$faxAddresses = Get-Mailbox "MailBox 1" | Select-Object -ExpandProperty EmailAddresses | Where-Object {$_.PrefixString -eq 'smtp' -AND $_.SmtpAddress -like '*fax*'}
Get-Mailbox "MailBox 1" | Update-List -Property EmailAddresses -Remove $faxaddresses | Set-Mailbox
Get-Mailbox "MailBox 2" | Update-List -Property EmailAddresses -Add $faxaddresses | Set-Mailbox

The script gets the SMTP email addresses on the mailbox called Mailbox 1 that have the word fax in them and stores them in the variable $faxAddresses. Then $faxAddresses are removed from Mailbox 1 and added to Mailbox 2.

Very quick and easy bit of PowerShell that can save quite a bit of time.

This post ended up being a bit wordier than I expected to feel free to jump straight to the summary if you wish.

Pre-course contact

Initially I contacted TCA through email to find out how long it would take to get the exam results after completing the course and I received a quick response which explained that I would receive the results via email within 1-3 weeks as it takes that long for the examining body to release the results. After this initial email I received two more emails about a week apart asking me to contact them to see if I had any more thoughts on taking the course or to help me proceed with a course booking. They answered my question well enough and for me two emails in a couple of weeks doesn’t qualify as spam and from their perspective I can see that it makes sense to follow up any queries.

I wanted to get on a course in the next week or two and whilst the TCA web site shows a list of dates and venues it appeared that only the London venue had places available so I decided to phone and see if there were still places available in Nottingham or Leicester. The call was answered quickly and I asked about whether courses ever got cancelled and I was told that it was pretty rare for a course to be cancelled and it would only occur for reasons such as if there is a problem with the venue. I then asked whether there were spaces available for Nottingham and Leicester but I was informed that they were fully booked and only London had spaces (someone else on the course had been told that the courses weren’t going to take place at those locations – which was interesting). As the Olympics were about to start and I wasn’t too sure about commuting to London I decided to do not book on the phone and just do one more look around to see if anyone else had the course available outside of London.

Booking the course

The only other ITIL Foundation course that seemed to be available in my time frame was in Leeds and it cost more than double the price of taking the course with TCA. As it was already Thursday and getting quite late in the afternoon I decided to book the course via the TCA web site. When it came to payment I was surprised to find that paying by credit card would result in a 2.99% charge which I didn’t see mentioned anywhere else on the web site but paying by debit card didn’t incur a charge so I completed the transaction with a debit card and received an email of payment confirmation almost immediately and within an hour I received an emailed confirmation of booking along with pre-course work, joining instructions and a map.

The ITIL Foundation Course

The London venue was in an excellent location right next to Aldgate East and within easy walking distance of Liverpool Street station so it didn’t take long to get there and the directions supplied were good. Once inside I could see that this was one of those managed office places shared by a number of tenants and the receptionist gave me an access code and told me that TCA were on the second floor. Once on the second floor I was able to entering the access code and someone was inside to direct me to the right room. Walking along the corridor I could see that there were a number of courses being run by TCA this week and my room was easy to find. Most of the attendees had arrived before me and so I settled for a seat at the front of the room by the window and soon after sitting down a slightly flustered looking instructor arrived who apologised for not being there sooner (train delays), he then proceeded to make sure that everyone knew where the refreshments and toilets were and that because of the transport problems he explained that he would be giving the other attendees a bit longer to arrive but that we would be starting soon. The refreshments consisted of tea, coffee and water (no biscuits!!!) and the toilets were down the corridor but you needed the access code to get back in.

The instructor introduced himself as Giles Boardman and we done the usual round of the room introducing ourselves and presenting our objectives for attending the course. There was a good mix of people from different backgrounds attending and perhaps as much as half of the class mentioned that they were attending the course to put on their CV (don’t you hate those keyword searches that agencies use!).

The first morning was very easy and went at a good pace and we broke for lunch after 1pm and Giles told us where the closest places were for lunch (head towards Aldgate East, turn left at the Maersk building and there is a Pret A Manger on Mansell Street). The afternoon left me feeling less comfortable than I had with the morning but the pace still seemed about right and Giles made a good job of trying to keep it interesting and the refreshment breaks were timed so as to keep everyone awake. People were free to ask questions during the day and this also helped break things up a bit. Giles was very good in highlighting areas of ITIL where we might find differences between the book and the “real world” which tied in very nicely with the ITIL principle of adapt and adopt which mentioned frequently during the course. The end of the first day came and I was relieved that there wasn’t any homework.

