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Are you working with many Microsoft Accounts? Well, I do. In our company we have tons of Microsoft Accounts (former: Live-ID). Of course we use Microsoft Accounts in all our Windows 8.1 clients, we use some for testing with Outlook and using Skydrive, some for Windows Store Apps, for Phone Store Apps (which Microsoft reunited into one Store Account for Developers at last), for Windows Azure (finally you can use organizational accounts - which are Active Directory users - since fall – before that you needed a Microsoft Account…) and so on. ...

Delegate365 changelog version 2. December 2013/January 2014 Order license: Added filter so only license types of your OU´s are visbile. Fixed. Switched to version 2 because of support for federated domains and users. The support works in the same way as in the Office 365 portal. Starting with version 2 of Delegate 365 synced domains and users are visible and group and license memberships are manageable. In Delegate365 the administrator can assign users to security groups and change the Office 365 licenses but cannot modify the user object itself because it´s managed in a local federated Active Directory. Windows Azure Active Directory handles federated objects differently, so these objects are no “full” objects which can be read but not changed. ...

Employees of Microsoft India developed a safety app for Windows Phone called “Guardian”. Microsoft launches a new safety app for Windows Phone dubbed Guardian Guardian covers all the features you would want in a safety app: SOS calls and SMS, Locate me and so on. See all features in the source article. Download the app here: Guardian – Windows Phone Store

A great blog post about the often seen relationship between developers and users by Pinal Dave: blog.sqlauthority.com: Developer – Nine Things Developers Hate to Hear How users often see the programmers: as aliens from another universe. How programmers often see the users: as horde of stone-age man. Great stuff – read the enumerations carefully.

During the holidays I stumbled about Hyper-V and importing an exported virtual machine from Hyper-V 2008 R2 to Hyper-V 2012. Well, of course, exporting, copying the files onto the new host machine and importing. Sounds easy – and how it´s supposed to work - but the Hyper-V 2012 says “There´s no spoon virtual machine to import”! The Import Wizard error message says: “Hyper-V did not find virtual machines to import from location “”.” ...

Web Platform Installer (WPI) is awesome. You get the installer as download from https://www.microsoft.com/web/ . WPI enables the installation of a server feature or a ready-to-use product with some mouse clicks! If you want to install a product like f.e. Umbraco CMS, WPI installs all the necessary components on your local machine. Well, that´s great. But – if you need SQL Server – maybe you already have an extra machine for your databases? ...

Windows Azure offers an easy and modern way to work with media files. With Azure Media Services you can upload video files, encode them and offer them for streaming clients. A great way to use multimedia content in your webs and apps! For example Azure Media Services have been used in the Olympic Games 2012 in London for delivering more than 2,300 hours of live and HD content to more than 20 countries for multiple Olympics broadcasters, see Windows Azure Media Services Case Study. ...

We´re happy to contribute to the new website of the Office 365 MVP community at https://www.office365mvps.com! This cool website was created by Darrell Webster and combines the blog feeds of the most known Office 365 MVP´s – worldwide! There are also some other MVP´s who share their expertise in the Office 365 products Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Azure Active Directory. More information about the Microsoft MVP award program can be found here. We designed and developed the new website layout. This is how it looks: ...

Recently TheVerge.com posted an article about a study of designer Jay Machalani. The new Windows 8 start screen is cool, but in many aspects inconsistent to the classic desktop. So Jay put together a plan to improve that a little bit… Back to the Start: imagining a better Windows Here are Jay´s results of a new Windows 8 start menu. Interesting. Or maybe so? Pictures taken from TheVerge. Click on a picture to open the source article. ...

Delegate365 changelog version 1.4 December 2013 Some minor fixes have been done in the UI. We extened Delegate365 with a WebAPI called “Delegate365Importer”. This is an interface running as cloud service in Windows Azure which receives users and licenses in JSON format, runs the requested operations in Delegate365 and returns also a JSON result. If you run an own system like a website where users can buy or request an Office 365 account or license then Delegate365Importer is perfect for doing all the necessary actions againt Windows Azure Active Directory or Office 365 in the back. You get back information for the tasks with the result. ...