Archive for January, 2010

Microsoft BPOS Offerings – Overview

No Comments » Written on January 26th, 2010 by
Categories: Microsoft Online Services
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What do you do to get reliable service? Do you hire the best IT people on the market? Do you spend millions of dollars on the cutting edge hardware running the most cutting edge software?

Honestly, if you’re like most people, you will have a “good enough” system in place. This doesn’t mean that you have a solution that is held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but it does mean that there could always be an improvement somewhere in there. If you want to improve things like e-mail, collaboration or communication, Microsoft actually has quite a nice offering available!

What is BPOS?

BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Suite and consists of a set of tools that allow a business to move some high maintenance services off-premise to be hosted in the “cloud.” What this means to the customer it that they have an option to have certain Microsoft products hosted by Microsoft and then they can consume that software as a service. This concept of “Software as a Service” is a really big deal at Microsoft right now, and it’s all over the business world. Virtualizing what used to be a desktop application and consuming it as a web page is the new way to enable workers to be productive on almost any hardware, almost anywhere.

What Software as a Service can I get?

The major components of the BPOS offerings are the normal server-based platform products that Microsoft offers for business productivity:

  • Exchange Online – You get to have your e-mail hosted on an Exchange 2007 cluster with full accessibility via Outlook Anywhere, Outlook Web Access and ActiveSync. Right now each user starts off with a default of 5GB of mailbox storage space, but that may increase in the near future (you can increase it to 25GB right now, but 5 is the default).
  • SharePoint Online – Using SharePoint, you get to take advantage of the rich collaboration tools such as document, calendar and task sharing; user based permissions; and workflow content management features.
  • Office Live Meeting – Each user will have the ability to install the LiveMeeting client and create and participate in LiveMeeting events.
  • Office Communications Online – One of my favorite features of the BPOS offering is that each company gets to use Microsoft Office Communications Server. With this product you have fully integrated IM and presence capabilities without having to install and configure a pretty complex product.
  • Grab-bag of features from Forefront Online Protection for Exchange – With this added bonus, you get virus and spam filtering using Microsoft’s Forefront products.

In addition to those things, there are options that you can purchase to increase what you get out of the service from Archiving and Encryption of e-mail to Desktop Management using System Center Online Desktop Manager.

I’m a BIG company, is this offering right for me?

That is one of the beauties of the offerings provided by Microsoft Online Services! The service that I have been describing is aimed at smaller business (below 3000 seats). For our larger customers, there is another offering called BPOS-D with the “D” standing for Dedicated. This means that instead of being hosted in a multi-tenant environment, a specific set of servers will be set aside, just for you.

I’ll be posting more information about how the service works and some of the issues that companies have had to deal with in more posts in a whole BPOS series. Tune in for more!

To learn more about Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), contact us and signup for a free 30 day BPOS trial here.

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Posted in Microsoft Online Services

I love the new Deployment Assistant

No Comments » Written on January 15th, 2010 by
Categories: Exchange
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So, I was clicking around in some Exchange 2010 documentation and I ran across the Exchange 2010 Deployment Assistant. I was totally floored! I knew that it was out there, but after poking around in it, it actually looks like a tool that I would recommend to people! It covers various deployment scenarios and even if they don’t cover EVERYTHING, it’s a good way for an IT Pro to get up to speed on the steps necessary for deploying Exchange 2010. The scenarios that are covered are:

  • Upgrade from Exchange 2003
  • Upgrade from Exchange 2007
  • Upgrade from Exchange 2003 & 2007 (Mixed environment)
  • New installation of Exchange 2010

Features like a “Start over” button and a fairly simplistic scheme allow for the reader to really focus on the actual steps. The one thing that I want to point out is that they break down the installation of the Exchange 2010 roles and what you need to do for each role once it’s installed. It looks like the basic assumption is that every role is on a separate machine, to help divide the required steps. Installing each of the roles separately is NOT required, but it is helpful to know what each role actually required.

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Posted in Exchange

Populating Mailboxes with Dummy E-Mail

No Comments » Written on January 14th, 2010 by
Categories: Exchange, PowerShell
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I’ve been looking around for some good ways to flesh out an Exchange lab to test some migration scenarios. I’ve gotten a lot of good advice from people on good ways to do this, but I really wanted something simple and elegant. Here’s what I settled on:

The Concept

Ed Crowley, MVP and all-around good guy (I suspect, since I’ve never actually met the guy), suggested that I just simply use a script to build a bunch of RFC-822 formatted files with the *.eml extension and then dump them in the Transport folder. This will cause Exchange 2007 to look at them and deliver them to the mailbox that they need to go to. I remember using some hackery like this back when I was manually looking at spam on an Exchange 2003 box. I would gather up all the false positives and resubmit them to the dumpster for delivery. The real benefit of this method is that I can use PowerShell to generate those files a LOT more quickly than I can figure out a script to generate the actual SMTP submission.

The Script

Once I did the research on what the RFC-822 format actually requires, here’s the PowerShell script I wrote to generate mail messages for the three test mailboxes:

<#

This is a script to generat a bunch of *.eml files and dump them in the transport directory of Exchange

Tim Robichaux

1/14/2010

EMLGenerationScript.ps1

#>

$Users = @();

$Users = "TimTest1","TimTest2","TimTest3";

$Body = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam id mauris sit amet nisl <snip> rutrum tempus, enim nisi sed.";

foreach ($User in $Users) {

$Counter = 1;

While ($Counter -lt 100){

$To = "To: " + $User + "@testdomain.com";

$From = "From: " + "tim@testdomain.com";

$Subject = "Subject: " + "This is test message `#$Counter";

$GUID = [system.guid]::newguid();

echo $From $To $Subject "`n" $Body | out-file "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\Pickup\$GUID.eml" -Encoding ASCII;

$Counter += 1;

}

}

The Outcome

It looks like the server that I’m populating is a VM, so I’ve totally swamped the transport service as it’s taking quite a while to deliver the messages. Another interesting thing is that it looks like it’s delivering them based on the order of the GUID, rather than the timestamp, so they’re showing up in all sorts of odd order.

I have to label this project as a success so far. I wanted to be able to generate some content quickly and I have to say that the hour I’ve spent getting this straight was worth it, balanced on the time it would have taken to populate messages by hand.

Lessons Learned and Future Revisions

There are a couple of really important things I learned from this. First off, the cmdlet “out-file” defaults to the system default. This means that if you are using it for generating some raw text, you have to explicitly set “ASCII” or whatever you need. I’ve run into this gottcha before, but it’s no less frustrating. Another thing that I learned from this is that older versions of PowerShell don’t always like comments and things like that. It’s often quite confusing about what you can do on a given system with the version of PowerShell that’s installed.

In future revisions, I want to build this into a user account generation script so that at the time of generation, I create the user, generate the mailbox and then populate it. Another thing that I would like to do is set up an array or pool of “From” addresses to give a little bit variety. Also a nice feature would be to add a “-FromFile” switch that would allow me to populate a bunch of the variables from a config file.

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Posted in Exchange, PowerShell