|
|
Browse by Tags
-
Webcasts  
|
-
I had a few administrators and end-users ask about how to set up mail forwarding for their inbox once this has been enabled on the domain. Mail forwarding is achieved through inbox rules, and I have documented the steps for this below.
- Log onto Exchange Labs
- Click 'Options' (top right-ish of screen)
- Click the 'Organize' tab
- Click the Inbox Rules' tab
- Click the 'New Rule' menu
- Select 'Create a new rule for arriving messages' and a New Rule Window will appear.
- Select 'Forward or Redirect' and check 'Redirect the message to people or distribution lists'. This rule will be added to the rule description on the left.
- Click the 'people or distribution lists hyperlink'
- In the Recipients box type the email address you want to forward to - eg jack@hotmail.com. You can also select another address from the GAL or your contacts list if this has been created already.
- Click OK
- Give the rule a name in the Name box
- Click 'Save'
Jonny
|
-
Live@edu sites 
|
-
Hello All, Filmed at the Royal Festival on 1st October, please find below the session by Paolo Barone on Microsoft Surface: If for any reason you cannot view this clip, please do let me know. Best wishes, Allison 
|
-
For those of you who joined us at the Royal Festival Hall on 1st October and, especially for those who were otherwise engaged, please find below the session by Thore Graepel, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela and Ralf Herbrich on Microsoft Research Talk on CS Inside Halo 3 True Ranking System: If you are unable to view the above clip, please do let me know. Best wishes, Allison 
|
-
Hello All, For those of you who came to the Royal Festival Hall and, more importantly, for those of you who couldn’t join us on the day, please find below the session by Jay Girotto, The Science Behind Live Search: If you have difficulty in viewing this clip, please do let me know. Best wishes, Allison 
|
-
Hello All, For those of you who came to the Royal Festival Hall and, more importantly, for those of you who couldn’t join us on the day, please find below the session by Andy McLoughlin, Lessons from Starting a Software Company: If for any reason you cannot view the clip, please contact me. Best wishes, Allison 
|
-
Hello All, For those of you who made it along to the Royal Festival Hall and, especially for those of you who had other commitments, please find below Steve Ballmer’s Keynote Speech:
If you have any difficulty in viewing the clip, please don’t hesitate to let me know. With best wishes, Allison 
|
-
A few days ago a customer asked me about automating the CSV_Parser.ps1 script to create and manage mailboxes. They wanted to run this script against an updating csv file containing student identity information on a scheduled basis. Followers of this blog will know that when I demo PowerShell, I explicitly run through all of the steps required to get things motoring...manually entering in admin credentials and then whatever comes next. This is fine... but you may have been wondering what to do if you want to hard-code your admin credentials so that you do not have to enter them manually.
I was interested in knowing how to do this as well... so I asked someone that had a clue, Richard Wakeman, for his input. He recommended not making modifications to the CSV_Parser script, but instead create a short script to capture the credentials and then call the CSV_Parser script from within that. An example of what this looks like is below:
# capture the admin LiveID username in a variable
$Username = "admin@yourdomain.edu"
# capture the admin LiveID password in a variable. Note, that it is stored as a secure string
$Password = ConvertTo-SecureString 'YourPassword' -AsPlainText -Force
# populate the $Livecred PowerShell credential with $Username and $Password
$Livecred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $Username, $Password
# call the CSV_Parser.ps1 file in a new shell, feeding in the usual parameters
./CSV_Parser.PS1 –UsersFile “C:\Source\users.csv” -RemoteURL https://ps.exchangelabs.com/powershell -LiveCredential $Livecred -LogDirectory "C:\Logging\" -LogVerbose $true -ValidateAction $true
# Gracefully remove the runspace so as not to leave any orphaned connections
Get-RunSpace | Remove-RunSpace
So there you have it...happy automating!
Jonny
|
-
One cool thing about a hosted service is that changes can be made that benefit end customers on an on-going basis. Over the weekend, the Exchange team have just rolled out the ability to reset a password in the OWA Options for Exchange Labs administrators. Using it is simple: After signing in to Exchange Labs as an administrator, navigate to ‘OWA Options’ or just go to https://www.exchangelabs.com/ecp and make sure you have selected to manage ‘My Organization’ First thing you’ll see is the Mailboxes UI. Search for the user you want to do the password reset on, highlight the username, then click ‘Reset Password’, a dialog box will open and you can change the users password. 
