Why you don't need a VPN or not?
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@coliver said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I don't see that working very well for large files - say AutoCAD or even some graphics files.
AutoDesk and Dessault both have toolkits to get around SMB limitations. I think most CAD vendors do actually.
Not that I've dealt with this in a long time - please share what you know - I'm interested.
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@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
WebDav can create a SMB like connection (but is SMB/Samba really that much less secure than WebDav?)
WebDav is a protocol that is an extension of http. It itself has nothing to do with SMB.
I know besides the point, just clarifying.
LOL - yep I know - my point was only that it allows people to map a drive like we've been doing forever in Windows and browse around, then launch directly from the share. Unlike searching a NC webpage, which would then require downloading the file, then opening it, saving it locally, then copying it back to the NC webpage.
IMHO, you've paid more in resources putting together hardware, time, energy, maintenance, planning, etc... doing it yourself with NC/OnlyOffice/proxy/backup/etc, for up to 20 users with many limitations... than it would cost for a hand full of O365 licenses and be done with it.
Yeah it's great for home use or for a PoC before purchasing a non-CE edition, or just for simple basic needs in a small SMB up to 20 users... which I'm sure there are quite a bit of cases that would work great for.
The resources to build that stuff isn't that much, and saves a ton of money quickly, even with 20 users. O365 requires a lot of management work that people often overlook. Maybe not as much as building your own, but a lot more than people actually consider. Zimbra takes some work to maintain, but saves us more on management time versus O365 Hosted Exchange. So not only do we save the monthly cost and get a better email system (okay, that bit is subjective, but we've found it way better), but you lower the management time on top of that savings!
What management do you find yourself doing for hosted Exchange? I have a customer on it - and other than making new users/groups/alias, there isn't much to it.
New users, groups, folders... it's so slow and convoluted with Exchange. Dead simple with Zimbra.
Go look into making an alias or a DL on Exchange. I'll have five made and done on Zimbra before you've found the right page on O365.
We manage customers and often have to spend 30+ minutes trying to find the group, user, folder, etc. that they are wanting modified because Exchange has no central or deterministic way to locate all resources. You can't even manage it all in the same place. Users and groups in one tool, folders and flows in a completely different one!
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@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@coliver said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I don't see that working very well for large files - say AutoCAD or even some graphics files.
AutoDesk and Dessault both have toolkits to get around SMB limitations. I think most CAD vendors do actually.
Not that I've dealt with this in a long time - please share what you know - I'm interested.
It's nothing special, each of the big vendors makes their own "cloud tool" to bypass SMB and other LAN-based storage, but with CAD awareness so that it can work with these kinds of files effectively.
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@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@coliver said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I don't see that working very well for large files - say AutoCAD or even some graphics files.
AutoDesk and Dessault both have toolkits to get around SMB limitations. I think most CAD vendors do actually.
Not that I've dealt with this in a long time - please share what you know - I'm interested.
Dessault has Solidworks PDM (https://www.solidworks.com/category/product-data-management) which is a massive piece of software that uses a database and IIRC web protocol to transfer data. It solves the latency and file locking issues that plagues SMB when doing large files that change very frequently.... on top of dozens of other enhancements.
AutoDesk does the same thing with Vault (I think, it has changed names and feature sets a few times).
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@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@coliver said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I don't see that working very well for large files - say AutoCAD or even some graphics files.
AutoDesk and Dessault both have toolkits to get around SMB limitations. I think most CAD vendors do actually.
Not that I've dealt with this in a long time - please share what you know - I'm interested.
It's nothing special, each of the big vendors makes their own "cloud tool" to bypass SMB and other LAN-based storage, but with CAD awareness so that it can work with these kinds of files effectively.
This is a good way to describe it. These softwares do make a "cloud-like" environment for users. Still a pain in the butt over the WAN.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
WebDav can create a SMB like connection (but is SMB/Samba really that much less secure than WebDav?)
WebDav is a protocol that is an extension of http. It itself has nothing to do with SMB.
I know besides the point, just clarifying.
LOL - yep I know - my point was only that it allows people to map a drive like we've been doing forever in Windows and browse around, then launch directly from the share. Unlike searching a NC webpage, which would then require downloading the file, then opening it, saving it locally, then copying it back to the NC webpage.
IMHO, you've paid more in resources putting together hardware, time, energy, maintenance, planning, etc... doing it yourself with NC/OnlyOffice/proxy/backup/etc, for up to 20 users with many limitations... than it would cost for a hand full of O365 licenses and be done with it.
