Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Ever wondered what the differences are between:

The nice people at Windows IT Pro magazine have two articles that are published that explain the differences between the 3:

• Windows Azure Active Directory vs. Windows Server Active Directory
  http://m.windowsitpro.com/identity-management/windows-azure-active-directory-vs-windows-server-active-directory
• Azure Active Directory vs. Azure Active Directory Premium
  http://m.windowsitpro.com/azure/azure-active-directory-vs-azure-active-directory-premium
• An Overview of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium
  http://m.windowsitpro.com/identity-management/overview-microsoft-azure-active-directory-premium

Back on June 4, 2014, Microsoft ran an event called the Enterprise Mobility Summit in the London.

Speakers include IDC’s John Delaney, who presents findings from the analyst firm’s Mobility Maturity Optimization research; and Chris Weber, Corporate Vice President Device Sales, who discusses Microsoft’s enterprise mobility strategy following the recent Nokia acquisition.

IDC also discussed the current trend AWAY from “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) and the reasons for the trend.

If you have the time, this is a video recap of the entire event.

If you’re interested in monitoring the status of the various services provided by Office 365, here’s the links & web sites you should know.

• Office 365 Service Health Dashboard
  http://status.office365.com/
• POST: “Office 365 Service Health Dashboard Now Supports Per-Tenant Service Status”
  http://community.office365.com/en-us/b/office_365_community_blog/archive/2012/01/07/the-office-365-service-health-dashboard-now-supports-per-tenant-service-status.aspx 
• DOCS: “View the status of your services”
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-suite-help/view-the-status-of-your-services-HA102817837.aspx

For those of you that leverage this tool to inventory your environment, understand what hardware you have in place for your Microsoft investment, or simply run reports to stay compliant, you’ll wanna check out v9.1:

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments. Learn more.

The MAP Toolkit includes the following components:
• MAPSetup.exe. Installation package containing the tool and SQL LocalDB.
• readme_en.htm. Available as a separate download. Provides information to read before installing the MAP Toolkit, including installation prerequisites and known issues.
• MAP_Sample_Documents.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample reports and proposals.
• MAP_Training_Kit.zip. Available as a separate download. Contains sample database and instructions for completing various exercises.

Download the toolkit here:

• DOWNLOAD: Microsoft Assessment & Planning Toolkit 9.1
  Date Published:  6/27/2014
  File Size: 71.4 MB, 1.4 MB, 63.5 MB, 17 KB
  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7826

Looks like this is now public so I guess I can blog about it.

We have a web site where people can sign up to participate in Office pre-release programs.  In particular, I believe they are looking for Office beta testers for Office for Android tablets but I’m pretty sure that there are other beta programs available as well.

If you’re interested in signing up, go to the link below and register.  Remember that signing up does not guarantee that you’ll be selected.

Good luck!

• REGISTRATION: Office Pre-Release Programs
  http://prereleaseprograms-public.sharepoint.com/

If you’re leveraging Azure Rights Management Services, this is the post for you.  Dan Plastina, Lead PM for Right Management Services posted this summary of all the recent documentation for Rights Management Services.

The thing that caught my eye is using PowerShell to manage RMS templates within Azure RMS.  Here’s an excerpt of the post:

This month sees new PowerShell documentation for Azure RMS custom templates. In addition to creating and managing custom templates in the Azure Management Portal, you can now do this from the command line, by using the latest version of the Azure RMS Windows PowerShell module (version 2.0.0.0). For installation instructions and the download link, see Installing Windows PowerShell for Azure Rights Management. The new version of the module ships with updated local help, and now also supports the online parameter so that you can easily get to the online version to check for the latest information.

For example, instead of typing "Get-Help Connect-AadrmService" to read the local help that ships with the module, type "Get-Help Connect-AadrmService -online" to automatically load your web browser and display the online version of the help. Unlike the local help, the online version supports web formatting, so it’s much easier to read. It’s often more up-to-date, and will automatically show localized versions for the standard 10 languages that TechNet and MSDN supports (Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazilian, Russian, Spanish).

The new cmdlets to support custom templates are:

• Add-AadrmTemplate
• Export-AadrmTemplate
• Get-AadrmTemplate
• Get-AadrmTemplateProperty
• Import-AadrmTemplate
• New-AadrmRightsDefinition
• Remove-AadrmTemplate
• Set-AadrmTemplateProperty

If you are interested in custom templates and missed the blog post announcement, you can read it here: Create custom templates in Azure RMS with the Azure Management Portal. To see what customers are asking about this new feature when they try it out, see Top 10 customer questions about Azure RMS custom templates.

• Read more here:
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/rms/archive/2014/06/30/announcement-azure-rms-documentation-library-update-for-june-2014.aspx

Windows Server 2003 is going completely out of support in less than a year – specifically July 14, 2015.  Are you prepared?  Or will this be another “Windows XP fire drill” all over again? 

Get ready for Windows Server 2003’s EoS with this FREE training session on how to migrate to Windows Server 2013 R2 or Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines.

