Posts from 2013

Windows 8.1 GA Update and Update Rollup Release

I got home from the second day of my PRINCE2 training today and fired up my desktop PC from sleep and tried to log in to Windows 8.1. My home domain user account was still logged in from the previous night with a locked session so I unlocked it however it hung on the please wait message. After a few minutes, I’d had enough to gave the PC the finger of death and restarted it.

When it booted back up, I saw the Configuring Windows Updates message appear. I’ve got an Intel 520 Series SSD so I normally don’t have to wait at all for things like Windows Updates being that the overall boot time for the PC from a cold start is about 15 seconds. On this occasion though, the PC reboot at least three or four times with the Configuring Windows Updates message each time.

I was worried initially that I’d got myself a bad update download and I was going to be stuck in a reboot update loop (not that I’ve seen this happen for a long time) but eventually the machine came back to the login screen as normal. Once I got logged in, I checked the update history for Windows Update and the PC had prepared and downloaded two major updates last night. The first being Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 General Availability Update Rollup, KB2883200 and the second being Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Update Rollup: October 2013, KB2884846.

Looking at the file information in both of these updates, they look like pretty substantial updates which you’re obviously going to want to apply but be patient. With updates of this size and type, you could end up seeing your PC reboot multiple times like I did. Have faith – It’s all working just fine.

If you’re deploying these updates at work or in your enterprise, make sure you’re users know to expect the multiple reboots otherwise your helpdesk team might not like you the next day.

4G Mode Tethering Not Working on O2 Windows Phone 8

After a recent software update on my Lumina 820, I noticed that under the Mobile Network settings menu there is a new mode for Connection Speed of mobile data. Previously, the choices were 2G or 3G but there is now a third item for 4G.

Whilst sitting in Heathrow airport bored because I arrived insanely early for my flight, I thought I’d at least get a bit of work done so started up Internet Sharing on the phone, but the Surface Pro would only see the connection status as Limited and never Connected.

This isn’t uncommon for tethering to fail to work off the bat so I restarted everything but still nothing. I tried a few other bits and still nothing so I decided to drop the speed on the phone to 2G just to see if it was a high speed data issue and immediately, the connection status on the Surface moved to Connected.

Not being happy with GPRS or EDGE speeds (and who would be these days), I moved it up to 3G on the phone and it still worked yet as soon as I moved it up to 4G, it stopped and the Surface reverted back to Limited. In that nothing has changed on my O2 account package or contractually wise, I must assume this is related to O2 blocking high speed  HSPA+ for tethering. What would be interesting is if I was in an area without HSPA+ coverage but with only HSDPA would it work in 4G mode? A call to O2 is in order I believe.

Whilst on the subject, I really dislike the industry coined term tethering to refer to internet sharing on mobile devices. Tethering means to be tethered or tied to something which implies a cable. As it’s all being done over an ad-hoc WiFi network, shouldn’t we come up with a better name than tethering?

Office 365 Setup and Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Something which I’ve never really talked about here is email. Me and my family currently consume Outlook.com via Windows Live Domains on both my blog domain richardjgreen.net and our personal domain name. Windows Live Domains really feels like something out of a Land Before Time movie these days. It hasn’t seen an update in years and frankly, I wonder what the shelf life of it is going forwards, leaving me to think that the options will be Outlook.com, Office 365 or bust. Not wanting to be stuck on a potentially end of the road email platform, left trying to move the mail service for my family on day zero, I started looking at options a few months back.

With Windows Live Domains being free, if I was going to pay for email, I needed it to not cost the earth, as low as possible really. At the same time, I didn’t really want anything more from a feature set than I get with Outlook.com via Windows Live Domains.  All I want is a flat service to match that of Windows Live Domains and Outlook.com. With me being such a softie, the option was really only going to be Office 365, it was just a question of what tier and flavour of it.

Windows Server 2012 Essentials which I use to run our home environment has native integration for Office 365 which means it would be super easy for me to manage which for me is great as the less time I spend managing our home solution, the more time I can spend blogging, working on other things and spend more time with the family themselves.

