ILvA (Intercommunale Land van Aalst) is the company that is responsible for collecting waste in the part of Flanders I’m living in. Once a year they provide a calendar on paper that, just like all other paper based materials, gets either lost or forgotten about. They also provide a digital version that you can consult on their webpage. However, it seems that nowadays they also provide the same calendar in an *.ICS file that you can subscribe to using Microsoft Outlook for instance.
However I also wanted to see this information on my windows smartphone. Here’s how I went about subscribing to it in Windows Live to get it to sync to my Windows Phone smartphone.
Download Schedule
First of all you need to get the correct ICS file for your home address. Go to the ILvA website and click on “Afvalkalender”:
Next you need to provide you home address details to get to the correct roster details:
You can then download the agenda for your specific location.
Import Schedule
Go to your Windows Live calendar.
Click on the subscribe link:
Import the *.ICS file in you main calendar. Note: this is the calendar of the main Windows Live account I use for my smartphone. I do not use Hotmail and/or the calendar on this account for anything.The advantage is that I can have these entries stand out by using a different color scheme
This is what it looks like:
Verify Settings
Check you phone settings; ensure syncing is turned on for your Windows Live Calendar. I’ve also chosen a color that is different from my professional (which is blue because that’s the main color in the Xylos logo) and personal (mango because there some of that in the Office365 branding) agendas.
There it is. No need to monitor the neighbors anymore 
The title of this post is probably longer than the post itself ;-)
I’ve already mentioned that I use excel to manage task lists from time to time. Sometimes reality catches up and a task is invalid before you get to it. You could obviously remove the task from the list, but I prefer to keep a reference of the task and why it became invalid. Instead I set the value of my status column to “Cancelled”. (Other possible values are: “Not started”, “Ongoing”, and “Done”.)
Now in case a task gets cancelled I want to apply a strikeout effect to the entire row, not just that one cell. This is not to difficult to establish, but I always forget about one of the details and need to look up an old copy. Hence I’m writing this post “for future reference”, hopefully somebody else out there finds it useful.
Have a task list at hand and select the rows in it:
Office 2010 Ribbon > Home tab > Conditional formatting > new rule
Select “Use a formula to determine which cells to format”
The formula syntax needs to be along the lines of:
=$e2="Cancelled"
Click the “format” button and check the “strikeout” effect:
The end result:
Now go ahead and try to make a rule that sets a green background for tasks where the status is set to done:
Things that usually go wrong (it’s in the details):
- Typing the wrong cell number; you need the row number of the first row in the area you selected
- Forgetting about one of the equal sings or the quotes
- Not specifying the formatting to apply
- Incorrectly selecting the area the formatting needs to apply to
Finally I’ve found a decent solution for moving my digital photographs to a date based hierarchy on my NAS: http://stevesmithblog.com/blog/copy-pictures-to-folders-by-date-taken-with-powershell/
My Photos are organized in a “Year\Year-Month\Year-Month-Day” structure based on the date the picture was taken. I’m very happy with the solution because a picture can only belong to one folder. No discussion possible. Moving pictures from multiple digital cameras and smartphones into that structure quickly becomes tiresome. I’ve tried AntRenamer and PhotoMove but always ended up doing most of the moves manually anyway. Until I discovered the post above, which refers to an even older post from Belgian SCCM MVP Kim Oppalfens.
I’ve only tweaked the script a little bit to have it match my exact folder structure.
I’m working for Xylos as you might have read on my about page. At Xylos we are constantly looking for new colleagues. Have a look at the list of current job offerings or consider a spontaneous job application instead.
If you prefer a more informal approach, or you’d like to watch the new “The Three Musketeers” movie, than you might be interested in our job event:
Date: Saturday, 1 October 2011
Time: from 09:30 till 13:30
Location: Utopolis Mechelen
As a matter of fact I will be present myself, but I’d like to see some people to come and talk to me.
Check out http://www.xylos.com/musketeers/ for more info.
Note: you can do me a favor by referring to me during your application.
I’ve added an about page to this blog to support my new efforts in blogging on this and other blogs.
Next post in my series of housekeeping with Exchange 2010 Retention Policies:
http://www.pro-exchange.be/blogs/exchange2010/archive/2011/08/26/applying-housekeeping-retention-policies-to-the-end-users.aspx
It might be coincidence but I have the feeling that archiving and retention are becoming more important on this side of the ocean. One of the customers I’m currently working for uses Enterprise Vault to archive all e-mail messages for all users forever.
Read the remainder of this post @ http://www.proexchange.be/blogs/exchange2010/archive/2011/08/11/basic-housekeeping-with-exchange-2010-sp1-retention-policies.aspx
It has been too long since I’ve written a post on this blog. On top of that some people have shown their appreciation when I wrote a post on some events I’ve attended in the past. How many more reasons does one need to do it all over again?
