I recently encountered a question in an online forum where someone asked for a script to convert all of their user’s email addresses to lower case values.  While this doesn’t affect the message delivery, it can have an impact on aesthetics when the address is displayed in an external recipient’s email client.  An Exchange Email Address Policy can do this to some degree, but I wanted to see how it could be done with PowerShell.

The challenge with a script like this is twofold:

1. Email addresses (proxy addresses) are a multi-valued attribute, which can be tricky to work with.
2. PowerShell is generally not case-sensitive, and therefore when we try to rename Mr. Gallalee’s email address in the screenshot below, we can see that it does not work:

After a little bit of inspiration from a script written by Michael B Smith, I came up with the below:

$MailboxList = Get-Mailbox  -ResultSize unlimited

$MailboxList | % {

$LoweredList = @()
$RenamedList = @()

foreach ($Address in $_.EmailAddresses){
if ($Address.prefixstring -eq "SMTP"){
$RenamedList += $Address.smtpaddress + "TempRename"
$LoweredList += $Address.smtpaddress.ToLower()
}
}
Set-mailbox $_ -emailaddresses $RenamedList -EmailAddressPolicyEnabled $false
Set-mailbox $_ -emailaddresses $LoweredList

#Without this line the "Reply To" Address could be lost on recipients with more than one proxy address:
Set-mailbox $_ -PrimarySmtpAddress $_.PrimarySmtpAddress
}

This script works as follows:

1. Puts all mailboxes into the $MailboxList variable.  If you don’t want all mailboxes,  edit the Get-Mailbox cmdlet as you see fit.
2. Filters out X400 and other non-SMTP addresses.
3. Creates an array called $RenamedList which stores each proxy address with “TempRename” appended to it (e.g. Rgallalee@demolab.localTempRename).
4. Creates another array ($LoweredList) and use the “ToLower” method on each proxy address.
5. Sets the proxy address for the user to the value of $RenamedList and then to $LoweredList.
   1. This is how we get around the case case insensitivity – name it to something else and then name it back.
6. Step 4 and 5 don’t preserve the “Primary” / “Reply-To” address, so we set it back manually with the last line.

Note: This script turns off the email address policy for each user.

As always, feedback is welcome.

WordPress.com provides statistics on how every blog is used.  Here are some facts about mine:

• My post on setting logon wallpaper for Windows 7 has been my most popular
• Google’s search results have sent most of my readers (by far). TechNet forums comes in 2^nd
• Google has sent people to this site at a rate 34x to that of Bing
• Only 9 viewers have used ask.com to find me (GASP!)
• The anti-spam feature for comments is very good, though the comment spam I receive has been surprisingly complementary; I’m half way inclined to let it through.

Thanks to all my visitors.  Please share my site with a friend, visit the sites that pay my bills (Mike’s Links – top right), and if you have any topic suggestions or feedback in general, please contact me!

Say you need to create a list of user’s mailbox size with their email address.  This sounds like a simple request, but what you’d soon find is that mailbox sizes are returned with the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet and the email address is not.  For that, you need to use another cmdlet, such as Get-Mailbox.

With the New-Object cmdlet, we are able to make a custom output that contains data from essentially wherever we want.

See this example:

$MyObject = New-Object PSObject -Property @{
EmailAddress = $null
MailboxSize = $null
}

In this example, I have created a new object with 2 fields, and saved it as the $MyObject variable.

For now, we’ve set the data to null, as shown below:

The next step is to populate each of those fields.  We can write to them one at a time with lines like this:

$MyObject.EmailAddress = (Get-Mailbox mcrowley).PrimarySmtpAddress
$MyObject.MailboxSize = (Get-MailboxStatistics mcrowley).TotalItemSize

Note: The variable we want to populate is on the left, with what we want to put in it on the right.

To confirm our results, we can simply type the variable name at the prompt:

Pretty cool, huh?

Ok, so now about that list.  My example only shows the data for mcrowley, and you probably need more than just 1 item in your report, right?