Exchange Online vs Office 365

This really confused me when I started looking into Office 365 and using the Windows Server 2012 Essentials integration features for Office 365 sometime ago. For me and my family, I am only interested in email. I’m not after Lync or SharePoint services as we just wouldn’t use them. I was concerned that if I signed up for Exchange Online Plan 1 which was my target option that the integration wouldn’t work. As it turns out, you just need to think of everything as Office 365. Exchange Online, Exchange Online Protection, Lync Online, Enterprise Plans; all of them fall under the banner of Office 365 so I now knew that Windows Server 2012 Essentials wasn’t going to care if I was on Exchange Online Plan 1 or if I was on an Enterprise 4 agreement.

Extending the Windows Azure Tenant into Office 365

Because I use Windows Azure Backup to backup our data from Windows Server 2012 Essentials already and because this blog is hosted on Azure, I already had a tenant setup on an onmicrosoft.com domain which I wanted to reuse so I needed to extend my tenant so the one tenant would work across Windows Azure and Office 365 services. To do this, I logged into office365.com using the account which I setup as the tenant global administrator when I configured Azure Backup on Server 2012 Essentials. I was greeted with a message that I didn’t have any licenses or any domains setup, but the login worked most importantly.

Buy a Service Plan

Before you can credibly do anything, you need a plan. I wrote this post after I set it all up and lucky I did really. When I first went through the motions, I added a domain richardjgreen.net and was wondering why I couldn’t do anything with it, not even validate it. It looks like you can’t even validate a domain to start configuring users until you have at least one license available to use.

As it’s just me on my blogs domain right now, I paid up for a single license of Exchange Online Plan 1. This gives me a 50GB mailbox, all of the Exchange features I want like OWA and Exchange ActiveSync and at £2.60 a month per user excluding VAT, the price is sweet enough for me also.

To buy a license or more, all you need to od is to hit the Purchase Services link on the left navigation. This presents a whole host of options for Office 365, Exchange Online services to buy and some add-on services also such as Exchange Online Protection and Exchange Online Archiving. Add a credit card detail on file, click buy and it’s as simple as that.

Adding Custom Domains

Adding a new domain is a simple matter of clicking Domains from the left navigation and then clicking the Add a Domain button then follow the instructions which follow into setting up DNS. I had both of my domains added within a matter of a couple of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Configuring the DNS Settings

As part of the process of adding the domain, you need to do two things:

  • Verify you own the domain for starters
  • Add DNS records for your services

The first step is verification which in my case, I completed by adding an MS= TXT record in my providers DNS management console. I tried to do this but I received an error “richardjgreen.net has already been verified for your account, or for another Microsoft Online Services account.”. I new I was going to see this but not quite at which stage.

This is caused by the fact that my richardjgreen.net domain was currently configured to use Windows Live Domains for email service. I logged into domains.live.com, deleted all of the mailboxes in Outlook.com for the domain and then deactivated the service. This was the most nerve racking part of the process as I’ve read that other users doing the same thing have had issues rattling on for months to get this to clear out of the system properly.

In my usual style, I kept trying the Office 365 portal to verify the domain and 15 minutes after deactivating Windows Live Domains, Office 365 pinged into life, allowing me to verify the domain.

With the first step now done, I needed to configure the service records as directed. I needed three records for my Exchange Online service: An MX record for mail delivery, a TXT record for the SPF (Sender Policy Framework, required to allow receiving servers to trust the Sender ID of outlook.com and Office 365 to deliver email on my domains behalf) and a CNAME record for Autodiscover to allow devices to be configured automatically for my mailboxes in Office 365.

If you use a DNS management agency which Microsoft have steps with then you can get direct instruction for doing this if you are little uncomfortable with DNS or if you are with GoDaddy then there is the option for an automated setup through some kind of API channel with Microsoft.

After adding the records to my DNS, it took about 10 minutes for Office 365 to pickup the new records and complete the domain setup.

Enable Office 365 Integration in Server 2012 Essentials

From my Windows Server 2012 Essentials machine, this part should have been really easy but it turned out to be a nightmare.

From the Essentials Dashboard, click Email from the home screen and then select Integrate with Microsoft Office 365. The dashboard will open a wizard for you to enter your Office 365 Tenant Global Administrator account if you already have an account as I do otherwise you have the option to initiate a free trial using an E3 subscription.

The Office 365 integration with Server 2012 Essentials is neither DirSync nor is it ADFS. If you elect to use Office 365 with Lync and SharePoint you will not get the AD FS Single Sign-On (SSO) experience as you would with a full deployment. The integration here I would describe as light. When you provision users on-premise, make changes to Office 365 licenses or mailboxes through the Dashboard, the changes are pushed up to Office 365 via a web channel which you can see from the logs (explained later).

