One of the members of my group was looking for a way to print a label for a contact from CRM to his Seiko Smart Label Printer. I told him unfortunatley there was no single click button like in Outlook, even with the Outlook client loaded, the Smart Capture sees no data. I told him I had a work around and in putting together a small how to for him, it seemed like a good thing to share here and maybe someone will reply with a more elegant solution (are you out there Anne?).

What we did was to create a Word mail merge document and save it. Then you highlight the contact you want a label for and open the saved merge doc and merge it and then hit the Seiko icon in Word to print the label I used this label which is close to the SPL-2RL we use.
.

Go through the steps for the first mail merge to labels and save it when it looks like this

Then when ever you need a label just highlight the contact in CRM and click Actions, Mail Merge, and New Document from Existing Document

and then click the Seiko icon in Word.

So like I said it is not the most elegant solution, but it does beat typing out each label.

Maybe one of these days Seiko will give us a button like the one in Word.

So in my previous post I menetioned a slight problem, I thought I would share my log of the repair process in case you find yourself in a similar situation.

Disable Exchange Service, let’s not lose any mail in the process

Restore C Drive to alternate location on usb drive, just to have these files on hand, we know C: is hosed

Fly to Sunny California

Download update bios & firmware, burn to cd’s

Flash Intel Serverboard bios

Flash Intel Raid controller firmware

Boot to Shadow Protect IT Edition, to use it’s tools
Unfortunatley I had not had a chance to image this system yet.
Btw Storage Craft’s great support bailed me out in this disaster, as I lost my IT edition disk and they were able to provide an ISO first thing Monday morning.

Delete C partition

Create C partition bootable (sorry can’t do bootable)

Boot to sbs cd1 repair console

Bootfix, sucessful

Bootcfg, fails

Verify boot.ini

Copy files from alternate restore location on usb drive

Copy root files from backup to xp machine, remove attributes

Copy to root of server from repair console, ntldr snd ntdetect will still not copy

Boot to IT Edition again, find clean spot to install w2k3

Start gold w2k3 install to W:, not going to be time efficient

Contact kb get download of SBS R2 w/slipstream beta I just tested for them, Thanks Kevin !

Do Time bombed install to G:, no key

Boot to DSRM

Do system state from 6/24/07, pre original corruption

Disconnect Internet Cable

Boot to OS I hope, yippee it boots

Do online exchange restore of 7/27/07 bu, it fails

Do offline restore of the 3 chunks of mdbdata to original locations

Reboot, stores mounted :>)

Breathe

Verify mail via owa locally, we got mail

Connect Internet Cable let mail flow

Send and receive test message, we are talking to the world

Logon to bookkeeping station, ok

Test 4 QB Data Files, one needs to be rebuilt

Rebuild successful.

Logon to Kenny’s station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logmein to remote, verify mail flows via Outlook Anywhere

Image Server with SP IT

Set backup to run tonight

Go to hotel for the evening, 11 hours is enough for one day

Logon to marketing station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact, CRM will not open, credential problem

Duh moment, I rolled system state back to before CRM rollup 2 was applied, system grumpy

Apply CRM rollup2 and reboot, CRM opens fine now

Logon to sales station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to process station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to lab station, Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to shipping station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to accounting station, Logon OK profiles intact

Need 4 updates on server from wsus allow all 4 and reboot

Delete demo install and gold install used to restore system state

Reconfigure backup to run regularly

Re-enable offsite copy scheduled task

Verify Hazard Waste database is operational

Clear Logs

Grab jpg of drive layout save to C:\

Grab ipconfig /all save to C:\

Image again with Shadow Protect IT

Install Shadow Protect Server

Give Kenny the good news, no data lost everyone back online

Goto Bella Vista tonight to celebrate :>)

Tomorrow back to hot and humid North Carolina

Talk about rotten luck, I had a drive go out in a raid 5 array Thursday, the hot spare kicked in like it was supposed to, life is good or so I thought.
I had one of the guys on site (who had done this before) put in a new spare for me while I walked him through the process over the phone, did I mention this happened in California and I am in North Carolina. Well we brought the server back up and told it there was a new drive available for the spare pool and it still looked like life was good.

Fast forward to this morning were there were a number of errors in the logs and after some troubleshooting it turned out there was some corruption on the C Drive. Not too tragic, the OS is on D, nothing on C but logs and boot files. Nothing to worry about, had this happen before just run chkdsk right? Ever seen the message mft is corrupt and chkdsk is aborting? Not the way to start the day. A little googling and it seems the /r switch will usually fix that, we will give it a try. It fails same message, but now explorer says unrecognized media, insert good media in drive C. Now we have gone from annoying problem to tragic situation, the server is still running I don;t dare reboot with no C Drive, but the SQL logs and Exchange logs all live on C: so not much is working on the server.

