Alan Burchill – Group Policy

Shane Hoey – PowerShell

Tim Barrett – SBS, Multipoint Server, and Storage Essentials

Ishai Sagi – Sharepoint, Office365

Kevin Royalty – Multipoint and WSSe

Arlin Sorenson – Peer Groups and Community

David Wales – Managing a Service Desk

Ryan Spillane – Finding and recruiting good staff

Honestly – there’s a lot more there that you should check out yourself.  Here’s Robs site

In a ‘post-apocalyptic’ universe where evil ‘cloud terminators’ dominate the technology landscape there remains a ragtag handful of SBS specialists roaming the streets surviving only by selling managed services and fixing broken technology. This rare band of highly skilled, but socially awkward individuals, comes to together but once a year to pit their skills against each other in a battle of nerves and speed. Their challenge is to build a Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Server on a virtualized base in the shortest possible time.

There are few rules in this arena, where only the fastest survive to be crowned ultimate ‘SBS Survivors’. The challenge pits two teams together in the same room with the same hardware against each other and the clock. They are allowed to use any means , fair or foul, to achieve the result, however they will not be provided with the domain name of their network until the day of the challenge. The winner will be the team that achieves an SBS best practices analyser report with no errors or warnings.

Clans are now being recruited so fly the flag, show your colours and join up with your peers to smash the opposition in this unique challenge. Spectators are also more that welcome to attend and witness the spectacle (heckling, jeering and cajoling is also more than encouraged).

To register for the event visit – http://smbitpro-syd.eventbrite.com.au/. The cost is $44 INC GST for SMBIT Professional Members and $ 99 for non-members. To register for either Team Ravenclaw or Team Gyffindor please email director@ciaops.com.

May the best ‘SBS Wizards’ win!

Well given that Ryan Spillane and I set the World Record for installing SBS 2003 R2 back in 2006 at SMBNation, we can’t let this one pass at all.  I’m up for defending my crown and I’ve already got quite a few tricks up my sleeve… now the only choice for me is which team do I pick to be on… or do I try and throw a real game changer and invent my own team… <evil laugh>

One way or another this next SMB Twilight workshop is set to be a good one.  Lots to learn between now and then for sure.  The only question is… will YOU be there…

Well the good news is that Roberts been able to pull some top notch talent in for this event, and the agenda is packed to the brim full of good learning.  Here’s a few names you might know that are speaking at this event….

Dean Calvert

Boon Tee

Mark O’Shea

Jeff Alexander

Roger Lawrence

Ishai Sagi

and of course Robert Crane himself.

This looks to be a pretty good local event, and if it were not for prior commitments, I too would be there.  Check out the full agenda and book here

Well the good news is that Roberts been able to pull some top notch talent in for this event, and the agenda is packed to the brim full of good learning.  Here’s a few names you might know that are speaking at this event….

Dean Calvert

Boon Tee

Mark O’Shea

Jeff Alexander

Roger Lawrence

Ishai Sagi

and of course Robert Crane himself.

This looks to be a pretty good local event, and if it were not for prior commitments, I too would be there.  Check out the full agenda and book here

How can I list all users mailboxes on a given server?

Get-Mailbox –servername SERVER1

How can I list a users mailbox size?

Get-MailboxStatistics –identity “Wayne Small – SBSfaq.com” | select TotalItemSize

How can I list all users mailbox size on a given server?

This is a little more tricky – here’s a site that I grabbed a script from which did it very nicely.

Here’s my record of my experience with upgrading from SafeSync for Business 3.x to 5.0

Firstly – here’s what I’m running now.

I started by making sure that I had a good backup of my desktop and laptop – that way if anything goes wrong, I will have a rollback plan that will mean my data is protected.

I decided I would upgrade my desktop first, therefore I ensured that my laptop was logged off SafeSync for Business so that it would not have any issues while I did the upgrade on both machines.

Start by downloading the client software from here

Once the download was done, I ran the installation program and followed the bouncing ball through the installation process.

After the restart, I noticed one major issue for me.  My Online W: drive – which was the drive letter I gave to SafeSync, was gone… ohhh so that’s what they meant by that first couple of screens.  I’m not happy at all about this change. The ability to have a drive letter on my computer and copy things directly to the cloud WITHOUT having to have them sync’d across all my computers was in fact a benefit to me.  Now it appears due to the change in functionality, I will be FORCED to use the web interface to do the same thing.  Sorry Trend – that’s not a step forward, it’s a step backward.

