Category Archives: Cloud

Ep 10 of the Microsoft Cloud Show – News on Azure, Google Compute Engine and Amazon and more

I can’t believe we just hit episode 10 of the Microsoft Cloud Show!  It feels like a mini milestone.

Episode 10 is jam packed with news and updates from the Amazon re:Invent conference, as well as news on the newly released Google Compute Engine & , of course, lots of Azure goodies too.

Go get it and let AC and I assault your ear buds.

Episode 010 – Latest news in the cloud from Microsoft, Amazon and Google

Thanks for the amazing support so far with the podcast.  We had > 7000 downloads over the past month or so which is astounding!

-CJ

Managing your Azure cloud costs with Kerrb

One of the big problems developers and organizations have using cloud services like Azure is the potential for the costs to go crazy if you don’t shut your dev, test or temporary Virtual Machines off. Sometime back Andrew Connell and I got talking about and had an idea for an online service that would help you manage those costs.  We talked with some people and found found loads of people that were concerned with using Azure and Amazon Web Services because of these cost overrun type of issues.

KerrbSo we decided to fix it …  Introducing Kerrb.

Kerrb is a SaaS product designed to save you money by automatically turning off Azure VMs that you forget about.  If you forget to turn off a virtual machine Kerrb will make sure it’s turned off on a schedule that you decide on.

Kerrb is still being built, but you can sign up for the launch list and be one of the first to get access when it is ready.  We will send you updates on how development is progressing and finally give those on the launch list the opportunity to sign up and test out the system when it’ ready. Also as an added bonus, if you are on the launch list then we will honor the pricing we have up on the site, even if we decide to tweak it prior to launch.

Kerrb will start small and evolve quickly as demand and feedback drives the product development. The high priority “Pri 0” [1]  feature is to turn off Virtual Machines in Azure if you forget, but we have a lot of other great features on the roadmap including adding Amazon Web Services as well as support for other leading cloud providers.

Keep up to date with developments and help us get the word out by:

  1. Signing up for the launch list
  2. Liking Kerrb on FaceBook
  3. Keeping an eye on the Blog for updates and news
  4. Follow @KerrbApp on Twitter

Have a read of a blog post Andrew wrote on the Kerrb blog here: Using VMs for Dev, Test & Show – Perspectives from an Indie Consultant, Trainer and Presenter

And something I wrote about Managing cloud spend in a development organization

We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback!

-CJ

[1] Pri 0 – Microsoft speak for the highest priority features in product development. You have to have all the Pri 0’s.

SharePoint Saturday Chicago #SPSChicago

Today I presented a 101 session on getting started with the new SharePoint App Model. It’s a lot to get through in 75mins, but hopefully it gave people enough to get started and try out building an app for Office 365 or SharePoint on premises.

Thanks to everyone that came along!  #SPSChicago is a great free event for people with a great lineup of speakers.

Here are the slides:

Introducing the Microsoft Cloud Show podcast

Microsoft Cloud ShowThe only place to stay up to date on everything going on in the Microsoft cloud world including Azure and Office 365.

Quite some time ago I bugged pestered asked my good friend Andrew Connell (AC) if he would be interested in starting a SharePoint podcast.  Given he is a busy guy with a lot on his plate he wasn’t so sure it was a good idea to begin with.  After all, we both said that if we were going to embark on something like this that we wanted to do it right.

We ultimately decided to broaden the shows scope to include not only SharePoint … but rather take on talking about the whole Microsoft cloud story.  After all, Microsoft are one of the largest Enterprise players in the market and there is A LOT going on in their cloud offerings.

The Microsoft Cloud Show was born.

Our aim with the show is to bring you news, information and commentary about all things going on in the Microsoft cloud world. We want to invite the listener into the show via way of audio and email questions sent in. We want to keep a consistent delivery of shows that you can count on.  Most of all we want it to be easily digestible and will try to stick to 30mins per show.

We are not pretending to be professional podcasters here and we will likely learn a lot along the way.  But we hope you will join us for the journey.

We are launching the podcast in iTunes (MS marketplace coming soon) with 3 episodes. These are just introductory shows and talk about our motivations for the show & then a background show on each host. We will be getting into the meat and potatoes in Episode 4 which is coming soon.  Ideally we would love to settle into a fortnightly show.

We would love to hear your feedback! We would love to hear about topics that interest you and that you would like to hear us address on the show.

In the meantime … please enjoy this screenshot from us recording our first show.

