How to remove an additional mailbox from opening with Outlook

I had a client today who's Outlook always opens a second mailbox of someone that they have delegated access over.

However, they no longer need it and it was being a pain to remove - no matter what option I tried, it just wouldn't go!

Trying to "Close" the mailbox results in the error

"This group of folders is associated with an e-mail account. To remove the account, click the File Tab, and on the info tab, click Account Settings. Select the e-mail account, and then click Remove."

After a while, I found that a solution was to go to the Exchange "account settings", then click "More Settings", go to the "Advanced" tab, and click "Add", choose a different Mailbox where the user has permissions.

This seems to refresh the Additional Mailbox section.

Next, click ok/next etc, and go back to that screen. The list should now be populated with the box you just added and the original box. You can remove both as usual.

How to reset a Windows password without third party tools

Whilst there are many tools that can change Windows account passwords, I personally like to do it manually as it doesn't take very long.

This trick will not work if you have Bitlocker full disk encyption - and, if you have EFS (Encrypting File System), your keys will become lost (as with any password resetting method).

Firstly, you need access to your hard drive - this can be from anywhere that has NTFS Write access (The easiest method is a Windows Vista/7 installation disk).

If you chose a Windows installation disk, simply boot from it and then at the first screen (Language/Location/Keyboard) click next, followed by holding Shift+F10. This will launch a command prompt window.

Depending on the amount of partitions and setup you have, Windows may be on a different drive. Try typing the following:

c:

dir

If this doesn't look like your hard drive, try changing c to d, and go through the alphabet until you reach your hard drive.

Once there, type the following:

cd\windows\system32

ren osk.exe osk_old.exe

copy cmd.exe osk.exe

Next, reboot Windows.

From here, click the accessibility\wheelchair icon and then the On Screen Keyboard option.

This will now launch a Command Prompt window as `SYSTEM` (Be careful!).

You have two options : the quickest, to change the password from the command line is:

net user username password

(Change username and password to... well, you can guess!).

There will be no confirmation, it will simply just change.

If you would rather use a UI, type `mmc` and press enter. From here, go to "File" > "Add/Remove Snap-in", Click "add", and choose "Local Users and Groups". click "close", then "ok".

Expand "Local Users and Groups" > "Users", and right click on a user, followed by "Set Password"... Choose whatever you want, and you are done!

To reset the earlier system changes, you have two options.

First, get to the command prompt from the Windows setup disk in the same way and type:

x: (where x is the drive)

cd\windows\system32

del osk.exe

ren osk_old.exe osk.exe

or, if you would rather just do it without the disk, go back to the login screen, launch command prompt and type this:

cd\windows\system32

start cmd

(Close the original command prompt window)

cd\windows\system32

del osk.exe

ren osk_old.exe osk.exe

and done!

How to enable the Start Menu in Windows 8 developer preview

If you want to enable the classic Start Menu on Windows 8, there is a simple registry switch you can use.

It is located at

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer"

Simply change the "RPEnabled" entry from "1" to "0"

Changing this key changes a lot - it seems to put it back to a "Microsoft Internal" state displaying the following warnings on Winver and the desktop:

Please note, as with everything on the preview, this is a sort of "hack" which is not officially supported. It changes a heck of a lot - Pressing the start button in the bottom left corner works as expected... but, the ribbon bar disappears, you get classic Task Manager, and pressing the Windows keyboard key is buggy - the start menu appears, then disappears to reveal the metro interface, then metro interface disappears and the start menu loads!

The start menu really is not officially supported in this release and does seem to have a few bugs (mainly style related). I am not sure if Microsoft have disabled it on purpose from the preview in order to get people to use Metro and it will be there in the final product, or if it will be dropped entirely from final product - (or in the state it is in now for some sort of legacy reason.

A big downside is that apart from seeing a glimpse of the metro interface when you press the Windows key, it does actually break it and the ability to deploy/test applications on it - which is the whole point of the developer preview. So... do this once, have a look around and put it back!

(Error starting a tile application)

As you can guess, the preview is unfinished and I am sure they will change the start menu (either disable completely or simply modify behaviour) before release.

