Author: Adam Fowler

Nokia Lumia 930 Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Thanks to Nokia Australia, I was given a new Nokia Lumia 930 to try out. It’s Nokia’s latest flagship Windows Phone running Windows Phone 8.1 straight out of the box, and it’s running on some pretty nice hardware. Here’s my thoughts on it: (also I have to give the phone back at the end of an 8 week trial, so I wonder if they’ll fall for the original phone box full of sand trick?)

For some history, I’ve used all of Nokia’s flagship WP8 devices being the Nokia Lumia 1520, 1020 and 920 (I think that’s all of them). So, how does the 930 compare to the previous models, and if you have one should you upgrade?

Screen

Skipping the Windows Phone 8.1 side of things (as I’ve talked about this previously), the 930 at first glance seems to be a pretty looking phone. The screen is 5″ 1080p which after trying the 4.5″ 1020 and the 6″ 1520, I think the 930 is the sweet spot for a smart phone display. It’s not so big that you have to wear pants with big pockets, and not so small that basic web browsing requires excessive amounts of pinching and zooming. The screen seems a bit glossier than others, I’ve noticed light reflections. It also has a bit of a curve near the borders which isn’t off putting when using the phone, but noticeable when the screen is off. The screen itself shows vibrant colours while seeming very clear to me.

One drawback of the 930 is that they’ve dropped Glance. This gave you simple information such as the time and your last email, even when the screen was in standby mode. It meant you could check to see if you had any messages without pressing anything, just a glance at the screen. According to WPCentral, this is because of the type of screen used on this particular model. I miss this feature, but really it just means I have to double tap the screen or press the screen unlock button to see what’s going on… not a deal breaker.

wp_ss_20140904_0001Screenshot of my 930 running WP8.1

Hardware

The Lumia 930 has 32GB of storage built in which should be enough for most people. It’s really snappy to respond, and going back to the 1020 I notice the difference. It’s powered by a Quad-core 2.2 GHz CPU with 2GB RAM.

Wireless charging is built into this model, which  the 1020 didn’t have (unless you bought a a cover that supported it). Not having wireless charging is something you miss once you’re used to it. If you haven’t used wireless charging before, just think about how many places you put your phone down – at work on your desk, next to your bed, in the car. If each of those places had a stand where you could just put your phone and it’s charging without any effort, you get used to that luxury. Taking away the stands and having to plug in a ‘right way’ USB connector into a tiny slot is tedious. First world problems I know, and I’m surprised myself how used to it I am. I had a brief encounter with a Samsung Galaxy S5 recently which reminded me of this.

One missing feature is a MicroSD slot, which has appeared on some Lumia phones while not on others. It would be nice if they just added it to all phones, but personally I don’t keep enough data on my mobile to need more than the inbuilt memory. Auto saving of photos to OneDrive means I can just get the photos from the cloud anyway (even though it logically pains me for my data to go via a long path around the world and back, just to move it 1 metre away).

Note that this phone takes Nano-SIM, while most other Lumias are Micro-SIM meaning you’ll need to swap SIM cards when you change over.

Camera

The Lumia 930 sports a 20mp camera, which is more than enough for a smartphone. Below I’ve zoomed in on a part of a bigger photo, and the zoomed in version looks of high quality. The original version is only 3mb in size.


wigglesCropped version

WP_20140831_15_43_01_ProOriginal Version

I’m not a camera enthusiast, and the Lumia 1020 was a bit of overkill for me. It’s good to have a point and shoot device that seems to take great photos, and doesn’t have the protruding lens that the 1020 is so well known for. The camera has a dual LED flash, which works great as a flashlight.

Nokia have built a bunch of apps to supplement the inbuilt WP8 experience, such as Lumia Storyteller which creates a video clip with music based on photos and videos you select, montage style and Lumia Cinemagraph which I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, allowing you to make wacky animated gifs based on a few seconds of video.

Cover

There’s only one official Nokia cover at the time of writing, which is the CP-637 Nokia Protective Cover. I tried one, and didn’t like it. It does what it should – protects, but it’s really bulky too. I don’t like having the flap over the front of the phone, and it won’t actually fit in the official CR-200 Nokia Wireless Charging Car Holder (link indicates there’s an updated version of it for the 1520, unsure if this makes a difference.. and why did the keep the same model number?) which lead me to order a cheap $6 cover off eBay – fits perfectly around the back of the phone and even came with a screen protector. I’d highly recommend a 3rd party one compared to the ~$40 official cover, unless you really want one in that style.