The second day was very similar to the first but with a small piece of homework to help us prepare for the next day and included an attempt at one of the sample test papers. I left doing the sample paper until quite late but was quite happy with a score of 32 out of 40 (pass is 26 out of 40) and when I reviewed the wrong answers it was mainly due to me not reading the question right (we had been warned about this) or because we hadn’t yet covered the topic. I made a note of the questions that I got wrong to make sure that they were covered the next day but it felt like the two days of the course had been worthwhile and that I would be ready for the exam when it time for it.

The third day was exam day and we finished off the rest of the course content in the morning leaving time for lunch during which we done the second sample test paper. Interestingly I managed to get 32 out of 40 again which was a bit disappointing but if it had been the real test then I would at least have got a pass. We then had some time to go through any of the questions that we hadn’t been sure about which was good and I had to kick myself when reviewing the answers because again I hadn’t read the question properly for a few of them.  I think it wasn’t long after 2pm when we ready to do the real exam which was delayed slightly because the exam pack hadn’t included exam registration forms which Giles resolved with a quick phone call and he explained what we had to do as we didn’t have the registration forms. The exam seemed easier than the sample papers and as it only took me 15 minutes which seemed too quick so I spent a bit longer checking that I had answered all the questions and that I had read them properly. As soon as I was ready I could just leave the classroom and head off home which made the last day a bit shorter than the previous ones.

The exam result

A week after the exam I received an email from the BCS requesting that I print, complete, sign and scan the attached registration form as it has a legal statement that needed to be read and acknowledged. Without a signed registration form the BCS would be unable to process the exam.

Five days after sending the signed registration form back to the BCS I received my exam result in an email. To view the result I had to register for access on the BCS web site for which I was supplied with my membership/reference number and a PIN. The registration process only took a minute and I was pleased to see that I had passed with 37 out of 40 correct answers.

Summary 

The Knowledge Academy were good with their communications, the venue was in a good location and although pretty basic everything you needed was there. The instructor was great and he done a good job of ensuring that you learnt everything required to pass the exam as well as explaining about ITIL in the real world. The other attendees all had different backgrounds and were good bunch willing to share their own experiences. There was plenty of opportunity to go through any areas that we weren’t sure of before taking the exam and I certainly felt ready to take the exam at the end of the course. I am sure that I would not have done so well in the exam if I had just read a couple of books and then taken the exam but I appreciate that others may do better with learning just from books.

Would I recommend The Knowledge Academy ITIL Foundation course?

Based on my experience I would have to say YES as I think it was superb value for money and I would certainly consider using them again in the future.

NOTE: I feel that as this review was so positive that it is worth pointing out that I am not affiliated with The Knowledge Academy in anyway.

Visio would display the following error when someone tried to check in a Visio file into a SharePoint 2010 Document Library:

Internal Error: #3400

Action 1787: Check in file

First try closing and reopening the file. Next try restarting Visio.

Cause:

One of the fields in the document library had been set to required and as no data had been put into that field the file wasn’t able to be checked-in.

Resolution:

In this case we were able to set the field to optional.

Part of the SharePoint extranet solution used ISA Server 2006 and my gut feeling was that somehow it was ISA 2006 that was causing the problem. I don’t have much experience with ISA 2006 and it is always easy to blame problems on the thing you know least about.

Fortunately I was investigating another SharePoint issue when I noticed that we didn’t have the output cache enabled in SharePoint. Turning on the output cache (Site Collection Administration, Output Cache Settings) and setting the Authenticated Cache Profile to Intranet (Collaboration Site) and now Extranet is performing as expected.

Looks like I will be spending a bit more time going through the SharePoint Cache documentation on Technet and its an important reminder that it easy to blame the thing you least know about when investigating an issue

We all had a great time and they done incredibly well especially as this was the first time they had played together as a team. Thank you to the organizer and all the other teams and helpers.

If you are know anyone looking for a Girls Football Team in the St Ives, Huntingdon/Cambridge area then please contact me (St Ives 464339) or pop along to one of our training session at the outdoor leisure centre in St Ives on a Tuesday evening 6pm-7pm.