If you are not comfortable editing the registry, here are some ready made .REG files for you:

Change the key to 0 (Enable the start menu)

Change the key to 1 (Disable the start menu)

UPDATE---

If you force close and reopen Explorer after changing this key, it stops the Metro app from flashing up when pressing the Windows Key - however - tile based apps and running from Visual Studio still do not work. That being said, you can change the target in Visual Studio to an Emulator which runs the tile applications fast. I haven't looked in to this more, but it is a really cool application that allows you to test touch amongst other things.

The Office 365 partner experience. Is Microsoft trying to get rid of us?

I originally wanted one blog post, but, it turns out that I had more to say than I thought, so, I am doing this as a two parter! Click here to read My take on Google Apps Vs Office 365 .

I first heard about Office 365 at a Microsoft partner briefing towards the end of last year, I have been wanting to sign a customer up to it for a while, but, I was simply not willing to do it whilst it was in Beta.

Now it is out, this blog post will give my experiences as a Microsoft Partner. I have already given my experiences as a user comparing it to Google Apps in the first part.

To get started - As I hope it came across in the first part, I really think Office 365 is a good solution, but, for the partner experience - I simply hate it! It is my honest belief that Microsoft are trying to cut partners out and that we are a complete after thought for Office 365.

The only controls available to partners are to send a trial code and to send a purchase offer at the end of the trial.... This is really just about it!

So, with one customer, I sent them a 30 day trial for Office 365 Plan E3. It became clear during the trial that they had no intention of using any of the additional Office 365 features and simply wanted Exchange Online. Here comes the first problem!

Almost no one at Microsoft seems to understand the different plans on offer through Office 365! I rang up the support line three times, firstly I got a "No, not possible", next I got a reassuring "Yes, I think it is possible, You may loose all data during the move", and then the third time I was told that they would look in to it and get back to me.

The same sort of experience can be seen on the official forums where I asked the same question - Someone from MS giving the wrong answer, not understanding what I wrote - but then, eventually someone else from Microsoft answers giving an answer I wanted...

However, I was far from convinced and purchased a licence myself in order to test the scenario - this is one of the major faults with Office 365 - Whilst there is quite a bit of help and support listed, there are not enough real world situations and examples. When I ring up the helpline, all they seem to do is a search of the same knowledge base and if they can't find an answer, I get the impression that they just guess.

In the end, I found out that it is perfectly fine and I was able to migrate my customer easily, without losing any data (or having any down time). But, if so many people from Microsoft do not understand the different subscription levels, I do not know how they expect us to! That being said, it isn't really that hard and I knew the levels, which is why I was so annoyed at Microsoft not knowing and giving me silly answers back.

Again, I just feel that the partner experience was an after though. There is no way that I have seen to manage clients at all.

There is a section about delegated administration - but... it doesn't work at all. The option is simply not there.

So, the best I have been able to do is to create an administrator account for myself under my clients account - it is not ideal, but it works.

Towards the end of the trial, when it came to selling them the license, I went to increase the count on the one I had already purchased. I did nothing special other than to order them, however, I got the following two emails straight after each other:

So quite frankly, without a good administration panel, I haven't a clue what is going on here, or even if I will get a single penny for signing up my client. This takes me straight to the next point:

I feel that Microsoft are really screwing partners in two ways. Firstly, the new hosted Exchange solution costs less and offers more than any hosted solution from any partner I have seen - I simply do not know why any partner will want to offer their own hosted Exchange going forward.

And next, the partner fees for Hosted Exchange are 6% for the time you are the partner on record and a further 12% for the first year of signing a company up, meaning that if you are a partner who signed someone up during the first year, you can earn a combined 18%/ However, once again, due to the way the partner system works, and the fact that there is a 30 day grace period, at the end of one year, you are much better off simply ditching/letting a license expire and signing your customer up to a brand new 1 year licence. This results in the customer getting a free month and the partner getting another 18% for the next year instead of just 6%.

I just have very mixed feelings over Office 365, I believe that it is probably the best solution out there, but, I really hate the partner experience, or complete lack of one.

