quick recap here. The numbers of attendees almost doubled and our website http://www.office365union.com was launched and is adding more information and content almost daily.

Office 365 News:

Office 365 for U.S. Government announcement: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2012/05/30/announcing-office-365-for-government-a-us-government-community-cloud.aspx

Office 365 FISMA Certification: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2012/05/03/fisma-security-certification-office-365.aspx

Microsoft Celebrates U.S. Small Business with Office 365: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Celebrates-9-6-Million-US-Small-Businesses-with-Office-365-270578.shtml

Can Office 365 beat Google Apps? (Spoiler alert, obviously if I am posting it, the answer is YES): http://www.cio.com/article/705945/Can_Google_Apps_Unseat_Microsoft_Office_and_Exchange_

Great Office 365 Blogs to follow (From http://www.office365union.com/Pages/Resources.aspx)

Loryan Strant, Office 365 MVP- http://thecloudmouth.com

Rene Modery, Office 365 MVP – http://modery.net/

Jethro Seghers, Office 365 MVP – http://www.j-solutions.be

Martina Groom, Office 365 MVP – http://blog.atwork.at/

Sean McNeill – http://office365evangelist.com Kinda partial to this one J

Nick Bowyer – http://itprofessional.co.nz/

Robert Pearman – http://titlerequired.com/

Windows 8 Client and Windows Server 2012 News:

Windows 8 Client Release Preview Availability: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2012/May12/05-31Windows8RPPR.aspx I am in the process of installing this on my tablet while writing this post!

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate Availability: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/05/31/windows-server-2012-release-candidate-available-now.aspx Will be working on this update next for my laptop dual boot!

So I am taking a quick detour from all things Office 365 to check out and play with Server 8 Beta. I have been running Windows 8 Beta on my Acer Iconia Tab and like it. Takes a little bit to get use to no start button but the touch interface with the Metro Start page is great!

So Catapult Systems provided me with a very nice laptop, a Lenovo W520, it has a 450GB, 8 CPU’s with multicore and hyperthreading enabled and 16GB of RAM. I use Windows 7 as my normal day to day workstation OS on a dedicated 100GB drive. The remaining 350GB drive is used for some data and dual boots. I have had a dual boot with Server 2008 R2 for some time and run some VMs there. So I want to add Server 8 Beta as another boot option. I thought I could do the same thing I did with Server 2008 R2. I downloaded the VHD from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx?ocid=&wt.mc_id=TEC_108_1_33. It is nice that Microsoft provide a VHD download as well as an ISO download. So I moved the VHD to the root of my data drive and used BCDEDIT to setup another boot option.

Well that didn’t work, every time I tried to boot into the Server 8 Beta it gave me some errors about Bitlocker and tried to run repair but never did. So I did what I always do when in trouble, Bing to the rescue! I found the solution here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdeveloperpreviewgeneral/thread/20f4dea6-f42b-41c3-9ff3-71e0b8b82340

Seems Windows/Server 8 cannot use the Windows7/Server 2008 R2 Bootloader, you need to use the Windows 8 Bootloader. So it was pretty easy to get it setup following the below steps from the above link:

1. Boot into my Windows 7 OS
2. User Disk Manager to Attach VHD
3. Set a drive letter for the VHD attached drive, I used S: for Server J
4. Open CMD as Administrator
5. Run BCDBOOT s:Windows

That is all it took. The command loads the Bootloader from for Windows 8 from the VHD and sets up Server 8 Beta as a boot option. The only thing I had to do was run MSCONFIG to reset my Windows 7 OD as the default and change the default timeout for choosing a boot option (default is 30 seconds, I reduced to 5 seconds) I then rebooted my laptop, choose the Server 8 Beta option and off and running I was!

I will be playing around with Server 8 Beta, particularly the Hyper-V role, and might have a blog post or two about my experiences.