One of the least favorite tasks of many administrators is to document. Good administrators also don’t want to manually do things when it can be automated. This is where Active Directory Topology Diagrammer (ADTD) can help to automate documenting your Active Directory environment.
Recently I have been working on a new Active Directory OU design and used the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer to create a Visio diagram for the AS-IS situation. I have to say it worked great. Keep in mind though that it will show the OUs and not any other containers.
Besides documenting AD OUs, the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer can document many other things as well. Take a look at the article “How To Use The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer” or play around with it yourself to see what it can do.
The tool can also be very helpful when:
- You’re in a new environment and need to get a quick overview of the Active Directory.
- When there’s no documentation available or when the available documentation is outdated.
- When you’re auditing the quality of documentation.
For more tools, take a look at my website: http://bjornhouben-web.sharepoint.com/Lists/Applications/Summary.aspx
Tags: Active Directory, Active Directory Topology Diagrammer, AD, ADTD, automate, automation, Diagram, document, document active directory, document AD, documentation, Microsoft, tool, Visio, Windows, Windows Server
At TechEd 2013 North America, Microsoft has announced a lot of new stuff. Many of the TechEd sessions have been recorded and can be viewed on Channel9. I’ll try to blog more about it as well.
For Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 the Microsoft Virtual Academy is hosting jump start sessions next month. For more information and registration take a look at this blog post.
Tags: channel9, ICT, jump start, jumpstart, Microsoft, Microsoft Virtual Academy, MVA, server 2012 r2, system center 2012 r2, teched, teched north america 2013, windows 2012 r2, Windows Server 2012 R2
Future events
Before starting with my summary of 2nd DuPSUG meeting, I want to inform you about some future events first:
- Dutch PowerShell User Group Meetings
- To keep track of news, use the links to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the RSS feed on the DUPSUG website.
- In the future, the plan is to meet every June and November.
- The next meeting will probably be at November 7th at VX Company.
- The idea is that community members will also present their own experiences, use cases, scripts, tools, methods. If you want to do so, please contact the DUPSUG group.
- Remko Weijnen | Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn might be one of the people presenting at a future DUPSUG meeting.
- Jeff Wouters might be able to arrange one or more copies of the PowerShell Deep Dives book from Manning since he’s contributing to it. The book isn’t complete and released yet, but Manning has an Early Access Program which means that you will get access to the completed chapters now and will get the full version when it’s done. Until June 13 there’s even a promotion to get a 40%-50% discount and it also applies to other great PowerShell books.
- Inter Access Microsoft Summer Summit (Hilversum, July 2nd 2013 17:30-22:00 CET)
This event
Last Thursday I attended the second Dutch Powershell User Group meeting in Hilversum hosted at Inter Access and sponsored by Sapien Technologies Inc.
Just like I mentioned in the summary of the first meeting there were manu interesting sessions that provided me with more insight and inspired me for practical uses. It was also great to discuss current developments with other knowledgeable and passionate people. The main differences with the previous meeting was that:
- This meeting was completely in Dutch, while the previous one was completely in English. As such, the workshop descriptions were also in Dutch and you needed to bring your own laptop.
- The format of this meeting was more of a workshop, while the previous one was mainly presentations.
Thanks go out to all attendees, especially those presenting, organizing and sponsoring the event. Special thanks to Daniel Bot for helping me fix a (stupid mistake in a) script I was working on 🙂
Goodies and giveaways
Workshops / presentations
And now on with the really interesting stuff, the sessions/workshops. Below are the sessions with some info about the speakers and their sessions. I also added notes I took and other information I looked up afterwards. If you come across any errors or have comments, please leave a reply so I can fix it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: $PSBoundParameters, -asjob, -passthru, Azure, background jobs, Cloud, Compliance Settings, DCM, Desired Configuration Management, Desired State Configuration, devops, DHCP, DHCP failover, DNS, DSC, DuPSUG, Dutch PowerShell User Group, error handling, Event, Exe, Filters, flickr, forms, Functions, graphical user interface, gui, GUI applications, high availability, Hilversum, HTA, HTML Application, Integrated Scripting Environment, Inter Access Microsoft Summer Summit, InterAccess, InterAccess Microsoft Summer Summit, Interface Video Training, IPv4, ISE, Jaap Brasser, Jeff Wouters, job, jobs, Manning, module, msi, nslookup, Out-Gridview, parallel, parallelization, passthrough, Ping, PowerGUI, Powershell, PowerShell 3, Powershell 3.0, PowerShell 4.0, PowerShell Deep Dives, PowerShell GUI, PowerShell GUI applications, PowerShell Runspace, PowerShell RunSpaces, Powershell v3, PowerShell Workflow, presentation, PS2Exe, Resolve-DNSName, Richard Siddaway, runspace, runspaces, SCCM, script block, script blocks, scriptblock, scriptblocks, ShowUI, splat, splatting, System Center Configruation Manager, Test-Connection, The MSI Wizard, VisualStudio, VX Company, Windows, Windows 2012, Windows 2012 Server, Windows 8.1, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, WinForms, workflow, workshop, WPF
Even though the website http://office.microsoft.com provides a comparison of the different Office 365 plans, it is not always entirely clear which features are available or what the restrictions are.