Yeah it's great for home use or for a PoC before purchasing a non-CE edition, or just for simple basic needs in a small SMB up to 20 users... which I'm sure there are quite a bit of cases that would work great for.
The resources to build that stuff isn't that much, and saves a ton of money quickly, even with 20 users. O365 requires a lot of management work that people often overlook. Maybe not as much as building your own, but a lot more than people actually consider. Zimbra takes some work to maintain, but saves us more on management time versus O365 Hosted Exchange. So not only do we save the monthly cost and get a better email system (okay, that bit is subjective, but we've found it way better), but you lower the management time on top of that savings!
In my personal experience for a multi-domain world-wide SMB of managing roughly 400 O365 licenses, It's honestly not been much overhead. That's the whole O365 suite (azure ad, office suite, sharepoint, email, etc), not just the Office suite. Any maintenance I do now would be done regardless of the solution... helping a user with the Office suite, contacting support to find a checkbox, etc... like creating users and things associated with that. So I don't see it as extra.
What I was referring to was backup maintenance, updating things, etc... it's not just one server, it's multiple as I described in another post, like reverse proxies, backup servers/storage, storage, email servers, I mean the list goes on. And each server requires maintenance, backup, etc... It adds up to way more than hosted O365.
I can't imagine doing that with a few handfuls of different adhoc software and servers by myself... that would be insane.
But I suppose we're talking about up to a 20-user shop, because that's all you can do with CE.
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Dashrender said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
WebDav can create a SMB like connection (but is SMB/Samba really that much less secure than WebDav?)
WebDav is a protocol that is an extension of http. It itself has nothing to do with SMB.
I know besides the point, just clarifying.
LOL - yep I know - my point was only that it allows people to map a drive like we've been doing forever in Windows and browse around, then launch directly from the share. Unlike searching a NC webpage, which would then require downloading the file, then opening it, saving it locally, then copying it back to the NC webpage.
IMHO, you've paid more in resources putting together hardware, time, energy, maintenance, planning, etc... doing it yourself with NC/OnlyOffice/proxy/backup/etc, for up to 20 users with many limitations... than it would cost for a hand full of O365 licenses and be done with it.
Yeah it's great for home use or for a PoC before purchasing a non-CE edition, or just for simple basic needs in a small SMB up to 20 users... which I'm sure there are quite a bit of cases that would work great for.
The resources to build that stuff isn't that much, and saves a ton of money quickly, even with 20 users. O365 requires a lot of management work that people often overlook. Maybe not as much as building your own, but a lot more than people actually consider. Zimbra takes some work to maintain, but saves us more on management time versus O365 Hosted Exchange. So not only do we save the monthly cost and get a better email system (okay, that bit is subjective, but we've found it way better), but you lower the management time on top of that savings!
In my personal experience for a multi-domain world-wide SMB of managing roughly 400 O365 licenses, It's honestly not been much overhead. That's the whole O365 suite (azure ad, office suite, sharepoint, email, etc), not just the Office suite. Any maintenance I do now would be done regardless of the solution... helping a user with the Office suite, contacting support to find a checkbox, etc... like creating users and things associated with that. So I don't see it as extra.
What I was referring to was backup maintenance, updating things, etc... it's not just one server, it's multiple as I described in another post, like reverse proxies, backup servers/storage, storage, email servers, I mean the list goes on. And each server requires maintenance, backup, etc... It adds up to way more than hosted O365.
I can't imagine doing that with a few handfuls of different adhoc software and servers by myself... that would be insane.
But I suppose we're talking about up to a 20-user shop, because that's all you can do with CE.
I'm in the same boat... plus I've automated like 90% of the administration tasks we had been doing on a daily basis.
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
In my personal experience for a multi-domain world-wide SMB of managing roughly 400 O365 licenses, It's honestly not been much overhead. That's the whole O365 suite (azure ad, office suite, sharepoint, email, etc), not just the Office suite. Any maintenance I do now would be done regardless of the solution... helping a user with the Office suite, contacting support to find a checkbox, etc... like creating users and things associated with that. So I don't see it as extra.
We have over 350 with a high turnover rate (5-20 per week and small growth). So we have a fair comparison against Zimbra. And while the overhead isn't terrible for Exchange, it's terrible in comparison to their competition. Every task is slow (it can take an hour for O365 to action something that takes a second or two on Zimbra), requires loads of screens, and often requires an IT person to do a task an admin should be able to handle. It is just complicated enough, and inconsistent, that it requires someone trained that really understands the pieces.
Zimbra does the same tasks in a fraction of the steps, in a fraction of the time, and in a much more straightforward manner.
