Morning Routine Habits of Highly Successful People

I recently had a short conversation with one of my friends on a very important subject. The subject of “How to start your day to have a productive one?”

Personally how you start your day is extremely important, in my perspective this sets the tone for the rest of the day and can determine how efficient you can be and possibly how successful you are. In my humble opinion if you wish to be high achiever start thinking about adopting specific morning habits.

While it might not work for everybody, its important that you set your own habits. So here are some of the habits high achievers and successful people have in common:

• The Early rise: Iam a fan of waking up early. Having an early start and ahead of your day and before distractions set in can lead to higher productivity and time for personal growth activities.

• Planning a night before: One of my favorite routines is to plan my tomorrow the night before. Sitting down and mapping out a list of things you need to get done the next day is highly important (you might miss some of course 🙂 we all do) This way, when you wake up you know whats on the menu to do and can help you hit the ground running. Not only does this saves you time, but it also reduces stress because you don’t have to worry about forgetting anything important. You can plan your work schedule, when you will exercise, when you eat, when to call a customer, anything written down in your plan is an opportunity to achieving and finishing a task. That means scratching that of your list will give you more motivation to continue with minimal stress.

PS: Effectively and wisely use your calendar.

• Positivity: Wake up with a positive mindset. Not Easy I know but on a serious note try to think of the day as if it is the most important day of your life, your most proud day and it will be like that (with different flavors ofcourse). Be kind to yourself.

• Visualization: when you visualize your goals and success you help yourself stay focused on what’s important and gets you motivated throughout the day. simply while having your morning coffee and reading through your planned agenda of the day, imagine yourself actually doing the task, run a scenario in your head about the task, how would it start and how you are going to execute till finish line. This way your plan now has a script, you just need to press the play button when that calendar reminder item pops up on your laptop or mobile.

• Lastly in my humble opinion I believe having an extra curricular activity can really help you unplug and plug again to your daily motion. That can be meditation which is an awesome habit for some maybe not me. Exercising and playing sports works magically to many of the successful and highly effective achievers. Exercise is also a great way to start your day because it gets your blood flowing and gets you out of any potential morning grogginess. The key point here is to find a form of exercise you like.

My “How to Lead Effective Virtual Meetings” tips

BEFORE the Meeting:
Step 1: Decide on a Need and Objective
Step 2: Determine the Attendees and Draft an Agenda
Step 3: Define the Logistics and Schedule the Meeting

DURING Your Meeting:
Step 1: Welcome and Logistics Check
Step 2: Go through the Agenda
Step 3: Capture Effective Meeting Minutes
Step 4: Close with a Review

AFTER Your Meeting:
Step 1: Distribute Meeting Minutes
Step 2: Follow up on Actions

So to put this into perspective for everyone, here are my tips for every phase.

BEFORE the Meeting:
Tip #1 is to decide on the needs. This sounds straightforward but the first question you should ask yourself before setting up a meeting is do we really need to have this meeting? and think very very hard about that question and about whether you can write an email, set up a quick call or use some other channel instead of setting up a full official meeting.

Tip #2 is to define the objective, so every single meeting should have an objective associated with it. And the objective should be determined before you set up the meeting and not during.

Tip #3 is to assign a leader and every single meeting should have a designated leader who moderates the meeting and that leader is responsible facilitating the communication between all attendees.

Tip #4 is to manage your virtual logistics to ensure that everyone has access to the virtual collaboration tool that you’re going to use. In addition choose a time zone friendly time/date.

Tip #5 is to send the invites agenda and the reminders so send out the agenda ahead of time and include it in the calendar. It is always a best practice to include the agenda with the invite so that individuals have time to prepare.

DURING the Meeting:
Tip #1 Join Early: It’s always a good practice to join your virtual meeting a few minutes early allowing you to check that the tools are working correctly and gives you some time to make some adjustments if needed.

Tip #2 Go through a welcome note to catch everybody’s attention and welcome the joiners by their names if you can. You may wait for few moments for late comers which can be very important key people and keep the wait time as short as possible.

