A Brief History Of My Nokia Lumia 920

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I don’t know where I was going with that title. Approximately three weeks ago, I received a Nokia Lumia 920 to try. My first Windows 8 Phone experience. It was grey, and not by choice – it was the only colour they had available. Still, it looked decent. Coming from using the Samsung Galaxy S III for the last several months, the first things I noticed was the extra weight and thickness of the Lumia. It’s also quite solid, it’s the phone that socks should be filled with if you were robbing a convenience store.

Fast forward a few days and I’ve sent the phone back to the carrier. What? Yes, close that open mouth and share my disappointment with the ear speaker being faulty. Some calls were OK, others sounded really muffled. The actual primary use of a mobile phone was faulty out of the box. I’m now waiting for it to be returned, and back on the Samsung Galaxy S III. I hate to say it, but I like it better.

The few days in between the two above events contained a lot of mucking around on the Lumia. The front screen with the tiles, I really like. At a glance of the screen you’ll see if you have messages, emails, or many other indicators as you deem fit. It’s nicer than Windows Phone 7.5 due to the 1/4 tile option, meaning you can fit a lot more on there without needing to scroll up and down.

The sub menu, which lists all your apps is OK. I’d rather have a screen of icons to swipe through, rather than swipe down a single list. I want lots of information at once! Nothing terrible there though.

Lying in bed, I noticed that the screen changed it’s orientation. As I would have done on the Galaxy, I looked for the option to turn orientation off and on. It doesn’t exist. After some research and complaining on twitter, I found out that the native experience doesn’t have the option, and each app controls it individually. That’s rather disappointing.

OK, so after playing with a bunch of settings (much less than I would of liked – on par with an older version of iOS and way behind Android) it was time to look at some apps. Most apps have a trial which is great, but the quality of the apps currently is rather poor. Both iOS and Android went through this, so it will get better – but coming from either of these devices, you will be disappointed.

A podcast app – surely something that’s easy to find. Several exist, but they’re incredibly basic. Subscribing to podcasts and have apps automatically download is not possible, which is crazy. Some developers have told me this is due to limitations with Windows 8 Phone not allowing background downloads unless very limited requirements are met. There is a native podcast functionality, but not enabled in most countries including Australia.

The official Twitter app is also poor in comparison to iOS and Android versions. You can’t see as much, and there’s not much customisation. That’s really my biggest complaint – customisation. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like iOS for my personal use, I don’t like being restricted. In saying that, Windows 8 Phone I can see working really well in a corporate environment. It’s basic, does a lot, and manageable.

Back to the Nokia Lumia side of things, there’s some extras you get vs other Windows 8 Phones. The most well known are Nokia Maps, which is awesome navigation software, and the high quality camera. I played with the camera and it really does take great pictures. One of the cool features is called Cinemagraph which will make an animated GIF from 5 seconds of video. The cool thing you can do with this is easily animate just part of the picture. Having someone perfectly still, but their hand waving is a creepy thing to see. I also found the autocorrect to be much more accurate than Android.

So, I will give the Lumia a second chance when it comes back with it’s high quality screen, but I’ll also feel crippled. It might be a different transition for someone using iOS and not fussed about many apps, but as it is now there’s more negatives than positives moving from Android. In a few months with some updates from Microsoft, and some more apps from developers, I’m hoping it’s a much closer choice.

Strange Old Media

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

Going through an office cleanup, this interesting item was discovered:

media2

media1

I’d never seen one of these before, but it is a Magneto-optical drive which holds 128mb of re-writable data. Quite a cool disk I thought!

We also had a bunch of these:

 

media3

media4

It’s a storage case for Microfilm from SnapLOCK Hadn’t seen this stuff either!

Not much else to add about these, it’s just nice to see ‘new’ stuff once in a while!

Update: Also found this one!

20130131_125501

It’s a 8 inch floppy, not to be confused with the newer 5 1/4 inch floppy. Read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats#IBM_8-inch_formats

Propagating User Folder Permissions on Exchange

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

This post is consolidating a lot of information I’ve found over the last day. It’s one of those things I’ve done a few times over the last several years, so each time I get to it I need a refresh!

For a user running Outlook connected to an Exchange server, and wanting to give someone else access to a large amount of existing folders, they really only have two options. Painstakingly go through every single folder’s permissions and add the other person, or set the permissions on a top level folder, then create new folders under that, and finally move the emails in. Permissions don’t inherit like normal file folders when you move one, only newly created folders inherit their parent’s permission.

Rather painful for the end user, but from the administration side of things, there are few options.

1. Give the second user full access to the first user’s mailbox. This option is far from ideal, because it’s an all or nothing permission, and it isn’t visible by the end user. They can’t tell who has access to their stuff. It also requires someone with appropriate Exchange privileges to manage and make these changes every time. It’s good for a generic mailbox, or someone who’s left the company etc where there is no particular user to manage the permissions.

