Software Assurance E-Learning?

Has anyone managed to get their Software Assurance E-Learning activated for their organization for more than one person? I was interested to see a side comment from Susan Bradley, an SBS MVP who also can’t get E-Learning working One of my customers gets the message “Access Code is over its user limit. Please contact your training benefits coordinator or HR representative for further assistance” when they try to access the site. They have a 50 user licence, and I only have 1 licence signed up (mine when I set the whole thing up). 3 times Microsoft have told me the problem has been fixed and asked for screenshots when I’ve told them it still isn’t fixed and EXACTLY the same error message appears on screen. The last time I was asked for my passport username and password which was pretty unbelievable. I refused to give them mine, but I did set up a new user who was requesting the training but hadn’t set up a passport account yet as there wasn’t much point as the training site wasn’t working. Anyway, I gave them this userid and password and they told me they had fixed it. If they had bothered to actually test the problem they would have discovered that they hadn’t fixed it.
This SA E-Learning is touted as a free benefit, so far it’s cost a lot in time spent chasing Microsoft and having to tell the users that No, it still doesn’t work yet.
Also you are meant to get an update on the case every other day via email – I’m lucky if I get one a week.

Flickr can read EXIF data

I uploaded a couple of pictures to the Geotagged Ohio flickr group and then got a comment on the photo requesting me to geocode the photo. This was a surprise to me as I’d already encoded the photos with wwmx so was expecting Flickr to have already coded the pictures. It turns out that you have to enable exif data import before you upload photos. Afterwards, any new pictures will automatically get uploaded.
Update See also my post on locr that is a new alternative for geotagging your photos prior to uploading to flickr.

Onenote export to web

A very cool OneNote Powertoy to export a OneNote Notebook to a website looks like a great must-have for publishing data to those unfortunate people who don’t have OneNote. I’ll be installing this on Monday and will try uploading a small notebook to see what the output looks like in IE and firefox.
I’ve used OneNote for several years and now have at least 4 of my colleagues using it on a daily basis as it is just so useful for gathering customer related information into one place. Just showing them the features such as audio notetaking,the offline functions and collaboration doesn’t take long to get them to see the potential and start using the software. The only problem we now have is that it is an extra storage location for customer data – we now have a OneNote Notebook per customer, a directory on a file server containing word files etc and the Lotus Notes Database with information. Sometimes it takes longer to find the data as you now have to remember where you stored it. This could be stored all in OneNote but for people who don’t have OneNote that wouldn’t be very useful and heaven forbid we use anything other than Lotus Notes! Thanks Daniel

Happy 4th July!

Dublin 4th of July Parade Happy 4th of July to all of the american’s visiting this blog! Today is the third July 4th we’ve celebrated in the States. Last year Kristen was in Texas at a wedding and this year both her brothers, their wives and kids are in town so it is a packed house at the in-laws. Kristen drove to get her brother from Dayton airport this morning so I went to the parade to take some photo’s. This is the second July 4th I’ve been to and the second parade this year (the first being the St Patricks Day parade. I was a bit disappointed with the parade as so many of the entrants were exactly the same as the St Patricks Day and it still makes me wonder why some of the groups are allowed in the parade – surely an empty old people’s home bus should not really be an entrant?
I took several photo’s but haven’t worked out where to put them yet – Zooomr smartset functionality is still down and I’m limited with the number and size of images at Flickr but I will get around to uploading some of them later.
It was nice and sunny this morning but now it is riaing and thundering – hopefully the weather improves as the Village People and KC and the sunshine band are scheduled to play at the concert tonight before the Dublin fireworks.

List RAS users in Windows 2003

I had the need to quickly list the users who had DialIn access to the domain. This can be achieved using the netsh command. More details can be found in the Help and Support Center for “netsh commands for remote access” but the command line you need is netsh ras show user mode=report >ras.txt (assuming you want the file exported to ras.txt

Windows Live Writer working now.

Thanks to Neil and Bryan, I’ve solved the problem I had and got Windows Live Writer working with MovableType now. When you set up a user in MT you set up a Web Services Password for each user. This is not the same as the one used for your standard login. The details can be found by going to the Main Menu, System Overview, Authors and then selecting your username. Down at the bottom is the information required with a reveal button to show the password. Thanks guys!

Getting a Samsung IP-830W to activesync.

After receiving a Samsung IP830W to allow international access to exchange, I had a big headache getting the device to sync with the exchange server.
The initial problem was caused by the SSL certificate having expired on the exchange server. Normal browsers can just hit the ok button to continue, but Windows Mobile5 will refuse to sync unless this is fixed.
Rather than purchase a new SSL certificate and wait the couple of weeks for Verisign or Network Solutions to provide me a certificate (this was needed *now*) I did some research and came up with the website SSL Enabling OWA 2003 using a free 3rd party certificate. Following the instructions was very simple and after a few minutes I had the certificate installed on the server. However the Windows Mobile Device would not accept the certificate! More research later the solution seemed to be to copy the cert file to the device and double click it but this still didn’t work.
In the end I copied the ca.cer file to my pc and then used the infrared connection to copy it to the device. This got around the previous problem I had with the certificate programs not recognising the previous certificate I had BUT I then got the issue “Security permission was insufficient to update your device”.
Whilst I was doing this I was on the phone with Sprint (on hold) for twenty minutes and at this point they answered the phone and were useless. They admitted they hadn’t had any training on this, that no certificates were allowed to be installed on the device and to contact Microsoft. I hung up on the guy as he obviously had no clue and downloaded the RegeditSTG file from Bernt Lervik. Using the instructions at Bernt’s site I edited the registry to allow the certificate to be installed. I did have to extract the zip file first and copy the exe file across as opposed to the zip file. Note that in order to expand the branches I had to use the center key within the rocker switch as the stylus/enter key wouldn’t work.
Start regeditSTG and navigate to the hive key HKLM\Security\Policies\Policies
Change the following three registry keys (hint: hit Values first)
a. 00001001 to 1 (was 2)
b. 00001005 to 40 (was 16)
c. 00001017 to 144 (was 128)
After that I was able to double click the ca.cer file to install it, and then start the activesync process with exchange.

Hope this (convuluted) solution will help any other users and me the next time I have to do this certification dance.