Password synchronisation does occur so that your on-premise password and Office 365 password are in alignment however. I found this happened really quickly and my Windows Phone would report a password change required on the Office 365 email account on the phone within about a minute or so of the password change on-premise.

When you enable the integration, one of the things that occurs is that it forces you to enable Strong password mode on-premise which results in passwords at least eight characters in length and passwords using symbols and all the tricks in the book. Whilst I agree this is something you should be doing, if you are a small business or a home user availing of the services of Office 365 like myself, this isn’t perhaps going to be ideal. Luckily, the password policy in Office 365 is actually less strict than this. I have gone under the covers using Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) in my setup and slightly amend the Default Domain Policy GPO and all my passwords sync okay still.

The Office 365 Integration Service Gone Bad

After I ran the initial setup integration for the first time, I stopped getting any data in the dashboard. I thought it may have been a result of some pending Windows Updates so I installed those and restarted but it was still broken. I found that the problem was that the Office 365 Integration service was stopped. I started in manually and it stopped immediately with a stack trace error in the Application event log which wasn’t particularly cool.

I tried to disable the integration so that I could then re-enable it, but it appears that any operation regarding the integration requires the service to be functional. I tried to re-run the configuration but I was informed that it was already configured and I would need to disable it first which didn’t help me.

The way I got around this was to force the service to be disabled via the registry. Open Registry editor and navigate to HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows ServerProductivity. From here, delete the key MailService and then restart the dashboard application. Doing this makes it think that the Office 365 Integration is disabled even though the dashboard will show the green tick to indicate that it’s configured. Simply re-run the configuration wizard at this point and all appears to be working now.

The Office 365 Integration Service Gone Bad Mark II

After the above happened and it all looked like it was working, I wasn’t getting password sync up to Office 365 although the Dashboard was functional to a point of allowing me to configure mailboxes. I found that the Password Sync service generates a log file in C:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindows ServerLogsSharedServiceHost-PasswordSyncProviderServerConfig.log.

Upon reading this file, I was seeing WCF errors and unhandled exceptions every few seconds which hinted to me that even though I had been able to repair the integration as far as the service health and the Dashboard were concerned, something was still amiss. I opted to this time, use the Dashboard to disable the integration, restart the server and re-configure the integration as I was now able to do this with the service for the Office 365 Integration running okay.

After removing it all and adding it again, everything worked as intended.

Configure Users

You can either do this via the Windows Server 2012 Essentials Dashboard or directly in Office 365. I’d recommend doing it in the Dashboard if you are using Essentials otherwise you have a second step to link the cloud mailbox to the on-premise user account.

To setup a user, very simply, go to the Users tab in your Dashboard. Click the user you want to activate for Office 365 and select the Assign Office 365 Account option from the tasks on the right. Pick the email address for the user using either the onmicrosoft.com or the vanity custom domain you have configured and then click Next. If you have a license available to allocate to the user, it will be setup for you. If you don’t have a free license slot then you’ll need to buy one from the site office365.com.

One thing worthy of noting is that once you enable a user for Office 365 in this way, Windows Server 2012 Essentials will set the change password on next logon flag for the user to force them into a password change with a new password for the cloud which can then by synchronised up to Office 365 for that single password login experience.

ExRCA is Your Friend

Through all of this, testing everything is working is critical. Office 365 does a good job of telling you when you’ve got things configured properly, but ExRCA or the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer is better as it’s a tool dedicated for the job. Visit http://exrca.com and click the Office 365 tab and run any of the tests you like to make sure things are working. Some tests need only your domain name to verify settings such as DNS records whereas others need a credential to simulate a synthetic transaction to a mailbox or account.

I found when testing my setup that everything is reported as working but Autodiscover fails every time. When you drill into more information this is caused because the certificate name presented by the CNAME redirect from autodiscover.richardjgreen.net to autodiscover.outlook.com means that the outlook.com certificate doesn’t have my domain name on it. My Outlook and Windows Phone clients still Autodiscover the service correctly so I think this is a by-product of the Office 365 configuration and not a problem as I’ve found literally hundreds of other people asking about failed Autodiscover tests on the TechNet forums.