For this, you need to use the foreach loop.  You can read more about foreach here, but the actual code for our list is as follows:

(I am actually going to skip the $null attribute step here)

$UserList = Get-mailbox -Resultsize unlimited
$MasterList = @()
foreach ($User in $UserList) {
$MyObject = New-Object PSObject -Property @{
EmailAddress = (Get-Mailbox $User).PrimarySmtpAddress
MailboxSize = (Get-MailboxStatistics $User).TotalItemSize
}
$MasterList += $MyObject
}
$MasterList

Finally, if you wanted to make this run faster, we really don’t need to run “get-mailbox” twice.  For better results, replace the line:

EmailAddress = (Get-Mailbox $User).PrimarySmtpAddress

With this one:

EmailAddress = $User.PrimarySmtpAddress

UPDATE (June 1 2012): This script now runs faster and puts the “Primary” SMTP address first.  For example:

###

Exchange Server stores user’s alternate email addresses as a multi-valued attribute within Active Directory.  For example, if my colleague Jorge has jdiaz@demolab.local as well as diazj@demolab.local, his proxyAddresses attribute would look like this:

Notice, the capital SMTP vs. the lowercase smtp.  There can be only one uppercase SMTP, and this represents the primary, or “reply to” address.

While, it’s very easy to view someone’s proxy addresses (often called aliases, but don’t confuse it with the “alias” attribute) within the Exchange Management Console, it can be tough to work with in the Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell) due to the data being stored as a  “Multi-Valued” attribute.  The usual “Get-Mailbox” output not only shows all addresses as a single item, but in the case “mcrowley” below, we can see the shell truncates:

While there are ways (example1, example2) to manipulate this output on the screen, I recently needed to create a complete list of all users possessing one or more secondary email address, and document what those addresses were.

On the surface, this sounds simple.  We want a list of users who have more than 1 proxy address.  At first, I thought of something like this:

Get-Mailbox -Filter {emailaddresses -gt 1} | Select EmailAddresses

But we can see this doesn’t actually capture the correct users.  In the above example, LiveUser1 only has a single proxy address, but it was returned anyway.  This is because the result is actually converted to a number, and the “-gt” or “greater than” operation is done on this number; not what we want.

To get the user collection you want, we actually need to break-out the data within this attribute, and evaluate it in a somewhat CPU intensive process.  I have written a script that helps here, by doing the following things:

• Grabs all mailboxes and counts the number of proxy addresses for each one.  I have filtered out X400, and other non-smtp addresses.
• If more than one proxy is found, it puts the user and it’s proxy addresses in a “nice” CSV file called c:\TooManyProxies.csv.
• Displays a similar output to the screen.
• Displays the total number of users found.

Here is a sample output, shown in excel (with some bolding on the headers):

The guts of this script might help with this exact scenario, or really, anywhere you want to break out and evaluate multi-valued attributes.  Feel free to use it and adjust as you see fit!

Some known limitations:

• I’m no PowerShell master, so this might not be as efficient as it could be.
• If a user has more than 10 proxy addresses, you’ll need to adjust the script and add more rows.
• There isn’t a lot of error checking here, but I’ve used it in 2 different environments and it ran as expected.
• As shown below, this script doesn’t differentiate “SMTP” from “smtp”.  The addresses are listed in order stored; not necessarily relevant to us.  If you want this information shown, remove this portion from the script:

If you ONLY want a csv of everyone’s proxy address, change “-gt 1″ to “-gt 0″

Finally, the script itself:

#ProxyAddressCount-v3.3
# by Mike Crowley http://mikecrowley.us

cls

Write-Host "Getting and evaluating users. Please wait; this could take a while..." -ForegroundColor Cyan

#Getting a list of mailboxes to work with
$UserList = Get-mailbox -Resultsize unlimited

$TooManyProxies = @()

foreach ($User in $UserList) {
#get a list of SMTP and smtp proxy addresses for each User
[array]$SmtpProxyAddresses = $User.emailaddresses | Where {$_.prefixstring -like 'smtp'} | sort IsPrimaryAddress -Descending

#This section creates a lot of errors since many users don't have 3,4,5 etc proxy addresses. Here we turn error output off.
$ErrorActionPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'

#Create a new placeholder object so that we don't store the x400/x500 proxy addresses
$UserAndSmtpObject = New-Object PSObject -Property @{
Name = $user.name
PrimarySmtpAddresses1 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[0] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses2 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[1] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses3 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[2] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses4 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[3] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses5 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[4] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses6 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[5] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses7 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[6] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses8 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[7] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses9 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[8] -replace "smtp:"
SmtpAddresses10 =$SmtpProxyAddresses[9] -replace "smtp:"
}