Luckily, Jasper Osgaard created a great blog post comparing the different plans in more detail without having to go through tons of documentation:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/lystavlen/archive/2013/03/30/office-365-comparing-p-m-and-e-plans.aspx
Tags: comparison, ICT, Microsoft, Office 365, Office 365 comparison, Office 365 Plan, Office 365 plan comparison, Office 365 plans, Office365
About 3 weeks before the upgrade took place, I received e-mails informing me about the upcoming update. It included the plan date and also mentioned I could postpone the update. As the date of the upgrade approached I also received mails with information of new features and what had to be done.
The upgrade itself took place on the date that was communicated to me and when it was done I got a mail informing me that the upgrade had been completed. When I logged on to the Office 365 admin center (https://portal.microsoftonline.com/) I immediately found this to be a big improvement. It also showed me some alerts containing links to information about changes and tasks that still needed to be performed like upgrading SharePoint sites.
I didn’t expect any big issues, but I was a bit worried if my SharePoint customizations would keep working correctly:
It is possible to leave the SharePoint site the way it is (at least with this upgrade), but you can also upgrade it and take advantage of the new options. If you are considering upgrading the SharePoint site, you can perform a health check and you can also request an upgrade evaluation copy of the site collection before you actually upgrade.
Probably because of my customizations, the Site Collection Health Check found some problems related to Customized Files that could result in unexpected visuals or behavior.
For now, everything seems to be working fine though on my upgrade evaluation copy of the site collection, so I’ll probably upgrade my site collection soon. If you want to, you can take a look at both the pre-upgrade SharePoint site and the post-upgrade SharePoint site. The evaluation post-upgrade version will only be available until the 23rd of June.
What I did notice, is that the interface of the services have improved and have also been changed to better suit for touch devices. By example the white space between navigation items seems to have increased and everything is a bit bigger.
After the upgrade, I also had to restart some Office 2013 apps once.
Of course the upgrade to Wave 15 provides many more advantages, but in this post I only wanted to share my service upgrade experience without really changing anything. All in all, I think the upgrade experience went very well.
Tags: Exchange, Exchange online, experience, Lync, Lync online, Office, Office 365, service, service upgrade, service upgrade experience, Sharepoint, Sharepoint online, upgrade, wave 15, wave 2013
The PowerShell Summit took place in North America in April and many of the prominent PowerShell people were there. And from what I read there were a lot of great presentations.
The PowerShell Summit 2013 North America conference schedule can be found here. Thanks to Don Jones and PowerShell.org (most of) these sessions are available for download: http://powershell.org/wp/2013/04/22/summit-downloads/
Videos are available here:
http://powershell.org/wp/2013/05/07/powershell-summit-videos/
So even if you weren’t able to attend, you can still learn from their presentations. Or if you did attend, you can review them again.
Tags: conference, conference schedule, Don Jones, download, downloads, North America, Powershell, PowerShell Summit, PowerShell Summit 2013, PowerShell Summit 2013 North America, PowerShell.org, schedule, session, sessions
The recordings for “Using Microsoft VDI to Enable New Workstyles Jump Start” are available now on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA).
These Jump Starts are a great way to quickly get up-to-date about a subject. Also there’s a great team of people working behind the scenes to answer questions and provide more detailed resources. Other attendees often also share their experiences and provide valuable insights. So be sure to check out the Q&A log as well.
Tags: Cloud, Free, Hyper-V, ICT, jump start, jumpstart, Learning, Microsoft Virtual Academy, MVA, Private Cloud, recording, Using Microsoft VDI to Enable New Workstyles Jump Start, VDI, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, virtualization, Windows
Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) is hosting the “Windows Azure for IT Professionals Jump Start” at May 16th. Information and registration is available on the website: https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/Windows-Azure-for-IT-Professionals?CR_CC=200206715
I’ve attended a couple of Jump Starts and I think it’s a great way to quickly get up-to-date about a subject. Also there’s a great team of people working behind the scenes to answer questions and provide more detailed resources. Other attendees often also share their experiences and provide valuable insights.
Also it’s only been a couple of weeks since Windows Azure IaaS is live in production backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and ready for your production applications. Therefore it is a great time to start learning more about it.
I hope to see you there.
Tags: Cloud, Free, Hyper-V, ICT, jump start, Learning, Microsoft Virtual Academy, MVA, Public Cloud, System Center, System Center 2012, virtualization, Windows, Windows Azure for IT Professionals Jump Start
In yesterday’s blog post I mentioned that I was looking forward to being upgraded to the new Office 365 in the next 4 weeks.
I did encounter an issue however that I was not able to open files on SharePoint using the desktop version of Office 2013. I kept on getting the message: “call us overprotective, but we need to verify your account before opening this document”. This never succeeded and I couldn’t modify my file using Office 2013. The Office Web App version was working fine though.
After googling around a bit, I found out that this was a common issue for people that are planned to be migrated (pre-upgrade). The solution/workaround for this issue is described here:
Office 365 pre-upgrade users cannot open or synchronize SharePoint files after the Office 2013: March 12, 2013 update is installed
Tags: call us overprotective but we need to verify your account before opening this document, Cloud, Excel, Microsoft, Office, Office 2013, Office 365, OneNote, Powerpoint, Public Cloud, Sharepoint, Sharepoint online, upgrade, Visio, Word
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