Client Experience

One thing I discovered which isn’t hugely clear in the documentation is that I wasn’t able to configure Outlook 2013 or my Windows Phone for ActiveSync until after I had logged in for the first time at office365.com using the account I issued my license to and configured the mailbox. You are prompted with a couple of questions such as confirming your name and time zone logging in for the first time.

After doing this online piece, Windows Phone started to sync the mailbox using ActiveSync okay, and Outlook 2013.

What’s Next

Well first I have some mail service consumers to address. I’ve got quite a few family members using Windows Live Domains with Outlook.com on our personal family domain name which I don’t fancy paying for Office 365 for so I’m going to have those tough conversations over do they want to pay for their own Office 365 mailbox or do I help them move to Outlook.com natively using a non-vanity domain. Whichever way it happens, I’m going to be looking at manual mail migrations out of Outlook.com to Office 365 for these users as there isn’t a migration path for this right now.

One thing I will be doing once I move my personal family domain over to Office 365 is implementing the Outlook Group Policy .admx files to allow Outlook to auto-configure the email address from Active Directory on first-run so that my wife and, in the future, kids don’t have to manually enter those details. It’s something I have come to expect from enterprise environments so I feel I owe them that simplicity factor enterprise computing can bring.

The kids have mail addresses right now but they aren’t live, they are aliases on our mailboxes as parents so I’m going to be looking at shared mailboxes for these to make them one step closer to full service mailboxes and I’m also going to be looking into settings up some MRM policies in Office 365 to apply to our mailboxes to keep them trim and reduce the amount of overwork we have to do to maintain the storage of it although frankly, with a 50GB mailbox, do I care?

Longer term, I may look at the option to spend an extra 65 pence a month per user and sign up to Exchange Online Protection to stem the flow of nasty emails as not everyone is as savvy as someone in IT and that’s why these services exist. It’s another one of those things for me where 65 pence per month could potentially lead to hours and entire evenings saved, not having to repair a PC after a virus got installed via an email attachment.

In more posts to come, I’ll show how I’m configuring some of the features and settings in Office 365 and I’ll talk about how I plan to upgrade my estate to Windows Server 2012 E2 Essentials to get some of the new integration and management features for Office 365 in the dashboard along with other new features.

 

SSL Certificates and Wild Pricing

As part of a project of work I’m looking into currently, we are planning a move from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. As those of you who’ve done this before will know, you need to setup the environment with two namespaces for a period of the migration which Microsoft refer to as the Exchange 2010 namespace and the legacy namespace (the Exchange 2007 namespace). As part of this, we need to get a new SSL certificate.

Normally we buy our certificates from VeriSign as a standard rule of thumb however after looking at the costs today, I’m starting to wonder how VeriSign do so well in the SSL certificate business? I’m not going to go into exact specifics, but the overall cost for the certificate I was looking to purchase was £69,000 which is frankly unbelievable for a certificate to secure a messaging platform. The cost of the certificate is over double what we paid for a pair of HP DL380p servers fully loaded with 900GB SAS disk for local storage to host the DAG Mailbox roles. To make it worse than just the price on it’s own, that’s just for one year validity on the certificates too.

Out of curiosity and because they are starting to develop a bit of a name for themselves, I decided to compare the cost of this to GoDaddy. That very same certificate, offering me the same number of SAN names for the Exchange features with GoDaddy is a mere £165 a year.

How I wonder, when you compare £69,000 to £165, do VeriSign actually sell any certificates? Sure VeriSign offer more in the way of commercial compensation that GoDaddy ($1,500,000 for VeriSign and $160,000 for GoDaddy) but commercial compensation really only applies to transactional or commerce websites. When you are talking about a messaging platform, coupled with a two factor authentication system, the compensation loses it’s value quickly. GoDaddy offer a Malware inspection service for secured sites, something which VeriSign also offer. VeriSign have some value add propositions that GoDaddy don’t, I will grant them that. Features such as Norton Secured Seal and a Symantec Search Seal are on offer but both of those things are dependant on people having Norton software and browser plugins installed to show the seal. Installing browser plugins which really aren’t needed and adding a true sense of value is something which I don’t recommend and nor do Microsoft hence the popups that modern versions of Internet Explorer have asking you to disable addons.

With GoDaddy being so popular these days, their Trusted Root CA certificate is valid on a claimed 99.9% of devices therefore gone are the days of use the likes GoDaddy or Comodo SSL at your peril due to the possibility of getting certificate invalid warnings on the clients.