Did I mention that we just tore up three bedroom to get ready for the drywall guy who is starting Monday and we are now living in the living-room, literally.

Well anyways, time to make some plane reservations and try to find a room, because you guessed it, this is the peak season in Silicon Valley, rooms are scarce and expensive. Well got over that hurdle, have my flights booked although some annoyingly long layovers, still I managed to find semi-reasonable fares, got a room locked up and a car. Time to do some last minute errands and pack for the trip tomorrow, I go to my local bank and notice the screen looks funny, then it hits me, does this CR@P happen to anyone besides me? Click the picture for a larger view.

So I am reading my normal slug of e-mail as I drink my coffee this morning and I see this messges in my inbox from ExchangeDefender.

Not wanting to miss a chance to annoy Vlad I sent him this note,

I think your system is suffering from an identity crisis, it does not recognise itself :>)

In his normal helpful manner (you can find this Vlad on his business sites, not Valdville his personal site) he sent me back the following explanation,

It could be SPAM,  not everything from ownwebnow.com is implicitly trusted because it could be web based generated junk.

Unfortunately before I got his reply thinking I was so smart, I approved it as always trust sender, so now I have to go back and figure out how to undo that setting. Probably just go into the white-list and remove it.
And just to make matter worse for my favorite smartass (me), turns out the message was a note from the blog engine asking me if I wanted to approve a reply that had been generated by a robot and contained nothing but spam.

So I sit here out of coffee and red faced eating crow, but have to admit ExchangeDefender Really Rocks!

!!disclaimer for conspiracy nuts out there, yes I am a reseller for ExchangeDefender & OwnWebNow, but that does not make the services any less valuable. Corollary, just because I am paranoid does not mean they are not watching :>)

A reader on the MCP Mag SBS Forum asks how hide a users e-mail address from the GAL?

Open the user properties and click the Exchange Advanced tab

Check the box called Hide from Exchange address lists

double click image to enlarge it.

Yet another one of my clients asked me today about their employee’s using web radio, as I started to answer him it occured to me this was a better venue to respond, so when the next client asks me I can just point to the response.

So here is what I started writing to him.

Hi Larry,

In regards to your question about streaming audio, here is my take.

Other than the obvious loss of productivity while folks search around for what they want to listen to.

1. Streaming Audio (like web radio) uses a portion of the bandwidth we purchase from BellSouth, so the more people listening to different streams the less bandwidth is available for our folks doing real work on the internet, like research, remote connections, timely mail service, ect. We do not have unlimited bandwidth, we purchase a fixed amount and the connection is just like a car with a governor on it. It ain’t gonna go any faster or in this case move anymore data.

2. The more streaming that is going on, on our internal network the more sluggish the response will be for people doing real work. Remember that music is traveling around our network as digital data and competing for resources on the network just like all the other data moving across it.

3. Anything we do on the internet carries some amount of risk, although we run industrial strength antivirus and antispam software, there is always the risk of something coming through. The best way to limit this exposure is to only use it for business related issues. Of course this is no guarantee we won’t pickup something, but short of porn sites, music sites have the worst reputation for being infected

I know my views on this are not popular and I will admit, I loose this battle at some clients, where they are willing to put up with the list above. My job is not to tell you how to run your business, just to point out things you may not have considered. Personally I really don’t internet radio anyways, real radios are really inexpensive nowadays, use no bandwidth and are not targeted by degenerate spammers and script kiddies.

So I hope that answers your questions, and you will see a charge on the next invoice for a Kevlar vest to protect me from your employees :>)

New Article on my SBS-Rocks.com website
Shadow Protect Enable Lan Communications
a.k.a. How to create an XP Firewall Exception GPO in SBS

So as you may know I have been working with imaging products and have pretty much settled on Storage Craft’s products.Well I hit a road block the other day trying to control the desktopversions of Shadow Protect from the Shadow Protect Server Console.

This article explains how to allow these communications as well as being a good intro to the XP Firewall GPO.

Enjoy,
HA

Updated 6/22/2007 Thankx to Bob Haley who just wrote and sent me an ADM Template for Shadow Protect, I have updated the article on my site with the new instructions Shadow Protect Enable Lan Communications

So I called in again today for my second private hotfix and the after I got to the third guy (he was a developer engineer) he said, did you read the KB? I said of course I did, that is why I am calling. He said you probably didn’t notice, but that KB is part of a new trial and the line you expected to say call in for the hotfix actually was a link to the hotfix on the connect site. It is still not a full public supported hotfix, but it is sure easier to get. Know that I know to look for it, I sure like this new program. And now that you know where to look you won’t end up with egg on your face, like I did.

If you look at the screenshot below the key line to look for when you read a KB is the line I have in red. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go take a shower to wash the egg off my face.