You might know about my most favourite add-in for Microsoft Excel called Fuzzy Lookup. It’s the best, most accurate and fastest tool to compare a string of text against a table of data. For example, I can have a table of songs (my entire music library of 12K+ songs), then in another table I can have a list of songs that a radio station has played over the past week – for example. With Fuzzy lookup, I can compare the two tables. Table A which contains songs played on a radio station and Table B which represents my library. For each…
All Ignite 2016 OMS (Operations Management Suite) videos
The following are a complete list of OMS (Operations Management Suite) videos on one page from Ignite 2016 in Atlanta. Content taken from here. As a tip – in Windows, download and install Breakaway Audio Enhancer which will dramatically improve your listening experience for audio in Windows. Alternatively, under the Windows sound properties, turn on Loudness Equalization. Either or will flatten the audio and remove the loud and quite differences for audio in Windows. Take your management and security strategy to the cloud with Operations Management Suite (OMS) Jeremy Winter & Srini Chandrasekar Protect your data with a modern backup, archive and disaster…
Ignite US 2016 rolling updates
The following are rolling updates from me personally, first and foremost for my interest and reference, secondly for anyone else that cares to read it. They are update snipits. Please note, I have done the quick and dirty and copy and pasted some of it directly from Microsoft sites and I’ve included links. It’s raw but updated in my own real time as I see updates come through from Ignite. SharePoint Document Libraries can now be sync’ed again with a brand new OneDrive for Business sync client. About time, I was waiting for this one! Bit of a dodgy setup…
Azure Automation using Azure AD SPNs
This is similar to my other blog post I did recently on sequentially starting and stopping virtual machines where I demonstrated setting up Azure automation using a normal user account in Azure AD as the credential. There is also another blog post I did about setting up SPNs (Service Principal Names) in Azure AD – similar to service accounts. So this blog post merges both Azure Automation and SPNs for credentials together. The difference being, you just need to add an additional Azure Automation Variable for the Azure Tenant ID. You’ll will need to set yourself up an SPN first using my script,…
Azure News 2016 – Week 37
The following is Azure news from the most recent ‘Need to Know’ podcast Episode 114 with both Robert Crane and myself. We speak to Steve Luper, who is the Worldwide Technical Director | Azure Managed Partners. Not to mention his Luper’s Learnings, is an awesome resource to stay on top of Azure. http://blog.ciaops.com/2016/09/need-to-know-podcastepisode-114.html We talk about: The change of direction Azure takes in competition against rivals such as AWS Partners in keeping up to date with ‘tech’ Ignite US You can subscribe to Lupers Learnings by emailing: luperslearnings@microsoft.com Other things mentioned in the podcast: Link to underwater datacenters – http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10883866/microsoft-underwater-data-centers Link…
Azure SPNs (Service Principal Names) – PowerShell
Using Azure SPNs is a massive benefit more so for the pure fact that it creates a specific user account in Azure (like a service account) which you can use to automate PowerShell scripts against Azure subscriptions for specific tasks. You don’t need to worry about whether the account needed is a Microsoft account, which you know that you can’t automate an Azure logon with PowerShell using a Microsoft account. You can however create an SPN and use this instead. The other benefit, you’re using a task based account. The SPN is created on the tenant (Directory) which can essentially…
Using the Azure REST API in PowerShell – ASM & ARM
This post covers using the Azure REST API in PowerShell. First of you need to install the latest and greatest Azure PowerShell Module on your machine. Best place to do this is to install the good old fashioned MSI available from https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/releases Once you have the latest Azure PowerShell Module on your machine, you’ll need to restart. For the remainder of this post we will be focusing on the Rest API for Azure, the reference for the Azure Classic Rest API is here and the Rest API reference for Azure ARM is here. The script below will have you Logon…
Azure News 2016 – Week 34
This weeks Azure News, probably the biggest and most popular Azure News is open source. Don’t forget, Azure news can also be heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast with Robert Crane and myself. New Provider for Azure CDN – Akamai CDN is a great way to speed up blob file access globally. Rather than having all your files on a single server in a single location, making use of a Content Delviver Network allows you to speed up accessability across the globe by utilising a distributed network of CDN provider servers. Your blob files are cached across the CDN network…
Azure News – Week 33
Previous News This weeks Azure News, probably the biggest and most popular Azure News is the fact that Azure is ditching Azure RemoteApp. Don’t forget, Azure news can also be heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast with Robert Crane and myself. RemoteApp being replaced by Citrix XenApp Express Currently Azure RemoteApp is 2 years old and Microsoft will stop offering RemoteApp services on October 1, 2016 and then turn off the service completely at the end of August 2017. The replacement being Citrix XenApp Express which is currently under development. XenApp “Express” will be the new Azure “RemoteApp v2.0”….
Sequentially Start & Stop Azure VMs – Azure Automation
Following on from my previous blog post, this is how I managed to sequentially start and stop Azure VMs (Virtual Machines) by using Azure Automation. First thing you need to do is setup an Azure Automation account – good news if you’re a light user, this is free! You will need to create some assets: The two assets you need to create are credentials and a subscription automation variable. The credentials the most important part to this for obvious reasons and just like in my previous post, you can’t use a Microsoft account here, you need to create for yourself…
Marc Kean 
You must be logged in to post a comment.