Considering how many times I have made this particular change to Windows 8 I should have blogged about this a year ago! I like to hibernate my laptop - it seems less risky than sleeping and means that when I need to quick start to the day I get one. For some reason the ability of easily hibernating a machine has been removed from Windows 8. If, like me, you want to continue to use the hibernation feature then you can follow these steps for enabling hibernation:

Over the years, my wife and I have taken a fair few digital photos with a variety of cameras and phones. Every single device has a slightly different naming convention and to be honest, none of them work for me. I want photos to be in a structured folder structure based on years and months, I also want the photos to be named based on the date and time they were taken.

This only applies to the 2011 interface, the CRM 2013 interface is COMPLETELY different. I am new to customising CRM online and have come to it since the December 2012 Service Update that included the ‘Updated Forms’. The interface that the ‘Updated Forms’ provide is much more in keeping with the 2013 generation of SharePoint and Office 365 products and would therefore be my first choice for a general CRM UI style.

In situations where the box that SharePoint is to be installed on does not have access to the internet, the pre-requisites need to be installed manually rather than through the installation interface. To achieve this type of install, all of the installation packages for the pre-requisites need to be downloaded and transferred to the box. Then the pre-requisites installer can be run and configured to pick up the local location rather than try to download the versions from the web.

Often, especially in virtual machines, when you try to rename a network adapter you get the message “Cannot rename this connection. A connection with the name you specified already exists. Specify a different name”. This message indicates that there is a record for a network adapter that you cannot see in the “Network Manager”. To see the records you need to start the “Device Manager”. I find the easiest way to open device manager is to open a PowerShell or Command screen and type DEVMGMT.

I recently was involved in the configuration of a hardware load balancer for a client. The SharePoint solution being load balanced consisted of three separate web applications, two of which were using FBA and third using NTLM. There were several issues that occurred during the process and I want to share some of the techniques that we used to resolve the issues. So Which Server Is This Running On? The first and foremost issue with diagnosing any issue with a load balancer is know which of the servers in the pool is serving up the response.

What is Sender Policy Framework? Sender Policy Framework is a system for validating the source of e-mails based on the DNS records of the domain from which the e-mail has been sent. It allows verification of the source of the e-mail through the use of a TXT record within the DNS records for the domain. SPF records can be used to allow third party e-mail servers to send e-mails from a domain with validated authenticity, e.

It’d be nice to have a slate or a tablet to be able to use the Metro interface that is part of Windows 8 but at the moment, I don’t have one so I am reduced to using a mouse and keyboard. Whilst a mouse is good, I have always been a fan of keyboard shortcuts and rely heavily on them whenever I interact with a Windows operating system. Windows 8 is no different although there are now some shiny new keyboard short cuts to play with.

Whilst installing a CRM 2011 on a SQL cluster some issues occurred that we resolved without any clear guidance from the web. The documentation available on the CRM installation is sparse and not very helpful when issues occur. So this is our story … The installation so far SQL Installation A SQL cluster has been installed for each of three SQL instances, each for a different application. Each of the SQL clusters has an Analysis Services instance and a SQL Agent.

Recently I had the pleasure of attending SQL Bits X in London. If you have never been to a SQL Bits conference and you have an interest in SQL Server or Business Intelligence then you are missing out on the best free resource in the country. SQL Bits consists of three days: Thursday – A paid for day of in depth learning from an industry expert on an aspect of SQL Server (Paid for) Friday – A day of sessions on a wide variety of subjects to suit a wide range of skill and experience (Paid for) Saturday – Another day of sessions in the same vein as Friday (FREE) To unwind after a day of learning, there are usually networking events on the Thursday and Friday nights.