I haven’t taken a decision on the purchase just yet as it needs some consultation within the company, but one or two people I spoke to today agreed with me in so much as why shouldn’t we use GoDaddy and frankly, I’m not seeing a lot of reasons why currently?

Update for Windows 7 SP1 to Cleanup WinSXS

I was surprised that I missed this release initially so I’m a few days off the pulse with this post but Microsoft have released an update for Windows 7 SP1 and it’s a good one.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/10/08/breaking-news-reduce-the-size-of-the-winsxs-directory-and-free-up-disk-space-with-a-new-update-for-windows-7-sp1-clients.aspx

This update gives you new options for cleaning up the WinSXS repository using the Disk Cleanup tool, allowing you to reduce the footprint of your Windows installation. As time goes by after installing Windows Updates which are released to address security flaws or provide stability and reliability improvements, this folder grows. This is because this folder stores previous versions of updated files to allow you to roll back.

With Windows 7 SP1, we had the DISM command for removing the Pre-SP1 WinSXS repository files which for some people, depending on updates you had installed could save gigabytes of disk, so this update to clean up Post-SP1 updates is really welcome.

There are some options for managing the usage of this clean up as an administrator for enterprise desktops however the process is a little clunky due to the fact that it is dependant on some registry and manual command line actions, but its nothing that can’t be achieved with the deployment of a Group Policy Object with a machine start up script.

Happy Cleaning.

Ballmer Leaving Speech Video

I saw the news last night that a video had leaked online of Steve Ballmer and got a chance to look at it today. Pretty emotional speech and quite restrained for Steve. I’ll be sad to see him leave Microsoft I think and he’s done so much for the company I love most. I hope that Microsoft can replace him with someone equally as energetic and enthusiastic about the company as he is. If you haven’t seen it, the  video on YouTube is below.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38pWRi_LqV0

 

One Week in Azure

My blog has been running in Windows Azure now for one week so I thought I’d post an update on how the billing is coming along and also the usage of the platform.

I’ve just dived into my subscription summary and here are the charges thus far:
Data Transfer Out (GB) – Zone 1 – 0.6GB (5GB Free)
Compute Hours for Cloud Services – 21.28hrs / £1.08

If the above holds true to the remaining three weeks of my billing cycle then I am looking at having consumed 2.4GB of egress data transfer which is less than half of the free allowance and I will have consumed 85.12hrs of compute time producing a bill of £4.32. As I predicted in my original post, the number of compute hours my blog is consuming is much less than the hours consumption shown on the Windows Azure Pricing Calculator.

At this rate of consumption, my annual bill for the site will be £51.84. When you consider that I was previously paying around £150 a year for a hosting plan with lower quality hosting providers offering much more clunky and cumbersome management interfaces and inferior billing transparency, I think I’m getting an amazing deal.

I am paying more than I had originally hoped for the Backup Recovery Services feature which I use to backup my Windows Server 2012 Essentials server to the cloud, protecting all of mine and my wife’s documents and files along with all of our family pictures of the kids growing up but. For the peace of mind having that data properly protected I’m happy to pay it. I actually made a change to the retention period for my backups in Azure earlier this week so fingers crossed that, that will reduce my bills going forwards a little.

Aside from billing, what else is there to show? Below is a screenshot of the Windows Azure Monitor page for the blog. As you can see, there is a huge spike at the beginning of the week. This was caused by me doing the deployment and maintenance of the site including uploading all of the WordPress files, doing the WordPress upgrade and then upgrading all of the plugins. As you can see though, it settles down nicely after this. All of this is running on a Shared Website Mode single instance. I don’t generate enough traffic to consider adding a second instance and scaling out the site although I might do it one day just to test it.

Blog on Windows Azure

App-V 4.6 SP3 Beta Available via Microsoft Connect

 

For those of you out there who are using App-V but have been put off from a Windows 8.1 upgrade due to the fact that when you run the upgrade installer it forces you to uninstall App-V due to incompatibility issues, fear not.

https://connect.microsoft.com/MDOPTAP

Visit the URL above, fill out the survey about how your organisation uses MDOP and enjoy the download. I installed it today on my desktop which I’ve just updated to Windows 8.1 Enterprise and the Beta worked a treat. For anyone who might wonder why I upgraded to Windows 8.1 Enterprise even though it means I would lose all my applications because the Enterprise installer doesn’t offer the Retain my Apps and Files option unlike the Pro installer, it’s because of App-V. Aside from the Office suite and a few other tiny little applets I use, all of my daily use applications come via App-V.

