Best practices on how to manage delegate access in Outlook

Best practices on how to manage delegate access in Outlook

To begin with, Microsoft Outlook gives you incredible capabilities, and one of these is your delegate access. It’s like having someone to create and manage your meetings, on your behalf. This person, who does it, is called as a delegate, meaning, you are delegating your tasks. Now when you have someone, to do that, you got to set the level of privileges as well for it, which you accomplish by the below levels.

Now when you assign some delegate as an Editor, you are giving him/her, the privileges of creating meeting requests, sending meeting requests, editing and deleting meeting requests as well. In addition, he/she can also be given access to receive mails pertaining the meetings, PRIVATE ITEMS and also accept and reject meetings on your behalf.

You could also assign a delegate as an Author, giving him/her the privileges of creating meeting requests and reading through your Calendar, PRIVATE ITEMS but he/she cannot modify or delete meeting requests. They can be given access to receive mails pertaining the meetings however.

You could also assign a delegate as a Reviewer who can view your calendar and PRIVATE ITEMS but cannot do any edits on it.

You can add your delegate by going to the Calendar pane, then going to File and under Account settings, select Delegate Access.

You get something as below and herein, you add your delegate.

You are all set with adding a delegate but now how do you give them the priviliges? Now once you add a delegate, you would immediately be asked as to which kind of a delegate is he/she as shown below.

This is all the necessary basics that you should know to understand delegate functionality. The following are the best practices that you can use for managing delegate access in Outlook.

1. NUMBER OF DELEGATES: Now ideally it is always advisable that you don’t have multiple delegates as it leads to lot of confusions, duplicities and inconsistencies.
2.  OUTLOOK VERSION: The Outlook version on the manager and the delegate/delegates should be the same.
3.       PATCH LEVEL: At the patch level, Outlook 2007 calls for service pack2, Outlook 2010 calls for Penn for Windows users and Entourage 2008 for MAC users.
4.   RECEIVING EMAILS: The mail should go only to the inbox of the manager, as in, on Exchange server only and not elsewhere like a PST file.
5.       MOBILE DEVICES: Manager can have one/more handheld devices, but try to avoid accepting and updating meeting through mobile devices. Chance’s of corruption significantly increases if you do so. A delegate should not try to manage manager’s calendar using a mobile device. This functionality is not available by design, but there are some third party solutions available and this should not be tried.
6.  DELEGATE PERMISSIONS: It is always advisable that, just incase you are using more than one delegate; you assign only one delegate as an Editor.  NOTE: It is always ideal to avoid confusions, as to who would respond to the meeting requests, either the manager or the delegate (Editor). Mostly it is apt, if the Editor does it, as the manager could be travelling.
7.  DL EDITS: It is good if you do not add or remove recipients from a DL whilst sending meeting requests as it leads to confusions and inconsistencies, at times it also results in some recipients not receiving prospective meeting requests as well. If at all you wish to add someone, do that in the TO field rather.
8.    AUTO ACCEPTING REQUESTS: It is always best to turn off this feature. The delegate should turn of this feature, if he/she is responsible for responding to the manager’s request as it leads to issues in delegate workflows. Go to Tools | Options | Preferences | Email Options | Tracking Options, and make sure that the checkbox “Process requests and responses on arrival” is unchecked for the manager.
9.      MAIL SYNCHRONISATION: On a normal scenario, it is good if you sync your outlook with a consistent mail synchronisation tool to avoid missing items. This means, if you acknowledge or read a meeting request through, one client, don’t try editing it in another. To make it simpler, if you have addressed a meeting request in the office using Windows, do not try editing it using your personal MAC.
10.    RECURRING ITEMS: It is best that you avoid the lags involved in recurring items. The recurring item will be taking place on its usual schedule, once you postpone it further; this causes a change in it. Now this change to the recurrence meeting will be an attachment and thus, an update has to be sent for this. The lesser the updates, lesser probabilities of errors.
11.   RESPONSE: It is always good if the manager responds to the meeting requests from his inbox as this will make less chance so for the delegate to miss the manager’s updates.
12.    EDITION ACCOUNTABILITY: If a meeting request, sent already, needs to be edited, it is ideal, if the manager/delegate, whoever created it, does it, to avoid discrepancies.
13.   OFFLINE MANAGER ACCOUNTABILITY: If the manager is going to be using Outlook, offline, he should ensure that he syncs it before and after making changes, as else they reflect partially, leading to missing items and duplicate items for both, the delegate and the manager as well.

Automatic administrator rights on windows

Admin right

windows seven/windows7

Windows 7

what is file server/what is a file server/file server

File Server

what is spam

Spam

what is active directory

What is Active Directory?