It adds up. It's so bad with Exchange that we spent a lot of resources building automation to get around the worst of it, and even the automation takes longer for MS to respond to the requests, that Zimbra takes to do manually!
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
What I was referring to was backup maintenance, updating things, etc... it's not just one server, it's multiple as I described in another post, like reverse proxies, backup servers/storage, storage, email servers, I mean the list goes on. And each server requires maintenance, backup, etc... It adds up to way more than hosted O365.
That's my point exactly .... doing both I can tell you for certain it doesn't. All those patches, backups, etc. get automated and take nearly zero effort. It's much less effort to do those simple, automated tasks, than to put in the effort to manage O365.
It simply doesn't add up to more. Not even close.
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I suppose we're talking about up to a 20-user shop, because that's all you can do with CE.
I think you are on a different topic on this line. CE of what? 20 user limit of what?
I think you are thinking of the OnlyOffice thread.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
In my personal experience for a multi-domain world-wide SMB of managing roughly 400 O365 licenses, It's honestly not been much overhead. That's the whole O365 suite (azure ad, office suite, sharepoint, email, etc), not just the Office suite. Any maintenance I do now would be done regardless of the solution... helping a user with the Office suite, contacting support to find a checkbox, etc... like creating users and things associated with that. So I don't see it as extra.
We have over 350 with a high turnover rate (5-20 per week and small growth). So we have a fair comparison against Zimbra. And while the overhead isn't terrible for Exchange, it's terrible in comparison to their competition. Every task is slow (it can take an hour for O365 to action something that takes a second or two on Zimbra), requires loads of screens, and often requires an IT person to do a task an admin should be able to handle. It is just complicated enough, and inconsistent, that it requires someone trained that really understands the pieces.
Zimbra does the same tasks in a fraction of the steps, in a fraction of the time, and in a much more straightforward manner.
It adds up. It's so bad with Exchange that we spent a lot of resources building automation to get around the worst of it, and even the automation takes longer for MS to respond to the requests, that Zimbra takes to do manually!
But this isn't about JUST exchange vs zimbra.
It's about the Office Suite vs OpenOffice... but it gets tricky, because with O365, you're done with it all... with OpenOffice, you will need so much more, like Zimbra, etc., for a full solution.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I suppose we're talking about up to a 20-user shop, because that's all you can do with CE.
I think you are on a different topic on this line. CE of what? 20 user limit of what?
I think you are thinking of the OnlyOffice thread.
Oh shit, you're right... ya I got side tracked and didn't realize.
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This is a bad example, but worth noting.
Remember that we (NTG) moved to Zimbra because of a support issue with O365. We built out the Zimbra environment, set it all up, created all the users, migrated the email, and switched over from O365 all during a single support incident where O365 was down and MS could not resolve it (it was partially MQ's fault and partially MS' fault - but MS had no ability to track the issue or resolve it) and it took fewer IT resources to setup and move to Zimbra than it did to resolve the issue with MS. It was eventually resolved and they admitted their mistake (and then sent the newly higher minion PSX to come on ML and try to customer shame us claiming the issue couldn't be theirs even thought they had admitted it and fixed it), but not until more than an hour after we had completed the migration to the superior solution.
The "no effort" of O365, and really any SaaS solution, is really overstated. Application management remains, even in the best solutions. And in really poor ones, like O365, the effort of management is often absurdly high compared to what it should be.
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
But I suppose we're talking about up to a 20-user shop, because that's all you can do with CE.
I think you are on a different topic on this line. CE of what? 20 user limit of what?
I think you are thinking of the OnlyOffice thread.
Oh shit, you're right... ya I got side tracked and didn't realize.
LOL.
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
In my personal experience for a multi-domain world-wide SMB of managing roughly 400 O365 licenses, It's honestly not been much overhead. That's the whole O365 suite (azure ad, office suite, sharepoint, email, etc), not just the Office suite. Any maintenance I do now would be done regardless of the solution... helping a user with the Office suite, contacting support to find a checkbox, etc... like creating users and things associated with that. So I don't see it as extra.
We have over 350 with a high turnover rate (5-20 per week and small growth). So we have a fair comparison against Zimbra. And while the overhead isn't terrible for Exchange, it's terrible in comparison to their competition. Every task is slow (it can take an hour for O365 to action something that takes a second or two on Zimbra), requires loads of screens, and often requires an IT person to do a task an admin should be able to handle. It is just complicated enough, and inconsistent, that it requires someone trained that really understands the pieces.