Out with the old! IT Pros, you’re probably aware that July 2014 marks the one-year countdown to end of support for Windows Server 2003. If you’re gearing up to migrate from Windows Server 2003/2008 to Windows Server 2012 R2 (on-premises and in Microsoft Azure), this Jump Start has a ton of helpful information for you.

Windows Server 2012 R2 provides many options to help ensure seamless transition to the new server platform. This course explores these tools and shows you how Windows Server 2012 R2 can ease your transition, not merely to upgrade earlier versions but also to migrate your key services efficiently, safely, and cost effectively. In these demo-rich sessions, industry experts also examine how to migrate your on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure virtual machines (VMs) to create a truly hybrid cloud environment.

Course Outline:

• Introduction to Windows Server On-Premises Migration Tools​
• Active Directory Migration
• Migrating Windows Server 2003 Workloads to Windows Server 2012 R2
• Migrating WSUS to Windows Server 2012 R2
• Migrating Clustering to Windows Server 2012 R2
• Migrating Hyper-V VMs to Microsoft Azure

DATE/TIME:
July 24, 2014 9:00am–1:00pm PDT

REGISTRATION:
http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/migrate-legacy-windows-server-to-2012-r2-and-microsoft-azure

One of my favorite presenters is a gentleman named David Chappell, an independent industry speaker & technology advisor around current trends that are of importance to Enterprise companies.

He is especially well-versed on Cloud technologies and has done thorough analysis of all the major players including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.

He recently did a Microsoft Azure presentation at the Cloud Expo and graciously published his slides for public consumption.  This provides folks with an independent 3rd party view on Microsoft’s offering in the PaaS & IaaS space… but presented without the gratuitous “marketing” and in a manner that is easily digestible.

I highly encourage folks to take advantage of the opportunity to download David’s slides.  They’re really good.

• POWERPOINT: David Chappell – “Microsoft Azure for Enterprises – What & Why?” (3.6MB, 38pgs, .PDF)
  http://res.sys-con.com/session/2212/David_Chappel.pdf

For those of you into “home automation”, controlling your home’s lights, locks, appliance, air conditioning, security, and other elements wirelessly and over the Internet, you’ll want to read this latest announcement:

• Microsoft joins key industry groups to deliver on promise of the Internet of Things
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/07/02/microsoft-joins-key-industry-groups-to-deliver-on-promise-of-the-internet-of-things.aspx

The AllSeen Alliance is located here:  https://allseenalliance.org/

You may notice that the AllSeen Alliance is distinctly open source & in particular, Linux-charged.  The post above explains where Microsoft’s role in this is:  Among our contributions to the AllSeen Alliance is our massive cloud infrastructure one of the only worldwide networks that provide Internet scale, flexibility & programmability that can aggregate & analyze the incredible amount of information that the Internet of Things targets.

CES 2015 – THE COMING BATTLEGROUND
One thing’s for certain:  The Consumer Electronics Expo in Jan 2015 sure is gonna be interesting.  South Hall 1,2 – which, in this blogger’s opinion – is usually the rag tag, rather hodge podge, disorganized battleground for home automation at CES, is gonna be really interesting with AllSeen suddenly backing the effort.  Usually dominated by the division of Z-Wave vs Zigbee, I think we’re gonna see a sudden & very loud shake up of the industry with the backing of big players in this market such as Qualcomm, Panasonic, Sharp, LG, & Microsoft.

• PRESS RELEASE: AllSeen Alliance “Microsoft Joins The AllSeen Alliance”
  https://allseenalliance.org/announcement/microsoft-joins-allseen-alliance
• REUTERS: “Microsoft sides with Qualcomm in showdown over connected home”
  http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/02/us-qualcomm-microsoft-idUSKBN0F709120140702
• Microsoft joins Qualcomm-backed AllSeen Alliance to standardize connected home tech
  http://m.wpcentral.com/microsoft-joins-qualcomm-backed-allseen-alliance-standardize-connected-home-tech

This is big news for Visual Studio developers.

Unity is a cross-platform game engine that is very widely adopted by game developers and allows for targeting desktops, consoles, mobile devices, and the web – including Windows Store (Win8) and Windows Phone.

From Microsoft CVP Developer Division, Soma Somasegar:

Today, I’m pleased to announce that we are acquiring SyntaxTree, the developers of the UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio.

UnityVS enables Unity developers to take advantage of the productivity of Visual Studio to author, browse and debug the code for their Unity applications. Already today, dozens of the biggest names in game development rely on Visual Studio and the UnityVS plugin.

With this acquisition, we have the opportunity to integrate this support for Unity even more deeply into Visual Studio, and to continue to push forward Visual Studio’s support for game developers.  Microsoft will also make the existing UnityVS plugin available for free on our download site shortly.

• Read more about the acquisition here:
  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/06/30/microsoft-acquires-syntaxtree-creator-of-unityvs-plugin-for-visual-studio.aspx