Hi all! I'm not sure if you have an environment where you have to manage Apple devices, but if you do (and you're not a Fortune 500 company - this is meant for the SMB space), I would HIGHLY recommend looking into Apple's JointVenture program.

I, myself, am not generally an Apple person in that I haven't had to support many Apple products, and I don't use them personally. However, my company has been doing more and more development work with iOS, which has been translating into more Mac and iOS usage on the network. As such, I found myself scrambling to be a better Mac Admin. Helping me on this journey has been the (somewhat) new program called JointVenture.

Essentially, it's a program that attempts to put Apple more front and center in a business by offering stellar support to those users who sign up for it. It cost about $80 per "system" per year. Each "system" can be comprised of a Mac (any device running OS X), Apple Cinema Display, iPhone, iPad, and iPod. once these devices are registered, you then become a first class citizen at the Apple Store. And by first class, I really mean FIRST CLASS. You get your own rep, you get to go ahead of EVERYONE waiting for a Mac Genius, you have access to a "private" schedule through their portal, and you get a 6% discount on all purchases. That discount also extends to employees (they love it).

It's a wonderful program and I highly recommend looking into if you support at least 5 Mac's (5 is the minimum to sign up for the program and you can add to that 1 by 1 as you grow your Apple devices).

@scottalanmiller said:

You need a written policy.

Spoken like a true CIO!

"No one shall be permitted to hand out stinky cheeses, or cheese-like things, in or around said conference. All stinky cheeses must immediately be reported to IT for proper quarantine and decontamination. Failure to report things like stinky cheeses up to and including (the following list is not exhaustive) Limburger, Roquefort, Epoisses, Pont l’Eveque, etc... will result in immediate expulsion from and future banning from said conference."

And here is a video of it from last year...

http://1drv.ms/1FaHNYG

SAM's recent Azure meltdown brought to mind a somewhat recent event we had with Azure. More specifically, with Visual Studio Online.

We're a small software development company of about 50ish employees at any given time. One of our internal source control platforms is Team Foundation Server. We tend to do a LOT of collaboration work with outside consultants and contractors. Since our TFS is inaccessible from the "Outside", Needless to say, this turns into a headache for me because I have to worry about Acceptable Use stuff, troubleshooting VPN issues, account and access issues, etc. with this "Outside" people. Visual Studio Online (essentially "TFS in the cloud") solves a lot of those issues for me. It's still not as full featured as internal TFS, but it gets the job done admirably most of the time. This leads me to my story...

We are a Silver MS partner. One of the benefits of this is having some free Azure credits. The account we used to sign up for these credits was a "Microsoft account". Those of you who are familiar with this know that there are two kinds of accounts in Microsoft's world - the aforementioned "Microsoft account", and the "Organizational or Work account" (this is essentially your Azure AD account synced from on-prem.) Since we adopted VS Online before the service was "hooked into" Organizational Account login, our account was tied to Microsoft account. At the time, there was no way to mix and match these (there is a way now... sort of.. that's another story for another time lol).

Anyway, I called MS subscription support (as per some conversion documentation on TechNet) to get our account "changed over" to an Organizational account. The woman I spoke with said that it was all taken care of and indeed everything seemed to be fine. Until two weeks later...

Help Desk ticket came in saying that no one can log into VS Online. Sure enough, I verified that we no longer had VS Online in our Azure Subscription (what the HOLY f&$&^???). Where was it?!? Did all my VS Projects just vanish? So, I called support and after almost TWO whole days, we found out that the conversion was never fully done and that they set the old account to expire (which it did, thus the inability to login and the missing VS instance in Azure).

LUCKILY, nothing was actually gone. Once we re-added the instance to the proper subscription, the projects were all back. I still had to re-assign VS subscriptions to each user (what a pain in the ass that was!) in order to get them back up and running again, but everything was back to normal.

So yeah, that was my Azure Anecdote. Sorry for the lack of brevity lol.

Yeah, depending on how your client is configured, the 2016 automatic client updates aren't starting until February 2016. If your tenant enables First Release for users, they can grab it from that link in their portal page. Otherwise, IT has to be the one to initiate the upgrade of Office 365 ProPlus from the "2013" version to the "2016" version. It's very confusing in true Microsoft fashion.

It's stuff like this that gives IT a bad name in terms of it incorrectly being labeled a "cost center". Like you said, reliability is the goal and throwing money away on solutions that not only don't help, but could actively HURT the goal of reliability, perpetuate these financial stigmas with IT. Thanks for this!!

Hey all - I'm moving on to another position and my company is looking to succeed me (because I can never be replaced lol). Check out the posting here and feel free to apply. Local only and located in Northport, NY. If you're on the Island, give it a look!

http://avi.catsone.com/careers/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrderID=6447066

@Ambarishrh said:

We are in the process of migrating our file server to SharePoint Online. Just wondering if any of you guys have a backup plan for SP online, to access files in case of any downtime with SP online. If so how can i do this?

Lots of posts here, so I'll just respond directly to this. Essentially, you've got two things to worry about here - DATA LOSS and CONNECTIVITY LOSS. A few thoughts on this -

1. Microsoft does all the backing up you could need and want, on a few levels. Number one, they have datacenter backups that we don't have access to. These are for when the shit really hits the fan. SharePoint, by nature, has many different ways of getting back a file. One, obviously, being version history. Second, you've got two levels of recycle bin on SharePoint. You've got the Site recycle bin and then you've got the Site Collection recycle bin, both of which have set retention (default is 30 days I believe). If that isn't good enough, you've also got the OneDrive for Business sync client that sync BOTH OD4B libraries, as well as ANY OTHER SharePoint library (yes, on-prem too - it's slick when it works). It has to be done on a library by library basis, so this certainly should NOT be considered part of any (sane) backup strategy, not to mention it's prone to sync errors.

