PiqueABoo

I don't love the steps outlined in the KB (IIRC some is recycled from old documentation, the *.com bit is guaranteed to trip some folk up), but I'm 100% certain you can use the IIS SMTP service to relay mail out through Live@Edu in that manner. Know it works on server 2008 R2, and see no reason whatsoever why it wouldn't on 2008 and 2003. If you use that KB then you do it with the IIS 6.0 Manager and it's simplest to do all the configuration it mentions (Basic Authentication, credentials, TLS, port 587, smarthost, Relay restrictions) on the SMTP virtual server properties i.e. do not make a Domains->*.com entry. Possible gotchas: Your LAN or RBC/LA/ISP don't let port 587 traffic out to the MS Live@Edu servers. AV software has been known to block all outbound SMTP related connections as potential spambots. You must configure anything sending mail this way to send mail with a From address which matches the mail address for the Live@Edu account used by the SMTP service. It gets used too much for diverse recipients and the Live@Edu account hits the Live@Edu recipient limits.

Again it's got to be in a domain to install the Management Tools. Not sure if that has to be a domain with Exchange.. or what it does if Exchange isn't there yet e.g. it *might* do the schema updates etc. More observations: - You can *not* obviously use EMC to create new Live@Edu mailbox users, contacts or distribution groups. - You can make new dynamic distribution groups, fiddle with a lot of existing mailbox attributes (including full access, send on behalf, whether they can do POP3, IMAP, MAPI etc), contacts, adjust normal distribution group memberships, make new transport and journal rules etc. - Interestingly the SP2 EMC doesn't expose those new extended custom attributes (multi as opposed to single value) we're all supposed to be in love with now. - It caches some info, so you'll need to hit refresh if, for instance, you make new Live@Edu users with remote powershell or the Live@Edu ECP. Would be quite cool if MS pulled fingers out of the obsessive shared address space federated wotsit world and made a version of EMC that: a) is easily installable and doesn't pine for an on-permises Exchange, b) added ability to create new users etc, c) Gave you some useful links that use stored credentials to get you past the LiveID login straight into the ECP, or straight into a logged in remote powershell console.

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008/65477-exchange-2010-useful-powershell-commands.html

I've played a little now (added my desired Win7 to a virtual domain, just a DC+E2K10 like the MS demo VHD, installed EMC, then threw the domain away). You can connect to multiple Live@edu tenancies and it remembers them (and optionally the credentials), but same as I've previously found so far in powershell with new-moverequest, you can't move a mailbox directly between tenancies.. mailbox moving is strictly tenancy<->on-premises only. That aside, I think it's useful because it does make some of the geekier powershell stuff you might want to get involved with easier to handle e.g. displays some info prettily, makes some configuration easier. Has little padlocks on all the fields you can't change (because it is Live@Edu). Raw, rather than this EMC abstracted powershell, is still the place for lots of things though, not least bulk changes. Not sure whether I'll use EMC much if at all, but reckon it's worth having in your "toolbox".

I followed this story and the share price dive over the summer and first part of the autumn term, and yes it feels like ancient history now. Only point I haven't read here that was in some RM official statement they said they'd be keeping in-house h/w production under review, see how the market goes, because of the overheads for that capability... wasn't sure whether that meant servers, workstations, or both. Also a couple of financial analyst articles last year suggested RM were a little slow reacting to the brave new world , which considering all that BSF/HT/other money went away the *previous* summer seemed like screamingly obvious fair comment. One answer, possibly *the answer* is that "people" definitely can, but if you're like me then such solutions are part of what pays the wages and there is no incentive to just give away a serious investment in time/expertise to your competitors. Ignoring that, there is still project documentation/maintenance/support/updates which for a "good and flexible" solution would be massive undertaking. The odd freebie app is one thing, a decent freebie off-the-shelf *system* is another league. Agree that it's inconceivable but since we're playing.... In both cases you would likely be able to get support from somewhere, systems will mostly keep working and the impact would be gradual. CC3 has gotten by for 2 -3 years without any RM development, just MS sec-fixes, which aren't that hard to do i.e. would carry on working until schools would have had move to something else regardless. CC4 is the one dependant on lots of proprietory RM code and although it's largely stable now, if that code or the database at it's heart breaks, then I think you and any support provider could be in serious trouble... but I think the majority would likely keep working well enough for long enough for changes to happen as part of the natural system life-cycle i.e. not an expensive, abrupt change. The eventual, significant loss would be the relative consistency we get across all those CCx systems... might not be the most brilliant standard possible, but they're OK and a world away from the worst I've seen in "vanilla" land... there are exceptions, but hell tends to be other folk's d-i-y systems.

