Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Registration is open for our public webinar, “What is Azure Data Lake?”

Big Data and Data Warehousing have taken a giant leap in the last few months and are now the helm of any data platform discussion.

This session delves into Microsoft’s play in the Big Data workload, and paints the end-to-end picture of effective solutions. Topics include:

• The importance of building a Data Lake
• Nurturing its potential with Hadoop and other analytics options
• Enriching the data warehouse with unforeseen tracts of information

This session will unfold an important chapter in the Microsoft Data Platform story. Join us to learn more.

Speaker for this session is Saveen Reddy, Principle PM Manager, Microsoft

• DATE/TIME:
  January 19, 2016  10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PT
• REGISTRATION:
  https://info.microsoft.com/CO-Azure-WBNR-FY16-01Jan-19-Azure-Data-Lake-Overview-Registration.html?ls=Social&lsd=Yammer

A new whitepaper describing Microsoft vision for security in the connected organization.

Protect Identities, Devices and Your Company Information in Today’s Device-Centric World

As an IT leader—identity management, device management, and information protection are critical to what you do. Traditionally, all three have relied on software that ran inside your organization.

This worked—because the identities, devices, and information were also largely inside your organization. Today, it’s a different world. Your workforce is taking their mobile devices everywhere, accessing both on-premises and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Now, your data protection must extend across Windows 10, iOS, and Android devices, whether in your conference room or at Starbucks. This is the cloud-centric, device-centric world your modern workforce expects.

In this new vision eBook, "Protecting and Empowering Your Connected Organization", from Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility team, you’ll learn:

• How your control plane for all these services needs to move from your own datacenter to the cloud

• How this approach lets you provide everything your users expect, while still giving you the protection and control you need

• WHITEPAPER: Protecting and Empowering Your Connected Organization (.PDF)
  https://info.microsoft.com/Vision-Paper-Protecting-and-Empowering-Your-Connected-Organization.html?ls=Website

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Without the right mobility strategy, your company data might be outside your control.

Microsoft has the tools you need to initiate an enterprise mobility strategy that gives you control of your sensitive corporate data—virtually anywhere and anytime. Your workforce is on the move and now you can safeguard your data across devices inside and outside your organization, as well as devices that hold a combination of personal and corporate data.

Tap the security value Windows 10 extends through Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, and keep control of your data no matter where it ends up.

Sign up now for the first in a series of three whitepapers by Jack Madden, “Getting to Windows 10: Microsoft’s new options for upgrading and onboarding."

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite + Windows 10 = Better Together. Keep your users productive and better protect your corporate data.

• WHITEPAPER: How to upgrade and onboard Windows 10 (.PDF)
  https://info.microsoft.com/How-to-upgrade-and-onboard-Windows-10.html

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If you’ve ever found that you need to contact the Volume Licensing Support Center for assistance, here’s the contact info for the United States:

Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC)Support Contact Info
Email(s): vlserva at microsoft.com
Toll Free Number(s): (866) 230-0560
Hours of Operation: 5 AM – 5 PMPST Mon – Fri
Languages Supported: English and French

Other countries are located here:
https://www.microsoft.com/Licensing/servicecenter/Help/Contact.aspx

New free preview eBook from Microsoft Press!

With Microsoft SQL Server 2016, a variety of new features and enhancements to the data platform deliver breakthrough performance, advanced security, and richer, integrated reporting and analytics capabilities. In this Preview Edition ebook, we introduce three new security features: Always Encrypted, Row-Level Security, and dynamic data masking; discuss enhancements that enable you to better manage performance and storage: TempDB configuration, query store, and Stretch Database; and we review several improvements to Reporting Services. This book is a Preview Edition because it’s not complete; the final edition will be available in Spring of 2016.

• DOWNLOAD: Free Microsoft Press eBook, “Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2016: Mission-Critical Applications, Deeper Insights, Hyperscale Cloud, Preview Edition”
• PDF (Desktop):
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/F/1/CF1B4F65-2F24-48E8-8111-5D46FC89BB56/Microsoft_Press_eBook_Intro_SQL%20Server_2016_Preview_Ed_PDF.pdf
• PDF (Mobile):
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/F/1/CF1B4F65-2F24-48E8-8111-5D46FC89BB56/Microsoft_Press_eBook_Intro_SQL_Server_2016_Preview_Ed_PDF_mobile.pdf

New free eBook from Microsoft Press!

Lead the journey to the cloud and drive innovation!

Discover what makes the cloud so compelling to enterprises; with which applications you should start your cloud journey; how your organization will change, and how skill sets will evolve; how to measure progress; how to think about security, compliance, and business buy-in; and how to exploit the ever-growing feature set that the cloud offers to gain strategic and competitive advantage.