Zimbra does the same tasks in a fraction of the steps, in a fraction of the time, and in a much more straightforward manner.
It adds up. It's so bad with Exchange that we spent a lot of resources building automation to get around the worst of it, and even the automation takes longer for MS to respond to the requests, that Zimbra takes to do manually!
But this isn't about JUST exchange vs zimbra.
It's about the Office Suite vs OpenOffice... but it gets tricky, because with O365, you're done with it all... with OpenOffice, you will need so much more, like Zimbra, etc., for a full solution.
Oh sure. But how much effort is LibreOffice, Zimbra, and NextCloud? More effort all together than setting up an O365 account? Heck yeah, no doubt. More than one day's effort? No. Just one day.
In an environment of 350 O365 users, we lose a few hours (let's say 1-3) per week, from O365 overhead compared to Zimbra. Let's be crazy conservative and say one hour a month.
That's only 67% of a year, roughly, to pay for the "effort" of the Zimbra, NC and CODE setup to get started. After one year, you are well ahead. Over time, you pull ahead more and more.
That's just on the effort side. That O365 costs more to license just adds on top of the higher cost of management.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
In an environment of 350 O365 users, we lose a few hours (let's say 1-3) per week, from O365 overhead compared to Zimbra. Let's be crazy conservative and say one hour a month.
That's so weird that it takes so long in your experience. User creation is instant for us. We add users all the time, as in several per week (lately). Those who are on-prem get added in on-prem AD (instant), which is automatically synced to O365, we just need to manually assign a license (that's on purpose), and that's instant. Those not in on-prem AD it takes an extra minute to get to the O365 portal to create a new user if it's not already there or book marked, but same dance there as with AD.
The thing is, we don't create users the second they need to do work involving O365 services. We do it before that, so there's no time wasted "waiting" for anything. The only thing that takes any "waiting" time whatsoever, is after you assign a license that involves Exchange services, it could take a little for provisioning/replication... which is not time wasted because the user is never waiting for it.
So with O365, it takes one of us about a minute to create a user and assign a license. When the user needs it, it's ready. This can be done a day before, during their orientation, etc...
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
we just need to manually assign a license (that's on purpose),
Curious why this is? Found a good script to do this via an AD attribute. https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Assign-Office-365-Licenses-b7385ebe
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@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
This is a bad example, but worth noting.
Remember that we (NTG) moved to Zimbra because of a support issue with O365. We built out the Zimbra environment, set it all up, created all the users, migrated the email, and switched over from O365 all during a single support incident where O365 was down and MS could not resolve it (it was partially MQ's fault and partially MS' fault - but MS had no ability to track the issue or resolve it) and it took fewer IT resources to setup and move to Zimbra than it did to resolve the issue with MS. It was eventually resolved and they admitted their mistake (and then sent the newly higher minion PSX to come on ML and try to customer shame us claiming the issue couldn't be theirs even thought they had admitted it and fixed it), but not until more than an hour after we had completed the migration to the superior solution.
The "no effort" of O365, and really any SaaS solution, is really overstated. Application management remains, even in the best solutions. And in really poor ones, like O365, the effort of management is often absurdly high compared to what it should be.
Yeah, I remember that.
I suppose the O365 slogan should be "O365 -- YMMV"
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
@scottalanmiller said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
In an environment of 350 O365 users, we lose a few hours (let's say 1-3) per week, from O365 overhead compared to Zimbra. Let's be crazy conservative and say one hour a month.
That's so weird that it takes so long in your experience. User creation is instant for us.
User creation alone, yes. But we never "just" make a user. It's always adding them to groups and stuff. Users never (for us) exist in isolation, they always are coming into a team and have to be configured. We have that all automated, but it can take 15-60 minutes for MS to process that. And making a new group, MS actually gives you a notice every time that says "this won't be active for an hour."
If we had one by one users with zero other configuration, it would be just normal. Same as Zimbra. But with things like groups, DLs, aliases, etc., it is not. It's slow as molasses.
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@Obsolesce said in Why you don't need a VPN or not?:
The thing is, we don't create users the second they need to do work involving O365 services. We do it before that, so there's no time wasted "waiting" for anything. The only thing that takes any "waiting" time whatsoever, is after you assign a license that involves Exchange services, it could take a little for provisioning/replication... which is not time wasted because the user is never waiting for it.
So with O365, it takes one of us about a minute to create a user and assign a license. When the user needs it, it's ready. This can be done a day before, during their orientation, etc...
We have the licenses automated, too. Even with that, the IT person (and computer) get tied up waiting for the task to complete. And they waste a lot of steps.
