Windows 8.1 what’s new(ish)

I suspect if Dr Evil used Windows 8 he would probably have said “Windows frickin' 8!”; however it looks like Microsoft “may” have seen some sense, I say may because everything is subject to change.

- It looks like the Start Button is back which links to the Start Screen, so small yeah!

- It also looks like Boot to Desktop has been added, so another yeah!

- The Start screen looks like it can be sorted to show an “All Apps” instead of live tiles, so semi start menu which is better than nothing I guess, so another yeah.

- The metro background can display the same desktop background which should allow for a more seamless switch to the Start screen, so yeah baby!.

More information can be found here and here;

I must admit that I couldn't really warm to Windows 8; it wasn’t the changes that put me off per se, rather the stubbornness from Microsoft telling us that we had to use it or stay with Windows 7.

The title says new(ish) because the main features requested are not new and should have been in Windows 8 from day one!  Microsoft could have easily hidden the features or used group policy to enable them; Windows 8 should have transitioned Windows 7 into Windows 9. 

I believe that this was a win for consumers; something had to change and I’m glad Microsoft have seen some sense.

So in the words of Austin Powers “Au contraire baby, you can't resist me”

XBOX One

One xbox to rule them all …?

 

XBOX One Reveal video is here;

Outlook Web App 2013 Layout tweaks

If your accessing Exchange 2013 or Office 365 OWA on a portable/touch device you can use the following URL tweak to change the layout.

Wide Format for Tablets (?layout=twide)
https://mail.contoso.com/owa/?layout=twide

Narrow Format for Phones(?layout=tnarrow)
https://mail.contoso.com/owa/?layout=tnarrow

Light Format (?layout=light)
https://mail.contoso.com/owa/?layout=light

Normal Format for Phones(?layout=normal)
https://mail.contoso.com/owa/?layout=normal

More information can be found here;

Windows 8.1

Public preview available via the Windows Store 26th June 2013.

More information can be found here and here.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack

Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack Documentation

• Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack Documentation provides detailed instructions and descriptions on how to import and use the Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack
• Exchange Server 2013 Management Health Set documentation comprehensive list of health sets and details

Overview

The Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack provides comprehensive service health information for your Exchange organization.

The Exchange 2013 Management Pack is engineered for organizations that include servers running Exchange 2013.

The key feature of this management pack is user focused monitoring. The simplified dashboard focuses on the user experience and makes it easier for you quickly determine exactly what your users are experiencing.

Feature Summary

The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack works with the Managed Availability feature in Exchange 2013. The alerts within the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) portal indicate unhealthy states as reported by the Managed Availability components in Exchange 2013.

The following are some of the new features in the Exchange 2013 Management Pack:

• Simplified dashboard The dashboard of the Exchange 2013 Management Pack has been simplified and refined into the following three categories
  • Active Alerts Provides a list of all outstanding alerts in your organization.
  • Organization Health Provides an overview of the overall service health in your organization.
  • Server Health Provides an overview of the health of individual servers in your organization.
• User focused monitoring Exchange 2013 introduces a monitoring and recovery infrastructure called Managed Availability. Managed Availability focuses on the user experience. All Exchange 2013 components have built-in monitors that detect problems and attempt to recover the service availability. Any issues that can't be recovered automatically are escalated to the Exchange 2013 Management Pack as an alert.

Download can be found here; more information can be found here.

AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center

What is the AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center?
The AWS Management Pack is an extension to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that enables you to view and monitor your AWS resources directly in the Operations Manager console. This way, you get a single pane of glass to view and monitor your resources, whether they are on-premises or in the AWS cloud.

Which AWS resources can I monitor using the AWS Management Pack?
You can monitor following AWS resources using the AWS Management Pack:

• Amazon EC2 instances (Microsoft Windows and Linux)
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
• Elastic Load Balancing
• AWS CloudFormation stacks
• AWS Beanstalk applications
  

Which versions of System Center Operations Manager can I use?
The AWS Management Pack is available for “System Center 2012 – Operations Manager” and “System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2”.

More information can be found here and here;

Lync 2013 Publishing Rules in TMG

Video from Fabrizio Volpe on how to publish the Lync Web Services.

Exchange Server 2013 Deployment Assistant

• Upgrading from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013
• Upgrading from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013
• Configuring an Exchange 2013-based hybrid deployment for Exchange 2007 organizations

These new scenarios provide step-by-step guidance about how to upgrade your existing Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 organizations to benefit from the improvements and new features of Exchange 2013. Plus, Exchange 2007 organizations can now configure a hybrid deployment with Office 365 using Exchange 2013 instead of Exchange 2010 SP3 in their on-premises organization.

 

(Mixed Exchange 2010 and 2007 is still not available)

More information can be found here;

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 2

Update Rollup 2 for System Center SP1 can be found here;

App Controller (KB2815569)
Issue 1
You cannot change the virtual machine network of deployed virtual machines.

Issue 2
The network connection is set to None after you view the network properties of a deployed virtual machine and then click OK.

Issue 3
You cannot view the virtual networks for a virtual machine.

