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How to enable Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 r2

July 17, 2014 by Paulie 43 Comments

If you are trying to view web pages that contain flash content on Windows Server 2012 r2 then you may find that it does not work. You are then led to a page on the Adobe website tells you that Flash player is already installed on Windows 8 and that you do not need to install it. This post explains how to enable Flash Player on Windows Server 2012.

Message from Adobe Website informing you that Flash Player is already installed on Windows Server 2012 r2   The page then goes on to provide instructions as to how to enable Flash, this basically consists of:

  • Ensuring that the flash player add-on is enabled.
  • Checking that Active-X filtering is disabled.

You will probably find that these instructions do not work for you as flash player is not listed in the Internet Explorer Add-ons.

How to install Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 r2

In order to install Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 you need to install the Desktop Experience Feature. To do this, do the following:

  • Go into server manager.
  • Click add roles and features: Using server manager to install flash player on Windows Server 2012
  • Press next until you reach the “Features” page.
  • Tick the box “Desktop Experience” which is hidden under the “User Interfaces and Infrastructure” feature: Installing the desktop experience to enable Flash player in Windows Server 2012
  • You will then have to accept the installation of some other features to support the installation of desktop experience
  • The features are installed and the server is rebooted: Desktop Experience Feature being installed on Windows Server 2012 r2

Or if you prefer, you can install with the simple but so effective Windows Powershell command:

Install-WindowsFeature Desktop-Experience

The reason I wanted to have access to Flash Player on this particular server was so that I could access the vSphere Web client, which uses flash. Hope this helps someone.

If you are looking for instructions on how to Install Flash Player on Windows Server 2016 – please follow this updated guide.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: Windows Server 2012 r2

How to bulk whitelist domains in Office 365 using Powershell

May 21, 2014 by Paulie 8 Comments

How to Bulk Whitelist domains in Office 365

There are plenty of blog posts that explain how to add a mail flow rule in Office 365 to allow you to white list a sender domain, bypassing the 365 spam filtering completely. There is a nice guide on how to achieve that in this blog post by Robert Crane.

I was working with a customer today that had a long list of domains that they wanted to white-list, but the Office 365 admin interface does not provide a facility to enter a list in bulk. So I wrote a PowerShell script that would do the job of creating a transport rule based on a simple list from a text file containing email domains.

Creating a Mail Flow rule to handle many trusted domains.

    1. Download the script
    2. Create a plain text file containing a list of domains or email addresses. The script will strip the first part of the address to leave only the domain name remaining.
      nicedomain.com
      trusteddomain.com
      tachytelic.net
      [email protected]
    3. Connect to Exchange Online using PowerShell. Instructions on how to do that here:
      http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj984289(v=exchg.150).aspx
    4. Run the script that you downloaded (Add365SafeDomains.ps1)
        1. With Parameters like this:
          .\Add365SafeDomains.ps1 -ruleName "Safe Domain List" -domainListFilePath "c:\domainlist.txt"
        2. Or without parameters and you will be prompted:
          Powershell script showing How to whitelist domains in office 365
  • Specify a meaningful rule name, this will help you segregate different groups of domains easily.
  • If you specify a rule name that already exists, the contents of the “SenderDomains” property will be loaded into an array and combined with the new list.
    • Duplicates are automatically removed
    • The list is sorted into alphabetical order for easier readability the Office 365 Portal to view the rule.
  • If you specify a rule name that does not already exist, a new rule will be created instead.

The script works by creating an array of domains and supplying that array to the set-TransportRule cmdlet.

Here is the code for the script:

Param(
   [Parameter(Mandatory=$True,Position=1)]
   [string]$ruleName,
  
   [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
   [string]$domainListFilePath
)

#Read the contents of the text file into an array
$safeDomainList = Get-Content $domainListFilePath

#Create a new array and remove all text for each line up to and including the @ symbol, also remove whitespace
$newSafeDomainList = @()
$newSafeDomainList += foreach ($domain in $safeDomainList) 
            {
              $tmpdomain = $domain -replace ".*@"
              $tmpdomain.trim()
            }

#If the rule already exists update the existing allowed sender domains, else create a new rule.
if (Get-TransportRule $ruleName -EA SilentlyContinue)
{
  "Updating existing rule..."
  $safeDomainList = Get-TransportRule $ruleName |select -ExpandProperty SenderDomainIs
  $completeList = $safeDomainList + $newSafeDomainList
  $completeList = $completeList | select -uniq | sort	
  set-TransportRule $ruleName -SenderDomainIs $completeList 
}
else
{
  "Creating new rule..."
  $newSafeDomainList = $newSafeDomainList | sort	
  New-TransportRule $ruleName -SenderDomainIs $newSafeDomainList -SetSCL "-1"
}

You can copy and paste the above into your own PowerShell script or download the script here.

