The upgrade itself took place on the date that was communicated to me and when it was done I got a mail informing me that the upgrade had been completed. When I logged on to the Office 365 admin center (https://portal.microsoftonline.com/) I immediately found this to be a big improvement. It also showed me some alerts containing links to information about changes and tasks that still needed to be performed like upgrading SharePoint sites.

I didn’t expect any big issues, but I was a bit worried if my SharePoint customizations would keep working correctly:

• http://bjornhouben.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/office-365-sharepoint-online-add-search-to-your-public-site/
• http://bjornhouben.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/office-365-sharepoint-online-change-public-site-to-look-like-a-sharepoint-2010-site/
• http://bjornhouben.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/provide-anonymous-access-to-sharepoint-lists-on-office-365-sharepoint-online/

It is possible to leave the SharePoint site the way it is (at least with this upgrade), but you can also upgrade it and take advantage of the new options. If you are considering upgrading the SharePoint site, you can perform a health check and you can also request an upgrade evaluation copy of the site collection before you actually upgrade.

Probably because of my customizations, the Site Collection Health Check found some problems related to Customized Files that could result in unexpected visuals or behavior.

For now, everything seems to be working fine though on my upgrade evaluation copy of the site collection, so I’ll probably upgrade my site collection soon. If you want to, you can take a look at both the pre-upgrade SharePoint site and the post-upgrade SharePoint site. The evaluation post-upgrade version will only be available until the 23rd of June.

What I did notice, is that the interface of the services have improved and have also been changed to better suit for touch devices. By example the white space between navigation items seems to have increased and everything is a bit bigger.

After the upgrade, I also had to restart some Office 2013 apps once.

Of course the upgrade to Wave 15 provides many more advantages, but in this post I only wanted to share my service upgrade experience without really changing anything. All in all, I think the upgrade experience went very well.

The PowerShell Summit 2013 North America conference schedule can be found here. Thanks to Don Jones and PowerShell.org (most of) these sessions are available for download: http://powershell.org/wp/2013/04/22/summit-downloads/

Videos are available here:
http://powershell.org/wp/2013/05/07/powershell-summit-videos/

So even if you weren’t able to attend, you can still learn from their presentations. Or if you did attend, you can review them again.

These Jump Starts are a great way to quickly get up-to-date about a subject. Also there’s a great team of people working behind the scenes to answer questions and provide more detailed resources. Other attendees often also share their experiences and provide valuable insights. So be sure to check out the Q&A log as well.

These sessions have been recorded though and are available now at Channel 9 and a great overview of sessions can be found here. This means you can watch them wherever and whenever it is convenient for you.

You can also use this great PowerShell script created by Stefan Stranger to download the MMS 2013 videos.

Enjoy.

I’ve attended a couple of Jump Starts and I think it’s a great way to quickly get up-to-date about a subject. Also there’s a great team of people working behind the scenes to answer questions and provide more detailed resources. Other attendees often also share their experiences and provide valuable insights.

Also it’s only been a couple of weeks since Windows Azure IaaS is live in production backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and ready for your production applications. Therefore it is a great time to start learning more about it.

I hope to see you there.

I really liked the previous meeting, so I’m going to attend this time as well. I hope to see you there.

PS: The number of attendees is limited, so don’t wait too long.

Basically it’s a feature that allows you to run a hypervisor (like VMware, Hyper-V, Xen Server) and create another hypervisor as a VM beneath it. This is also called nested virtualization.

Some of you might say, “Hey this is not new, I’ve already done this with VMware!”. The difference however is that the current method uses some sort of emulation that does not directly access the hardware. And even though it’s great for testing purposes, the performance is suboptimal.

With the embedded hardware supported VMCS shadowing in the new Intel Haswell CPU the nested hypervisor can directly access the hardware, which should improve performance. Also, it might even make it possible to use non-VMware hypervisors in a nested virtualization scenario.

Of course as always, we’ll just have to wait and see how the performance will be in real-life. It’s also not clear to me yet if hypervisors need to be updated to be able to leverage this option. Nonetheless, to me it sounds very promising and I look forward to playing around with it.

For more information read this great article by Gabe Knuth called “Could VMCS Shadowing (a.k.a. nested VMs) from Intel’s new Haswell processors be what Bromium needs to work in VMs?”. When you use the links in the article you will be able to get more information about the Intel Haswell CPUs including benchmarks and more detailed information about VMCS shadowing and use cases.

If you’re planning to build / buy an Intel Haswell based computer or Home Lab, be sure to look into the confirmed USB3 bug in the chipset. Also unfortunately the DDR3 prices have increased substantially (almost 50%) over the last half year.

I did encounter an issue however that I was not able to open files on SharePoint using the desktop version of Office 2013. I kept on getting the message: “call us overprotective, but we need to verify your account before opening this document”. This never succeeded and I couldn’t modify my file using Office 2013. The Office Web App version was working fine though.

After googling around a bit, I found out that this was a common issue for people that are planned to be migrated (pre-upgrade). The solution/workaround for this issue is described here:
Office 365 pre-upgrade users cannot open or synchronize SharePoint files after the Office 2013: March 12, 2013 update is installed

These changes are in effect right now. In short this means that the E1 and K1 plans that previously were only able to read with the Web Apps have gotten the full Office Web Apps (view, edit, create). This replaces the old E2 and K2. So basically:

• Old E1/K1 have gotten E2/K2 functionality at the same low cost.
• Old E2/K2 customers will keep the same features, but at a lower cost (E1/K1).
• Old E2/K2 will be replaced by E1/K1 since they will then have the same functionality.

The new situation has become like this:

New Office 365 Enterprise Plans overview

PS: I love the Office 365 service and I’m looking forward to the new Office 365 features that will be added when Office 365 will start using the Office 2013 (Wave 15) versions of SharePoint, Outlook, Lync, Office Web Apps. I’ve gotten a mail that I’m planned to be upgraded within the next 4 weeks, so more about that soon. I’m especially curious if my SharePoint customizations will continue to work.

What’s also interesting is that Apple is losing tablet market share to Google and Microsoft compared to Q1 last year:

My view on this:

• Tablets are becoming increasingly more important.
• Pricing is very important to tablet buyers since the Google Android tablets have been selling that well.
• Apple needs to come up with something fresh if they want to maintain or even increase their market share.
• Windows tablet sales haven’t been as bad as some believed. Of course there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but I think that it will keep gainimg market share. Especially when prices will become more competive and when the number of good apps increaes.
• Windows 8 has been blamed for bad PC sales, but Apple Mac sales fell 7.5% as well. I believe it’s just that customers rather have tablets and smarphones instead of PCs. Also it might be possible that the PC market just has become saturated.