Is there a proxy in the way? If so it won't work until you configure the WinHTTP proxy [XP: use proxycfg, W7: use netsh]

Haven't seen much about it anywhere but knew that was supposed to work and nearly tried it earlier this year (2011). Gave up because the EMC won't install on a standalone Win7(64) where I wanted it and never got around to downloading the MS Exchange demo VHD. If anyone has played lots, I wanted to see what you could and couldn't do with a claimed feature: Moving a mailbox from one forest to another? I'm not optimistic, but it would be cool if you could persuade it to move a mailbox from one Live@Edu tenancy to another without too much tech effort... have done this with Outlook export and import which works, but that's a bit of a pain.

Getting a free for edu cert from say IPSCA isn't much hassle i.e. if you can receive for (amongst others) [email protected] to authenticate the cert request then it just works. What does ja.net add?

I'm not, but since I'm hijacking this I'll *bump* that point anyway Take a hint from the raison d'etre for the implementation guide in your kit and for that matter some of your output i.e. it's not necessarily the right kind of documentation. In the last decade or so if you wanted to do something on Exchange you could: a) spend ages trying to distill the recipe from formal MS reference docs and probably fail, b) fire off a net-search and arrive at some near-perfect recipe with pretty screenshots at a site like petri.co.il and usually succeed. For some reason Live@Edu doesn't seem to encourage much of the latter [although @RabbieBurns did it for ILM on here]. Dunno whether it's simply because fewer competent folk are playing with it in depth, whether they have commercial reasons to keep relevant wisdom to themselves, or what. It's a similar landscape on the outlookliveanswers forums.. people turn up there with problems, but there's not obviously many wandering by with solutions.. Steve Goodman clearly did that for a while, but the average MS response (if they're made to any non-trivial query) just isn't that great. Again I do like Live@Edu, set it up, make mailboxes, contacts a few DGs etc and it's all hunky dory, but if you dive in deeper then keeping up with current capabilities, good stategies for doing X or Y, seems to take a little too much effort. You can try it with a reasonably obvious "X" that's crossed my radar a few times: "I want to move everything from our half-dead ancient Exchange 2003 box and just use Live@Edu instead". See if you can point to a decent recipe for that and note you're not allowed to add new boxes/stuff coz they don't have the budget.

CC4/4.3 supports XP workstations too same as MS do until Apr 2014, hence a WMP11 package.

Been there, done all of this a couple of years ago. RM do give you things for the money and if you're trying to make a system that's in the CC feature ballpark, then one way or another it won't be free i.e. you either have to pay for stuff or spend time making it yourself. The key trick is not to blithely trade expense of management tools for management via manual labour (costs of which can wipe out apparent saving). There are lots of details like the one in this thread, but I think the biggest issue to sort out is s/w deployment.

bitsadmin does UNCs or URLs.

Best guess (might be wrong): Go to the Control folder in your distribution share, look in bootstrap.ini for "SkipComputerName=YES" and change that to NO, then regenerate the WinPE boot image.

There's a command line util bitsadmin.exe you can use to make/query BITS jobs that was once my plan B for throwing files around the planet (didn't get around to playing with it because plan A worked).

::sob:: It's one of those "offer applies to new customers only" things isn't it? I think you should hunt down and send folk who do the real work (as opposed to evil delegators) a cutely customised arc mouse or something on their tenancy's anniversary. Nope? OK then I'll settle for vigorous effort in enhancing MS->Techmarine communications clarity. I genuinely like Live@Edu and if you're not too ambitious you can happily just use it without caring much, but otherwise picking out reliable, current, useful information on **the Live@Edu you've got right now** from the Live@edu/Windows Live/Office365/Forum/Blog-here/FAQ-there infoverse has been a teensy bit challenging at various times during 2011. Sure having all those docs rounded up on a penstick or skydrive *is* a good start, but some of them need a refresh to get rid of confusing dead wood etc.

