Finding Your Active O365 Usage

Your organisation owns a number of office 365 (O365) licenses but how do you know that they are being used and ensure you are getting value for your money? There are few reports available to the administrator but the one that will answer this question is the Licensing vs Active Usage.
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AzureCon and Azure Tour

AzureCon is a free, virtual event where experts from Microsoft and the community will present the latest in Azure innovation and easy-to-adopt solutions. This event has three (3) Keynotes, fifty (50) technical breakout sessions and live Q&A with Microsoft executives, Azure engineers and community members including:
• Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud & Enterprise
• Jason Zander, Corporate Vice President, Cloud & Enterprise
• Bill Staples, Corporate Vice President, Cloud & Enterprise
• Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure

Event details: September 29, 2015 9am - 5pm PST

The Azure Tour starts in Philadelphia and continues in eight (8) different cities around the world from October 2015 to March 2016. Each city will host a free, in-person, one-day technical training event that offers technical breakout sessions, hands-on experiences and full-day immersions. The tour site has more details.


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Announcing SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.3, Upgrade Advisor 2016 Preview 1.1 and Management Studio August Preview

The SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.3 release includes enhancements to the core SQL Server components and also addresses issues that were reported for CTP 2, CTP 2.1 and CTP 2.2. The full list of features and improvements can be found on SQL Server blog. Download CTP 2.3 here.

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Row-level Security Available for SQL Database

Earlier this week, Microsoft made Row-Level Security (RLS) available for SQL Database. This feature, which was released as a preview in January, allows the customer to control who has access to rows in their database table based on a user's characteristics such as identity, role and execution context.  The concept is similar to having  all the data is in one table and then using a query with predicates to decide what data is returned, the query doesn’t change only the values being used in the where clause changes.

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Dude, Where's my GUI - Windows Server 2012/R2

During one of my classes, a student encountered an issue with his virtual machine (VM) which was running Windows Server 2012. After attempting multiple solutions to fix the issue the VM restarted but all that came up was the command prompt, the Server Manager tool didn’t start, there was no task bar. Holy crap, we just lost our GUI!

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Clone Virtual Disk Image (VDI) as a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file

Due to some laptop issues I needed to move some virtual machines (VM) to my replacement machine but this time I decided to run them on Hyper-V. Instead of trying to convert the disk image files to VHD I decided that having a VDI and VHD copy for future would be best. Virtual Box has a command-line interface called VBoxManage that allows you to clone the hard disk image using the clonehd command.

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