The event I attended today is called Community Day (the 5th edition already) and given the name it won’t come as a surprise that it’s basically a gathering of most of the Belgian ICT user groups.
Opening Keynote
We started off in the biggest room reserved for the event with a fun movie the @ComDayBe team made in Leuven. They were basically asking some random people which versions of windows and office they were using and whether they knew what Cloud Computing is all about.
Session: What if disaster strikes – Failover clustering explained
I have worked in an operational team that supported multiple fail-over clusters so I’m familiar with most of the concepts, except for the “Dependency Report” that is. I did have the impression that there was some mix-up between shared storage and Majority Node Set (MNS) clusters though.
It was also stated that deploying such a cluster is pretty straight forward. That might be true from a technical point of view, but it’s an entirely different story if you have to start dealing with server, network and storage teams. Additionally, It has proven difficult to ensure people are using the correct network name to connect to their database or application.
Session: Communication Enabled Business Processes using Lync 2010
Next up was the first of 2 sessions of the community I’m most involved with myself; Pro-Exchange. Johan Delimon showed us some demos and examples of applications that are build on top of the Lync client or server APIs and Exchange Web Services (EWS).
Lunch
IT-Pro Chalk Talk
My colleague @MVanHorenbeeck used all his credits during this interactive Q&A session. Hence we mostly discussed about “the cloud”:
- Cloud vs. Jobs
- Cloud vs. Security
- Cloud vs. Monitoring (both SLA & security)
- ADFS not feasible for small companies
On a side note; this VIP room was really nice. I can certainly see my self watching a movie in this environment. Lots of leg room! No that I have such a long legs, but I’m not very good at sitting still for a longer periods of time. Ask my wife ;-)
Sponsor Presentation: From Box to Solution in one session with the HP/Microsoft Business Decision and Messaging Appliances
We kicked of the afternoon with a session hosted by sponsor HP. They talked about joint effort from Microsoft and HP in combining their technologies. The result is a kind of purposely built appliance. Apert from 3 SQL server related appliances there’s also one related to Exchange Server; the E5000 Messaging System. Obviously I was more interested in the latter.
Some notes:
- load balancer required (read: not included)
- meant for SMB; the entry-level model supports about 500 mbx of 1GB while the largest one supports 3000 users of 2,5GB
- HA out-of-the-box; no active component which is not redundant, but then again both servers are still in the same rack/data center.
It certainly looks interesting at first sight. We will need to investigate and compare prices to decide whether this could be a useful for our customers.
Session: Roll-out and Manage Multi-Platform Mobile Devices using some simple tools… and Exchange 2010
Second Pro-Exchange session of the day. Wim Borgers kicked of with a bit of history on the evolution of the smart phone platform and discussed some of the issues with managing lots of mobile devices with different operating systems, versions and makes.
Ruben Nauwelaers took care of the second part and discussed what can be done when using native Exchange 2010 features and/or some 3rd party tools:
- Apple Push notifications services
- SCCM
- Exchange Server 2010
- iPhone Configuration Utility
Session: Operations Manager 2012 Overview
A bit unfortunate, but only 6 people showed up for the SCOM session. We were kindly invited by @AlexVerkinderen to come and sit on the first row, which results in huge slides. Anyway my notes for this session read:
- SCOM 2007 Management Packs will be compatible with SCOM 2012
- New functionality will require deploying “feature packs” thus allowing customers to upgrade their monitoring infrastructure without to big of an impact.
- SCOM vs. cloud
- An MP for monitoring Azure already exists.
- Project Concero will allow monitoring of infrastructure deployed in the cloud and on premise
- Root Management Server (RMS) is replaced with a peer-to-peer architecture of management servers
- In depth network monitoring and SNMP v3
We ran out of time and didn’t get to see the entire presentation. I’m certainly interested to see the remainder of it, be it with or without a Duvel.
Closing
We ended the evening with some, mainly developer oriented, price draws. I quickly returned home to put the kids to bed, but not before doing some sight-seeing around the construction works in Vilvoorde.
Note: I hope the mango update for Windows Phone 7 comes quickly because not being able to turn of the shutter sound is getting annoying, especially for the other people in the room…
If you’re deploying multiple Client Access and Mailbox servers, possibly behind load balancers and/or reverse proxies, the host names of the physical servers are replaced with common DNS aliases.
However for troubleshooting/validation purposes you may want to know the exact host you’re connected to. There are a number of solutions for this but the easiest one by far is using Help > About in Outlook Web App in Exchange Server 2010:
A new pop-up appears to get you started;
Happy Christmas!
Strange taskbar icon for the Lync client?
Koen Vermoesen
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