I have seen one of the biggest annoyances people have been saying about is lack of partner billing support, I do not see this as a big problem as it is easy to simply not give your client access to the license section and buy the licence yourself, then charge your client at the end of every month direct. I personally have no intention of charging my clients over the price set my Microsoft... but... it would be nice to have the option to do so....

... When I say this, I am not talking about ripping off my customers in any way, simply put, I have always been used to giving my clients a single bill at the end of every month or quarter which covers everything I do - email hosting included. I find it annoying to change my business processes to have to fit in to the way that Microsoft thinks is best.

I feel it would be so much better if they simply offered licences to partners for sale at 18% off the retail price and let us do what we like with our clients. I for one would love this and by far think it is a superior solution.

However, again, I do not see Microsoft doing this any time soon, I think they have slapped together the bare minimum to call it a cloud partner program and are going to leave it there.

I signed another client up on a trial and they had a small issue on the control panel - they decided to call Microsoft for help as the control panel has a support link - this is not customisable to partners and they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. Upon speaking to Microsoft, they were asked to go in to PowerShell and type a bunch of commands - they were out of their comfort zone and rang me up to do it for them...

I just don't think Microsoft understands the relationships that support companies have with their clients, I would be willing to get a cheaper licence without end user support thrown in... That line must cost a bit to have and the whole point of being a partner is that we want to be the single point of call for our clients.

I just think within the next few years, we are going to see a lot more of Microsoft targeting end users directly and attempting to cut out partners as much as they can.

Going back to this support line - It is the most stupidest use of VOIP and localisation I have seen - No matter what country you ring from, you get forwarded to the same country/target, but, it is only open during working hours in your country. I had an urgent issue in the middle of the night, so, I rang up the Australian help number and it was the exact same IVR/Option, and I went through to the same help line! Why can't they just keep the number open 24x7?

And... If anyone wants any free trial links to Office 365, here are some for you!

Office 365 E3 25 user trial

Office 365 K2 25 user trial

Office 365 P1 10 user trial

Office Professional Plus 25 user trial

Exchange Online Archiving 25 user trial

If you want to purchase Office 365 and do not have a partner, feel free to get in contact with me and I will be happy to set you up - I would still say I am a Microsoft fan and I really hope they improve the partner program, I for one would love to be proved wrong on many of the points I have made here - I just unfortunately do not see it happening. I still feel Office 365 is a brilliant solution... Just not for partners!

My take on Google Apps Vs Office 365

I am writing this entry as an IT pro who has a few clients on Google Apps now for several months, and has recently switched one client to Office 365. Rather than make this even longer than it is going to be, I will be writing about the partner experience in a separate post.

I believe Google Docs is a nice tool - if you are creating a basic document in it and want to share it with other Google Docs users, or even download and run inside Office, it works well... but... I have had (many) issues with existing complex documents that I have uploaded to it.

On the other side, I have used Microsoft Office Online and believe it is perfect. Documents are preserved entirely.

The above being said, Google Docs offers a few nice features such as surveys/questionnaires that are a really nice touch and I have used several times. I have clocked a lot less time on Office Online, but, from my limited time, I would say that Google also has better sharing/multi user capabilities. I think that Microsoft make up for this with SharePoint, but cannot personally comment.

However, taking in to account the above, the majority of my clients are happy with the way they work - they only want hosted email and the only time they need to write documents is in their Office where they use Dropbox, VPN or network shares to sync things. Whilst Dropbox can get expensive for very large projects/teams, all of these solutions work very well for my clients.

Now, I have never really had a problem with Gmail... until one of my clients did, which cause me to spend many many hours researching it and trying to find a solution.

If you or your company are not big emailers, or are happy with the Gmail web interface, it is a perfectly adequate solution. That being said, IMAP support is just error filled, rubbish, flawed, and annoying.

One of my clients is a recruitment company who pretty much live in Emails - their business depends on it. In addition, they use software for their business that includes an Outlook Add-in and despite following guide upon guide online (and writing one myself), there are just frequent problems.

I do believe a few of these issues I have seen are due to Outlook's IMAP handling, but, some of the issues were also seen during my testing in Thunderbird.

After finally managing to get help from someone in Google, the only solution was to try to go back to pop3, which for sync issues to phone is just a no-go area.