Below you can see my W: drive that I used to have along with the contents that I had there.  The Software folder was one that I used that was NEVER sync’d to my computers as it allowed me to easily keep copies of software that I use so I can install them without having to go to various vendors websites all the time.

Ok – so the upgrade went fine, but there’s at least ONE feature I have lost.  I decided to poke around and look at the settings for SafeSync for Business 5.0

After upgrading my desktop, I told SafeSync for Business to logout.  I then proceeded to do the same upgrade on my laptop.  The upgrade for it also went fine, so nothing major to report there.

I am however concerned about the change in functionality that Trend have done with this.  The offline drive was something I used a LOT, now I’m going to be forced to use the web interface to do the uploads which is not ideal at all.  I would suggest quite highly to Trend that they reconsider this and restore this feature to SafeSync for Business .

Trend also have a SafeSync Blog where you can find out lots of info including the details of the monthly feature updates on the SafeSync blog here.

Note – you can also use this process to convert a ShadowProtect backup to a VMDK or a SPF (ShadowProtect Full Backup) file as well.

1. Install ShadowProtect onto a machine – it does not have to be licensed as you are only using the conversion tool.  Reboot as needed.

2. Open ShadowProtect

3. Select Image Conversion Tool from the Tools menu on the left hand pane

4. Select Next to continue

5. Select Network Locations

6. Fill out the form listing the network location where the images are stored

7. It will now list the volumes that it has found here

8. Select the volume you wish to convert and then select Next to continue.  If you have password protected the images, you will now be prompted for the password.  Enter it and select Ok to continue

9. You will see the a list of all the backup points that you can restore this system from.  Select the one you want and then select Next to continue

10. Specify the destination location where you want the VHD file created. Also specify that you want it to create a VHD and select Next to continue

11. It will display a summary screen for you to review.  Select Finish for it to start the image creation process.

12. ShadowProtect will now run the job and you can see the status below.

13. The time it takes to complete the job is a direct relationship to the number of files in the image chain.  The more files in the chain, the longer it will take. 

14. Once the conversion is complete, you will need to do a couple of things.  Boot into the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment.

15. Set the partition to be Active as below

16. Select the Boot Configuration Utility from the Tools menu

17. You will see that the BCD Store is broken on this VHD – you can select Auto Repair to fix it

18.  This is it fixed!

19. Now boot the Virtual Machine and you should be good… for the most part anyway

A couple of things to be aware of here too…

1. The image you’ve just created does not have the same disk signature as the disk – therefore if you try to run any backups using ShadowProtect from within this newly created machine, they WILL FAIL.  The error message will be something like the screenshot below.  The only way to resolve this is to edit the backup job and reselect the volumes you wish to backup and start again with a new full backup image.

2. Given you need to create a new base image, you will also need to prune/delete the older images in the destination folder.  This might well affect your archival requirements.  Therefore assess if this method is the best way for you before you start!

I’ve used SkyDrive in the past but have more recently moved everything over to TrendMicro SafeSync for Business which suits me just fine.  I did that because I could not get more than the 7GB with SkyDrive and with Trend I could purchase as much as I needed.  I’m currently using around 14GB which I sync across a number of computers.  One of the new features of SkyDrive is integration with iPad’s – this is a feature I’m keen to trial myself.

So today I got my free upgrade to 25GB.  I suggest you get yours and start to play with it some more.  Windows 8 promises to use SkyDrive even more than Win7 did, so I’m keen to start playing with it myself.

When a computer BSOD’s, it leaves behind a dump file of the status of the computer.  It’s those files that we need to analyse in order to understand what went wrong, and how we can fix it.  Rather than break out the debug tools, I decided to take another approach.  I employed a tool called Whocrashed to do the analysis of the BSOD DMP file and tell me what went wrong.

Whocrashed is available free for home users from their website here.  They also have a few other tools which look quite cool as well and I’ll check them out later.

Anyway – I downloaded the tool and let it analyse my DMP files.  It took less than a second and came back with the information below.

Ok – so I know where it crashed (it reviewed the previous BSODs too and said the same thing).  Now I just need to figure out WHY it’s crashing in that area…