All we need now is for the KMS Host update for Windows 8.1 to be released – Hopefully within the next 30 days otherwise my desktop is going to need to be given the rearm treatment.

Setting Up Shop in Windows Azure

Several months ago after numerous outages with my old American web host, I moved some of my sites over to a UK hosting company. For this reason and that reason, I didn’t complete the migration of all of my sites over to the UK host and the time is upon me that the agreement with the old American host is up for renewal in a couple of weeks.

After some persuasion, I’ve managed to convince a the other half that some of the sites could be dropped as they just weren’t used anymore – Just one site left to sort and that’s in the hands of a friend to arrange.

This left me in a position where I only had one site of my own left, this blog. When I was first reviewing options for moving to a new host, I looked at Windows Azure. I’m working with Azure heavily in a project at work so I was comfortable with the environment enough to want to deploy a multi-language enterprise site there so why not my own sites? Well at the time, cost was an issue. To run all of my sites in Windows Azure Web Sites Shared mode would have cost about three times as much as the hosting agreement elsewhere. This is down to the fact that in Windows Azure to use a custom domain name you need to be on either the Shared or Standard tier; the Free service tier limits you to using *.azurewebsites.net addresses.

So with just one site left my thoughts returned to Azure. I did some sums and it looked like it was going to cost about the same for Windows Azure as it was going to, to renew the UK plans but on a way more solid platform which tonnes more features, scalability and support. Not to mention that Windows Azure services outperform those of its competitors up to 3x if you believe the hype (I do for the record). I’m hedging my bets actually on my costs being lower. The Windows Azure Pricing Calculator puts a Shared Web Site at £6.16 per month but that’s based on 684 hours (28 days @ 24 hours per day) of compute time as Windows Azure now calculates billing based on hours of compute time. As my blog isn’t visited that heavily and I’m using the amazing WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress, I think I can do it for about half of this actually but month one will tell – I’ve always got the bug out option with Azure as I’m on pay as you go monthly with no upfront commitment.

So after migrating the MySQL database in the ClearDB free 20MB database service which fits perfectly for my MySQL WordPress instance database at a wee 9MB and after copying over all my files and doing some WordPress PHP magic to move some of the URLs I had it working. Makes you realise how quickly WordPress moves though! I was already two versions behind the latest and all of my plugins were out of date so first job was to fix those which I did in quick order.

Custom Domain registration is a simple case of configuring a few CNAME records and updating my domain root A record and done. My registrar FastHosts have a great interface for updating DNS and they use a 1 hour TTL which means that the updates happen really quick although one thing I think Microsoft are doing actually is that they are performing live queries each time and not relying on cached DNS entries and potentially long TTL times. I updated my A record and Azure knew about it within about a minute of the change.

So surely I did more than just move host and upgrade? Damn right I did 🙂

I’ve finally fixed the Twitter hook on the blog which means my latest tweet is now actually shown. This was fixed by replacing the Twitter plugin I am using with one which actually works with the new Twitter oAuth developer framework. I’m now using Advanced Twitter Feed Integration if anyone else out there is looking for a Twitter plugin that works. I’ve removed the old jQuery Lightbox plugin as the new version of WordPress has improved this functionality so renders it pointless. In a more functional space, I’ve fixed the CSS which was causing issues with the collapsible navigation from working properly so you’ll now actually be able to read the text as well as see the pretty Windows Phone inspired plus and minus buttons. I’ve also updated my permalink structure to drop the year/month/day element. My URLs are now simply the domain plus the post name. Much cleaner and the chances of me wanting to recycle a post name are slim to zero so it shouldn’t come back to haunt me.

The coolest thing I’ve setup is the Windows Azure Storage for WordPress plugin. I’m not sure what my mileage with this but I’ll give it a month or two and see – purely a cost factor though, not functional.

