Date Published: August 2008.

Author: Claudio Vacalebre.

Soundtrack: For Test, Author: Claudio Vacalebre.

Here below a collection of technical bulletins related to HMC. I'll update this section regularly as soon as new bulletins are released.

In HMC provisioning system, all the data are stored in Active Directory and SQL Server database. Inconsistent data between AD and SQL Server database will cause our system problems. This article explains the data relationship and provides detail procedures about how to use CROSSDS procedures to solve the inconsistency problems.

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HMC 4.0 and previous solutions have shipped with two different and segmented user models, commonly known as the Business Model and Consumer Model. These models applied to the way how organizations and users were configured and granted permissions, how resources such as stores were allocated and the features available to users in each model. But the consumer model was a very limited model with respect to the feature set and the ability to up-sell users to better or more diverse services. Consumer users want richer experience, limited collaboration between friends and family, to take advantage of additional services such as Windows SharePoint Services, Office Communication Services. To give consumers or newly called “individual information workers” the same up-sell capabilities that Business users have today, IIW model was introduced in HMC 4.5.

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The monitoring and reporting platform in Hosted Messaging and Collaboration provides a new set of APIs for retrieving Exchange and SharePoint service availability state based on the product team’s definitions of health model. The new APIs provide multi-tenancy health state of services. This article introduces details about how to retrieve the health information of a tenant’s service in HMC.

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Hosted Exchange Services is now facing the challenge of managing larger and more complex Exchange resources (mail store, public store, mailbox, public folder, and front-end server) while tracking the kind of information available in Hosted Exchange Services. Managing Exchange resources means not only managing the data size and availability but also the enforcing the hosting policies with a very good understanding of how existing storage is used. This allows for sound strategic planning and prompt response to organization changes.

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The Windows SharePoint Services hosting component is a part of Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) solution. It provides basic functionalities of Windows SharePoint Services with additional support for multi-tenancy and resource management. This article mainly introduces the improvement of People Picker feature of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 and how it is configured in HMC for multi-tenancy support. Toward the end of this article, we will introduce a way of using this feature to recover HMC site collection information in Active Directory.

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To provision a user for Office Communications Server service, HMC 4.5 provides a procedure called Hosted Office Communications Server::CreateSipUser. The procedure sets AD properties for the target user, so that they can use OCS service. The properties set on the user are either provided by the caller or read from a user’s plan which is of type OCSUserHosting. However, we have to understand the dependencies between the properties. If a property violates these dependencies the request will not succeed. This bulletin is to guide you through what these dependencies are and why OCS needs them.

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Automated testing is a widely adopted practice in Microsoft. In HMC team, 70% test cases are automated. It saves much time for us to do regression tests and run test pass at regular intervals. Automated testing is not only about how to automate test cases, but also about automating the test process which includes test case management, test case execution, test results analysis, test report generation, and building a daily-run system. The HMC test team’s work covers all these areas. What’s more, we also develop some separate testing tools to improve our engineering process. There is no free lunch with no exception to automated testing – – it needs additional time to develop and maintain test code, let alone that not all the test cases can be automated. So we (test team) will get early involved in the project, and investigate what has to be automated, and review developers’ design spec to make sure that the design is testable. Afterwards, we will work out a test spec to finalize our test methodology in this project.

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