Other Bits

Colours – they’ve gone with the options of Bright orange, bright green, white and black. Mine’s black, but it’s good they’re giving options for the conservative approach as well as letting people use the phone as a safety device in case they get lost in the woods.

Charger – 1.5a output which is more than the standard 1a, maybe to decrease charging times?

OS Name – I’m a bit confused if I should be calling this a WP8 device, or a WP8.1 device. Still, anything that used to run WP8 can run WP8.1

Apps – WP8(.1?) still lacks apps, but less so – the gap is closing. Do you really care though? I don’t use that many apps, and there’s enough stuff in the Windows Store to keep me occupied. A free game that’s just come out is Tentacles: Enter the Mind which is an interesting platformy type game.

Should I Buy One?

If you’re on an older Windows Phone… maybe. If you want things to feel smoother and faster, or you’re running certain things that could do with more grunt, then sure. If you want a bigger screen but don’t want a giant 1520, yes, you’ll be happy. Otherwise, there’s no leaps and bounds in this phone vs the older Lumias. It’s better for sure, but maybe not worth paying hundreds of dollars for when you’ll still have a pretty good experience on the device you have.

If you’re on another device and looking for a change, the Lumia 930 is a reasonable time to jump. You’re probably going to miss all your apps, but are they mostly just timewasting apps anyway? You’ll find new ones. The hardware is solid, and the OS is creeping closer with features that I can’t think of anything glaringly omitted vs iOS and Android. Maybe you’ll like your old phone better though, or live in an Apple ecosystem where it’s going to be painful to have a non iOS mobile. I would be surprised if anyone would strongly dislike the WP8 experience, but the same can be said about iOS and Android. You’ll just need to decide for yourself!

Script to Change Multiple Out Of Office Messages

Posted on by Adam Fowler

This is probably an inefficient script, but I needed to create it as a once off to change the wording of any user with an Out Of Office message. It will go through every account, and change any instance of swearword and replace it with censored (no, this isn’t what I needed to use it for!).

This is using the Exchange Management Shell:

$data = get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited
foreach ($user in $data){
$currentreply = Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $user.alias
$newreply = $currentreply.internalmessage -replace “swearword”, “censored”
Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $user.Alias -InternalMessage $newreply -ExternalMessage $newreply
}

You can also use this to find any accounts with an Out Of Office message containing a certain word or phrase:

$data = get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited
foreach ($user in $data){
Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $user.alias | Where-Object {$_.internalmessage -like “*swearword1 swearword2*”}
}

Used on Exchange 2010, but should work on 2007 and 2013 also. You may notice the results of InternalMessage and ExternalMessage are hard to read, as by default they’ll show the HTML coding – you may need to factor this into any searches or replaces you perform.

Updating Active Directory from a CSV

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Scenario:

You’ve been asked to populate everyone’s Active Directory job title. The payroll system is correct, and they’re able to export you a list of usernames and correct job titles. All you need to do is get that into AD.

Solution:

You could do this manually of course, but that’s no fun and a waste of time. This is one of those scenarios where you’ll hopefully think ‘PowerShell can do this!’ and possibly wonder how. That’s what I did anyway, so set out to make it work.

Here’s a fake example of the data I was working with, in a file called fake.csv:

EMPLOYEENAME,JOBTITLE
AFOWLER,IT OPERATIONS MANAGER
RSOLE,JANITOR

Tip: If you open a csv file in Excel it is a bit easier to read.

From this data, we want to match the EMPLOYEENAME to the correct AD account, then update the Job Title field from the JOBTITLE entry of the csv file.

A script that will do this is:

Import-module ActiveDirectory
$data = import-csv -path c:\fake.csv
foreach ($user in $data){
Get-ADUser -Filter “SamAccountName -eq ‘$($user.employeename)'” | Set-ADUser -Replace @{title = “$($user.JobTitle)”}
}

So, what’s happening here? It can take a bit to get your head around especially if you’re not used to programming (like me), so I’ll try to explain it:

Import-module ActiveDirectory
Importing the ActiveDirectory module so the Get-ADUser command works. If you can’t load the module, install RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) which includes the AD module.