If you found the script helpful, please rate the post! 😀

Filed Under: How To, Office 365, Scripts & Utilities Tagged With: Exchange, Office 365, Powershell

High Memory usage in SBS 2011 caused by SQL Server Databases

May 12, 2014 by Paulie 17 Comments

SBS 2011 in it’s default configuration will experience very high memory usage caused by the three SQL databases that are running and in my experience will eventually cause poor performance where physical memory is being consumed by these databases. In particular I have noticed extremely High memory usage in SBS 2011 by the DataCollectorSvc.exe process, it was using around 12 GB!

There are three databases:

  • SBSMONITORING
  • SHAREPOINT
  • WINDOWS INTERNAL DATABASE (MICROSOFT##SSEE)

All three of them have the potential to consume a great deal of memory and by default the memory limit on these instances is set to 2147483647 MB – which is 2048 Terabytes. Given that SBS 2011 supports a maximum of 32Gb of memory, restricting the memory usage on the databases can give you some of your memory back and improve the performance of the machine.

Because all three databases are separate instances you need to connect and modify each one separately.

We can use one instance of SQL Server Management Studio to manipulate all three instances, which makes things a bit easier. Open SQL Server 2008 Management studio by doing the following:

Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 -> Right click on “SQL Server Management Studio” and choose, run as administrator:

How to start SQL Server Management Studio in SBS 2011 as Administrator

Reduce memory usage of the SBSMONITORING, SHAREPOINT and Windows Internal Databases

Once SQL Server Management Studio has opened you will be prompted to connect to a server, enter SERVERNAME\SBSMONITORING. In this example the server is simply called SBS:

Connect to SBSMONITORING Database with SQL Server Management Studio

Once connected to your database, connect to the other two databases at the same time by going to File -> “Connect Object Explorer”. This time in the server name enter:

SERVERNAME\SHAREPOINT

Connect to SHAREPOINT database on SBS 2011 with SQL Server Management Studio

Once again to go File -> “Connect Object Explorer”. Enter:

\\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query

All being well you should now have SQL Management Studio with all three databases listed like this:

SBS 2011 - SQL Server Management Studio connected to SBSMONITORING, SHAREPOINT and Windows Internal Databases

 

Repeat the following procedure for each database:

Right click on the name of the SQL Instance and choose properties:

Modify SQL Instance Properties in SBS 2011 using SQL Management Studio

Click on the “Memory” option on the left hand side and adjust the memory figure as appropriate for your system. The system in this example has 32Gb of physical ram so I have chosen to give each database 2Gb. If you have less memory you will need to adjust according to your own system.

Setting the maximum memory usage for an SQL Instance on SBS 2011

After you have adjusted all three databases you can quit SQL Server Management Studio and then restart the following services for the changes to take effect:

  • SQL Server (SBS Monitoring)
  • SQL Server (Sharepoint)
  • Windows Internal Database (MICROSOFT##SSEE)

Hopefully after doing this SBS 2011 should run a bit smoother, on this system the SQL Databases were using over 16Gb of Ram and it was running very slowly.

Hope this helps.

Filed Under: How To, Technical Posts

How to set scan to email on an HP Officejet 8600 with Office 365

April 19, 2014 by Paulie 4 Comments

This post covers how to configure the HP Officejet 8600 to scan to email directly via Office 365.

Generally speaking it is often easier to configure an IIS (or other SMTP) server to act as an internal relay for messaging through Office 365 for office based devices such as scanners and photocopiers, however, sometimes this is not practical, especially in small environments where there is no server.

E-Mailing directly from the Officejet is easy to setup and takes only a couple of minutes to setup.

Setting up scan to email on an HP Officejet 8600 with Office 365

First of all, ensure that your Officejet is connected to your network and has access to the internet. You then need to find out what IP address the printer has, you can do this by doing the following:

From the main menu of the printer touch screen go into “Setup” and then “Network”, then go into “View Network Summary”, choose “View Wired” or “View Wireless” depending on how you have connected the printer to your network and the IP address will be displayed on the screen. Make a note of the IP address.

Browse to to the IP address of your printer from a computer connected to the same network and you will be presented with the Officejet 8600 embedded web server administration system.