#Turning error reporting back on
$ErrorActionPreference = 'Continue'

#Count the number of proxy addresses for each User
$SmtpProxyAddressCount = ($SmtpProxyAddresses).count

#Add Users with more than 1 proxy address to the $TooManyProxies variable
if ($SmtpProxyAddressCount -gt 1) {
$TooManyProxies += $UserAndSmtpObject
}
}

Write-Host ""
$TooManyProxies | select name, PrimarySmtpAddresses1, SmtpAddresses2, SmtpAddresses3, SmtpAddresses4, SmtpAddresses5, SmtpAddresses6, SmtpAddresses7, SmtpAddresses8, SmtpAddresses9, SmtpAddresses10 | Export-CSV c:\TooManyProxies.csv -notype
$TooManyProxies | select name, PrimarySmtpAddresses1, SmtpAddresses2, SmtpAddresses3, SmtpAddresses4, SmtpAddresses5, SmtpAddresses6, SmtpAddresses7, SmtpAddresses8, SmtpAddresses9, SmtpAddresses10
Write-Host ""

#Display a count
Write-Host "You had" ($TooManyProxies).count "Users containing two or more proxy SMTP addresses." -ForegroundColor Cyan

Write-Host ""
Write-Host ""
Write-Host "Your result file is here 'c:\TooManyProxies.csv'" -ForegroundColor Cyan

If you are looking for slides from other speakers, please see here: 

http://www.devconnections.com/updates/LasVegas_Spring12/Cloud

You can download this poster here.

If you’re interested in learning more on Hyper-V in Windows 8, click some of the links below.  This update to Hyper-V is my favorite part of Windows Server 8!

Reading

• Understand and Troubleshoot Hyper-V Replica in Windows Server "8" Beta
• How does Storage Migration actually work?

Videos

• Windows 8 Hyper-V: Availability Video
• Windows 8 Hyper-V: Scalability Video
• Hyper-V Cmdlets in Windows Server 8 Demo Video
• Windows Server 8 Extensible Switch in Hyper-V interview with Bob Combs

Exploit code published for RDP worm hole

————————————-

I don’t always post on Windows security updates, but when I do, it’s a Dos Equis near to my heart!  Do you use Remote Desktop?  Of course you do.  That’s why you need to install this update immediately:

MS12-020: Vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop could allow remote code execution

This is important for anyone running just about any version of Windows, but especially if you’ve got any machine exposing Remote Desktop directly to the internet (such as a Terminal Server).  Fortunately there is a mitigation for those who just cannot patch tonight: enable NLA for your Remote Desktop connections.

Read more here.

Hop to it!  Microsoft says not to wait for a normal patch-cycle on this one…

“PSTs are bad M’kay?“

This is a line we’ve all recited a time or two (ok maybe not exactly that line), but do we even know why?  Are we just parrots, or do we actually have a reason for condemning this hugely prolific file format?

Let’s start by acknowledging that PST files aren’t all bad.  M’kay?  If you run Outlook at home, or if you use IMAP/POP-based accounts (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) at work, using a PST file can actually be a good idea.  While it is possible to direct internet mail to the Exchange mailbox, this would create several problems:

• Wasting expensive Exchange disk space
• Potential violation of company policies
• Internet mail is now subject to corporate retention (and discovery!) policies
• Makes moving to a job more painful
• etc.

I’d even go so far as to say you might want to use PST files for archiving corporate email!  If you run a small shop – or a big one that isn’t subject to any retention policies.  A group policy configuring AutoArchive (and a note to your users) might be a good way to implement spring cleaning in your Exchange data stores. 

See, PST files actually can serve a purpose!

Then there is the other side of the coin:

In most situations, PST files represent unmanaged storage of email.  For someone who is charged with administering an email environment, this means we aren’t able to do our job.  If users begin to rely on something that we aren’t taking care of; what happens when it breaks?  We’ve all had the uncomfortable task of telling someone we can’t get their data back at least once in our careers.  It doesn’t make for fun times.