$data = import-csv -path c:\fake.csv
This is setting the $data variable to memory, which will contain all the contents of the fake.csv file.

foreach ($user in $data){
This is saying ‘for each line of information from the $data variable (which is the csv file), map that to $user and do the following”

Get-ADUser -Filter “SamAccountName -eq ‘$($user.employeename)'” | Set-ADUser -Replace @{title = “$($user.Job Title)”}
This is getting any AD User where their SamAccountName matches the employeename column of the $user variable (which is the current line of information from the csv at time of processing). Then with the pipe | it will use the result to then Set the AD User’s title field (where the job title goes) to the Job Title part of our $user variable. This command will run twice, because there are two lines for ‘foreach’ to process.

}
This is closing off the command which each ‘foreach’ command runs.

 

I hope that explains it enough so you’re able to manipulate the script to your own requirements.

 

KMS and MAK Licensing

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft licensing is one of the things that puts fear into most people who have dipped their toes into it. Understanding how to be compliant with Microsoft – and how to make sure the company’s money is being spent properly – can be daunting. From an admin’s side, this is often not a concern as it’s not a part of their job – but at least understanding the implications of installing 10 different SQL servers in the environment is a necessity. One of the more fundamental models Microsoft now uses with Windows Server, Windows Client (e.g. Windows 7) and Office is using a key to register the products. So, how do you do it if you’re on a Volume Licensing Agreement?

What are KMS and MAKs?

With a Volume License Agreement with Microsoft, you are normally given two types of keys: Multiple Activation Key (MAK) and Key Management Services (KMS). The MAK will normally have an activation count, while the KMS does not. Simply put, MAK is a key that registers direct back to Microsoft with a certain amount of allowed activations. KMS on the other hand, lets all your clients use a generic key to talk back to a KMS Server on premise, and that centralised server talks back to Microsoft. The MAK side of things is pretty straight forward: you put a different key in per client, it will phone home and then either activate or fail. This works, but isn’t the way you should do things in a large environment. KMS gives you that automation.

KMS sounds great, how do I set that up?

I’ve written about this before on How To Enable Office 2013 KMS Host and How to add your KMS keys for Windows 8 and Server 2012, so I’ll just clarify how the process works. There are two types of KMS keys – client and server. The client key is normally the default key installed when using a volume license version of software, and the keys are publicly available. Here’s a list on Technet of keys. The KMS server needs to be configured as per my “How to” articles. Having a KMS Client key registered on your client will make it go through a different process of phoning home and check DNS records. The KMS server on premise gets the request, approves and activates the client. Technet as per usual has great documentation covering all of this, available here.

I’ve set it up and it’s not working – help!

OK, don’t get too worried here. First, you need to have enough clients trying to register on your KMS server before it will activate any of them. For Windows Client operating systems, you’ll need 25. Yes, that’s a lot. For Windows Servers and Microsoft Office, you’ll only need 5.

For an example, let’s say you’ve installed Microsoft Visio 2013 and it’s not registered (if you’re unsure if it’s registered or not, in Visio go to File > Account. On the right hand side it will tell you if the product is activated or not). Start by checking that you have a correct KMS key entered – you can re-enter it in the product.

You can force the activation of Office 2013 by going to the folder where it’s installed (by default it’s C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15) and running the command:

cscript OSPP.VBS /act

This will either tell you that you’ve successfully activated your product, or give an error. One of the most common errors is:

ERROR CODE: 0xC004F038
ERROR DESCRIPTION: The Software Licensing Service reported that the product could not be activated. The count reported by your Key Management Service (KMS) is insufficient. Please contact your system administrator.

Nice description. So, next up you’ll need to check your count reported on the KMS server. Forgot what server your KMS server is? You might be able to find out by using the command:

slmgr /dlv

which will give you an informative window telling you the KMS machine name from DNS. Or you can check your DNS for the entry from the DNS console under DNS Server > Forward Lookup Zones > internal domain name > _tcp > _VLMCS record.

On your KMS server, you can display the client count so far, to see if it’s hit the magic 5 with this command:

cscript slmgr.vbs /dlv 2E28138A-847F-42BC-9752-61B03FFF33CD

The string on the end is the Office 2013 Activation ID. For Office 2010 it’s “bfe7a195-4f8f-4f0b-a622-cf13c7d16864”. You’ll see a lot of information, but the important part is this:

Key Management Service is enabled on this machine
Current count: 5
Listening on Port: 1688
DNS publishing enabled
KMS priority: Normal

In this example, I’ve just hit the 5 so clients will now activate. If it was less than 5, I’d still be getting the previous error on the clients I had.