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-CJ

Keeping up with cloud releases, Yammer vs. 365

A colleague Brendon Ford , and Office 365 MVP I would add, pointed me at a great resource today for keeping up with what Yammer are up to in terms of new stuff coming down the line.

http://success.yammer.com/product/releases/

This gives a reasonable amount of detail on the things they are working on and at what stage they are at.  I say reasonable because they don’t give hard dates on when things will release, but they do give some detail on what is coming.

Here are some examples that specifically relate to Office 365.

Better search integration…

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Could this be the single sign on we are all waiting for?  Maybe not, but it seems to be getting better…

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Office web app integration in Yammer for viewing documents etc…

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This is pretty cool insight into what’s coming.

The question I have is:

When are we going to get this level of visibility into the core Office 365 products? Exchange, Lync and SharePoint?

One of the big issues we face with customers in Office 365 is having zero visibility into when things change.  We are not alone, Jeremy has a good write up about some issues they have faced with APIs changed unexpectedly.

If I were at Microsoft still here is a sampling of things I would be pushing hard for:

  • Release and Update schedule.  Notes on exactly what is coming and when (per tenant).
  • Dev sandbox.  Ability to ask for a temporary test tenancy on a particular “version” of the service/product so that customers and partners can test their other systems that integrate with Office 365.
  • Postponement.  The ability to ask for a postponement of an update for up to 30 days. This would give customers/partners time to test and fix up any issues.
  • Open dialog with trusted advisors.  Microsoft was built on the back of strong partnerships.  Having a group of trusted advisors with a Bat Phone to someone who cares in engineering would go a long way. This group wouldn’t need to be big, but would be of good people who get it. People who want to help MS get better, not moan about it publically.

Some might say:

“Chris that is all great, but surely they should just get their cloud model to work and not break stuff randomly!”

Yeah that is great if you think you can reach Nirvana.  However, that is an impossible goal. Especially with something as complicated as Office 365 and all of its constituent parts.  Don’t let some chump from the valley with bubble gum SaaS product tell you otherwise 🙂

I think with some of the above changes proposed that things would get A LOT better really quickly.

-CJ

Extending your Azure AD tenant to include Office 365 services

I learnt something today that I thought would be interesting to share in the hope someone else won’t need to do the research.

Say you already have Windows Intune or Azure AD already up and running and now you are ready to give Office 365 a go.

You have a couple of choices:

  1. Create a new Office 365 tenant
  2. Extend your existing Azure AD tenant and add Office 365 services.

The correct way to do things is to Extend your existing tenant and add Office 365 services.  If you have Azure AD already you are likely DirSync to push all your user accounts from your on-prem AD to Azure AD.  It makes sense that those are the same users you want to access Office 365 no doubt.

If you try and create a new tenant and then do DirSync to that tenant you will most likely hit issues with trying to push the same users to two different Azure AD tenants.

Extending is the way to go.

If you sign into the Office 365 management portal using your current credentials you use for Azure AD/Intune you will see a page like this:

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You will notice it is saying that you are not currently subscribed to any Office 365 services.

So how do you go about adding those?

Jump over to the “purchase services” tab in the left navigation and you will get a selection of the various plans (aka SKUs) available.  In my case I picked the E3 –Trial.

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This will then add the services included to your tenant. Once provisioning is complete you can carry on with the other tasks you might like to do like setting up Identity Federation (ADFS) etc…

It seems blatantly obvious now I have tried this and this is possibly hardly worth a blog post, but until now I had always started from the Office 365 side of things and had never looked at starting with Azure AD and adding Office 365.

Turns out to be dead simple 🙂

-Chris.

SkyDrive Pro naming quandary and the mess of MS file sync products

Today Mary Jo Foley wrote a piece about Microsoft losing the fight with British Sky Broadcasting Group over the name SkyDrive and in particular (as I understand it) in the “Sky” part of that.

Microsoft to rebrand SkyDrive after losing trademark skirmish – Mary Jo Foley – ZD Net

In that article she also mentions that this will likely effect the SkyDrive Pro product naming also.  Which perked my ears up given its SharePoint linkage.

I never liked the SkyDrive Pro name.  Why?  Primarily because it makes it sound like it has something to do with SkyDrive and cloud storage.  When in reality you can use SkyDrive Pro to sync files from your on-prem SharePoint system … which doesn’t feel particularly “Sky” or “Cloudy” to me!  It just confuses everyone I speak with.