More important than our comfort; many organizations are subject to regulations which require them to turn email data over to the courts upon request.  A judge wont want to hear your sob story about how PST files aren’t searchable, and how you’re going to have to look across the whole network by hand to find that email thread.

I recently completed an Exchange 2010 deployment for a government organization that was subject to such legislation.  Once we activated the Personal Archive for their users, they decided to put the kibosh on PST files.  To enforce this, we laid out a three phased approach:

1. Prevent the users from making new PST files
2. Prevent the users from adding content to existing PST files
3. Use the abovementioned PST Capture Tool to import PSTs as necessary

The first two steps were quite simple to accomplish.  Outlook reads a registry value called PSTDisableGrow (REG_DWORD).  We deployed a GPO to implement this as follows:

Set PSTDisableGrow to “1” (without the quotes).  This will allow users to mount PST files in Outlook, but it will not allow any new content to be placed within.  Don’t worry about overkill here.  I used a single GPO for all 3 settings.  Outlook version X doesn’t care about extra registry settings in Outlook Y’s key.

PSTDisableGrow has some siblings; read more about DisablePST, DisableCrossAccountCopy and DisableCopyToFileSystem here.

That’s all for now, have a great week!

You can download the RTM here.

As previously announced, the major features for this update focus on the following areas:

• A “Hybrid Configuration Wizard” (HCW) – which is used to guide administrators through the Office 365 Rich Coexistence setup.  BTW, you’ll notice Microsoft actually no longer uses the phrase “Rich Coexistence”, but instead prefers “hybrid” configuration.

• Address Book Policies (ABP) – which allow an Exchange organization to segment the address list so that separate user populations can be hidden from each other (such as in a multi-tenant environment).  Here is an article that describes how this works, as well as another discussing some of the limitations.

• Cross-Site Silent Redirection for OWA – which allows more seamless OWA redirection in a multi-site topology.

• OWA Mini – which provides a text-only OWA experience so that you can use OWA from phones that do not support ActiveSync.

Here are some other fun facts:

• Exchange 2010 SP2 extends the schema.  One interesting change is the new msExchExtensionAttribute attributes.  We’ve had 15 custom attributes for a while now, but this adds 30 more, all of which are multi-valued.  For your reference, Microsoft tracks Exchange schema extensions on this page.

• Administrators can now disable the auto-mapping of user mailboxes in Outlook 2007/2010.  This may be helpful if a user has the “Full Access” permission to many other mailboxes.  By default, Outlook will try to mount all of them which could cause performance issues.

• You’ll need to add the “IIS 6 WMI Compatibility” component if you are upgrading from RTM or SP1.  A fresh install would offer to add this for you, but if you’re upgrading, you’ll need add it yourself.  You can easily add the IIS role service with the following two PowerShell commands:
       Import-Module servermanager
      Add-WindowsFeature Web-WMI

• On some new hardware, I clocked the upgrade at ~22 minutes.  Ironically, Exchange Update Rollups often take longer than this!

• There are many new Wiki pages discussing the features of SP2.  Use these until formal TechNet documentation is available.
• UPDATE: TechNet documentation is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529924.aspx

Planet Technologies is hosting a free webcast in which we will be providing some tips, insights and updates on Office 365 and Exchange Online.

If you’re interested in attending, or would like to read the agenda, please see the registration page below.

-REGISTER NOW-

About Planet Technologies

Planet Technologies, a leading Microsoft partner with multiple gold competencies, is recognized world-wide  as a leading expert in the integration and customization of Microsoft technologies, architecture, security and  management consulting. Planet’s clients include some of the largest public sector and  commercial  organizations  in the world.

Learn more at www.go-planet.com

Below are some screenshots of my experiences and insights along the way:

Before you start: Read and follow the instructions!  In this article, I assume you’re at the point where you’re actually ready to install this product.