If you generally want to see what licenses you have on the KMS server, you can run the ‘Volume Activation Management Tool’ which is available as part of the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). Install instructions from Technet are available here. This tool will visually show you what products you have licensed, but won’t go into great detail. It’s good to have just as an overview.

There are other scenarios and issues that can happen with KMS activation. On the KMS server, you can check the KMS event logs in Event Viewer under Applications and Service Logs > Key Management Service. On the client, there are a huge amount of switches you can use with the slmgr.vbs script – you can run it without any switches to see them all.

Samsung Gear 2 Neo Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

The Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Gear 2 (+Neo/Fit versions) released in Q2 this year, with high expectation. The Galaxy series of phones is one of the best selling in the world, and a product update to the Gear smartwatch had many consumers eagerly awaiting the release. The Samsung Galaxy S5 is a decent update to the Galaxy line (I’ll echo the phrase “evolution not revolution”), but the Gear 2 I believe still has a long way to go.

I’ve been playing with the combination of the Samsung Galaxy S5 mobile phone and Samsung Gear 2 Neo for the last few weeks. I really wanted to like these complementary devices, I had been waiting for weeks on their arrival. Disappointingly I’m not convinced about the usefulness of smart watches, and I’ll explain why.

First to clarify for those wondering – there are three versions of the Samsung Gear 2. The Neo version is similar to the vanilla Gear 2, but is missing the camera. I’d suggest to avoid confusion they call the Neo the Samsung Gear 2, and the Gear 2 the Gear 2 Cam… but I’m not in marketing so maybe that didn’t test well with focus groups. The third version is the Samsung Gear 2 Fit, which is a longer and skinner version, missing the camera and IR sensor.

Feature Samsung Gear 2 Samsung Gear 2 Neo Samsung Gear 2 Fit
Camera Yes No No
Screen 1.84-inch narrow 1.63-inch square 1.63-inch square
IR Sensor Yes Yes No

To start with, the Neo has a strange clipping mechanism on the strap. It just pushes in, and actually works quite well but took me a moment to work out due to requiring enough force to make me worried I was about to break something.

Once on my wrist, I found it to be very comfortable and sleek. It feels reasonably natural to wear, and the wrist strap doesn’t dig in. I was feeling good about this watch… until I turned it on.

There was a bit more of a process to get the watch up and running than I expected. On the Samsung Galaxy S5, I had to go into the Samsung Store (not the Google Play Store) to find the Gear Manager app. With all the pre-installed apps already from Samsung, it was a bit annoying to not find it already installed. I think this is because Samsung want to get you into their own App store to buy all the extra applications and watch faces, or I could just be a bit cynical.

Being a watch, I started by wanting to find the nicest watch face possible. The default was rather brightly coloured face, so I changed it to a much more sensible inbuilt time/date/applications display, with a very unexciting black background:

20140528_172105

 

I thought this looked rather smart. I played around with the apps for a bit, checked the weather and came to the realisation that battery life was still a big issue, which meant this smartwatch was a backwards step in telling time.

There’s the obvious annoyance of having to charge your watch every few days, rather than changing the batteries every few years (or never if you’ve got a fancy kinetic watch). Putting that aside, the usability of a smartwatch that’s trying really hard to preserve battery life is frustratingly annoying.

The watch display on the Gear 2 Neo is off by default. Completely black. When you make a motion with your arm to look at the time, it usually detects the movement and turns on the display for you. That’s great, but it takes half a second. If you have a normal watch, you’re used to a half second glance and you’re on your way. With this watch, you’re waiting that half a second that feels a lot longer for the display to light up. Sometimes it doesn’t even work, and you’ll have to press the button below the display with your other hand. You might as well have pulled your phone out of your pocket at this stage.

Your standard watch doesn’t have a pedometer. This smartwatch does, but you have to turn it on and off. It doesn’t just continually keep track. On the flip size, at night it will continually buzz or beep when anything happens on your phone such as a email or notification. This can be turned off by enabling sleep mode, but again this seemed to be a manual function. I had a brief look and couldn’t find a way to automate this (such as setting the times 10pm to 6am for sleep mode), which was another frustration.

To me, this is a watch that is the start of a good idea. Battery life needs to be improved vastly, and so does the flexibility around how you choose use the watch. I ended up concluding that this didn’t do as good of a job at being a watch as my analog watch, and until that’s fixed, the Samsung Gear 2 smart functions are icing on a stale cake.