So... I wanted to find an alternate solution and since Office 365 has just launched, I decided to switch to it - and email now works perfectly.

Personally as an administrator and someone who is responsible for support, I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Exchange. Exchange is a behemoth of a solution! It is quite expensive, requires a lot of planning, seems to touch everything... but... works very well indeed (once up!). I truly believe that there is nothing better for a business than Exchange with Outlook as a client.. One of my favourite words, but the only word that can really describe Exchange and Outlook is "Flawless".

The downside though is whilst the base functionality is there, it really lacks a lot of features that makes Exchange truly great. If you want some of the advanced features, you really need to learn PowerShell. An example is mailbox delegation which requires manually going in to a persons Outlook and setting (or using a PowerShell script). Annoyingly, this is a very easy task to perform in Google Apps.

When Gmail launched, it was sort of revolutionary - Very good anti spam, enormous storage space and labels instead of folders, but a few years on and I would say anti spam in Office 365 is just as good, Storage in Gmail is the same as Office 365 and... Labels are a fad... this was one of the big problems with IMAP Gmail access - deleting emails only removed the label. There are options, but without a central way to set it - it was annoyingly difficult.

Whilst I can not give a full account of Office 365 Vs Google Apps, I can give a fair review of Gmail Vs Hosted Exchange (which I believe is the main component people will be using).

With Microsoft offering the Kiosk worker plan and Hosted Exchange on its own, I think this is the way forward and I will no longer be offering any Google Apps services to my clients for the foreseeable future.

I feel that Microsoft have a truly superior product that simply lacks a good enough control interface and real world scenario/support - I can only hope they improve this soon. Whilst I am writing this in brief here, this is actually a major point, but will cover it in my next part which is about Microsoft abandoning partners on Office 365.

How to speed up Gmail IMAP in Outlook... No more hangs, not responding or timeouts!

I have now switched 4 clients over to Google Apps for Domains and they have all noticed various speed issues from time to time.

The most common is Google Mail hanging or not responding when doing various operations such as deleting or sending email.

I have tried to contact Google several times and have been getting no where, and searching the internet has come up pretty blank.

Anyway, straight to it... Examples/Pictures are based on Outlook 2010, but, you should be able to adapt to other versions.

The problem is because of both Gmail IMAP being bad, and Oulook's IMAP handling not being as good as it could be.

Firstly, Go to the "Send / Receive" Tab, and "Define Send/Receive Groups"

Next, tick all the boxes and change the send/receive timer down to one minute (or whatever you want).

Then, double click on the account, and whilst you can use any settings you like, I recommend ticking Inbox and choosing "Download complete item including attachments", then unticking all the other boxes.

Lastly and most importantly, put Outlook in to Offline mode.

And we are done!

The reason for this, as far as I can see, is that Outlook attempts to do all operations live on the server, however, Google's IMAP server constantly disconnects, and generally does not play nice with Outlook. This means that every time you try to do an operation, it has to reconnect - but it does this on the UI thread and causes everything to hang.

By forcing Outlook in to Offline Mode, it does every operation locally and instantly on your machine then because we set the account to send/receive whilst in offline mode, everything will still work as expected and because the send/receive happens in the background, nothing freezes!

The only downside is that this countdown to the minute is always running in the background, if you send an email, it will not actually go until the next cycle, so if on the phone or doing something urgent, you may want to click send/receive instead of waiting.

I have been racking my brain out on this, I really hope it helps you and please leave a comment/pass it on if it has!

How to clear a whiteboard that has dried ink / without scrubbing!

I really have no idea why I am blogging this!

As a geek, I have so many whiteboards around me - they come in so handy!

As many people know, if you leave the ink on for a while, it is possible for it to dry out and require a lot of elbow grease in order remove.

Instead, a little hint - just get out your dry wipe pen and go over the top of the text!

This techniques add another layer of the chemical carrier and allow you to remove the original ink as if you had only just written it!

I went to a client that hadn't used their meeting room in a while and they had this problem - They did not know this technique and I could see the bloke trying to scrub really hard! I hope I didn't come across big headed but this is something that a lot of people just don't realise you can do!

Hope it helps others!