I can see what Microsoft were trying to achieve with regards to Office 365 and syncing files … it makes a little more sense in that regard.  However, I always had a problem with it “hooking” on to the consumer brand of SkyDrive. They are 100% totally separate products, no technical similarities etc… The only similarity is that they sync files to your PC from somewhere.

I actually think having to rename SkyDrive is a blessing in disguise for Microsoft.

Now is the perfect time to get it right and clear up all the confusion!

To make naming and technology matters worse Windows Server 2012 R2 is introducing a feature called “Work Folders” which enables access to on-prem file shares remotely. The reason being that 1000s of customers have files in shares and will continue to do so & therefore it would be good to have access to those remotely.  You can read about Work Folders here: Introducing Work Folders on Windows Server 2012 R2  It’s actually a pretty nifty solution.

SO!  Now we currently have:

  • SkyDrive Pro – which allows you to sync files from Office 365 and from SharePoint on-prem.
  • Work Folders – which allows you to access files from file shares on-prem.

Do you see where I am going with this?

Wouldn’t it be sensible for Microsoft to release ONE Enterprise grade file sync/access tool that let you access files from Office 365, SharePoint on-prem and file shares on-prem?

I call it “Files”.  Users would never see that name however as it would show up branded/renamed in Explorer, iOS, Windows 8 and Windows Phone using the organizations logo and name e.g. “Contoso Files”.

Currently here is what i see in Explorer:

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Here is what I want to see in Explorer:

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In that one location you would see a list of “folders” that either belong in SharePoint on-prem, Office 365 or Work Folders (file shares on prem).

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Is this really too much to ask for?

I don’t think so 🙂

With branding up in the air it would be a good time to strike and fix the mess up. However, I suspect it will take a while for this to happen and we are likely to see a name change first in the coming weeks/month (after all its a Select All replace right?! :)) and a consolidated product down the line (all fingers crossed).

What do you think should happen? or what would you like to see from Microsoft to make your file sync and management simpler?

-CJ.

SPChat transcript: App Model with Chris Johnson

On Wednesday last week I had the pleasure of participating in my first SPChat over on the SharePoint-Community.net site.  These are online Q&A based chats where an “expert” is invited and questions are fielded in real time from the live audience.  Each chat has a topic, but anything goes within that topic.

My topic was about the new SharePoint application model for developers is SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. It was really fun fielding questions, but i also felt like my typing was slow and it was hard for me to temper my answers with knowing that i wanted to get as many questions answered as possible.

Questions ranged from the app store submission process to app domain isolation, to tools i use in app development and the financial side of apps.  All interesting topics.

You can read a full transcript online here:

http://sharepoint-community.net/profiles/blogs/spchat-transcript-app-model-with-chris-johnson

I hope to do another one some day!

-CJ

Using SharePoint VMs in Windows Azure with VPN access

At TechEd North America 2013 my good friend Paul Stubbs did a session with Michael Washam and Corey Sanders on:  IaaS: Hosting a Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Farm on Windows Azure

This was a really cool session that focused on building out SharePoint farms in Azure.  One of the things they talked about was a set of PowerShell scripts that they have built to fully automate this process.

The “SharePoint 2013 Automated Deployment Master Scripts” is a set of scripts that you can grab from GitHub that will automate end to end the process of creating, configuring and setting up SharePoint in Azure IaaS VMs.  They let you build out two farm types right now:

  • Single VMs – 3 VMs (DC, SQL and SharePoint)
  • Highly Available – 9 Vms (DC x2, SQL x2, 1 Quorum VM, SP App servers x2, SP WFE x2)

I watched the session in the online recordings after the TechEd and it interested me enough to try it out. 

So I did! and I have to say it totally rocks!

The PowerShell all runs on your client machine and uses the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets to remotely setup Azure etc… Getting your machine setup before you run the scripts is a little tricky as it uses CredSSP for delegation which requires some manual setup, but if you follow the Wiki word for word you should be fine (here).  My CredSSP setup failed because the Windows Remote Management service wasn’t running.

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I wont get into all the steps for how to set up and run the scripts as that is well documented:

https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-samples/wiki/Automated-Deployment-of-SharePoint-2013-with-Windows-Azure-PowerShell

After you run the scripts you end up with a fully configured SP Farm running in Azure.  Nice!  I opted for the SingleVMs option … so 3x VMs in total.