…and that’s it! Happy password resetting! Don't forget, you can also do this programmatically. Jonny 
|
-
For those existing Live@edu customers out there that need to log a support call for any reason, you can now do so by using our new eForm here: https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlpc&ct=eformts. All incidents that are logged will be routed to a human working at Microsoft :) I get to see some of the things that customers ask about from time, and sometimes these can be addressed by the help you can find on Technet, or this blog (but remember, I am not an official document source, just a field-based blogger when I am in between customer engagements :-) ). Also, don't forget, you can also check out overall service status for Exchange Labs here. I hope that all helps if you ever need it. Jonny 
|
-
I had been intending to do a post on this for some time, but like a lot of my intentions, they sometimes do not get much further than that :) We have a lot of Exchange based offerings today, and Dmitry Sotnikov has just produced a nice, concise overview of his take on what we offer on his blog. Some customers do find a lot of this challenging to get their heads around at times... but I do hope it demonstrates that we offer choice, and that we are serious about our Software plus Services strategy with some tangible offerings :) Thanks Dmitry! Jonny 
|
-
One of the more popular Live services that customers like to provide their students with is SkyDrive; I even make use of it myself through this blog to distribute some files. The SkyDrive team have just announced on their team blog that some improvements are in the works, and will be arriving with you all soon. This is part of the overall Wave 3 upgrade to many of the other Live Services. These include: - An increase in the storage limit from 5GB to 25GB - a 500% increase!
- Improved facilities for working with photos, including a new slide show feature that is Silverlight enhanced, and the ability to order prints
- The ability to download a bunch of files at once in a .zip
- Improved file sharing options
All of this is coming soon...! Enjoy! Jonny 
|
-
Hello Everyone, The Windows Server HPC team have created a special award for UK Software Design competitors who use the Windows HPC Server in their Software Design solution of the Imagine Cup. Microsoft want to stimulate the thinking of UK students about how HPC can change the world. We want students to think big, and to use the world’s fastest systems to solve the world’s biggest problems. That’s what the HPC prize in the Imagine cup’s about. You know how mutli-core is about writing a program that uses more than one cpu? Well HPC (High Performance Computing) is the next step up: it’s about programming for hundreds or thousands of CPUs. This is for all the stuff that needs more compute than you can get from a single server. Think about online gaming, when you have hundreds of people simultaneously modifying a visual database – that needs more power than you can get one a single CPU. Think about calculating the temperature over 20,000 land sites in the UK and then projecting that forward into the future, one minute at a time, for 500 years. This all needs heavy duty computing – and that’s HPC. It’s the A380 of the computing world. To win the HPC prize you don’t need to have a working system – but tell us how your design would scale-out from one CPU to a thousand. And explain how all that power would help. The award will be given to the Software Design teams who demonstrate technical competency with HPC, have a real world need for high performance computing and present the commercial viability of their implementation. HPC is used in lots of places – last year the two winners used HPC for genetic engineering and motorway design. People in the UK use HPC for everything from theology to thermodynamics, archaeology to aerodynamics, gaming to genetics. How could you use it? If you’ve got questions please contact your local HPC or SuperComputing Centre. Or email Michael... Good luck and hope to see you at the finals. Best, Allison 
|
-
I had a conversation with a customer recently about setting mail forwards administratively. They had 2 scenarios we discussed...perhaps there are some more you can think of? One scenario was in the context of a migration to our Exchange Labs service where the institution had a list of all of the email addresses students used (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc). They wanted to provide students with their new Exchange Labs email addresses and set a forward on all of these mailboxes so that mail got delivered in 2 places until such time that students familiarized themselves enough with Exchange Labs to make the permanent switch. The other scenario was where the institution wanted to investigate all incoming mail to a student's mailbox without the student knowing that this was happening or being able to turn this off. Both of these can be achieved using the same method I outline below, but there are some things you should be aware of. The command to do this in PowerShell, assuming you are pushed onto a runspace is: Set-Mailbox jackjones -DeliverToMailboxAndForward:$True -ForwardingAddress dannyk ...where jackjones is the mailbox that you want to set the forwarding on, and dannyk is the name of the mailbox/contact/group/etc that you want mail forwarded to. You can use the mailbox name, the SMTP address, the DN here; I am just keeping it short for convenience. The key thing to be aware of is that you can only use this command to forward mail to objects that exist in the Exchange Labs Global Address List. So in the first scenario outlined above, if you wanted to build this instruction into some bigger script that did this forward for 1000's of users, you would need to ensure that the target email addresses are all in your GAL as mail-enabled contacts first. So this is not really a great option as you would end up with double entries for every individual you are managing. A much better way to do this is to tell users to set up their own forwarding through the Outlook Web Access UI or Outlook 2007 interfaces through inbox rules. For the second scenario, this method would be a much better choice; the setting does not show up in the user interface. Hope this helps... if options change in the future, I will let you know. Jonny 
|
|
|
|