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Overnight and today I have been working on Migrating from Windows SBS 2011 Standard server to Windows Server 2012 Essentials with Office 365 Hosted services.   The whole process appeared to be going pretty well until this morning when I noticed that Outlook 2010 could not connect to any of our existing internal mailboxes.   (Though the ones that were already connected… Read more →

Well, its finally here.   Windows Server 2012 Essentials.   http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2012/10/09/windows-server-2012-essentials-released-to-manufacturing-available-for-evaluation-today.aspx “Hi, I’m Sinead O’Donovan, Director of Program Management on the Windows Server Essentials team. Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a significant milestone in our efforts to help cloud-enable small businesses and home offices. It is designed to help you protect business data, to allow highly secure access to the information you… Read more →

Wow!, what a load of hassle just to get some updates onto my Windows 8 RTM machine. I was getting this error, amongst others, on the Windows 8 Client.   Error 80246003.    The Update Fix tool did nothing, and many forum posts pointed me to removing the SoftwareDistribution folder (don’t do that!) or running through this article (don’t do this either).… Read more →

For the past couple of days, I have been struggling with a HP printer on Windows 7 that refused, no matter the settings, to print in A3 size from Adobe PDF Reader.   The fix was difficult to find, but easy to implement, here is how: Go to Printers, Get into the properties of the print.  Click on Advanced tabClick on… Read more →

OK, I have to admit that I obviously completely missed the memo on this.    Trust me, if I have then so have a ton of you…. Windows Server Essentials 2012 will allow you to migrate past 25 users and keep (almost) all of the toolsets you need.   Taken directly from the Official SBS Blog: Hi, I’m Cristian Molina, Lead Program… Read more →

SkyDrive is a pretty awesome file sharing and sync tool available for free from Microsoft.   With Windows 8 around the corner, this and the new Outlook.com mail service are going to be more and more popular.   Anyway, I recently replaced Dropbox and Sugarsync with Skydrive mainly because I am sure that this service from Microsoft is better and will be… Read more →

Well, I was mid draft of a really long blog post about the quite astonishing announcement from the Small Business Server team, when yesterday I got the legs taken out from under me again by this announcement from the Microsoft Game Studios. What a Disaster Seriously, the two key products that I have loved and specialised in over the past 15… Read more →

Worth pointing out to my readers that are interested in Microsoft Flight this excellent and frank interview that Tom Allensworth had with Joshua Howard, the Team lead of Microsoft Flight. Well worth the read. Tags: Microsoft+Flight, Flight, Microsoft, Joshua+Howard, Tom+Allensworth, AVSIM Read more →

SBS Essentials 2011 is a great product, and one that we are selling a lot more of to our client base.   Normally migrations from SBS2003 to SBS2011 Essentials are relatively painless, but I had a case recently where after the migration was partially complete, we could not use the SBS2011 Essentials Add user wizard, which kept failing with this message:  … Read more →

            Well, here is something that I saw at the MVP summit but was under NDA on, which was just lifted for this Flight Announcement a moment ago! Microsoft Flight have announced the very very excellent Alaska downloadable content pack that will be available for Microsoft Flight sometime in the future.   I have to say that… Read more →