Branding the Consultant: what can I do versus where can I add the most value?

19th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Engaging new and potentially challenging clients can always be daunting, particularly when an expectation has been set as to what role you will play as a part of a team. Whether consulting and road-mapping potential outcomes and future work, to delivering a full project. In my time working with Kloud, the broader sense of the term ‘consultant’ appears to be at an all-time high in terms of what it means to the professional marketplace. I view today’s Business Consultant as someone who guides an individual stakeholder or group, based on engaging and understanding given circumstances or a proposed business case, to help make decisions on adopting a specific direction – one which is considered the most appropriate or in their best interest.… [Keep reading] “Branding the Consultant: what can I do versus where can I add the most value?”

Sharepoint 2013 Cumulative Updates Patching Overview

18th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to help a client to patch their Sharepoint on-premise 2013, which was last patched up to 2014. It was a challenging but interesting experience. We decided to use the Nth-1 patch, which was March 2018 at that time. It was a 5-weeks engagements, where we had to break down the steps and processes from back-up preparations, roll back strategies, on-patching strategies to post-patching testings. Lots of inputs and discussions among DBAs, system engineers, IT manager and Sharepoint engineers.… [Keep reading] “Sharepoint 2013 Cumulative Updates Patching Overview”

Why is the Azure Load Balancer NOT working?

12th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Context

For most workloads that I’ve deployed in Azure that have required load balancing, for the Azure Load Balancer (ALB) used in those architectures, the out of the box experience or the default configuration was used. The load balancer service is great like that, whereby for the majority of scenarios it just works out of the box. I’m sure this isn’t an Azure only experience either. The other public cloud providers have a great out of the box load balancing service that would work with just about any service without in depth configuration.… [Keep reading] “Why is the Azure Load Balancer NOT working?”

IaaS – Application Migration Management Tracker

11th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

What is IaaS Application Migration

Application migration is the process of moving an application program or set of applications from one environment to another. This includes migration from an on-premises enterprise server to a cloud provider’s environment or from one cloud environment to another. In this example, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) application migration.

Application Migration Management Tracker

Having a visual IaaS application migration tracker, helps to clearly identify all dependencies and blockers to manage your end to end migration tracking.… [Keep reading] “IaaS – Application Migration Management Tracker”

Replace Personal Privilege Account into Shareable Broker Accounts

11th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction
Most of the organizations still have the practice of Personal Privilege Accounts in their corporate platforms and application. It’s very challenging when comes to managing and monitoring those accounts which gives non-restrictive access to the most valuable systems in the Organizations. Effective procedures around managing these privileged accounts are extremely difficult without specialized tools.
CyberArk Privileged Account Management solution enable these organizations to secure, provision, manage, control and monitor all activities associated with privileged accounts present in their IT landscape.… [Keep reading] “Replace Personal Privilege Account into Shareable Broker Accounts”

SharePoint site template error : IsProduction field is not valid or does not exists

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

In this post I will be talking about exception “IsProduction field not accessible or does not exist”. In our case we had saved an existing site as site template in solution gallery and created a new site collection from saved site template but it was breaking with the below exception message.

Error message:

“The field specified with the name IsProduction is not accessible or does not exist”.



Background

The idea of using Site templates feature in SharePoint OnPrem helps with saving site as template and reusing the site template to pre provision the standard site elements in new site collection such as list, libraries, views, workflows, logos, branding and other elements for different department.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint site template error : IsProduction field is not valid or does not exists”

Web Application ADFS integration error: Invalid Cryptographic Algorithm

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

In this post I will be talking about invalid cryptographic algorithm exception in web application. We have a multi-tenant single sign on asp.net application which connected with different identity provider to enable single sign on experience.

Background

Single sign-on multi-application scenario has been a soughed feature lately to make the user experience seamless across applications. In this case web application (service provider) was integrating with the ADFS 2.0 client hosted on Windows server 2012 R2 to implement single sign on experience for the end user on their network.… [Keep reading] “Web Application ADFS integration error: Invalid Cryptographic Algorithm”

Bots: An Understanding of Time

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Some modern applications must understand time, because the messages they receive contain time sensitive information. Consider a modern Service Desk solution, that may have to retrieve tickets based on a date range (the span between dates) or a duration of time.
In this blog post, I’ll explain how bots can interpret date ranges and durations, so they can respond to natural language queries provided by users, either via keyboard or microphone.
First, let’s consider  the building blocks of a bot, as depicted in the following view:

The client runs an application that sends messages to a messaging endpoint in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Bots: An Understanding of Time”

Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1

5th of July, 2018 / / 1 Comment

What if you wanted to leverage Azure automation to analyse database entries and send some statistics or even reports on a daily or weekly basis?
Well why would you want to do that?

  • On demand compute:
    • You may not have access to a physical server. Or your computer isn’t powerful enough to handle huge data processing. Or you would definitely do not want to wait in the office for the task to complete before leaving on a Friday evening.
… [Keep reading] “Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1”

PowerShell gotcha when connecting ASM Classic VNETs to ARM ExpressRoute

5th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Recently I was working on an Azure ExpressRoute configuration change that required an uplift from a 1GB circuit to a 10Gb circuit. Now thats nothing interesting, but, of note was using some PowerShell to execute a cmdlet.
A bit of a back story to set the scene here; and I promise it will be brief.
You can no longer provision Azure ExpressRoute circuits in the Classic or ASM deployment model. All ExpressRoute circuits that are provisioned now are indeed Azure Resource Manager (ASM) deployments.… [Keep reading] “PowerShell gotcha when connecting ASM Classic VNETs to ARM ExpressRoute”