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All those VMs sit on a Virtual Network that is also configured for you:

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Once the whole script has run (warning can take a couple of hours) you can RDP into the VMs … or, just navigate to the default Sharepoint site that is configured. The script also outputs the admin credentials and the sites that were created:

Credentials: corp\spadmin Password: *********
Created Farm on http://sp-foo.cloudapp.net
Created Admin Site on http://sp-foo.clouadpp.net:20000

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to get started with building a SharePoint environment out on Azure then this is a great way to get started.

The next thing I wanted to do was to connect my personal machine into the same virtual network that the VMs run on.  Azure provides the ability to set up a point-to-site VPN that lets you do this.  Once you have configured this you will end up with a VPN connection from your machine into the network with your VMs in Azure.  This makes working with the whole setup a bunch easier and you can use your local machine for development and connect to the farm seamlessly.  You could even join your machine to the AD Domain that was automatically created for you if you wanted.

I did this & although its pretty complex it was pretty neat to finally get up and running.

A good starting point is this guide: Configure a Point-to-Site VPN in the Management Portal

HOWEVER!  One of the steps in that guide is creating a Gateway.  This is the VPN endpoint that your client PC connects to.  However, the steps in that guide assume you are creating a new  virtual network whereas in my case the virtual network was already created.  This means the settings referred to in the guide above are not available!  In particular i couldn’t modify the “Configure point-to-site connectivity” checkbox as it was disabled.  This took me quite some time to figure out.

First you need to Export your configuration using the Export button on the Virtual Network:

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Then you need to modify the Export XML file and add the bits in bold below:

  <VirtualNetworkConfiguration>
    <Dns>
      <DnsServers>
        <DnsServer name=”DC1″ IPAddress=”10.20.2.4″ />
      </DnsServers>
    </Dns>
    <VirtualNetworkSites>
      <VirtualNetworkSite name=”SPAutoVNet” AffinityGroup=”SPAutoVNet-AG”>
        <AddressSpace>
          <AddressPrefix>10.20.0.0/16</AddressPrefix>
        </AddressSpace>
        <Subnets>
          <Subnet name=”AppSubnet”>
            <AddressPrefix>10.20.1.0/24</AddressPrefix>
          </Subnet>
          <Subnet name=”DCSubnet”>
            <AddressPrefix>10.20.2.0/24</AddressPrefix>
          </Subnet>
   <Subnet name=”GatewaySubnet”>
        <AddressPrefix>10.20.3.0/24</AddressPrefix>
    </Subnet>
        </Subnets>
        <DnsServersRef>
          <DnsServerRef name=”DC1″ />
        </DnsServersRef>
    <Gateway>
        <VPNClientAddressPool>
            <AddressPrefix>10.0.0.0/24</AddressPrefix>
        </VPNClientAddressPool>
    </Gateway>

      </VirtualNetworkSite>
    </VirtualNetworkSites>
  </VirtualNetworkConfiguration>
</NetworkConfiguration>

This adds a gateway subnet and an address pool for client PCs that connect via VPN.

Then you can reimport that configuration and your setup will be updated to include those settings.

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Then you should see the point-to-site settings correctly setup like this:

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You can then move on to creating the Gateway you need on that virtual network:

When you do that it can take a while to create the gateway … so be patient 🙂 it took about 10mins for me.

If that works correctly you will see your gateway setup properly along with its external IP etc…

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Now comes the fun part … CERTIFICATES!  The VPN uses client certificates to authenticate and so you need to create and upload a root cert to Azure as part of this. These steps are detailed in the MSDN guide here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn133792.aspx#bkmk_VPNCertificates

It’s a bit fiddly, but in a nutshell you create a root certificate, upload it to Azure, create a client certificate off that root certificate & then load that on your client PC.  Below is my root cert uploaded to Azure:

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Finally you get to the results of all your hard work.  You can download the VPN package which contains the configuration etc… from the Azure portal via a handy link:

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Install it on your client PC … and once complete you should see a VPN connection available in the network area in Windows:

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All going well you will be VPN’d into your Azure network and you should be able to ping the VMs! e.g. 10.20.1.5 is the main SP VM.

I went and created a new Web App in SharePoint on http://intranet, and the only other thing I did was add “intranet” to my hosts file on the client PC so it knew to hit 10.20.1.5 (the SP machine).

After that … boomtown! … my newly minted SharePoint site is available off my client PC via the VPN to Azure.

