Today, the Live@edu program team launched a new site, aimed at students, with the purpose of raising awareness of Live@edu.  Please pay a visit here: http://www.livecampus.net/.

The entire site is built on our Silverlight technology, so it is interactive and has plenty going on.  If you are an admin that has just rolled out the program and would like some materials to assist with awareness raising on your campus, you may be interested in some of the branded, reusable materials we have provided here for IT Administrators and here for Microsoft Student Partners. 

notebooks	tee-shirts	tips and tricks	posters

etc...

If you work in IT Support, and like me in my past are used to sitting on the cardboard boxes that rackable servers come in to get a break, you may also appreciate the chance to win an electronic massage chair (US Only, I believe).

Relax!

Jonny

That's bad use of the metaphor, but anyway...

One of the first things I usually tell new Live@edu admins to do is to create additional administrative accounts.  This is of course for  number of reasons such as avoiding losing the username and password when someone walks out the door with it.

There are TWO types of account.  The WLAC Admin, and the email service admin.

The first admin account you create when you enroll in the service is a kind of double admin... a Windows Live Admin Center (WLAC) admin and also an Exchange Labs or Hotmail admin.  Being the WLAC admin allows you to log on to http://domains.live.com, and make some high-level service changes (such as turn it off :) ) This account can also create additional Exchange Labs admins (I blogged on how to do this here).

You should also create additional WLAC admin accounts - as many as you need, but more than one to be safe.  To do this, you simply run through the enrollment process again for the same domain, and when you come to the bit about creating an admin account, that is where you create the additional LiveID.  Once you complete this step, you will be presented with an additional MX record as well.  You can stick that into your DNS along side the original one you got - same priority/different priority, it does not matter that much.

Enjoy!

Jonny

One of my favorite things to come out of the Live team's portfolio of products is Mesh... and I am a bit of a geek about it.  Mesh combines the online storage capabilities of SkyDrive with the peer-to-peer sharing capabilities of FolderShare.  While it is a new offering, is still in beta, and is not a replacement for the latter two solutions yet, do a bit of digging and it will become apparent that we have big plans for this platform component in the future.

So what are the education scenarios here?  Imagine a student that has a desktop PC in their dorm room, a laptop they carry around, and random machines they access in a library.  Normally their 'synchronization device' is the USB stick they carry around in their pocket, and this all works fine until it gets dropped down the toilet, stood on, lost, or worse.

Now imagine that same student using Live Mesh.  They create an online folder (or several folders) on their Live Desktop, add their own machines (the PC and the laptop) into the mesh and have those folders all synch up.  Now regardless of whether they are online on a library PC or offline on their laptop/PC, they can always access their files.  Even if their machine of choice is a Mac, we offer a Mac Mesh client as well (currently in limited tech preview as of today) and soon a client for Windows Mobile SmartPhones!

But it does not stop quite there...  let's say a student forgets to put a file into their Mesh, they are connected to a wireless network from their laptop, and they know that the file they need is on their dorm PC.  Mesh enables that student to connect to that dorm PC over a terminal services session, log onto it, and drag the file into their mesh.

But it does not stop quite there... ... let's say that that same student is now working with a group of other students in a study group.  Any folder in the mesh can also be synched with other people through an invitation model.  For students that are invited to share a folder with someone else and that accept, that folder will be added to their Live Desktop.  Permissions can be set by the originating owner, and folders can be synched with other members' machines.

But it does not stop there either...is this getting wearisome? You can also use Mesh as a messenger service to communicate with others by posting messages or chatting directly through the interface.

But it does not stop quite there ... ... ... there is also an API available, so the ultimate number of uses you could set this to are limited by your imagination.

Enjoy!

Jonny

So the big Educause event is on this week, and many of my team members are there waving the flag for Microsoft.  We also have the Partner Developer Conference running in parallel with this.  This year the big story is all around Software + Services, which is really our take on this whole Cloud Computing phenomenon that is currently sweeping the world of IT.  I tell education customers that Live@edu is a good concrete example of some of the things that you can roll out now as a taster for things to come.  Today, we announced a load of things that make the future tastier still.

The full press release is here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-28Educause08PR.mspx.  Below, I touch on some of these.

Azure - a hosted cloud computing/development platform:  Think Facebook applications for one, or think of a research department in a university that wants to spin up a bunch of computing cycles to solve some mathematical problem and they do not have the resources to do this locally...

Office Web Applications:  Use your favorite productivity applications through your browser and not have to worry about having Office installed to edit documents.  Good for students that want to work in a controlled collaborative way with their documents, or researchers working across geographical boundaries on a paper.

Geneva: Then buried a little deeper, we had the announcement that we will be supporting SAML in our forth-coming "Geneva" offering - a claims based authentication platform.  This has implications for how we may eventually work with Shibboleth - more to come here as the development unfolds.