Active Directory is Microsoft's Directory Server. It provides authentication and authorization mechanisms as well as a framework within which other related services can be deployed (AD Certificate Services, AD Federated Services, etc). It is an LDAP compliant database that contains objects. The most commonly used objects are users, computers, and groups. These objects can be organized into organizational units (OUs) by any number of logical or business needs. Group Policy Objects (GPOs) can then be linked to OUs to centralize the settings for various users or computers across an organization.

What is a domain and what is a forest?

A forest is a security boundary. Objects in separate forests are not able to interact with each other, unless the administrators of each separate forest create a trust between them. For example, an Enterprise Administrator account for domain1.com, which is normally the most privileged account of a forest, will have, no permissions at all in a second forest named domain2.com, even if those forests exist within the same LAN, unless there is a trust in place.

If you have multiple disjoint business units or have the need for separate security boundaries, you need multiple forests.

A domain is a management boundary. Domains are part of a forest. The first domain in a forest is known as the forest root domain. In many small and medium organizations (and even some large ones), you will only find a single domain in a single forest. The forest root domain defines the default namespace for the forest. For example, if the first domain in a new forest is named domain1.com, then that is the forest root domain. If you have a business need for a child domain, for example - a branch office in Chicago, you might name the child domain chi. The FQDN of the child domain would be chi.domain1.com. You can see that the child domain's name was prepended forest root domain's name. This is typically how it works. You can have disjoint namespaces in the same forest, but that's a whole separate can of worms for a different time.

In most cases, you'll want to try and do everything possible to have a single AD domain. It simplifies management, and modern versions of AD make it very easy to delegate control based on OU, which lessens the need for child domains.

I can name my domain whatever I want, right?

Not really. dcpromo.exe, the tool that handles the promotion of a server to a DC isn't idiot-proof. It does let you make bad decisions with your naming, so pay attention to this section if you are unsure. (Edit: dcpromo is deprecated in Server 2012. Use the Install-ADDSForest PowerShell cmdlet or install AD DS from Server Manager.)

First of all, don't use made up TLDs like .local, .lan, .corp, or any of that other crap. Those TLDs are notreserved. ICANN is selling TLDs now, so your mycompany.corp that you're using today could actually belong to someone tomorrow. If you own mycompany.com, then the smart thing to do is use something like internal.mycompany.com or ad.mycompany.com for your internal AD name. If you usemycompany.com as an externally resolvable website, you should avoid using that as your internal AD name as well, since you'll end up with a split-brain DNS.

Domain Controllers and Global Catalogs

A server that responds to authentication or authorization requests is a Domain Controller (DC). In most cases, a Domain Controller will hold a copy of the Global Catalog. A Global Catalog (GC) is a partial set of objects in all domains in a forest. It is directly searchable, which means that cross-domain queries can usually be performed on a GC without needing a referral to a DC in the target domain. If a DC is queried on port 3268 (3269 if using SSL), then the GC is being queried. If port 389 (636 if using SSL) is queried, then a standard LDAP query is being used and objects existing in other domains may require a referral.

When a user tries to log in to a computer that is joined to AD using their AD credentials, the salted and hashed username and password combination are sent to the DC for both the user account and the computer account that are logging in. Yes, the computer logs in too. This is important, because if something happens to the computer account in AD, like someone resets the account or deletes it, you may get an error that say that a trust relationship doesn't exist between the computer and the domain. Even though your network credentials are fine, the computer is no longer trusted to log into the domain.

Domain Controller Availability Concerns

I hear "I have a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) and want to install a Backup Domain Controller (BDC)" much more frequently that I would like to believe. The concept of PDCs and BDCs died with Windows NT4. The last bastion for PDCs was in a Windows 2000 transitional mixed mode AD when you still had NT4 DCs around. Basically, unless you're supporting a 15+ year old install that has never been upgraded, you really don't have a PDC or a BDC, you just have two domain controllers.

Multiple DCs are capable of answering authentication requests from different users and computers simultaneously. If one fails, then the others will continue to offer authentication services without having to make one "primary" like you would have had to do in the NT4 days. It is best practice to have at least two DCs per domain. These DCs should both hold a copy of the GC and should both be DNS servers that hold a copy of the Active Directory Integrated DNS zones for your domain as well.

FSMO Roles

"So, if there are no PDCs, why is there a PDC role that only a single DC can have?"

