Microsoft Finally Building Canadian Data Centres and Region

We were very excited today with Microsoft's announcement that they will be building data centres in Ontario and Quebec, and creating a Canadian region for Azure and Office 365.

This will dramatically expand the potential to help more of our customers move their data to the cloud, while ensuring they meet privacy and regulatory requirements to keep data in Canada.

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be live until 2016, but superb news nonetheless.

They even flew Kevin Turner in to help make the announcement.

Microsoft today announced plans to deliver commercial cloud services from Canada. Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online will be delivered from Toronto and Quebec City in 2016, further strengthening Microsoft’s footprint in Canada’s competitive cloud landscape.

These new locally deployed services will address data residency considerations for Microsoft customers and partners of all shapes and sizes who are embracing cloud computing to transform their businesses, better manage variable workloads and deliver new digital services and experiences to customers and employees. General availability of Azure is anticipated in early 2016, followed by Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online later in 2016

The full press release is available here.

We look forward to helping more Canadian customers migrate to the cloud soon!

Contact us today to get planning!

Download and Install the 64 bit version of Office 2013 OEM

The 64 bit version of Office is finally becoming a better default option for many use cases, as the era of old-school COM add-ins and obscure third-party incompatibilities fades away.  Excel x64 is also becoming a must-have for heavy spreadsheet users, as the 32 bit version of Excel 2013 seems to be a disaster of instability.  Internally, we are running the 64 bit Office Suite across the board, and have yet to find a single problem. The stability and performance is notably better.

Despite the push towards subscriptions, many home and small business users still get their copy of Office when purchasing their computer as the OEM pricing is attractive, and the trial is bundled on most computers.  Unfortunately, it seems like Microsoft still isn't paying attention to their web sites, and the download pages have effectively completely hidden any links to actually retrieve the 64 bit installers, despite what their own support articles says.  The mystery Language and install options > Additional install options > Office (64-bit) link doesn't exist.

We  have found an obscure workaround that is documented on various TechNet forums, and seems to fairly consistently work to find your way to a 64 bit download link.  Additionally, once you grab the installers you can just store them on your network and re-use them for future installs (as long as you're not attempting to re-use the key).

https://c2rsetup.officeapps.live.com/c2r/download.aspx?ProductreleaseID=HomeBusinessRetail&language=en-US&platform=x64&token=XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX&TaxRegion=PR&Source=O15PKC&version=O15GA

In the above link, put your OEM Product Key after the token - with the dashes.  Then copy the full link and paste into your browser. Voila! Your very own Office 2013 OEM x64 installer.

Your mileage may vary, and of course Microsoft might pull this down at some point so let's hope they get the hint and actually fix the normal install page.

Canadian Public Data in the Public Coud

Customers - particularly in Canada - often wonder if they can legitimately store their data in the public cloud.  The short answer in almost all cases seems to be yes, with British Columbia public-sector (and industries serving them) being a complicated exception.

ITBusiness.ca has published a good article on this topic that includes an interview with a computer science doctoral candidate specializing in privacy in Canada.  It's useful reading on the topic and addresses many of the relevant legislation and questions.

When speaking about cloud, the terms “data sovereignty” and “data residency” come up frequently.  Within the private sector, there is still a great deal of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about topics such as the Patriot Act.  A fair bit has been written about this topic here on ITBusiness.

The abridged version of the discussion is simply that while private companies may want to keep data in Canada for customer perception or personal comfort reasons, there is no valid regulatory reason not to put data outside of Canada. There is also not much extra protection from U.S. law enforcement.  See “Keeping data here no protection against US” as a good article on the topic.

The question then moves to public sector organizations who have to abide by different regulations and privacy legislation than most private sector companies.  PIPEDA impacts everyone, and needs to be taken very seriously by public sector, but what about regulations such as the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) and Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA).  Do they limit what public sector organizations can put in the cloud?

The full article is available here.

Networking via PowerShell

PowerShell is clearly the way forward at Microsoft, particularly as more workloads are moved to the Azure cloud.  Learning the language of POSH, as it's colloquially become known, is definitely one of the best investments in time an administrator can make.  It always amazes me how powerful and consistent this language is compared to the multitude of obscure and non-standard tools of the past.

A great example is replacements for our old friends ping, tracert, ipconfig and the like.

There's a great article on Technet that describes some of the more useful and common ones.

Go forth and Get-NetIPConfiguration today!

So, Office 365 is what, exactly?

As we help more and more of our customers migrate from their existing on-premise Exchange 2007, 2010 and 2013 environments to the Office 365, the number one question we get is: "So, umm, what is Office 365 again?"  The biggest misconception that exists (and one we're not entirely sure how it came to be) is that Office 365 is the actual Office software suite, versus the cloud services. Microsoft's ever-growing and ridiculous amount of versions and names certainly doesn't help the cause.

Blogging genius, and all around swell guy Paul Thurrott once again does a great service to the community by summarizing the many, many options available. 

Which Office 365

Microsoft offers a wide range of Office 365 subscription plans that target individuals, households, and businesses (and business-like entities) of all sizes. But given the tremendous value and the sheer amount of choice here, how do you choose? Ultimately, it just comes down comparing the consumer and business versions of Office 365, and then understanding the benefits of each subscription.

Now that you've figured out which version you want and need, get in touch with us and let us help with your migration.  We'll do it right, the first time.

Living Microsoft in an iPhone World

With the continued struggle of Windows Phone to get any kind of market traction, despite finally being mostly on par functionality wise, most of us in the Microsoft world have switched to using iOS or Android mobile hardware.

Surprisingly, these days, it's actually quite an easy coexistence.

Paul Thurrott recently discussed this very topic in an excellent blog post we recommend

Microsoft + iPhone

What surprised most about this article is just how many applications Microsoft makes for iOS. Well worth a read.

WinX: The case of the missing Windows 8 right-click Admin Menu

Windows 8.x features a very useful right-click context menu that offers quick access to many common administrative tasks. While this was initially a concession Microsoft made for the ridiculous misguided removal of the Start Menu, after using this for a short period of time it quickly becomes obvious how much better this is than the random collection of places these shortcuts existed in the past UIs.

Periodically, however, Windows will lose track of these shortcuts and right clicking the Start Button will result in...nothing.  Most often this issue presents itself due to an apparent bug in Sysprep, or with Roaming Profiles between different versions of Windows.

This...becomes...

What few people know is that this menu (known internally as "Win+X") is actually created on the fly from a list of shortcuts stored in the file system.

WInX

Not only can this menu therefore be customized by modifying shortcuts in these folders, but it also leads to our solution to fix the mysteriously non-working menu.

Resolution

1. Log in as the administrative user experiencing the "no right click admin menu" issue
2. Open File Explorer, and in the address bar type 
   
   C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\
    
3. This will open a local application data folder of the Default user profile, containing a WinX folder.  Right-click to Copy this folder
4. Again, in the address bar of File Explorer, delete the contents and type
   
   %localappdata% (including the % signs)
    
5. This will open the current (broken) user's local application data folders
6. Navigate below here to Microsoft\Windows\
7. Paste in the WinX folder previously copied into this location
8. Log out and back in as the user, and the context menu should work correctly