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This is going to be very handy for playing around with various SharePoint farm setups in Azure with the flexibility of having them run in the cloud.  I don’t have a 32GB RAM laptop to do this “on prem” unfortunately. Azure VMs have only recently become affordable for me with the recent announcement that you don’t pay for them when they are switched off. 

Enjoy and thanks for reading.

Chris Johnson

Integrating SharePoint Online and Yammer – An app for that!

Way back at SPC12 (Nov 2012) the keynote included a demo that showed an example of the integration possible between SharePoint Online and Yammer that could be done with a little bit of development effort. I built that demo and decided to turn it into a real app anyone could use.

Some Background first: This surfaced in SharePoint Online by way of a new ribbon button that when pressed posted the selected document to Yammer via the Yammer Open Graph API.  It was shown pretty quickly and it was pretty easy to miss.  However, it demonstrated a few interesting methods of integration that are possible today using the new SharePoint App plumbing and Yammers pretty decent set of APIs.

The basic flow

1. In a document library a document was selected like this

clip_image002[4]

2. Then in the ribbon a new “Post to Yammer” button showed up

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3. When it was clicked it posted to the Yammer activity feed. 

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The image above shows the hover over the activity. 

The activity feed shows a scrolling history of activity in the the Yammer network.  e.g. “Chris Johnson updated Product Catalog.docx”.  Its like that thing in Facebook that shows you all the music that your mates are listening to that they probably don’t know they are publishing to all their friends via spotify.  More on the Activity feed a little later on.

4. Clicking on the activity will take you a page in Yammer for that activity where you can Be Social™ and discuss the document, like it etc…

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How it’s made

This app is pretty simple.  It’s a SharePoint Provider hosted application running in Azure Websites.  The SharePoint part of the app includes some xml to add the ribbon button to all document libraries.  When the user clicks the “Post to Yammer” button it sends some details about the document(s) to the backend of the app running in Azure. The backend code then uses the CSOM to call back into SharePoint to retrieve the name of the document and some other properties. Then the app directs the user through the Yammer OAuth authentication flow.  Once this is complete the app then is able to access Yammer on behalf of the user that signed in.

Finally the posting of the information includes posting to the Yammer activity stream using the OpenGraph APIs (JSON/REST based). It will also post to the main feed in Yammer too via the Messages REST API in Yammer. Both of these are easy to use and are fairly standard XML/JSON/REST based services.

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Why is this interesting?

Recently there has been a bunch of noise about SharePoint’s current dual headed social story. 

  • In the red corner you have the social features in SharePoint (both on-prem and SharePoint Online)
  • In the blue corner you have Yammer.

The problem is that right now there is much consternation about how they don’t work nicely together. Things seem to be happening too slowly for some people.  The products are currently not integrated all that well. That is slowly changing, like the ability to switch from the NewsFeed to Yammer in Office 365 that rolled out the day of writing this post.  Those improvements will continue over time and eventually I think we will see the ability to totally replace the current out of the box social features with Yammer.

<mini-rant>
How on earth people think Microsoft can magically mash together one product with another overnight and make it all work perfectly is beyond me. It will take time people! Just because you think you could have done in overnight doesn’t mean it works that way in huge software projects … better stop this rant now before i get carried away.
</mini-rant>

The short story is that right now you have to pick one or the other.  My vote is firmly in the Yammer category. But at the end of the day there are many factors that will go into your decision either way and there isn’t a perfect answer.

There is no doubt that Microsoft will integrate the two products more deeply.  This could come in a variety of flavors including:

  • surfacing stuff that happens in Yammer in SharePoint more seamlessly (short term strategy),
  • totally replacing the existing SharePoint social features with ones backed by the Yammer in the cloud (more likely and what I would put money on, maybe with the ability to use the old stuff if you can’t use a cloud service)

Back to why this integration is interesting…

You can do things today to help with this situation.  The demo showed a very basic example of some custom integration using things we know exist today.

I smell a set up!

… and you would be right.  We are going to release this app to the store so that anyone with Office 365 can use it.  It needed some tweaks to make it work well in production & some branding changes. However in the coming days/weeks we will release it under the name “ShareIt”.

image 

I am going to write a future post on how this app was created and it will include code to illustrate how to call the Yammer APIs.

Ultimately you should be able to follow along and learn about how you can leverage the SharePoint App model + Yammer APIs to help integrate the two products while we wait for MS to offer a nice compelling seamless integration at a yet to be determined point in time 🙂

Note: It is very likely that this app will no longer be needed once MS do their thing and integrate the products further.  I hope so to!

-CJ