I hear this a lot. There is a PDC Emulator role. It's different than being a PDC. In fact, there are 5 Flexible Single Master Operations roles (FSMO). These are also called Operations Master roles as well. The two terms are interchangeable. What are they and what do they do? Good question! The 5 roles and their function are:

Domain Naming Master - There is only one Domain Naming Master per forest. The Domain Naming Master makes sure that when a new domain is added to a forest that it is unique. If the server holding this role is offline, you won't be able to make changes to the AD namespace, which includes things like adding new child domains.

Schema Master - There is only one Schema Operations Master in a forest. It is responsible for updating the Active Directory Schema. Tasks that require this, such as preparing AD for a new version of Windows Server functioning as a DC or the installation of Exchange, require Schema modifications. These modifications must be done from the Schema Master.

Infrastructure Master - There is one Infrastructure Master per domain. If you only have a single domain in your forest, you don't really need to worry about it. If you have multiple forests, then you should make sure that this role is not held by a server that is also a GC holder unless every DC in the forest is a GC. The infrastructure master is responsible for making sure that cross-domain references are handled properly. If a user in one domain is added to a group in another domain, the infrastructure master for the domains in question make sure that it is handled properly. This role will not function correctly if it is on a global catalog.

RID Master - The Relative ID Master (RID Master) is responsible for issuing RID pools to DCs. There is one RID master per domain. Any object in an AD domain has a unique Security Identifier (SID). This is made up of a combination of the domain identifier and a relative identifier. Every object in a given domain has the same domain identifier, so the relative identifier is what makes objects unique. Each DC has a pool of relative IDs to use, so when that DC creates a new object, it appends a RID that it hasn't used yet. Since DCs are issued non-overlapping pools, each RID should remain unique for the duration of the life of the domain. When a DC gets to ~100 RIDs left in its pool, it requests a new pool from the RID master. If the RID master is offline for an extended period of time, object creation may fail.

PDC Emulator - Finally, we get to the most widely misunderstood role of them all, the PDC Emulator role. There is one PDC Emulator per domain. If there is a failed authentication attempt, it is forwarded to the PDC Emulator. The PDC Emulator functions as the "tie-breaker" if a password was updated on one DC and hasn't yet replicated to the others. The PDC Emulator is also the server that controls time sync across the domain. All other DCs sync their time from the PDC Emulator. All clients sync their time from the DC that they logged in to. It's important that everything remain within 5 minutes of each other, otherwise Kerberos breaks and when that happens, everyone cries.

The important thing to remember is that the servers that these roles run on is not set in stone. It's usually trivial to move these roles around, so while some DCs do slightly more than others, if they go down for short periods of time, everything will usually function normally. If they're down for a long time, it's easy to transparently transfer the roles. It's much nicer than the NT4 PDC/BDC days, so please stop calling your DCs by those old names. :)

So, um...how do the DCs share information if they can function independently of each other?

Replication, of course. By default, DCs belonging to the same domain in the same site will replicate their data to each other at 15 second intervals. This makes sure that everything is relatively up to date.

There are some "urgent" events that trigger immediate replication. These events are: An account is locked out for too many failed logins, a change is made to the domain password or lockout policies, the LSA secret is changed, the password is changed on a DC's computer account, or the RID Master role is transferred to a new DC. Any of these events will trigger an immediate replication event.

Password changes fall somewhere between urgent and non-urgent and are handled uniquely. If a user's password is changed on DC01 and a user tries to log into a computer that is authenticating againstDC02 before replication occurs, you'd expect this to fail, right? Fortunately that doesn't happen. Assume that there is also a third DC here called DC03 that holds the PDC Emulator role. When DC01is updated with the user's new password, that change is immediately replicated to DC03 also. When thee authentication attempt on DC02 fails, DC02 then forwards that authentication attempt to DC03, which verifies that it is, indeed, good, and the logon is allowed.

Let's talk about DNS

DNS is critical to a properly functioning AD. The official Microsoft party line is that any DNS server can be used if it is set up properly. If you try and use BIND to host your AD zones, you're high. Seriously. Stick with using AD Integrated DNS zones and use conditional or global forwarders for other zones if you must. Your clients should all be configured to use your AD DNS servers, so it's important to have redundancy here. If you have two DCs, have them both run DNS and configure your clients to use both of them for name resolution.

Also, you're going to want to make sure that if you have more than one DC, that they don't list themselves first for DNS resolution. This can lead to a situation where they are on a "replication island"where they are disconnected from the rest of the AD replication topology and cannot recover. If you have two servers DC01 - 10.1.1.1 and DC02 - 10.1.1.2, then their DNS server list should be configured like this:

Server: DC01 (10.1.1.1)
Primary DNS - 10.1.1.2
Secondary DNS - 127.0.0.1

Server: DC02 (10.1.1.2)
Primary DNS - 10.1.1.1
Secondary DNS - 127.0.0.1

OK, this seems complicated. Why do I want to use AD at all?