This plugin connects to a Windows Azure Storage Account and stores content that you upload to the blog into Windows Azure Storage BLOBs instead of directly into the Web Site instance. This is good news in theory because it offloads transactional tasks and storage from the web instance giving me the potential to reduce my compute time on the web instance and it also allows me to use the Azure CDN feature for even more massively improved performance if I wish (although the performance is pretty awesome already). Configuration of the plugin is super simple thanks to the fact that the plugin is actually written by Microsoft and once connected to the Storage Account Container and enabled, anything you upload either in the web interface as media or via a third-party editor like pictures, videos or other post content get’s stored out in the Storage Account Container. Simples.

Xbox Music Pass and the Fail

My wife has recently been trialling some of music subscription services. As a Windows Phone household with Lumia 820’s for both me and the wife, she tried Nokia Mix Radio Plus first as she’d loved the free version. She wasn’t really impressed as it wasn’t really much better than the free one.

She moved on to Spotify next and I decided to try out the free 30-Day Trial of Xbox Music Pass. I had high hopes for Xbox Music Pass as I already love the free streaming for Windows 8/RT devices listening to the odd song on it. The cloud syncing feature is great for me too because it means on my work Windows 8 desktop I can access the majority of my music that’s at home and have it streamed to my work PC courtesy of the Xbox Music service. Being able to create playlists and Smart DJ playlists on my home PC and then have those available on the Xbox, my Windows Phone 8 device and my work Windows 8 desktop was pretty appealing.

After enabling it on my Microsoft Account, I first tried to create some Smart DJ playlists for some artists I’m enjoying at the moment thinking I could discover some new music. To name two artists I’m enjoying currently, Avicii and Gareth Emery, neither of them allowed me to create Smart DJ playlists. Not a good start considering a search of the Xbox Music Store reveals quite a few songs for both artists so it’s hardly like they aren’t indexed, classified or categorised. I figured I’d come back to this another day to test the true extent of the problem

I created a static playlist called Favourites and started adding music to it, only to discover that about a third of the songs I am enjoying currently aren’t available to stream on Xbox Music but require a purchase. What was most annoying is that it allowed me to add them to the playlist but then when playing the playlist it would skip over those tracks with an exclaimation mark warning instead of telling me from the offset before adding them to the playlist.

Why am I going to pay £8.99 per month for a service which doesn’t actually have a third of the music I am interested in? I know Spotify doesn’t have some of the value-add that Xbox Music does around Windows and Xbox features and integration but for an extra £1 per month I would actually be able to listen to whatever I wanted and not have to buy the songs.

I thought I would see what the experience was like on the phone with the playlist I’d just created. Opening the Music hub, I navigated to Playlists and after a few moments, the phone realised I now had Xbox Music Pass and showed me the playlist and I started to play it. Some of the songs were detected as already existing on the SD card of my phone from my conventional music library but the majority of them were streaming. I was started looking for the download option as I wouldn’t want to be streaming this over 3G when I left the house. I couldn’t find it.

Eventually, I stumbled upon the fact that I needed to go directly into a song to download it. Seriously? My playlist is only 20 songs currently, but what if it was 200 or more songs? Am I seriously expected to go to each song and select the download option? With Spotify, my wife can just download the playlist and all the songs within it are downloaded automatically. I’d go as far as to say that I think if she adds and removes songs from the playlist that it will probably automatically update what’s held on storage automatically too.

The other failing of the Music hub on the phone is that there is no option that I can find to show Storage/Cloud/Downloaded music specifically. In the Music app on Windows 8 there is the option to only view music in a certain storage location, especially useful on a phone if you want to only select music that is on SD card storage to prevent a big 3G usage bill each month. Searching for Music in the Xbox Music Store is pretty straightforward however really I think it takes too many screen taps to go from playlist to store, store to song selection and then back to playlist with the new song added.

The Windows 8/RT Music app has been getting a lot of attention recently with updates and I think it’s probably time that Microsoft turned their attention to the Windows Phone Music hub and gave that a matching overhaul to bring the features and UI of the two in closer alignment as it’s needed. I haven’t tried it on the Xbox yet, but I suspect that will probably suffer some of the same fates as the Windows Phone environment. I think if there are a lot of gaps and cracking in which artists you can and can’t stream or setup Smart DJ for then this also needs to be addressed.

It’s a real shame, because I want to like Xbox Music Pass and I almost want to actually give Microsoft £89 a year for a one year subscription, but with simple flaws like this, I just can’t, it’s not practical. I think Microsoft also need to look at making an Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Music Pass bundle where if you renew and buy the two together you get a slight discount.