Tip #3 If you are to record the call ALWAYS ask for the attendees permission. This is a very sensitive point and its the right of the attendees to approve the recording.

Tip #3 Start with the objective, state the outcome. This makes sure that everyone’s on the same page as you kick start the meeting – then walk through the agenda and what you expect them to talk about or discuss

Tip #4 Remain on topic and and respect everyone’s time.

Tip #5 if anyone joins really late avoid repeating any information and carry on with your meeting.

Tip #6 Always type up a notes of any decisions or ideas that have been discussed in the meeting so that your team can have a quick reference to go back to.

Tip #7 Have a short review at the end

AFTER the Meeting:
Tip #1 Send the meeting minutes, distribute the meeting minutes to everyone who attended the meeting as well as anyone who missed it and any others who need to be informed such as other stakeholders.

Tip #2 Ask for updates. Follow up with your team on all the next steps including action items risks and issues that you listed and the meeting minutes and you sent after your meeting.

Tip #3 Document the latest status and track the status of all your action items drifts and issues that are assigned to your team.

Outlook client error – Your automatic reply settings cannot be displayed because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later.

Good Day Folks.

Today I am sharing with you a new problem we are facing with some of our outlook clients. some users are reporting the below message when trying to set Out of Office and look for mail tips.

Your automatic reply settings cannot be displayed because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later.

If I log into OWA Outlook Web Access, (Options > Set Automatic Replies) I could set it up and it worked fine.

The approach you can take is to check the first 2 requirements for EWS.

1. You are logged in, or authenticated against your domain.

2. If you are accessing web pages via a proxy server, the name of the Exchange server should be added to the Proxy Exceptions list.

Assuming you have met the two requirements above, the nest step is to test the connectivity to the right URL.

1. Open Outlook > In the task bar (in the system tray) > Hold down CTRL and Right Click the Outlook Icon > Select Test E-mail AutoConfiguration.

2. Enter your details > Use AutoDiscover > Test.

Note: Here I got the following error message;

Autoconfiguration was unable to determine your settings

This was because the client I was on, could not resolve autodiscover.my-domain-name.com.lb once that was rectified I could get further.

3. In the first section Locate the URL that is being used for OOF, and make a note of it.

4. Open your web browser and make sure you can open that URL. (Note: It will redirect to Services.wsdl that is normal).

Note: If you are asked for logon credentials, you are NOT authenticated against the domain.

5. At this point mine started working. My problem was the lack of DNS resolution, if you find another fix drop me a line and Ill update this article (link at the bottom of the page).

and the problem is resolved.

Regards,

Hisham Mezher

How to Backup your Domain Controller by Using Windows Server Backup

Good Day,

Today i shall share with you a very useful procedure to take a full backup of your domain controller, this is a very important risk item that you should always consider.

A full server backup captures all volumes on all locally attached volumes. Only membership in Builtin Administrators or Backup Operators, or equivalent can perform this task.

Follow the below to perform a full server backup of all volumes by using the server backup interface:

• Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Windows Server Backup.
• If you are prompted, in the User Account Control dialog box, provide Backup Operator credentials, and then click OK.
• On the Action menu, click Backup once.
• In the Backup Once Wizard, on the Backup options page, click Different options, as shown in the following figure, and then click Next.

• If you are creating the first backup of the domain controller, click Next to select Different options.
• On the Select backup configuration page, click Full server, as shown in the following figure, and then click Next.

 

 

• On the Specify destination type page, click Local drives or Remote shared folder, and then click Next.

• Choose the backup location as follows:
  • If you are backing up to a shared drive, on the Select backup location page, in Backup destination, put the shared path for backups, and then click Next

• Under Access Control, select Do not inherit or Inherit to determine access to the backup, and then click Next.
• In the Provide user credentials for Backup dialog box, provide the user name and password for a user who has write access to the shared folder, and then click OK.
• On the Specify advanced option page, select VSS copy backup (recommended) and then click Next.
• On the Confirmation page, review your selections, and then click Backup.
• After the Backup Once Wizard begins the backup, click Close at any time. The backup runs in the background and you can view backup progress at any time during the backup. The wizard closes automatically when the backup is complete.

