Using Liquid transformations in Logic Apps… for free!

25th of February, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Microsoft offers a few different solutions to perform message transformations in Logic Apps. One of them I described before in ‘Translating JSON messages with Logic Apps’. Liquid is considered as the new way forward to translate JSON and XML messages. XSLT still has strong support if you’re working with XML documents but if you’re working with the JSON message format Liquid is your friend.

Liquid is an open source template language created by Shopify.… [Keep reading] “Using Liquid transformations in Logic Apps… for free!”

Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation

22nd of January, 2019 / / No Comments

Recent consulting engagements have found me helping customers define what Office365 means to them & what value they see in its use. They are lucky to have licenses and are seeking help to understand how they drive value from the investment.

You’ve heard the sales pitches: Office365 – The platform to solve ALL your needs! From meetings, to document management, working with people outside your organisation, social networking, custom applications, business process automation, forms & workflow, analytics, security & compliance, device management…the list goes on and is only getting bigger!… [Keep reading] “Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation”

Skype for Business Standard Edition – Unable to failback once DR is invoked

17th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

During the process of “Invoke-CsPoolFailover” the process changes the “PoolState” of the primary server from Active to FailedOver state, if this is not addressed after the restoration of the primary server the failback will not work.

Figure 1: Primary Server FailedOver State

In order to failback the pool back to the primary server the “PoolState” will need to be set back to Active. This can be done by running the following command:

PS C:\Set-CsRegistrarConfiguration -Identity “Service:Registrar:primaryfe.testdomain.com.au”… [Keep reading] “Skype for Business Standard Edition – Unable to failback once DR is invoked”

DR Failover for Skype for Business Standard Edition

16th of January, 2019 / / No Comments

The article takes you through step by step of carrying out both health check and invoking disaster recovery (DR) a standard edition environment. The diagram below shows the layout of the environment where the DR was carried out on:

Figure 1 – Environment Overview

Before proceeding to test DR you need to make sure the appropriate registrar information is available/configured in the environment otherwise you will get the following error during Pool Failover process:

Please check that the pool <Prod_S4B> is healthy as conditions such as high CPU, low available memory
 or any disabled services can delay (or in some cases result in unsuccessful) fail over operations.… [Keep reading] “DR Failover for Skype for Business Standard Edition”

Why quantitative and qualitative research needs to run together?

19th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

As a UX designer, I am in love with metrics this whole idea that we can just use data for anything and A/B tests is the best way to a great product. I think it’s just one of the worst aspects of the rise of this worship of data. Lots of teams think that quantitative data can solve all of their product problems. 

Only 24% UX professionals are reported using quantitative AND qualitative data to determine success

NN Group “Quant Qual Research in Practice survey with 429 participants”

Quantitative data doesn’t replace designers or design or replace listening to the users and it doesn’t tell us what we should be building.… [Keep reading] “Why quantitative and qualitative research needs to run together?”

Using Invoke-WebRequest calls within a Granfeldt PowerShell MA for Microsoft Identity Manager

13th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

If you use PowerShell extensively you should be familiar with the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet and the ability for PowerShell to call API’s and receive information. The great thing about Invoke-RestMethod is the inbuilt conversion of the results to PowerShell Objects. However there are times when you need the raw response (probably because you are trying to bend things in directions they aren’t supposed to be; story of many of my integrations).

From within Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent script(s) that use Invoke-WebRequest calls, these will in turn leverage the Internet Explorer COM API on the local machine.… [Keep reading] “Using Invoke-WebRequest calls within a Granfeldt PowerShell MA for Microsoft Identity Manager”

Asynchronous Logic Apps with Azure API Management

12th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

One of the many great features of Logic Apps is its support for long running asynchronous workflows through the ‘202 async’ pattern. Although not standardised in any official specification as far as I know, the ‘202 async’ pattern is commonly used to interact with APIs in an asynchronous way through polling. In summary, this pattern informs an API consumer that an API call is accepted (HTTP status 202) accompanied by a callback URL where the API consumer can regularly check for an actual response payload.… [Keep reading] “Asynchronous Logic Apps with Azure API Management”

Transferring Individual Transformation Table between two Sonus Gateways

7th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

Quick Hack for Transferring Sonus Transformation Table between two Sonus gateways

Recently I been working on migration of users from an aging Cisco platform to Skype for Business 2015 on premise platform.

Customer has two Sonus 2000 Voice Gateways connected to Enterprise grade SIP trunks providing an Active-Active connection for inbound calls.

Both gateways are connected to CUCM via SIP using 5060 as below:

Note: To meet Disaster Recovery requirements for the Business they had their Datacentre 50km+ from each other.… [Keep reading] “Transferring Individual Transformation Table between two Sonus Gateways”

Windows 2016 fileserver cluster on Microsoft StorSimple – Part 4

5th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

Failover to cloud appliance in case of DR event

In a disaster recovery (DR) scenario, the primary device stops functioning. StorSimple uses the primary device as source and moves the associated cloud data to another target device. This process is referred to as the failover. The following graphic illustrates the process of failover.

The target device for a failover could be a physical device or even a cloud appliance. The target device may be located in the same or a different geographical location than the source device.… [Keep reading] “Windows 2016 fileserver cluster on Microsoft StorSimple – Part 4”

Windows 2016 fileserver cluster on Microsoft StorSimple – Part 3

5th of December, 2018 / / No Comments

Setting up a 2*node windows 2016 on-prem fileserver cluster and 1*Windows 2016 fileserver on Azure

In previous posts (part1 and part2) of this series I discussed about the overall solution and how to configure on-prem and cloud StorSimple storage systems. I also explained the steps to provision the storage to servers from StorSimple storage.

The focus of this post is to discuss about the requirements and steps to create an on-prem Scale-Out-Fileserver cluster and a standalone fileserver on Azure for DR capability.… [Keep reading] “Windows 2016 fileserver cluster on Microsoft StorSimple – Part 3”