Category Archives: microsoft

cloud computing, microsoft, professional, software, windows

Offline web mail in new Office 365 and Exchange 2013 Outlook Web Access

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Microsoft has posted details of the forthcoming Exchange 2013, and one of the features that intrigues me is the ability to use the browser-based email client, Outlook Web Access (OWA), offline.

Since offline use is one of the primary issues with web applications, this is a key feature. It would be particularly interesting if it worked with mobile devices such as the Apple iPad or Google Android tablets.

I asked about this and was directed to this table, which states that offline access is supported in Internet Explorer 10 or later, Safari 5.1 or later, and Chrome 18 or later. Offline is not supported on mobile browsers, nor on “Windows 8 tablet”.

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I have not seen Microsoft use the term Windows 8 tablet in a technical sense before. I presume it means Metro-style IE and Windows RT?

Next, I went to my preview Office 365 account on a Windows 8 tablet (ha!) but in desktop IE, and noticed that OWA already has an offline option there, which I presume is essentially Exchange 2013 though perhaps with some differences.

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I selected the option and was prompted to confirm.

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I clicked Yes and was prompted to add to favourites.

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Then I closed the browser, turned on Airplane mode, and restarted.

Success! I was able to return to OWA, compose and send an email. Note the Airplane mode icon in the screen grab.

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Looking at IE settings I also had an offline cache set for outlook.com.

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I closed the browser, re-enabled the network, and restarted.

Bad news, my first email was never sent. I tried again though, and this time confirmed that, while offline, my email was in an unsent folder.

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However, when I went back online I could not see it in sent items. I made a third attempt. Eventually though, both my second and third attempts succeeded and I got the email.

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That’s good, but I have a few observations (bearing in mind that this is preview software):

1. The experience in Metro-style IE is terrible. You can enable offline there (I tried) but it does not work. And where is the cache setting for Metro-style IE, is it shared with desktop IE? Does it have one? This whole relationship between the two forms of IE 10 in Windows 8 is obscure and difficult.

2. What happened to my first email? Did I not in fact click send (I am fairly sure I did)? Losing emails is bad and can be costly.

3. This offline setting would be particularly useful on mobile devices so I would like to know what plans Microsoft has to get it working.

microsoft, sharepoint

Recovering documents from SharePoint 2010

I mentioned the other day that an update broke my SharePoint installation. The timing was bad as I was just about to leave the office for a few days, so as it turned out I did not get to focus on this properly until last weekend. This virtual server is backed up nightly. I restored from before the failure but it still did not work. Perhaps there was an update pending that was not fully applied until the server restarted, so that even my “good” backup was bad.

The error was frustrating. Accessing a SharePoint site got me a 503, service unavailable. I could run either psconfig or the SharePoint Configuration Wizard without error, but it still did not work. The event log showed a bunch of errors that made little sense to me, including those annoying DCOM activation errors, and database login errors when the accounts concerned had valid logins.

It was wasting too much time so I went for plan B. Reinstall SharePoint from scratch and restore the content database.

This was actually easier than I expected. I backed up WSS_Content using SQL Server Management Studio. I then removed everything SharePoint, and deleted a couple of remnants in IIS. Reinstalled and everything worked.

After that it was simply a matter of attaching the old content database. Well, nearly that simple. My first attempt failed because SharePoint was not fully patched and had an earlier schema than the content database. I manually downloaded and applied the latest SharePoint hotfix rollup. Then I attached the old content database to a new SharePoint site, and everything came up just as before.

I find this reassuring, as keeping documents as blobs in SQL Server is just a little scary from a recovery perspective.

Even if attaching the database were to fail, it is not too bad. You can write code to write out the documents to files and recover them that way. There are some clues here.

microsoft, windows

Intranet and Mail hassles with Windows 8

Microsoft has made changes to networking in Windows 8, mainly I presume for security reasons, but there are odd side-effects, at least in the Release Preview version.

One is that if you browse to a site on your intranet in the Metro-style browser, you are likely to get a connection failure. This is what I get when trying to get to my Logitech Media Server (the Squeezebox server):

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A bunch of useless, misleading suggestions and that is it.

The solution is to go to desktop IE, Tools, Internet options, Security, Trusted Sites, Sites and add the target URL to the list of Trusted sites. Now it works fine in Metro-style IE:

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I got exactly the same behaviour with Outlook Web Access on the intranet. It did not work from Metro IE until I added the URL to Trusted Sites.

I am not sure if this is “expected behaviour”; I hope it is not, because it is a significant annoyance. The answer may lie in Microsoft’s Enhanced Protected Mode, described here, but although this states that Metro-style apps cannot connect by default to a server running on the same machine, it does not suggest that the entire intranet is blocked. The security benefits are also compromised if you can easily bypass them by running desktop IE.

While I am on the subject, I am still puzzled by the problems the Metro-style Mail app has with connecting to Exchange when this is configured with a self-signed certificate. I obtained a free SSL Cert from StartCom and confirmed that using a cert from a recognised issuer does fix the problem, though it is not a perfect solution for me because of the detail of my setup.