1. First I installed the .Net Framework prerequisites as well as my favorite MMC snap-ins onto a new Windows 2008 R2 server. You can do this using the following two lines in PowerShell	Import-Module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS -Restart
2. Then I ran dirsync.exe (downloaded from the portal.microsoftonline.com site). a. NOTE: Microsoft didn’t bother to change the installer’s executable name (dirsync.exe). This may be confusing if you plan to download and store both x86 and x64 versions.
3. A few clicks of the “Next” button…
a. NOTE: We install to the “Program Files” directory. If this were a x86 application we’d be using “\Program Files (x86)”
b. NOTE: This screen may take 5-10 minutes. It’s installing a few things in the background: i. SQL 2008 R2 Express ii. Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (FIM) iii. Configuration of the FIM Management Agents (MAs)
…
4. Once the background tasks have completed, you’re able to run the Configuration Wizard. This is where you will need to have your Office 365 tenant prepared and credentials identified, etc.
5. Next…
6. You should have created this account earlier. Whatever you put in here will be stored within FIM, and if you ever change the credentials, you’ll need to re-run this setup wizard.
a. Or for the expert user: Dive into FIM directly
7. Here you need to supply your forest’s Enterprise Admin credentials. This username is not saved anywhere, and is only needed once to set permissions for these new objects: a. Yourdomain\MSOL_AD_Sync b. Yourdomain\MSOL_AD_Sync_RichCoexistence
8. Selecting this box enables some extra features required for a “hybrid deployment” / “rich coexistence”, and by doing so you’ll allow FIM to update attributes IN YOUR Active Directory. If this box is not checked, FIM will read-only.
9. Next..
10. If you’re ready, you can run the initial full synchronization now. Otherwise, you can run it manually at any time. a. Once configured, DirSync runs every 3 hours.
11. If you promise to be careful, you can poke around in the FIM configuration. a. Note the “hidden” client UI b. If you get an error when opening the FIM console, log out and then back in. Your account was added to some groups that are not yet part of your login ticket. c. Clicking the Management Agents tab shows both sides of your configuration. “TargetWebService” is responsible for all of the Office 365 configurations and the “SourceAD” management agent contains your Active Directory connector information (double-click them to open). NOTE: Changing the DirSync configuration directly within FIM is unsupported by Microsoft. They would prefer you rerun the previously mentioned Configuration Wizard if you need to make any changes.	C:\Program Files\Microsoft Online Directory Sync\SYNCBUS\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe
12. Finally, be sure to run Microsoft Update again. You’ll notice that SQL 2008 R2 does not have SP1.

Filed under: Office365 Tagged: ActiveDirectory, Microsoft, Office365 ]]> http://mikecrowley.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/office-365-dirsync-x64-installation-walkthrough/feed/ 5 mikecrowley DirSync Install Screenshots DirSync Install Screenshots DirSync Install Screenshots DirSync Install Screenshots DirSync Install Screenshots DirSync Install Screenshots Directory Synchronization Configuration Wizard Screenshots Directory Synchronization Configuration Wizard Screenshots Directory Synchronization FIM Management Agent Directory Synchronization Configuration Wizard Screenshots Directory Synchronization Configuration Wizard Screenshots Directory Synchronization Configuration Wizard Screenshots clip_image027 Smile Unable to connect to the Synchronization Service Directory Synchronization FIM Management Agents Download Service Pack 1 for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 http://mikecrowley.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/a-new-version-of-office-365s-directory-synchronization-tool-has-arrived/ http://mikecrowley.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/a-new-version-of-office-365s-directory-synchronization-tool-has-arrived/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:42:46 +0000 Mike Crowley https://mikecrowley.wordpress.com/?p=739 ]]> Most medium and large organizations using Microsoft’s Office 365 service will also be using “DirSync” to provision and manage user identities. Until now, DirSync has been based on ILM 2007 FP1, which is a functional, but older application, with no x64 support. This means when installing DirSync onto a server, you had to go out of your way to deploy the Windows Server 2008 operating system since the Server 2008 R2 OS is x64 only.

ILM was replaced by Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) 2010, which uses the x64 CPU architecture and as therefore Windows Server 2008 R2 as well. 

Today (finally), Microsoft announced DirSync can now be downloaded for use with the 64-bit architecture.  This is great news for new Office 365 customers – no more legacy software needed.  However, this does raise a question for existing DirSync users: How do we migrate?

You should check out the announcement for details, but essentially, you reformat and rebuild.  Wait!  Before you start muttering nasty things about Microsoft – the new installation of DirSync will find all of the identities currently in Office 365 and match them up with the appropriate Active Directory accounts in your environment.  There is no downtime for the users. 

