Estonian e-Residency

I just applied for e-Residency in Estonia!

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As an e-Resident you are issued a secure digital identity by the government of Estonia. This enables you to use services provided by the Estonian state agencies and private sector. Thing you can do:

  • Establish a company online
    Estonian companies can be established, registered, and administered entirely online.
  • Open a bank account in Estonia
    Estonia is well-known for its user-friendly and secure online banking. The e-Resident smart ID card is approved by LHV, Swedbank and SEB banks in Estonia, with others planned in future.
  • Digitally sign documents and contracts
    Digital signatures have been available in Estonia since 2000 and are used daily. More than 200 million digital signatures have been created in Estonia since inception.

As someone interested in digital identities I think this is fantastic stuff, and heralds the coming of a new age of business. Looking forward to visiting the Estonian consulate in Oslo to pick up my ID card.

Read more about Estonian e-resicency here:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-residency_of_Estonia
  • https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/services-and-benefits/

 

Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard fails due to DateTime.MinValue issue

I was helping a customer set up a hybrid Exchange environment recently. When the time came to run  the Office 365 Hybrid Configuration Wizard we received this error:

utc

The error given is:

The UTC time represented when the offset is applied must be between year 0 and 10,000.
Parameter name: offset

I asked the Internet and quickly discovered that this is not a Hybrid Configuration issue, but rather some bug in the .NET framework DateTime function. I soon found this page (quite old as you can see). To quote the author: The value of DateTime.MinValue cannot be cast to a DateTimeOffset if you are east of London!

So the solution in our case was to temporarily set the time zone of the server where we ran the Hybrid Configuration Wizard to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), aka. GMT.