Exchange 2003 instructions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998707%28v=exchg.65%29.aspx

Exchange 2007 insutrctions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996343%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx

Exchange 2010 instructions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996343%28v=exchg.141%29.aspx

Exchange 2013 instructions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124097.aspx

2. Using either PFDAVAdmin or ExFolders, an administration can use a GUI to connect to a user’s mailbox and apply permissions to a folder, then force propagation of those settings to all child folders. This gives the user visibility and control of the current permissions and future changes, but also will save someone a lot of time from manually doing this.

For Exchange 2000 (sorry if you’re still on this!), Exchange 2003 and 2007, the PFDAVAdmin tool is used, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22427. Keep in mind if you’re on Vista or above you’ll need to manually install Microsoft .Net 1.1. There are some great instructions here on how to do so: http://saranspot.blogspot.com.au/2009/02/installing-dotnet-framework-11-on.html

How to apply the permissions and propegate? This blog post contains great detail, although you can just choose the option of all mailboxes and drill down to the one you’re after rather than worrying about long URLs: http://www.nigelboulton.co.uk/2010/12/delegating-and-propagating-exchange-folder-permissions-using-pfdavadmin/

For Exchange 2010, they change the utility to ExFolders, available here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Exchange-2010-SP1-ExFolders-e6bfd405 . This one can only be run on your Exchange server, read the notes below the download.

Hope that helps anyone looking for a refresh on how to give mailbox permissions or propagate folder permissions!

Removal of Recovery Storage Group

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

Following on from my post here http://www.adamfowlerit.com/2013/01/02/recovery-storage-groups-in-exchange-2007/, once you’re finished with your Recovery Storage Group, you should clean it up. A rather simple process, you start with this Exchange Powershell command:

Remove-MailboxDatabase -identity <Server_Name>\<RSG_Name>\<Database_Name>

This will do the obvious thing of removing the mailbox database. If you can’t remember what you called your Recovery Storage Group, just use the command ‘Get-MailboxDatabase’ and you’ll see all your databases, and if you’ve named the RSG sensibly, you’ll be fine. One thing I ran into was trying this command from a Windows Server 2008 R2 box, while Exchange 2007 was running on Windows Server 2003. It brought up an error saying that I couldn’t remotely do commands from 2008 to 2003, but when I got onto the 2003 box, the database was gone! If you didn’t have this problem, you should get a message stating that you need to manually remove the database file.

The second step is to remove the Storage Group with the following command

Remove-Storagegroup -identity "<Server_Name>\<RSG_Name>"

Again, run ‘get-storagegroup’ to remind yourself of the name. After this, you’ll get a message telling you to remove the log file:

WARNING: The specified storage group has been removed. You must remove the log file located in h:\path\logs from your computer manually if it exists. Specified storage group: exchange\rsg.

Pretty straight forward. If you don’t clean up your RSG, you may have issues with backup software detecting the extra database.

Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125197(v=exchg.80).aspx

SCCM 2012 Right Click Tools and Permissions

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
I ran into some issues getting this working in 2012, so thought I’d share some details about getting this working.

There’s a few variants of the Right Click Tools for System Center Configuration Manager 2012, but the first one I tried didn’t have a right click option for “Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle” which is a rather important one to have. I settled on this one http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2012/08/22/configmgr-2012-right-click-tools-update/ called “ConfigMgr 2012 Powershell Right Click Tools”. The other variants are also available here http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/community/groups/sccm-right-click-tools/docs/.

After downloading and installing, I first discovered the addon didn’t actually install. I needed it on both a Windows Server 2008 R2 box, and a Windows Server 2012 and they both had issues. On 2008, I discovered in the comments of the page I linked before, that the following fix was suggested:

someone gave a quick way to fix this in Powershell 3.0. Just run these commands in powershell and then test it out:
Get-ChildItem “C:\Program Files\SCCMConsoleExtensions” | Unblock-File
Get-ChildItem “C:\Program Files\SCCMConsoleExtensions\PSTools” | Unblock-File

Now the first issue is that Powershell 3.0 isn’t built into Windows Server 2008 R2, so you’ll need to install it, download available here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4725.powershell-v3-guide-en-us.aspx

Once you’ve got that, just run powershell, run the two commands and that seemed to be all I needed to do, the right click tools now worked perfectly.

On the Windows Server 2012 box though, the right click tools came up, but did nothing when any of the options were selected. It already has Powershell 3.0, but running those commands didn’t help. I then thought that re-trying the installer with the right click option ‘Run As Administrator’ would work, but no difference.

As per my “Windows 8 – Easy Admin Access” blogpost, I launched command prompt with those elevated privilidges and installed again. No luck! Finally, I then ran powershell.exe from the elevated command prompt, entered the two Unblock-File commands, and that did work. Keep in mind I even tried the above with the domain administrator account before running the elevated command prompt, so it really demonstrates how different security is in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

Just because you’ve got God level access, and run something with ‘Run as Administrator” doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got access!

run as