Issue 4
When you change the virtual network in App Controller, you receive the following error message:

10605-InvalidVLanConfiguration

Issue 5
You cannot copy virtual machines that have multiple processors or large amounts of memory from Virtual Machine Manager to a Windows Azure cloud service that already has a deployment.

Issue 6
App Controller requires Microsoft Silverlight 5 but links to the download page for Silverlight 4.

Issue 7
An argument null exception may occur if network connectivity is interrupted.

App Controller Setup (KB2823452)
Issue 1
App Controller cannot be installed if the Microsoft SQL Server database server name starts with a number. For more information about this issue, see Installation of App Controller to a Remote SQL Server fails with Exception Error Code: 0x80131500.

Issue 2
Setup incorrectly reports that the SQL Server database has insufficient disk space.

Issue 3
Setup is unsuccessful when it tries to enable Internet Information Services (IIS).

Operations Manager (KB2826664)
Issue 1
The Web Console performance is very poor when a view is opened for the first time.

Issue 2
The alert links do not open in the Web Console after Service Pack 1 is applied for Operations Manager.

Issue 3
The Distributed Applications (DA) health state is incorrect in Diagram View.

Issue 4
The Details Widget does not display data when it is viewed by using the SharePoint webpart.

Issue 5
The renaming of the SCOM group in Group View will not work if the user language setting is not "English (United States)."

Issue 6
An alert description that includes multibyte UTF-8 characters is not displayed correctly in the Alert Properties view.

Issue 7
The Chinese (Taiwan) Web Console displays the following message even after the SilverlightClientConfiguration.exe program is run: Web Console Configuration Required.

Issue 8
The Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to IntelliTrace conversion is broken when alerts are generated from dynamic module events such as the Unity Container.

Issue 9
Connectivity issues to System Center services are fixed.

Issue 10
High CPU problems are experienced in Operations Manager UI.

Issue 11
Query processor runs out of internal resources and cannot produce a query plan when you open Dashboard views.

Issue 12
Path details are missing for "Objects by Performance."

Operations Manager - UNIX and Linux Monitoring (Management Pack Update) (KB2828653)
Issue 1
The Solaris agent could run out of file descriptors when many multi-version file systems (MVFS) are mounted.

Issue 2
Logical and physical disks are not discoverable on AIX-based computers when a disk device file is contained in a subdirectory.

Issue 3
Rules and monitors that were created by using the UNIX/Linux Shell Command templates do not contain overridable ShellCommand and Timeout parameters.

Issue 4
Process monitors that were created by the UNIX/Linux Process Monitoring template cannot save in an existing management pack that has conflicting references to library management packs.

Issue 5
The Linux agent cannot install on a CentOS or Oracle Linux host by using FIPS version of OpenSSL 0.9.8.

Service Manager (KB2828618)
Issue 1
If the number of "Manual Activities" that are displayed in the Service Manager Portal exceeds a certain limit, page loads may time out and do not render correctly. This results in a blank page.

Issue 2
Incorrect cleanup of a custom related type causes grooming on the EntityChangeLog table to stall. This causes the table to grow significantly.

Issue 3
Service requests complete unexpectedly because of a race condition between workflows.

Issue 4
The console crashes when you double-click a parent incident link on an extended incident class.

Issue 5
PowerShell tasks that were created by using the authoring tool do not run because of an incorrect reference to certain assemblies.

Issue 6
The Exchange management pack is stuck in a Pending state after management pack synchronization.

Orchestrator (KB2828616)
Issue 1
The Monitor SNMP Trap activity publishes incorrect values for strings when a Microsoft SNMP Trap Service connection is used.

Issue 2
Inconsistent results when you use Orchestrator to query an Oracle database.
Data Protection Manager (KB2822782)
Issue 1
An express full backup job in System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 may stop responding on a Hyper-V cluster that has 600 or more virtual machines.

Issue 2
When a System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 item level restore operation is performed on a SharePoint host header-based site collection, the restore operation is unsuccessful.

Issue 3
When you open Data Protection Manager on a computer that is running System Center 2012 Service Pack 1, the Welcome screen does not indicate the correct version of Service Pack 1.

Issue 4
When you perform a disconnected installation of the Data Protection Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 agent, you receive the following error message:  Protection agent cannot be installed on a machine where DPM is installed.

Issue 5
When you use Data Protection Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 for tape backup, you receive the following error message:

The operation failed because of a protection agent failure. (ID 998 Details: The parameter is incorrect (0x80070057))

Issue 6
Backups of CSV volumes may be unsuccessful with metadata file corruption in Data Protection Manager 2012 Service Pack 1.

Issue 7
The Data Protection Manager console may require more time to open than expected when many client systems are being protected.

Downloads;

App Controller (KB2815569)

Operations Manager (KB2828615)

Operations Manager - UNIX and Linux Monitoring (Management Pack Update) (KB2828653)

Service Manager (KB2828618)

Orchestrator (KB2828616)

Data Protection Manager (KB2822782)

Microsoft Management Summit 2013 Keynote.

MMS 2013 Keynote.