It's about *little* kids e.g. perhaps in the range Nursery - Year2. I think the difficulties are overestimated, but many schools definitely want something easier than the small/fiddly native menus for that age range.

::can't resist:: That problem was solved a long time ago: You either made the code (wasn't difficult) or bought a password change notification DLL to worry about password policy for different user groups. Add-ons to improve security are acceptable in so many other ways e.g. AV, so it's curious that there has apparently been resistance/indifference to improving this notoriously vulnerable area. Way I remember it "dreadful security" was the milieu, not a notably unique attribute of NT. Like most of the alternatives NT4 was OK if you knew what you were doing and that was part of my job on the private side of fence, where I heard quite a bit of poorly understood received opinion (typically picked up from the MS vs. Netware vs. commercial Unix PR battle raging in the tech press) from county public sector folk whose existing network security was a naively box-ticked joke they simply couldn't or wouldn't see. More techs obviously know more about security now and MS have obviously made it easier for those who don't to survive (system integrity protection, UAC, more secure out-of-box etc.). But a lot of networks still have notable flaws, so I think some of the change in attitude is about risk perception i.e. networks were scarier in their infancy, but by and large folk running networks behind LA/RBC firewalls have gotten away with the flaws, nothing bad has happened or at least if it did, they didn't notice. -- Separate obviously can be better, but I don't think there is a rule. In practice, subject to techs and users, 'separate' networks can be roughly as secure or insecure as combined ones. Perhaps the more useful question is: "If I combine the networks, what are some pragmatic approaches to achieving enhanced security for especially sensitive network resources?"

Not an expert, especially on that model, but the usual trick for HP is NOT to set an IP address for that VLAN on the switch e.g. if you've given it say 192.168.250.1, then get rid of it.

Don't know if this Telnet class is any good (a glance suggests it will do), but I would find a free dotNet telnet class. Failing that, I happily did cert authenticated SSH sessions to modify large amounts of config on some network gadgets a few years ago by simply calling the puTTY command line util from my dotNet code (puTTY does telnet too).

Google "session 0 isolation" to find out why. There might be some trick or arcane dotNet call to get you around this, but I suspect you have to p/invoke the WTS API (for an example of the territory we're in run QWINSTA) to get the physical console user's session ID, and via that info about their session e.g. desktop dimensions. And if you're doing this because you want your service to do something on the user's desktop then the google I suggested should turn up typical methods.

MegaRaid?

I did: Some obligatory BASIC on the Sinclair, plus lots of 8086, plus Forth. -- I broadly agree that you don't have to have been trained in coding to become good at it, but making good (and pragmatic!) code does require good analytical skills. Whether you're born with those, or whether they can be acquired is anyone's guess, but if they can be taught/encouraged I'd like to see more of that that happen... certainly doesn't have to be formal programming or anything obviously computer-centric, just something that exercises the same kind of thought processes. Bunch of us relatively literate folk (in a dodgy area) got dragged out of English classes @ 12yo and mostly did lateral thinking stuff instead, maybe that helped do the trick for me... dunno.

GPP has a specific Internet Explorer settings feature that works fine. The only problem with it is that MS don't update it for new releases of IE e.g. 2008 server GPP does IE7 + earlier, 2008 R2 does IE8 + earlier (but not IE9). [You can fiddle the underlying XML but that's a pain] Reasons for IE8 not working when *you haven't changed anything else*: Some old IE settings have been known to confuse later IE e.g. you don't have a proxy for gopher set do you?

Re. "trumping" I posted an angle on thatl last Dec. Re: SkyDrive I thought MS explicitly said data stored there could end up anywhere in the world (unlike Live@edu which is, and Office365 sharepoint which is supposed to bee EU)? Have they changed that?

Possibly stating the obvious, but does running the first part (below) list any mailboxes? Get-Mailbox | Where { $_.OrganizationalUnit -eq “test.internal/test High School - Users/teaching staff” }