As promised, I have uploaded the slides. You can download them here:

• EXC22_Exchange_Online_Administration
• EXC23_Exchange_Online_Understanding_Archiving_and_Compliance

If you’re looking for slides from other presenters, you can find them here:

• http://www.devconnections.com/updates/LasVegas_Fall11/Exchange

http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5261

Thanks to everyone who follows this blog and attends my Exchange Connections sessions; its because of you I am able to wear this badge of honor for another year.

Needless to say:

The strict support statement, combined with Microsoft’s release of Office 365 really came as a one-two punch to some of the smaller companies who wished to host Exchange but could not afford to employ developers and/or take the risk of forfeiting support from Microsoft.  It seemed like Microsoft may have lost some love for their hosting partners.

With the Exchange 2010 SP2 update (scheduled to launch later this year), you will be able to host a multi-tenant environment with a regular deployment of Exchange.  This is made possible by the new Address Book Policies and specific configurations to be documented with the SP2 release.

Personally, I’d look at this very carefully before deploying any new /hosting environments.  This (SP2) seems like a much simpler deployment to maintain.

Before I get into the steps themselves let’s take a look at one of the simulators, which is based on Blackberry OS 7 device software:

You should know this software is free!  You can download it here after you complete the registration.

Once you run through the application setup, you’re greeted with this intuitive interface

———>

Within, you can do all softs of fun things such as navigate the menus, take screenshots, simulate use of the touchscreen, compass and more.

What we’re after today however is Enterprise Activation (the process of associating the handheld with a Blackberry Enterprise Server).

Initially, I was discouraged to see Enterprise Activation was not working via the normal process:

But after some research I learned it can be completed via simulating a USB connection to the BAS interface instead.

To accomplish this, follow the below steps:

(Click images to enlarge)

1. Launch the simulator. You may need to resize the screen and click through a few pop-ups to get to the device’s main screen.
2. From the Simulate menu button, select USB Cable Connected.
3. From the same computer, launch the BAS web site. Accept certificate warnings and install ActiveX CAB files as prompted. Depending on your browser configuration you may need to adjust the security settings.	The default URL is: https://server.domain.local:443/webconsole/login (Bad)
4. You can verify the device is properly connected by expanding the Devices menu tree on the left and selecting Device properties.
5. Before you can begin the  EA process, you need to create a user. Select a user from your directory that does not currently have a Blackberry device. To do this, expand the BlackBerry solution management menu tree on the left and select Create a user. 6. Once on this screen, simply select Search from the right. It will pull up all of the users in your Exchange Server environment.
7. Select a test user and click Continue.
8. On the following screen, select Create a user without activation password.
9. Expand the Devices menu tree on the left and select Manage current device.
10. Select Assign the current device to a user.
11. Click Search once again and select the test user. 12. Click Associate user.
13. Once complete, notice a new envelope icon on the simulator (covered with a briefcase). This represents the new EA relationship.
14. Touch the new envelope and compose a test message.
15. Verify it reached its destination and that the message was saved to your test user’s Sent Items folder.

And we’re done! I hope this was helpful.

Or heck, maybe it’s just been a while since you’ve been to Vegas? 

Join me and other Microsoft enthusiasts at the DEVCONNECTIONS conference this fall!  This semiannual event covers many tracks from Visual Studio to Exchange Server to Microsoft’s hot new cloud products: Azure and Office 365.

In addition to attending some great sessions, I will also be presenting on two topics:

Sign up here, and use the SPKR discount code to save $50.

And if that’s not incentive enough, I’ll close by reminding you that Halloween in Las Vegas should prove to be very interesting…

It seems that Microsoft has finally created a way to upload pictures to the forums!  No more feeling around in the dark, trying to guess what’s wrong.

As the seasoned forum participants will tell you, this isn’t entirely new.  You’ve always been able to add an image if it was hosted by another site via editing the thread’s HTML manually, but the introduction of this button will now allow you to store images with Microsoft; no 3rd party site needed.  And more importantly, this will allow anyone to upload a screenshot.

Once you upload an image, there are controls to drag it into place, as well as controls to resize.

I’m curious to see how this goes.  While I think it’s a needed addition, I would imagine there is a high risk of abuse, or worse, administrators accidently exposing sensitive information about their environments.

Do you use the TechNet forums?  If no, why not?  What other forums do you like?