WW Readiness for Enterprise Alliance Partners

Get Your Head around Office 365

Rajesh Makhija — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 08:22:00 GMT

Have you found it a bit challenging to get your head around the length, breadth and depth of Office 365. Here is tool that you can use as an anchor to navigate around various options, services, plans and features

Office 365 Service Comparison to filter and compare the features of Office 365 plans, Office 365 services, and on-premises products. As a side note, you get to see the power of Excel Online as well where you get to work with the full size workbook from within the browser to filter and check out features available.

Office 365 Services Descriptors The topics in this library provide detailed descriptions of the services and features that are available with Office 365.

Capability Development Guide

Rajesh Makhija — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 21:11:29 GMT

Are you in the process of building capability of your teams across roles including TDM/BDMs, Sales, Pre-Sales, Architects, Developers, IT Professionals and are looking for learning material. for Microsoft Azure, Enterprise Social, Data Center, Office 365.

Check out the Capability Guides here https://1drv.ms/1mFeba2

Setting up a Microsoft Center of Excellence

Rajesh Makhija — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 21:05:01 GMT

Are you planning to setup a Microsoft Technology based Center of Excellence within your organization and/or Business Unit?

Check out the inputs here to give you a jump start https://1drv.ms/TrbsFs

Archived Sessions on MS Events

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 10:34:00 GMT

Here are few select archived sessions on MS Events

Archived Sessions

Datacenter
Datacenter Practice Guidance Accelerator for BDM/TDM	View Recording
Datacenter Infrastructure and Management Fabric for Architects	View Recording
Datacenter Infrastructure and Management Fabric Management for Architects	View Recording
Datacenter Infrastructure and Management IAAS PLA for Architects	View Recording
Datacenter Modernization for Architects	View Recording
IT Services Management and monitoring the Service Level goals in the cloud with System Center 2012. - Session 2	View Recording
Achieving Automation and Self Service in the cloud enabled Datacenter - Session 2	View Recording
Automation and Service Delivery in the Hybrid Cloud with Windows PowerShell and System Center Orchestrator - Session 1	View Recording
Windows Azure Iaas-Basics with Managing Storage and Disks and Virtual Network Basics, Vnets and Cross-Premises Connectivity	View Recording
Migrating Virtual Machines to Windows Azure and Implementing High Availability and Load Balancing	View Recording


Windows 8 Admin Series
Windows 8 Usage Support Scenarios	View Recording
Windows 8 Devices & Advanced Options	View Recording
Windows 8 Maintenance & Troubleshooting	View Recording
Windows 8 Deployment	View Recording
Azure IaaS
Microsoft Cloud Strategy and components of the Cloud OS Story	View Recording
Key Considerations for Migrating and Managing Workloads with Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks (IaaS)	View Recording
Data Management Services in Windows Azure	View Recording
Building SharePoint Applications on Azure IAAS	View Recording
Building Your Dev and Test Environments with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services	View Recording
Microsoft Cloud Strategy and components of the Cloud OS Story	View Recording
Dynamics CRM
Troubleshooting Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Defining Processes In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Security and Administration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Reporting and BI In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Introduction to Dynamics CRM	View Recording
Sales Management in Dynamics CRM	View Recording
Marketing Automation in Microsoft Dynamics CRM	View Recording
Introducing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Business Process Flows In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Customize Navigation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Building HTML Web Resources In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Using Plugins In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013	View Recording
Enterprise Social
Building Enterprise Social Solutions using Yammer, SharePoint and CRM	View Recording
System Center 2012 Series
Configure and Deploy the Private Cloud Infrastructure with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1	View Recording
Lab 1: Configuration	View Recording
Creating Private Cloud Building Blocks and configuring Application Delivery with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1	View Recording
vLab: Infrastructure	View Recording
vLab: Private Cloud	View Recording
Monitoring the Private Cloud with Operations Manager 2012 Sp1	View Recording
vlab: System Center 2012 SP1- Installation and Deployment	View Recording
Windows Azure Series
Building Media Solutions and Mobile Solutions with Media Services and Mobile Services in Windows Azure	View Recording
Microsoft Enterprise Integration Stack : Patterns of Cloud Integration	View Recording
Automated deployments, Scaling, Monitoring for Cloud Services	View Recording
Building solutions with SharePoint and Azure	View Recording
Cloud OS: Windows Azure IaaS, Virtual Networks and Azure Server pack	View Recording
Win 8.1 App Dev Series
Win 8.1 App Dev Series : What's New in Win8.1 for Developers	View Recording
Win 8.1 App Dev Series : Contracts & Search	View Recording
Introduction to the Modern UX	View Recording
Dynamics CRM Series
Integrate CRM 2011 with MS Office family of products & legacy product	View Recording
CRM 2011 Business Intelligence	View Recording
BI Series
Building a Reporting Services Solution using SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services	View Recording
Designing & Building MS Self-service BI solution	View Recording
Using DAX with SQL Server 2012 Tabular Data Models	View Recording
Best Practices and Performance Tuning & Optimization for SQL Server 2012 Databases	View Recording
What’s New In SQL Server 2014	View Recording

Building Blocks of Great Cloud Applications

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:25:43 GMT

Following the blog on Designing Great Cloud Applications, the Azure CAT team is planning to give more detail and technical explanation to the components found in the code project Cloud Service Fundamentals in Windows Azure posted on MSDN Code Gallery. This starts the series of blogs and tech articles to describe the use of these fundamental build blocks which we’ll refer to as components.
Over the course of the next several months, we will be publishing a series of blogs every other Thursday with detailed technical notes that walk through the individual components of Cloud Service Fundamentals.