I would still like to know exactly what is stopping the self-signed approach from working. There are numerous discussions on the subject (this is one of the best) but I have not seen any definitive explanation from Microsoft. Following a suggestion from that thread, I have tried publishing the CRL (Revocation List) on the internet but that has not fixed it for me.

Security is great but we do want to get stuff done with our computers and some of this stuff just seems obstructive. Even if Microsoft is doing the right thing here, that is no excuse for false error messages. Mail, for example, reports “Unable to connect. Ensure that the information you’ve entered is correct.” How hard would it be to report a problem with the server certificate?

microsoft

Microsoft financials: still growing in the cloud era, but watch out for tablets

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I am in the habit of putting Microsoft’s results into a simple table. Here are the latest:

Quarter ending June 30th 2012 vs quarter ending June 30th 2011, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Profit Change
Client (Windows + Live) 4145 -598 2397 -511
Server and Tools 5092 +568 2095 +409
Online 735 +55 -6672 -5927
Business (Office) 6291 +339 4100 +399
Entertainment and devices 1779 +292 -263 -276

It is easy to spot the stars: Server and Office.

It is also easy to spot the weaklings, especially Online, which reported a breathtaking loss thanks to what the accounts call a “goodwill impairment charge”. This translates to an admission that the 2007 acquisition of aQuantive was a complete waste of money.

Mixed signals from Entertainment and devices, where revenue is up but a loss is reported. Since this segment munges together Xbox and Windows Phone, it seems plausible that the phone is the main culprit here. Microsoft identifies payments made to Nokia and the addition of Skype as factors.

Windows is down, in part because Microsoft’s upgrade offer for Windows 8 means some revenue is deferred, though one would imagine that worldwide reports of stagnant PC sales are a contributory factor as well.

If you add up the figures, and allow for overheads, it comes to a wafer-thin operating income of $192 million and a $0.06 loss per share.

What do the figures tell us? Two things: Microsoft still makes a ton of money, and that it is exceedingly bad at acquisitions. I am not sure how a company can mislay $6.2bn without heads rolling somewhere, but that is not my area of expertise.

Microsoft’s Server 2012 family has impressed me so my instinct is that we will see good figures continue there.

On the Office side, it is not all Word and Excel. “Exchange, SharePoint and Lync together grew double-digits,” Microsoft said in its earnings call, adding that Lync revenue is up 45%.

That said, how many server licences can you sell in the cloud era? How can Microsoft grow Azure without cannibalising its server sales?

It is tempting to state, like James Governor at Redmonk, that this is The End of Software: Microsoft Posts a Loss for the First Time ever. Microsoft’s figures have stubbornly refused to prove this though; and a quarter where revenue has risen though poisoned by an acquisition disaster is not the moment to call it.

Microsoft has survived the cloud. The bigger question now is whether it can also survive tablets eating into its Windows sales, not helped by Google pushing out Nexus 7 at casual purchase price – see my first take here.

All eyes then on the new Windows 8 and Office 2013.

cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft Office 2013 SkyDrive Pro in action, with offline documents

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Microsoft Office 2013, combined with Office 365 or the new SharePoint, introduces SkyDrive Pro. This is an area where users can store documents online, similar to the public SkyDrive, but as part of an organization’s SharePoint site or Office 365 team site.

One features which I was glad to see is the ability to store documents offline in a special Explorer folder. These are kept synchronized with the online storage.

Here is how this works with my preview Office 365 account. I log in to the online portal, and click the SkyDrive option in the menu.

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I see my SkyDrive files.

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At top right is a SYNC hyperlink. Click that, and this sets up synchronization to a special Explorer folder, which in my case is called SkyDrive @ Office Next. This is not just a shortcut to a network location. The documents remain there if you are working offline.

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This excellent feature seems to depend on a new client called SkyDrive Pro Preview which has an icon in the notification area and also shows up in Task Manager.

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If the SkyDrive Pro client is not installed and you attempt to sync your online files, the bad old SharePoint Workspace shows up instead. The consumer SkyDrive client will not do. SharePoint Workspace also supports offline files, but does not integrate with Explorer and is prone to go wrong.

Now here is the puzzle. Microsoft loaned me a Samsung Slate with Office 2013 pre-installed, and this has SkyDrive Pro. However it also has SharePoint Workspace, and the associated Office Upload Center, which duly went into a sulk when trying to sync my SkyDrive Pro files.

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Clicking Resolve and entering my login details did nothing. However, when I clicked on the SkyDrive Pro icon instead, I got the new-style Office sign-in, following which everything worked.

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A few puzzles then. Is the SkyDrive Pro client really new, or it is just a new wrapper for the bad old SharePoint Workspace?

Further, it seems that Microsoft has not yet cracked the problem whereby users sign in, tick the “Keep me signed in” option, but still get asked to sign in repeatedly.

.net, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, software development

Microsoft opens up Office 365 and Azure single sign-on for developers

Remember Passport and Hailstorm? Well here it comes again, kind-of, but in corporate-friendly form. It is called Windows Azure Active Directory, and is currently in Developer Preview:

Windows Azure AD provides software developers with a user centric cloud service for storing and managing user identities, coupled with a world class, secure & standards based authorization and authentication system. With support for .Net, Java, & PHP it can be used on all the major devices and platforms software developers use today.