From the tabs at the top of the menu choose scan:

Selecting the Officejet 8600 scan menu to setup direct emailing from Office 365

From the scan settings page choose “Scan to E-Mail Setup” and then “Outgoing E-mail Profiles”:

Setting up an Outgoing E-mail profile on the Officejet 8600 to work with Office 365

From the Outgoing E-Mail profiles page, click new:

Officejet 8600 Outgoing E-Mail Profiles

Enter the email address of the account that you are going to be sending messages from. This has to be a valid Office 365 user in your tennat. As you can see I have created a dedicated account called “Message.Relay”, but any active account will work.

Enter a display name for the account, I have called mine “Office 365”.

Officejet 8600 Step 1 of Email Profile Setup

Click Next to move on to step 2.

On Step 2 do the the following:

  • In SMTP Server put “smtp.office365.com”
  • In SMTP Port enter “587”
  • Tick the box that says “Always use secure connections (SSL/TLS)
  • Tick the box that says “SMTP server requires authentication for outgoing e-mail messages”
  • Enter the email address of the Office 365 account you are going to use to send messages from the Officejet
  • Enter the password for the Office 365 account you are going to use.

Officejet 8600 Step 2 of Email Profile Setup

Click next to move on to step 3 of 5.

This screen offers you the chance to specify a pin to prevent unauthorized access to the email scanning function, I didn’t want or need to set this up so just pressed next.

Step 4 of 5 asks you to specify a maximum message size and default CC options. As the default maximum message size in Office 365 is 25Mb I decided to set this to 20Mb so that there is a little bit of margin.

I chose not to receive an automatic CC of the message.

Officejet 8600 Step 4 of Email Profile Setup

Click next to move to the step 5 email setup summary screen:

HP Officejet 8600 Email Profile Setup - Step 5 Summary

Click on “Save and Test” to ensure that all of your settings are correct. Hopefully you should see the following:

Officejet 8600 Outgoing E-Mail Profiles Test Complete

That’s it! You can now scan to email directly from your Officejet Pro 8600 via Office 365.

 

 

Filed Under: How To, Office 365 Tagged With: Office 365

Office 365:Outlook rule to show which alias an email was sent to

April 19, 2014 by Paulie 13 Comments

When you have multiple email aliases associated with your Exchange or Office 365 based email account, it can be useful to know which email address it was sent to. However Outlook does not show this information.

I can think of a couple of ways to resolve this:

  • Use an Office 365 transport rule to modify the message subject so that emails sent to a particular email address can be easily recognised. 
  • Use an Outlook rule to examine the message header and display an alert or perform some other action when an email to an alias is received.

The advantage of using a transport rule is that the rule is always executed, it does not depend on the Outlook client running. This is useful because mobile devices or other clients will not execute any rules.

There are a couple advantages of using Outlook the Outlook method:

  • Greater flexibility over what you want to do with the message.
  • No need for Office 365 administrator rights to set up.

As the transport rule method has already been documented, this post is about how to use an Outlook rule to determine which email alias an email was sent to.

Using an Outlook rule to determine which email alias an email has been sent to

    1. Go to File and then “Manage Rules and Alerts” and then click on “New rule”.
    2. Click on “Apply rule on messages I receive” from the “Start from a blank rule” section and click Next.
      Outlook 2013 - Creating a blank rule on an incoming message
    3. Choose “with specific words in the message header”.
    4. In the “Step 2” section at the bottom of the page, click on the “specific words” link:
      Specifying specific words to search for in the message header of an Outlook message
    5. Type in the email address that you want to identify and click on “Add” and then click OK.
      (Note: You can add multiple email addresses here to use this rule for multiple aliases.)
      Outlook 2013 rule - specifying search text
    6. You will drop back to the main rule creation dialog box, click next.
    7. On this page you have lots of options about what to do with the identified message, the options are quite self explanatory.
    8. I am going to choose “display a specific alert in the New Item Alert window” as below:
      Displaying a custom new item alert in Outlook 2013 when an email is received to an email alias
    9. This means that when I receive an email to the alias specified, Outlook will show an alert to inform me.
    10. Finish creating the rule with any other options or exceptions that you require.
    11. You should get an alert when messages are sent to the alias:

Outlook 2013 - New Mail Alert for message sent to a specific email address

I hope this post was helpful, if you did, I would really appreciate it if you rated it 😀

Filed Under: How To, Office 365 Tagged With: Exchange, Office 365

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