TEAMAS

Recently I have been completing some test work with Azure, Azure AD and ADFS.  In the next week or two I will be doing some work with the Enterprise Mobility Suite (Intune for MDM, Azure AD Premium and Azure Rights Management). Hopefully I will be able to blog some random information from my experiences, but this post is to identify potential speed bumps before you attempt to use Azure, Azure AD and ADFS. Money/MSDN Using Azure virtual machines and storage costs money.  When you sign up you must provide valid credit card information.  You are given a £125 trial for a month, but after that it will cost you.  You can configure spend limits which will stop surprise bills being racked up each month. If you have a Visual Studio or MSDN subscription you actually get free credits.  I have a Visual Studio Ultimate Subscription through my work so I get £95 a month to spend in Azure (which is plenty for labs). MSDN Credits Make sure you turn off your Cloud ...

The event was held at the Novotel on Blackfriars Road in London. Unbeknown to me it was the 13th session in the UK (my first).   The announcement of the Citrix User Group Community at Synergy made me more aware of these events. So how was the day? Well it was bloody good fun, unusual for these types of events. Lots of jokes, a few swears but crucially some really interesting technical information. -------------------- News & Synergy Update Neil Spellings Firstly Neil ran a news update session which covered the Eliot group shareholders analysis of Citrix's business strategy. Forbes article He also covered some high level Citrix news including Xenserver 6.5 sp1 release, acquisition of telephony provider Grasshopper and resurrection of the cloud.com domain which Citrix purchased some years ago for Citrix Workspace Cloud. He also showed that Citrix and Xenmobile specifically is in top quadrant for EMM. Neil followed up with a whistle stop tour of Synergy h...

We are using an extraction tool to export data from one of our business applications in preparation to switching to our ERP solution. Unfortunately this tool doesn't add the file extensions to the exported files! So I needed to create a powershell script to do the job for us. As with most things there is no point reinventing the wheel.  I did a google search and found this useful blog post. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dan_fay/archive/2012/09/17/rename-file-extension-with-powershell.aspx The script was pretty much there, but I needed to tweak it slightly.  I added a line which asks the user which file extension they want to use.  I also changed it so that it would only change files which currently have no file extensions configured. What users are presented with The result is as follows $extractedfiles = Get-ChildItem | Where-Object {$_.Extension -eq ""} $fileext = read-host "what file extension?" ForEach ($file in $extractedfiles) { $filenew = $file....

Whilst installing a Windows 2012 R2 virtual machine in Hyper-V, I received the following error message immediately after choosing the edition. "Windows cannot find the Microsoft Software License Terms.  Make sure the installation sources are valid and restart the machine" I had built many 2012 R2 servers in my lab previously so wondered what was different here?  The only thing I had changed was the amount of RAM to 512MB as I had a number of virtual machines already running.  When you change the RAM to 1024MB this problem no longer occurs. I wish Microsoft would do a RAM check and show a message which said "not enough RAM" rather than this cryptic mess. Cheers Sam

Citrix Mobility 2014 At the start of the event there was a look back over the last 25 years of Citrix systems.   Lots of nostalgic images of previous versions of software including Client Access Suite.   It was an interesting introduction which reminded us all how far Citrix has come over the years. Jason Tooley, Country Manager for Citrix in the UK was the host for the event.   He didn’t cover too much himself, but acted as the glue between other presenters. Philip Redman, VP of Mobile Solutions & Strategy at Citrix, was the first main speaker on stage covering “enabling the mobile enterprise”.   His initial point was some things never change and included a quick dig at England’s poor performance at the World Cup in the summer, but then continued to say that the Enterprise Mobility spectrum is always changing.     Initially I wasn’t too impressed with the slide deck.   It seemed a bit slapdash with old icons for Twitter and the imag...

    Password security Over the last couple of years there have been quite a few instances of sophisticated hacking attempts on major companies. These include (but not limited to) Playstation Gawker LinkedIn Adobe When these events occur, it can raise any questions, such as How does this kind of thing happen?   What can people do with this information?   What can you do to protect yourself? Let’s try and answer these questions! How does this kind of thing happen? There are lots of different ways hackers use to access information they are not supposed to have access to.   The majority of these hacks are a result of Malware or a Virus being installed on a PC in the companies’ network.   This can be used to get access to company resources from the inside rather than directly from the Internet.    If the Malware can send information back its author, then this can be very successful for a hacker.   To get Malware onto...