• DOWNLOAD:Free Microsoft Press eBook, “Enterprise Cloud Strategy”
• PDF (Desktop): http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/0/E/50E393D9-0E1C-4A23-B29B-6B43CEBB806A/Microsoft_Press_ebook_Enterprise_Cloud_Strategy_PDF.pdf
• PDF (Mobile): http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/0/E/50E393D9-0E1C-4A23-B29B-6B43CEBB806A/Microsoft_Press_ebook_Enterprise_Cloud_Strategy_MOBILE_PDF.pdf
• EPUB:
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/0/E/50E393D9-0E1C-4A23-B29B-6B43CEBB806A/Microsoft_Press_ebook_Enterprise_Cloud_Strategy_EPUB.epub
• MOBI/Kindle:
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/0/E/50E393D9-0E1C-4A23-B29B-6B43CEBB806A/Microsoft_Press_ebook_Enterprise_Cloud_Strategy_MOBI.mobi

AMAZING POST.  This is more for my own reference but I think there’s a lot of folks running Skype for Business or Lync that could make use of this.

Hi All

Happy New Year for 2016. I thought I’d start off the year with a blog on a topic I have been meaning to get to for 18 months now J, and that is on monitoring your Skype/Lync Edge servers with Operations Manager. Too often I go out and review Skype/Lync environments that include an Edge component and find that external role is not well monitored. In my opinion, in a Skype and Lync environment monitoring your external facing components is critical and in some ways more important than monitoring your internal servers. This is of course down to the fact that they are external facing and more likely to be attacked/compromised. In the same vein, Skype Edge Servers should also be well managed, patched, configured for Antivirus and updated with software updates as they are released. Please make sure you monitor your Edge Servers and your Reverse Proxies. *End of rant* J

Now part of the reason I think Operations Manager doesn’t get used enough to monitor the Edge Server role is it can be quite tricky monitoring a server that is 1) in the DMZ and 2) in a workgroup. So this blog is all about setting up monitoring of an Edge Server with Operations Manager 2012 R2.

To use a Gateway Server or not?

The first decision you need to make when embarking off on this monitoring adventure is to decide whether or not you are going to allow your Edge Servers to talk directly to the Operations Manager Management Servers directly, or whether or not you need to funnel all communication from the DMZ through an Operations Manager Gateway server. Gateway servers are useful for taking connections from lots of servers in a DMZ and funnelling back the communication to the internal Operations Manager Server, limiting of course the connections from untrusted (in the DMZ) to trusted in the internal network. This is likely to be the best option for you if you have a lot of servers in the DMZ that need to be monitored.

…

Read the rest of this VERY LONG instructional post here:

• PFE BLOG: How to setup monitoring of your Skype for Business or Lync Edge Servers with Operations Manager 2012
  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/canberrapfe/2016/01/06/how-to-setup-monitoring-of-your-skype-for-business-or-lync-edge-servers-with-operations-manager-2012/

Last month, we published KB3123303 with details of the new "End of Life" upgrade notification for Internet Explorer, which will be shipped as an update next week on January 12th.

The update will apply to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 for users who have not upgraded to Internet Explorer 11 (i.e. IE8, IE9, and IE10 users). The update includes a new “end of support” notification feature when the browser is launched. This will automatically open a new tab with the appropriate Internet Explorer download page for their OS.

Customer environments in which the migration to Internet Explorer 11 is incomplete may disabled the notification feature by deploying a registry key. See KB3123303 for details and this blog article for step-by-step instructions.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not affected by this update. IE9 is the latest version of Internet Explorer supported by these operating systems. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 are also unaffected (support for Windows 8 ends on January 12th and Windows 8.1 comes with IE11).

The notification tab will not appear on every launch of the browser. After the tab is closed it will be 72 hours before it is shown again and only when launching IE (i.e. not during a browsing session).

For more information about the end of support for old versions of Internet Explorer see the Windows for Business summary and the Microsoft Support Lifecycle for Internet Explorer page. For technical information about how to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge see the Browser TechCenter pages on TechNet.

WAIT.  Before you ignore the Kangaroo as just “another cheap PC”, read the stats on this thing:

• Fast Atom x5 CPU w/ integrated graphics – includes Windows 10 Home
• 2GB/32GB storage
• 3 USB ports including full size USB 3.0
• HDMI port (Full size)
• WiFi a/b/g/n/ac
• Bluetooth 4.0
• TPM 2.0 chip for strong physical hardware encryption security
• MicroSD slot for storage expansion (supports 256GB cards or more)
• Fingerprint reader (Windows Hello compatible)
• 4 hr Lithium Ion battery to enable usage without AC power
• $99

Besides Windows apps, it runs BlueStacks for Android apps & Kangaroo has worldwide distribution & support through it’s manufacturer, InFocus.

You can see how this would be useful for anyone who has access to an HDMI connected display.  Imagine students carrying this to school or to a library… or families with only a cheap TV using this to connect to public WiFi.  I bought one & I’ve found so many scenarios in which this thing is useful.

• InFocus Kangaroo Signature Edition Mobile Desktop – $99
  http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/InFocus-Kangaroo-Signature-Edition-Mobile-Desktop/productID.328073600

Brad Anderson – Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Enterprise Client & Mobile Management & one of the Engineering leaders for Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite – gives an overview of our solution, EMS. 

This is a 42 minute session that explains how identity & security pervades Microsoft’s strategy around Enterprise  & why this is the foundation for any cloud strategy – especially hybrid architectures.

This is one of the best videos you’ll ever see on the topic.  If you’re responsible for client and/or mobile technology – this is must-see.