Because once you know what you're doing, you life becomes infinitely better. AD allows for the centralization of user and computer management, as well as the centralization of resource access and usage. Imagine a situation where you have 50 users in an office. If you wanted each user to have their own login to each computer, you'd have to configure 50 local user accounts on each PC. With AD, you only have to made the user account once and it can log into any PC on the domain by default. If you wanted to harden security, you'd have to do it 50 times. Sort of a nightmare, right? Also imagine that you have a file share that you only want half of those people to get to. If you're not using AD, you'd either need to replicate their username and passwords by hand on the server to give seemless access, or you'd have to make a shared account and give each user the username and password. One way means that you know (and have to constantly update) users' passwords. The other way means that you have no audit trail. Not good, right?

You also get the ability to use Group Policy when you have AD set up. Group Policy is a set of objects that are linked to OUs that define settings for users and/or computers in those OUs. For example, if you want to make it so that "Shutdown" isn't on the start menu for 500 lab PCs, you can do that in one setting in Group Policy. Instead of spending hours or days configuring the proper registry entries by hand, you create a Group Policy Object once, link it to the correct OU or OUs, and never have to think about it again. There are hundreds of GPOs that can be configured, and the flexibility of Group Policy is one of the major reasons that Microsoft is so dominant in the enterprise market.

Reference and for details: http://serverfault.com/questions/402580/what-is-active-directory-and-how-does-it-work

what is sharepoint

What’s SharePoint? 

 The business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web
 Allows individuals in an organization to easily create and manage their own collaborative Web sites
 Simplifies how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions
 Seamlessly integrates with Windows and MS Office
 Does not refer to a specific product or technology
 Using the word “Microsoft SharePoint” is like using the word “Microsoft Office”
 Refers to several aspects of Web-based collaborative solutions

SharePoint as an Organizational Platform 

 Individual groups can have a collaborative web site
 Access can be limited to the team and appropriate stakeholders
 Relevant information can be centrally stored and maintained
 Communications can be streamlined
 Relatively easy to use
 IT intervention is minimal
 Based on familiar tools and technologies: Web, Windows, Microsoft Office

WSS vs MOSS 

 WSS is the core technology of Microsoft SharePoint
 Considered as the “engine” of SharePoint
 Provides document management and team
collaboration tools
 WSS is available for free as long as your organization is
utilizing Windows Server 2003 or above
 MOSS extends the capabilities of WSS
 Going back to our car analogy, MOSS provides
extended capabilities such as GPS, a DVD system,
Voice Commands, etc.
 Extended features include Enterprise search,
Personalization, Enterprise Content Management, etc.
 Unlike WSS, MOSS is not available for free

7 Ways SharePoint Can Empower Your Organization

#1 Easily Create a Collaborative Site 

 Technical skill requirement is minimal 

 Microsoft Windows 

 Microsoft Office 

 Familiar with web browsing 

 Easily define relevant access 

 Based on communication needs 

 If deployed appropriately, IT does not  have to deal with 

 Updating content 

 Defining account privileges 

 Maintaining a document repository

#2 Efficiently Manage Information 

 SharePoint provides various tools to effectively centralize  and manage information 

 Schedule 

 Documents 

 Change Request 

 Risk/Issue Log 

 Budget 

 Document management features 

 Information storage 

 Check-in/check-out 

 Version control 

 Content approval

#3 Facilitate Team Collaboration 

 Document Collaboration 

 Document Workspaces can be used to jointly develop  requirements document, reports, templates, etc. 

 Tools 

 Wikis to document lessons learned 

 Discussion boards for offline communication 

 Meeting Workspaces to support meetings

#4 Enhance Communication 

 Right information for the right person at the right time 

 Tasks 

 Schedule 

 Reports 

 Dashboard 

 Relevant information access 

 Appropriate privileges can be defined based on 

informational needs 

#5 Automate Business Processes 

 Common project workflows 

 Change Control 

 Expense Reimbursement 

 Vacation Request 

 SharePoint workflows 

 Three-State 

 Custom workflows

#6 Generate Relevant Reports 

 SharePoint can be used to generate relevant 

 Interactive summary of a project 

 Project tasks information 

 Automated alerts 

 Dashboards can be created using Web Parts 

 Red, Amber, Green (RAG) Status 

 Key Performance Indicators (KPI) 

 Charts

#7 Integrate with Existing LOB Systems 

 Integrate SharePoint with existing data sources 

 SQL – based data 

 Web Services 

 XML 

 Non Microsoft enterprise systems 

 CRM 

 Reporting Tools