The clearest explanation I can find is in John Shewchuk’s post on Reimagining Active Directory for the Social Enterprise. He makes the point that every Office 365 user is signing on to Microsoft’s cloud-hosted Active Directory. And here is the big deal:

The Windows Azure Active Directory SSO capability can be used by any application, from Microsoft or a third party running on any technology base. So if a user is signed in to one application and moves to another, the user doesn’t have to sign in again.

Organisations with on-premise Active Directory can use federation and synchronisation (Shewchuk fudges the distinction) so that you can get a single point of management as well as single sign-on between cloud and internal network.

Is this really new? I posted about Single sign-on from Active Directory to Windows Azure back in December 2010, and in fact I even got this working using my own on-premise AD to sign into an Azure app.

It seems though that Microsoft is working on both simplifying the programming, and adding integration with social networks. Here is where it gets to sound even more Hailstorm-like:

… we will look at enhancements to Windows Azure Active Directory and the programming model that enable developers to more easily create applications that work with consumer-oriented identities, integrate with social networks, and incorporate information in the directory into new application experiences.

Hailstorm failed because few trusted Microsoft to be the identity provider for the Internet. It is curious though: I am not sure that Facebook or Google are more well-trusted today, yet they are both used as identity providers by many third parties, especially Facebook. Spotify, for example, requires Facebook sign-in to create an account (an ugly feature).

Perhaps the key lesson is this. Once people are already hooked into a service, it is relatively easy to get them to extend it to third-parties. It is harder to get people to sign up for an all-encompassing internet identity service from scratch.

This is why Azure Active Directory will work where Hailstorm failed, though within a more limited context since nobody expects Microsoft to dominate today in the way it might have done back in 2001.

microsoft, sharepoint

SharePoint security update stops SharePoint working

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This morning I noticed that my test SharePoint 2010 installation was not working. Browsing to the site got me HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

The problem seems to be related to the update KB2553365 which I noticed had been installed last night, following an initial failure.

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Note this point in the description of the update:

After you install this security update on all SharePoint servers, you will have to run the PSconfig tool to complete the installation. For more information about how to use the PSconfig tool, visit the following TechNet webpage:

PSconfig command-line reference (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

In other words, if your server is set up update automatically, this update breaks SharePoint until you manually run the PSconfig utility which applies SharePoint updates.

Further, there is no automatic notification of this requirement. You have to figure it out.

SharePoint administrators know about PSconfig, but companies with Small Business Server or other small-scale environments are not always familiar with the problem.

Worse still, in my case PSconfig has not fixed it. I am restoring last night’s backup.

microsoft, professional, security, software development, windows

Macro virus reborn: ACAD/Medre.A steals drawings using AutoCAD AutoLISP

Remember the Concept virus? Someone wondered if you could make a self-replicating virus with a Microsoft Word macro. It worked; and the proof of concept soon became a real virus causing the usual mayhem and spoiling our clever VBA templates.

Microsoft locked down Office macros fairly effectively; but the idea lived on and has re-emerged as an AutoCAD virus which runs automatically when a drawing is opened. It is not quite the same, as in AutoCAD the code has to be in an external .lsp file, but you can have code in the S::STARTUP function run when a document loads, as explained in the documentation here. The malware relies on the fact that when drawings are emailed, users often archive an entire folder rather than sending a single file. This is how the virus spreads.

Most of the actual malicious code is not in AutoLISP, but in the more familiar form of VBScript files to which the code calls out. The malware then emails AutoCAD drawings to addresses in China – a rather crude mechanism for stealing data, but apparently somewhat effective since on investigation the target mailboxes were found overflowing with messages.

The threat is serious though. Much intellectual property and many future product plans are contained in AutoCAD drawings.

Security vendor ESET’s white paper [PDF] describes the attack in detail.

According to ESET, the combined efforts of Autodesk, Chinese ISP Tencent, and the Chinese National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center have contained the virus for now. There is also a free clean-up utility here: http://download.eset.com/special/EACADMedreCleaner.exe.

microsoft, professional, windows

Microsoft announces launch dates for Windows 8: software will be done early August

Microsoft’s Tami Reller has announced the launch dates for Windows 8, the company’s controversial new operating system which combines the familiar desktop with a new touch-based user interface and associated runtime. She was speaking at the Worldwide Partner Conference under way in Toronto.

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The team is on track to complete the software in early August, a milestone known as RTM (Release to Manufacturing).

This means that the final version of Windows 8 will be available for download by developers and enterprises from August – just a couple of months from now.

PCs and tablets preloaded with Windows 8 will be in the shops from late October.

The appearance of Windows 8 hardware is more significant this time round than is usually the case. One reason is that most PCs currently on sale do not have touch screens; and even those that do will lack the range of sensors expected in Windows 8 tablets.

Even more significant is that the ARM build of Windows 8, called Windows RT, is only available with new hardware. This means it will not be generally available at all until the hardware appears in October.