Enjoy!

Jonny

I will be running a drop in lab for some students soon in a University computer lab, and in support of this, I pulled together a simple lab manual that people could use to walk through some of the Live@edu applications.  I will be placing a copy of this doc beside each workstation.

Anyway...here is a link to my instructional masterpiece :)

Don't forget, there is a range of other student-facing materials that we have provided here: http://go.liveatedu.com.

Enjoy!

Jonny

I have a few emails from customers because they have not been able to run PowerShell scripts that they have downloaded from the Internet; csv_parser.ps1 is an example.

What is happening here is that when you download the file, your browser (IE, Firefox) can mark the file as unsafe as it comes from that shady place known as the Internet.  If you trust the source however, there are a number of things you can do to get the file working again:

1. Right click the file in question, select 'Properties' and on the General tab you will see some text “This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.”  You can choose to unblock the file, and then it will run normally.
2. Open the file, and copy/paste the contents into a new file with a new name...the file will then run normally.

Hope that helps!

Jonny

A lot of customers would like to be able to 'brand' the look and feel of how Exchange Labs is presented to end users with their own look and feel.  This can be done inside of the OWA Premium experience by using co-branding, you can add your own logos, color schemes, links and so on.  Read more about this here...I will blog on this topic eventually :)

Other colleges want to go a little further, and keep users of Exchange Labs completely within their portal environment, and the way that a lot of colleges are doing this is through the use of iFrames. I have included a sample of this technique below.

The HTML required to do this is simply:

<iframe style="width: 500px; height: 375px" src=http://exchangelabs.com frameborder="3" scrolling="yes"></iframe>

...of course you would not use the dimensions I have used!

Enjoy!

Jonny

Well...I did my Webcast the other day on the various deployment options for Exchange Labs.  You can view this again here: http://www.educationwebcasts.com/Webcast.aspx?i=3472.  The sound quality is not so good... but hopefully you can make it out OK.  It covers stuff I have on the blog here.

I have another Webcast tomorrow...check out www.educationwebcasts.com for a full list.

Enjoy!

Jonny

While I have to say I prefer to use PowerShell to create mailboxes as I like to do some customization of the scripts, if you simply want to create a load of mailboxes in one go, the CSV Import tool will do the job just as well. 

There is a good collection of articles on this tool on our Technet site here.  The only thing I can say you need to watch out for is that the csv file format that you use with the CSV Import Tool is slightly different than the one you use with our CSV_Parser.ps1 script.

CSV Import Prerequisites:

• Download the CSV Import Tool: the CSV Import Tool is available as part of the Windows Live Admin Center Software Development Kit V3.0 (or better), you can download this from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=101670.
• Install the .Net Framework 2.0 or later: this is needed to allow the CSV Import tool to run.  It can be obtained from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=65500

Prepare a CSV file for use with the CSV Import Tool:
There are a number of places you could obtain a CSV file from in the format required to use with the CSV Import Tool.  If you have an Active Directory running to support your student accounts, you can use the CSVDE tool to get this file (download here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=101669).  If you do not have an AD running, it is highly likely you will have other databases you can extract an accurate list of your user population from.

• The CSV file needs to be laid out in a set format.  You can work with many combination of actions and mailbox attributes when creating your new users, but only a few of these are mandatory:
  • Action: The type of procedure to be performed, for example ‘Add’
  • Type: You can create 2 types of item, an ‘Account’ or a ‘Contact’
  • EmailName: the email address of the new mailbox you want to create.  This address also becomes the LiveID
  • Then there are many others…a full list of all the attributes you can specify are here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/bb847829.aspx, along with sample csv files for your reference.

Anyway, I recorded a short video of me creating some users with CSVImport.exe for your viewing pleasure.

download

Enjoy!

Jonny

Customers often ask me what all they can do through PowerShell with Exchange Labs.  There are several resources I always refer to, but sometimes it is nice just to have a list in front of you.

General resources you can use are:

Scripting with PowerShell:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx

Exchange Labs
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/default.aspx

And if you want a list, then you can run this command, courtesy of one of our consultants (Ben Appleby)...

Invoke-Command –Runspace $rs {Get-ManagementRole “OrgManagement_Tenant” | Get-ManagementRoleEntry} | Select Name, Parameters | ConvertTo-HTML > CmdletExport.html

Enjoy!

Jonny

A college was asking me the other day about enabling external email forwarding for Exchange Labs.  This is not a feature that is on by default, but you can enable it in a few minutes by logging on to your service through PowerShell, creating a runspace, popping onto it and then entering:

set-remotedomain * -autoforwardenabled $true

That's it.

Mailbox users can then use rules to set up mail forwards to other services by simply typing the address to send mail to into the rule.

Enjoy!

Jonny