Managed IT Services Blog

One key aspect of Exchange Online is the SSO experience. With single sign-on, also called identity federation, users can access services in Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises with their existing Active Directory corporate credentials (user name and password). Benefits of a native SSO experience include the reduction of support calls (forgotten passwords), and the means for administrators to manage account policies through their on-premise Active Directory ecosystem.
To get this level of fidelity, however, requires the adoption of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS 2.0). Without diving into specifics, ADFS provides the means for SSO by securely sharing digital identity and entitlement rights (claims) across security and enterprise boundaries. So in a way, ADFS is your identity interface to the cloud (Office 365). So if your company values SSO as you move your mail to the cloud, ADFS would be needed if you are aiming for Exchange Online.

Welcome to the Rutter Networking Technologies, Inc. Blog site.

One of our customers had recently opened up a new site at a colocation and wanted to run all non-production out of this new site, keeping production in the existing datacenter for the time being.  This would allow them to leverage the investment in their Disaster Recovery site by running a good chunk of their workloads there and in the event of a disaster, all of the non-prod VMs would be powered off to make room for Production.

For many traditional domain migrations, the use of sIDHistory is a common vehicle to avoid disruptions. As users and groups are migrated to other domains, they inherit new SIDs. This is because SIDs are domain specific. So historically problems arose when users and groups attempted to access resources in the source domain. Because the DACLs (Discretionary Access Control List) of the source resources are still attuned to the original SID's, users who migrated to a new domain or forest would be denied access. So to circumvent this starting with Windows 2000 Microsoft introduced the sIDHistory attribute. The premise of this attribute is to store the users or groups SID from the previous source domain and append it to the access token along with their new SID. Now users and groups in the midst of a migration could have access to source resources like file servers that have yet to be migrated.

Rutter Networking Technologies, Inc. will be joining VMware associates at Gillette Stadium on Thursday,  January 19, 2012 for the New England VMUG Winter Warmer. VMware has revolutionized the way businesses and people solve IT challenges through the innovation of cloud infrastructures and management platforms.   Learn about the latest virtual technology. Hear from the leading industry experts. Get a deeper understanding with our hands on labs and take advantage of the opportunity to network with over 1100 people. Join us at the New England VMUG.

This document will provide an overview of Microsoft Transporter Suite which allows for the coexistence of IMAP Messaging environments and Microsoft Exchange 2007. I will focus on coexistence in this article and will separately discuss about migration in a different article. Some companies have requirements for a coexistence solution which will need to last for a couple of months to a year, or even longer. Although it is not recommended to have such a long coexistence period, this requirement typically exists because of the long durations it can take to develop, deploy and migrate existing Notes applications to a separate environment (typically Microsoft Sharepoint).

When planning a Lync deployment, we are finding some customers are running into issues in planning the CPU overhead of their systems. For many people, they are using the “Lync Server 2010 Capacity Calculator” to generate their anticipated system load.

As an administrator faced with the demanding task of an Active Directory migration, you need to know which machines are used by every client, which machines are used by multiple people and which employees log into them. This information can be very useful for support staff in general – but it really becomes a lifesaver when doing an AD migration or consolidation. You do not need a sophisticated third party auditing tool with an expensive support agreement. Just a one line capture script:

At Teched 2011 this year, Microsoft announced the broadened virtualization support of Exchange 2010.

vSphere 5 has been out for about a month now and we are all really excited about some of the new features.  The internal Rutter environment has been running View and vSphere 5 for about a month now with no issues (knock on wood!).