Our technical series will detail the components in the code project, including:

Telemetry
Data Access Layer
Caching
Configuration
Application Request Routing
Deployment

Choosing between SQL Server in Windows Azure VM & Windows Azure SQL Database

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:24:21 GMT

Windows Azure gives you a choice in where to host your SQL data, with both SQL Server running in a VM (henceforth referred to as SQL/VM), and Windows Azure SQL database
(henceforth referred to as SQL DB). SQL/VM and SQL DB come from a single code base, and each offering has its own strengths when it comes to cloud deployment. In this article we will build upon the earlier blog post on SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machine vs. SQL Database and provide a simple decision tree to help choose the best SQL database solution in Windows Azure for your application/service.

This post is focused on SQL Engine rather than BI and reporting. Future posts will looking into BI/Reporting choices in more detail

Why choose Azure for SQL?

Choosing the right database solution

Decision tree - In this decision tree, the following key application/service specific decision points are examined:

New or existing application/service
Application/Service requirements
Database size Willingness to (Re)architect/partition for economies of scale

SQL Server Backup and Restore to Cloud Simplified

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:16:01 GMT

SQL Server 2012 SP1 Cumulative Update 2 includes enhancements to SQL Server native backup that simplifies backup and restore of a SQL Server Database to Window Azure storage. The SQL
Server database can be either on an on-premises instance of SQL Server or on an instance of SQL Server running in a hosted environment such as Windows Azure Virtual Machine. Read the information below to get a brief introduction to the new functionality and follow the links for more in-depth information.

Benefits:

Flexible, reliable, and limitless off-site storage for improved disaster recovery

Backup Archive

No overhead of hardware management:

Currently for instances of SQL Server running in a Windows Azure Virtual Machine, backing up to Windows Azure Blob storage services can be done by creating attached disks.

In addition, the backup file which now is stored in the Windows Azure Blob storage service is directly available to either an on-premises SQL Server or another SQL Server running in a Windows
Azure Virtual Machine, without the need for database attach/detach or downloading and attaching the VHD.

Cost Benefits

How to use it

To write a backup to Windows Azure Blob storage you must first create a Windows Azure Storage account, create a SQL Server Credential to store storage account authentication information. By using Transact-SQL or SMO you can issue backup and restore commands.

The following Transact-SQL examples illustrate creating a credential, doing a full database backup and restoring the database from the full database backup. For a complete walkthrough of creating a storage account and performing a simple restore.

Migrating a Java Spring Framework Application to Windows Azure

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:10:41 GMT

We have just published a new tutorial and sample code to illustrate many of the Windows Azure Java-related technologies in action. In this guide, we provide a step-by-step tutorial that shows how to migrate a Java Spring Framework application (the PetClinic sample application) to the Windows Azure Cloud. The code that accompanies this document is also published on GitHub. We encourage Java developers to download and explore this new sample and tutorial.

Windows Azure Cloud Services (PaaS) or Windows Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS)?

Fundamentally, there are two different ways to run an application layer, such as a Web site, on Windows Azure. The first is via Platform as a Service (PaaS) via Azure Cloud Services. The second is via Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) via Windows Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).

Spring Framework on the Windows Azure Platform

Spring Framework’s recently updated PetClinic sample was chosen for this new guide because it is a familiar vehicle for demonstrating several enterprise technologies that are used to create scalable Java EE applications such as Spring Data JPA, MVC, AOP, JMX, EhCache, and Logback. We will be extending PetClinic by injecting transient fault handling and Memcached on Azure Cache via AOP.

Securing your Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) with HTTPS and SSL

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:08:12 GMT

With the rapid increase in identity theft and various forms of cybercrime, security your website with Secure Socket Layer, or SSL for short has become more important and more common. If you are hosting your web site on Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), you might be looking into setting it to use HTTPS, and in this guide, we will see how to do so.

The first step for this seems to be getting a digital certificate…right? Well, not necessarily. The first step is actually deciding whether you want to have your own custom domain, or to run your site using Azure’s default domain of Azurewebsites.net. The reason for this being the 1^st step is that Windows Azure Web Sites actually comes pre-configured to run on SSL, and if you don’t want your own domain, then you can use SSL immediately. All you have to do is simply browse to it! In your browser, change the prefix from https:// to HTTPS:// and voila! Your site will respond and you will have a secure connection to it.
However, we do not recommend using this to secure sensitive content or applications, because the wildcard certificate used is generic for all Azure Web Sites.

Windows Azure Websites Development Stacks Support

Rajesh Makhija — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:05:39 GMT

The Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) team passionately invests in a support model for development stacks that allows your web apps to start running quickly and gives your web apps room to grow. This blog article captures a few basic principles we use for versioning and extensibility of development stacks and how these principles apply to your web apps.

We currently support .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Python stacks. The Windows Azure development center at https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop provides a great knowledge base for each of these. Once you create a website you can just upload your content and we will get it running with minimal information input from you.

A summary of versions available with WAWS for each supported development stack and the respective version defaults is available at this link: https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Azure-Web-Sites-Development-Stacks.

Development Stacks Extensibility

We support extensibility points provided by each development stack in case you may need to customize.