 

Regards;

Hisham Mezher

 

How to collect Exchange performance counters using Experfwiz

Good Day,

Back in my earlier post I shared with you how to use the PAL tool to collect and analyze server performance data.

Today I am sharing with you another very interesting subject, collecting and analyzing exchange server performance using the tool ExPerfWiz

ExPerfWiz is a PowerShell based script to help automate the collection of performance data on Exchange servers.

IMPORTANT!! The default duration is 8 hours to save on disk space meaning that the data collection will stop after 8 hours. If you should need a longer duration, please review the switches below for the best possible configuration that meets your needs.
The below table outlines what parameters ExPerfWiz can accept.

Parameter	Description
-help or -?	Provides help regarding the overall usage of the script
-begin	Specifies when you would like the ExPerfWiz data capture to begin.  The format must be specified as: “01/00/0000 00:00:00”
-circular	Turns on circular logging to save on disk space. Negates default duration of 8 hours
-ConvertToCsv	Converts existing BLG files to CSV. Must include –filepath (to BLG files). This can be run from any machine with PowerShell.
-CsvFilepath	Path where converted CSV files should be stored
-delete	Deletes the currently running ExPerfWiz data collection
-duration	Specifies the overall duration of the data collection. If omitted, the default value is (08:00:00) or 8 hours
-end	Specifies when you would like the ExPerfWiz data capture to end.  The format must be specified as: “01/00/0000 00:00:00”
-EseExtendedOn	Enables Extended ESE performance counters. Currently not supported with Exchange 2013.
-EseExtendedOff	Disables Extended ESE performance counters. Currently not supported with Exchange 2013.
-ExMon	Adds ExMon tracing to specified server.  Exchange 2013 support added in 1.4.2.
-ExMonDuration	Sets ExMon trace duration.  If not specified, 30 minutes is the default duration.  Exchange 2013 support added in 1.4.2.
-ExmonOnly	Only collect ExMon capture – do NOT collect Performance data. Version 1.4.5+
-filepath	Sets the directory location of where the BLG file will be stored. Default Location is C:\Perflogs.
-full	This switch has been deprecated in version 1.3.8.  You can still run the script with this switch, however ExPerfWiz will ignore it as all collections are considered ‘full’ now.
-interval	Specifies the interval time between data samples. If omitted, the default value is 30 seconds. NOTE: Exchange 2013 and Server 2012 introduced a large number of counters that were not available in previous version of Exchange/Windows.  Because of this, using a value of less than 5 will result in very large files, very quick.  Please be sure the storage location has enough space.
-maxsize	Specifies the maximum size of BLG file in MB. If omitted, the default value is 512. NOTE: Starting with v1.4, Exchange 2013 defaults to 1024MB
-nofull	Run ExPerfWiz in role-based mode.  This will collect counters based on the roles installed.  Currently not supported with Exchange 2013.
-query	Queries configuration information of previously created Exchange_Perfwiz Data Collector
-quiet	Silently run ExPerfWiz (no prompts).
-server	Creates ExPerfWiz data collector on remote server specified.  If no server is specified, the local server will be used.
-start	Starts a previously created ExPerfWiz data collection
-stop	Stops the currently running ExPerfWiz data collection.  This is useful if you need to stop ExPerfWiz before the configured duration is met.  For example, the default duration is 8 hours, however you may want to stop the collection process after only 4 hours.
-StoreExtendedOn	Enables Extended Store performance counters. Currently not supported with Exchange 2013.
-StoreExtendedOff	Disables Extended Store performance counters. Currently not supported with Exchange 2013.
-threads	Specifies whether threads will be added to the data collection. If omitted, threads counters will not be added to the collection
-webhelp	Launches web help for script

To begin the collection first download the tool from the above link and copy it to your exchange server to start the collection.

To launch script:

1. Open the Exchange Management Shell
2. Go to c:\temp\ experfwiz
3. Type the below:

.\experfwiz.ps1 -server TESTEXCAS -duration 04:00:00 -interval 20 -filepath C:\CollectedLogs\ExperfWiz

Enter Y to start the collection for 4 hours and with interval of 20.