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Microsoft-SharePoint Products-SharePoint Foundation
Event ID:      6398
Task Category: Timer
Level:         Critical
Description:
The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.SharePoint.Diagnostics.SPSqlBlockingReportDiagnosticProvider (ID e0c0213b-63fc-4ede-acc9-7a569ba95812) threw an exception. More information is included below.

You do not have permission to run ‘SP_TRACE_CREATE’.

and

Source:        Microsoft-SharePoint Products-SharePoint Foundation
Event ID:      6398
Task Category: Timer
Level:         Critical
Description:
The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.SharePoint.Diagnostics.SPSqlBlockingReportDiagnosticProvider (ID e0c0213b-63fc-4ede-acc9-7a569ba95812) threw an exception. More information is included below.
The blocking query diagnostics provider could not set the ‘blocked process threshold’ for the sql instance SPSQL01.  Blocking queries will not be captured in this instance.  Error Code: User does not have permission to perform this action.
You do not have permission to run the RECONFIGURE statement.
The configuration option ‘blocked process threshold’ does not exist, or it may be an advanced option.
You do not have permission to run the RECONFIGURE statement.

Solution

On the SQL server make sure the account specified in the username of the events has ALTER TRACE and ALTER SETTINGS enabled. You can do this through Management Studio by selecting the username and changing the securables.

The event details were:-

Source:        MsiInstaller
Event ID:      1001
Level:         Warning
Keywords:      Classic
User:          NETWORK SERVICE

Detection of product ‘{90140000-104C-0000-1000-1000000FF1CE}’, feature ‘PeopleILM’ failed during request for component ‘{1681AE41-ADA8-4B70-BC11-98A5A4EDD046}’

Source:        MsiInstaller
Event ID:      1015
Level:         Warning
Keywords:      Classic
User:          NETWORK SERVICE

Failed to connect to server. Error: 0×80070005

Resolution:

The resolution suggested by http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2473430 was to give the NETWORK SERVICE account access to the %programfiles%\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0 folder and sure enough that has done the trick.

The Problem

I have a document library with 16 documents in it.

3 documents have the reporting week set to Week 1
4 documents have the reporting week set to Week 2
5 documents have the reporting week set to Week 3
4 documents have the reporting week set to Week 4

As you can see below, the view is grouped by Reporting Week, sorted by Created and I have set the item limit to a low number just to recreate the problem without having to create 100s of documents.

Page 1.

The first page looks perfectly normal and the group total for Week 2 is correct so when I click the arrow to goto the next page I would expect to see the other 2 documents for Week 2 but instead I see…

Page 2.

Where have the rest of Week 2 gone? All I can see if the 5 documents for Week 3 – perhaps they are on the next page?

Page 3.

Nope. No Week 2 documents are on Page 3. I know I will click the arrow to go back to the previous page…

Page 2 again

Oh! Now one of the missing Week 2 documents has appeared – but I’m still missing one.

Anyway you get the idea – it’s in a right mucking fuddle with groups totals correct but documents missing and no wonder the poor users of this site are confused.

The Fix

The fix!

Uncheck the checkbox for “Sort only by specified criteria” and the views work correctly with all documents visible and no there aren’t any folders are permission inheritance issues.

Image 1

After creating an empty SharePoint 2010 solution in Visual Studio 2010 I added an Application Page to the project but compiling failed and gave me the following error:

The type or namespace name ‘LayoutsPageBase’ does not exist in the namespace ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls’ (are you missing an assembly reference?)

Image 2

Using the object browser in Visual Studio I could see that the namespace Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls didn’t contain LayoutsPageBase (Image 1) but when I viewed the same Microsoft.SharePoint.dll outside of Visual Studio (in Red Gate Reflector) I could see (Image 2).

The reason for this was quite simple when I created the SharePoint Project I had chosen to deploy it as a Sandbox Solution and application pages are not supported in sandboxed solutions. Selecting the project properties and changing the Sandboxed Solution property to False and it compiled successfully.

Fortunately you can do the same thing with some simple powershell:-

Add-Type -Path "c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\14\isapi\microsoft.office.server.dll"
$mySiteUrl = "http://yourmysitegoeshere"
$site = Get-SPSite $mySiteUrl
$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$upConfigManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileConfigManager($context)
$profilePropertyManager = $upConfigManager.get_ProfilePropertyManager()
$upConfigManager.GetProperties().SetDisplayOrderByPropertyName("NameOfProperty", OrderNumber)

The powershell method is a much easier way to re-order things I’m sure you will agree