Category: Mat

Enabling the demo users in Microsoft Dynamics AX

Today a customer asked me if the could get a user and test Microsoft Dynamics AX (for search engine reasons i will add AX7) in our demo environment. The customer does not use Azure Active Directory yet and this made things a bit tricky. If they hade a AAD tenant I would just use this method.

After searching around a bit I found that there is a way to enable the demo users. These are users created by Microsoft which are in a AAD tenant owned by MS.

Note that these users are static and you cannot change the password which means that everyone can use these users to log in to your system if you enable them. This is not recommended in a sensitive environment.

To enable the users just edit the user and add contosoax7.onmicrosoft.com to the domain field. The end result should be https://sts.windows.net/contosoax7.onmicrosoft.com

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The users all use the password Pass1Word

/Johan

Links
http://kaya-consulting.com/how-to-enable-the-contoso-personas/

Microsoft Band and Web Tiles

Edit (10/7 2015): Added Images

To day MS announced a thing that was pretty cool… The ability to easily add an information stream to your Microsoft Band. All you need is an RSS feed and an icon image file… lets do it

  1. Go to http://developer.microsofthealth.com/WebTile/ and click get started
  2. Choose a layout

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  3. Input your RSS adress

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  4. Assign your datafields to the specific fields on the band by drag and drop. I used Channel.Titel, item.title and item.encoded.

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  5. Enter information about your app and add an icon (46 x 46) it needs to be a PNG and have a transparent background

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  6. Download the app and either send it by email och save it to OneDrive

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  7. Open it on your phone
  8. Done

    WP_20150710_13_36_22_Pro      WP_20150710_13_36_44_Pro

  9. That all for today /Johan

Geek Trick: Custom “New Tab Page” in Google Chrome

Yesterday I signed up for WunderList (since Microsoft bought it i thought I’d give it a try) and I noticed that there were a Extension in the Google Chrome store which displays my Wunderlist as a “New Tab Page”. That got me thinking: I wonder if I could set up any page as a New Tab Page… Like Todoist, which is the todolist manager I use.

I looked in the Chrome Store and found Replace New Tab Page which I installed and customized to display Todoist… Happy Days

/Johan

Download all Ignite sessions… Using oneget…

Hi

Today I will highlite a couple of things…

First of all: If you have not used OneGet (which comes with Windows 10) you should definately take loog at it. It lets you install software and powershell modules from different repositories on the internet (think Apt-get on Linux)

Second of all… My colleagues at AddLevel has created a PowerShell module for downloading the Ignite sessions automatically and it is available from Technet Gallery which makes it downloadable by using OneGet… Here is how you do it:

    1. Start an elevated Powershell prompt on your Windows 10 Computer
    2. Enter Find-Module CH9 | Format-List to have a look at the information about the package. If this is the first time you use Oneget, Powershell will ask you if it is OK to install the NuGet provider.

    1. If you want to install the package use: Find-Module CH9 | Install-Module
    2. Once you have installed the module, use get-command -module CH9 to fund which CMDlets are available

    1. To download all Mikael Nystroms sessions from Ignite 2015 use this:

      Get-CH9EventItem -Speaker “Mikael Nystrom” -EventName Ignite -Region NorthAmerica -Year 2015 | Save-CH9EventItem -StorePath C:\Users\johan.persson\Downloads

/Johan

Using OneNote to post blogs in WordPress

I have for a while now been using Windows Live Writer to create Blog Posts on my WordPress Blog. Since Windows Live Writer is not beeing updated “alot” any more I have been trying to find a replacement for a while now. I was quite happy the other day when I saw that MS has created a solution to use OneNote (one of my absolute favorite applications) to post blog posts.

To install this you start by going to the admin console on your WordPress Blog and in the Plugins sections search for OneNote and install One Note Publisher. When the install is done activate the Plugin and click Settings

Click the link that says “Click here for instructions…” to create a new application and get the MSA ClientID and Client Secret…




 

 

When you have gotten the info from your new application you will have to enter them in WordPress

To create a new posting you write it in OneNote and then you go to the new post screen in WordPress and press the little OneNote icon and browse to your post, select it and it will magically appear in your edit window (atleast within 20 seconds) and you can add category and click Publish as usual…

BTW This post was of course posted using OneNote 🙂

/Johan

Set up Site-to-Site VPN from pfSense and Microsoft Azure

 

Today I have played around a little with Azure Site-2-Site VPN… I do not have a high-end (or for that matter low end) Cisco firewall to test with so I set it up in my lab firewall which is running pfSense.

First of all you need to create the VPN settings in Microsoft Azure

We start with creating a new virtual network

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First we name the network and select the region

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Then we add an internal DNS server. These are used to let our servers in Azure resolve DNS names in our internal environment. We also select that we will use site-to-site VPN and that we want to specify a new local network

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We now have to specify our on-premise network which in my case is 192.168.1.0/24 and the gateway to my network (the external IP of my firewall)

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We need to set up the new subnet and the gateway subnet

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When the network is done we have to create a gateway network. This will take a while. You only need to use a Static Routing Gateway since you will only have a single endpoint.

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When the gateway is created we can see that Azure is trying to connect… so we will need to set up the other side

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For that we need to take note of the pre-shared key and the gateway address so we can enter them into pfSense. Take note of the gateway and then click Manage Key and copy the key

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The last thing to do is to set up the pfSense configuration. Log on to the pfSense web interface and goto VPN –  IPsec and enable IPsec.

We start with creating the phase 1 part of the VPN tunnel. Create a new one and add the Azure gateway and the key.

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Now we need to set up phase 2 of the IPsec tunnel.

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First we add the local subnet (in my case 192.168.1.0/24) and then we add the remote sublet in Azure. Note that this is the complete adress space and not just the server network (in my case 10.0.0.0/8). Also verify that you are using AES as encryption algorithm and AES 256 as hash algorithm.

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The VPN is now up and running and you can verify in Azure

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And in pfSense (go to Status – IPsec)

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Now you can set up a virtual machine on Microsoft Azure and connect it to your Azure Server Network and they will be accessible from your onpremise network.

Links:
https://knowledge.zomers.eu/pfsense/Pages/How-to-connect-an-Azure-cloud-to-pfSense-over-IPSec.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKVgIaFg1Z4

Questions from class: Centrally configure the start screen in windows 8.1

One question I got in yesterdays class was:

How do I customize the start screen for my Windows 8.1 users?

The answer is: You can use Powershell and the registry to set this up.

    1. Start by logging in to a computer and set up the Start Meny to your liking.
    2. Use the following Powershell command to export it:Export-StartLayout -Path “C:\StartLayout.xml”
      -As XML
    3. On a DC, start Group Policy Management console and create/edit a policy with the following setting

      User Configuration – Policies – Admin Templates – Start Menu and Taskbar – Start Screen Layout: [Path to your XML file]

Note: This setting can be applied to either Users or Computers

Links:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn467928.aspx