You can check the data collection set by opening perfmon, under user defined data collector set with status as running.

After 4 hours you can find the .blg file under the file path you specified. you can take this file and use the PAL tool to analyze the data. Refer to the article here.

You can also use the below to stop the job at any time:

.\experfwiz.ps1 -stop

 

How to publish your exchange OWA through TMG

In my previous post I presented to you how to create a SAN certificate with multiple DNS names, today I am going to show you how to publish exchange 2013 external client services through TMG 2010 after acquiring the certificate from your trusted certificate authority.

You need to have the following first:

• SAN Certificate from your trusted CA
• One external IP for OWA publishing with external public DNS record same name as your certificate
• TMG can already authenticate with your Active Directory

We first need to do some preparations from exchange side.

Prepare Exchange 2013:

Open exchange management shell and run the below:

• Set-OwaVirtualDirectory -id <CasServerName>\* -BasicAuthentication $true -WindowsAuthentication $true -FormsAuthentication $false
• set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -id <CasServerName>\* -WindowsAuthentication $true -BasicAuthentication $true
• set-EcpVirtualdirectory -id <CasServerName>\* -BasicAuthentication $true -WindowsAuthentication $true -FormsAuthentication $false
• set-OabVirtualDirectory -id <CasServerName>\* -WindowsAuthentication $true -BasicAuthentication $true
• set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory -id <CasServerName>\* -BasicAuthentication $true

Copy the certificate to the TMG server

Configure certificates

• Click Start –> Run –> Type MMC
• Click File –> add remove Snap-in –> Certificates –> ADD –> Computer account-> Next –> finish-> ok
• Click Personal –> certificates
• Right Click on 3rd party certificate and click all tasks –> export
• Click Next –> Yes, Export Private Key –> Base-64 –> next –> Browse for file location.
• Next-> finish
• Copy certificate file to the TMG server
• Click Start –> Run –> Type MMC
• Click File –> add remove Snap-in –> Certificates –> ADD –> Computer account-> Next –> finish-> ok
• Click Personal –> Right Click certificates –> all task –> import –> next –> select file –> next –> next finish

Configure TMG:

Open TMG

Choose Firewall Policy

Find in the right side menu under task and choose Publish Exchange web client access

Name the rule: eg “Exchange 2013 OWA access Rule”

Choose Exchange Server 2010 as there is no Exchange 2013 template, Choose outlook web access and click next

Choose Publish a server farm of load balanced web servers in the case of 2 load balanced CAS servers, in my CAS I have configured windows NLB on my CAS servers (I shall share with you the procedure of load balancing CAS servers using windows NLB and KEMP free load balancer)

Choose Use SSL to connect to the published web server or server farm, Internal Site Name should be your CAS server FQDN (and very critical this needs to be on the certificate)

Choose your farm.

Now enter the external name is what you want to give to your clients to access OWA (Also needs to be on the certificate) and click next

On the select web listener page, choose New.. as we need to create new listener to OWA

Enter a web listener name and click next

Choose require SSL secured connection with clients

Select one of the External IPs listed (not all IP addresses, or else we cannot do multiple authentication methods)

Now select the certificate you have just imported in the beginning of this article

Use form based authentication

Remove SSO and click Next

Review and Click finish

Select the Listener and click next to choose basic authentication

On the select user window you can specify a security group in your AD or just leave it All authenticated, this depends on your security policy to have this external client service to be available for specific group of people or all.

Review and click finish

OWA is published now. you can go check from your browser. use the published DNS name.

My first Blog post

Hi,

I am new to the blogging world, I will try to start this with baby steps.

In this blog i will share my day to day experience on many areas in the IT world and mainly but not limited to Microsoft products. I am exposed to Microsoft technologies in the messaging and communications systems, Exchange servers, Lync and office 365. Active Directory forests. Hoping that my posts will help me better focus and organize my knowledge and technical library and share it online.

Thank you.

Hisham Mezher