Thursday, January 21, 2016

Embed Office 365 Video

I still remember in year 2012, building our own Video portal in on-premises when Microsoft Media services was on beta, when Microsoft allowed it to be used to build your own video steaming service. Later Microsoft released Office 365 Video, but it had its own limitation at the release. User voice was helpful enough to make it a better product for an enterprise (still not a fully fledged product though).

Embedding video published to Office 365 video portal on other sites and pages was a limitation till today. With the release of new features, you can embed videos in your SharePoint Online and also in your SharePoint On-Premises environment.

Edit an existing (or new) page, go to the insert tab and click on Office 365 Video.1

Select the video from the Office 365 Video portal.
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Once added, you can still change the look & feel by amending the html. Select the Edit snippet and do the necessary changes.
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Apart from the above method, if you want to add a video from Office 365 portal in to a page in your on-premises environment, you add the code to embed. Go to your video portal and below the video you can find the embed button to get the html.
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Selecting the embed code will allow you to add the code.
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Simple as that. Smile

Friday, January 15, 2016

Deploy on-premises database to Azure SQL database

This is simple step by step guide to deploy your on-premises (or even cloud) Microsoft SQL database to Azure SQL database service with data.  Simply, this is a data migration to Azure SQL.

You have to make sure you have an Azure tenant with an active subscription to proceed with the next few steps. I have downloaded and installed AdventureWorks2014 database in my own machine for the demonstration.

One more prerequisite, you need to have a SQL database server in Azure. Your server name should look be similar to yourservername.database.windows.net.

Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, right click on the database, select “Tasks” and select “Deploy Database to Microsoft Azure SQL Database…”
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After the introduction screen, you will be asked to set the deployment settings. There you must set the server connection, the new database name and a temporary location for the bacpac file.
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Once you click on the Connect, to connect to the Azure database server, you will be asked to enter the credentials.
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You will then be asked to add a firewall rule where you have to sign in and provide access permissions to your ip address (or subnet) to access the azure database server.
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Once the above steps are done, you will be allowed to set the pricing tier for the server. This is bit of a tricky thing as there are DTUs for each tier. The resources and power of each service tier and performance level for Microsoft's Azure SQL cloud databases are expressed in terms of Database Throughput Units (DTUs). The available resources will vary based on the DTUs. So till we complete the data migration, it’s better to stay within the standard tier.
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Providing the necessary information, you can proceed with the data migration.
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Once completed, we can see the DTU consumption and you can use your preferred tool to connect to Azure SQL Database.
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