Nick Whittome

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2013/07/29/update-rollup-kb2855336-released-for-windows-server-2012.aspx Products which belong to Essentials and Small Business Server family might crash if virtualized on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V host in the event that the host crashes or loses power. The active directory instance may become corrupted and might result in blue screen/bug check with error: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start because of the following error:  %hs  Error… Read more →

…Microsoft stopped advertising like this: You see, the problem is that you cannot in fact mix these two plans.    Even though they are displayed side by side on the Microsoft website.    If you actually read the details, you can see that the M plans, like the P plans, cannot be mixed with E plans. The problem here is that most… Read more →

Well, that is a mouthful, but its the new official MVP expertise title for me…. Read into that what you will…..   Read more →

This is the best write-up I have seen on Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 from Paul Thurrott.    The guy is a machine for churning out great articles quickly!    http://winsupersite.com/windows-server-2012/windows-server-2012-essentials-r2-preview For me, the greatest thing coming with R2 is the fact that Essentials is now a role.   So many clients we have will make use of this! Read more →

We wrote this up for the NTES blog today.   Office 365, wave 15, are having DNS woes this morning… http://www.ntesitsupport.ie/2013/office-365-wave-15-current-outage/   Read more →

EDIT: For some reason this post didn’t show last month!  Fixed! Microsoft have released the Windows Server Essentials 2012 Update Rollup 2.    I highly recommend installing this update!    The link to the list of issues resolved in this update is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2824160 Major issues that are resolved by this update Issue 1 Assume that you have the Microsoft Office 365… Read more →

….but that isn’t the whole story. There must have been a problem with this XP Machine for a while, but the Wave 15 upgrade made it stand out.    The problems seemed to stem from a missing certificate which meant that the outlook.com chain was broken.  I was getting “The Issuer of this certificate could not be found” on the outlook.com… Read more →

So, you have a work laptop, or a nicely running non-domain based home network.  But alas, you have no home server options anymore… You are left with the option of installing a Windows Server 2012 Essentials machine (which whilst expensive, really is a great home server option).    The problem is, you don’t want the machines in your home in a… Read more →

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 →