2. With the above being said, I can understand your trepidation about not having access to files that were once happily stored on your file server (this was a gutsy move by the way - especially if it wasn't only for "User" files as opposed to real-deal NTFS shares on a Windows box somewhere on your network. SharePoint is a giant pain in the ass when it comes to file\path length and character-type limitations). We started "suggesting" to users that they take advantage of their OD4B accounts as a replacement for their "My Documents" storage. We have not started enforcing this yet because OneDrive has way too many sync issues that are going to be addressed, but haven't been yet. In fact, I was just dealing with a sync debacle as recently as yesterday. I digress. Anyway, backing up SharePoint in the cloud is a challenge and it can be costly to solve it. Essentially, there is no right answer here (as proven by the 60 plus replies here lol)

3. You mentioned your concern was downtime, so I'll address that. So it can basically come in two forms, right? One - your work ISP goes down and no one has internet access. Two - SharePoint Online goes down and the whole world can't get to it. While number 2 can certainly happen, think realistically at how possible that really is. Sure it can happen, but it's a long shot, at BEST. Looking at your ISP, I'm sure you have a nice little redundant firewall setup going so if ISP 1 goes down, ISP 2 takes over happily, right?

So to sum up, I think if you've got your head in the game with knowledge about how version history and how the recycle bin structure of SharePoint works, you really should be covered from DATA LOSS. If you've got redundant ISP's, you should be covered from CONNECTIVITY LOSS. So unless you've got some sort of regulatory requirement to back that sh*t up, I think you should be OK.

Happy Birthday ML! Glad to be here now

We recently purchased about 7 different iDRAC's from xByte and they were beyond wonderful. In fact, one of the cards required another piece of hardware which I didn't know about, so a rep from xByte called to ask me if I needed it since the card required it. Saved us some hassle right off the bat. If you are a Dell shop (or even if you aren't - they sell refurbed servers), I would highly recommend checking them out. Good prices and great people to work with.

@scottalanmiller said:

(Windows 10 is kernel NT 6.4.)

Windows 10 is kernel version 10. They changed it after one of the major consumer previews were released.

About your performance issues in Win 10, check your processes for misbehaving OneDrive for Business client. I've had more than one incidence with more than one user (including myself), where ODfB was running at 95% cpu or higher basically non-stop. My laptop got so hot I could barely touch it. Once I killed the process, everything cooled down and the performance recovered significantly.

Oh, also, if that happens, you may have to disconnect the library and re sync.

They need to get their shit together with this OneDrive for Business nonsense. Seriously.

If I end up coming to the conference, there is no way I'd miss hitting up those trails. Long Island has some wonderful wine out East, especially the North Fork Wine Trail (a couple were recently featured in Wine Spectator), but Finger Lakes wine is something special I've never gotten a chance to try.

@scottalanmiller said:

@brianlittlejohn said:

I remember a SW thread where Chris from Microsoft addressed this, and to upgrade your machines to 10 and image them, you have to manually run the update to 10, then go back and re-image.

To get the free upgrade, you mean? Since there is a free 8.1 -> 10 path, I could see that. Is there something similar to get from 7 -> 8?

It was my understanding that the free upgrade to Windows 10 did not include Enterprise. The upgrade to Enterprise still requires a VL agreement, so in that regard, nothing changed with the release of 10.

@scottalanmiller said:

If you want to learn CRM basics and not a specific system, SugarCRM is very popular and is free and open source. You can install it on a Linux VM quite easily. Or you can install it to a system like A Small Orange with a single click. Getting access to a common CRM to play with it would be pretty easy. Then you can say that you have deployed it as well.

Azure has an out of the box SugarCRM in the Web App gallery

You sure it isn't a borked Outlook profile on that 2016 instance?

@Ambarishrh said:

We are in the process of migrating our file server to SharePoint Online. Just wondering if any of you guys have a backup plan for SP online, to access files in case of any downtime with SP online. If so how can i do this?

Lots of posts here, so I'll just respond directly to this. Essentially, you've got two things to worry about here - DATA LOSS and CONNECTIVITY LOSS. A few thoughts on this -

1. Microsoft does all the backing up you could need and want, on a few levels. Number one, they have datacenter backups that we don't have access to. These are for when the shit really hits the fan. SharePoint, by nature, has many different ways of getting back a file. One, obviously, being version history. Second, you've got two levels of recycle bin on SharePoint. You've got the Site recycle bin and then you've got the Site Collection recycle bin, both of which have set retention (default is 30 days I believe). If that isn't good enough, you've also got the OneDrive for Business sync client that sync BOTH OD4B libraries, as well as ANY OTHER SharePoint library (yes, on-prem too - it's slick when it works). It has to be done on a library by library basis, so this certainly should NOT be considered part of any (sane) backup strategy, not to mention it's prone to sync errors.

2. With the above being said, I can understand your trepidation about not having access to files that were once happily stored on your file server (this was a gutsy move by the way - especially if it wasn't only for "User" files as opposed to real-deal NTFS shares on a Windows box somewhere on your network. SharePoint is a giant pain in the ass when it comes to file\path length and character-type limitations). We started "suggesting" to users that they take advantage of their OD4B accounts as a replacement for their "My Documents" storage. We have not started enforcing this yet because OneDrive has way too many sync issues that are going to be addressed, but haven't been yet. In fact, I was just dealing with a sync debacle as recently as yesterday. I digress. Anyway, backing up SharePoint in the cloud is a challenge and it can be costly to solve it. Essentially, there is no right answer here (as proven by the 60 plus replies here lol)

3. You mentioned your concern was downtime, so I'll address that. So it can basically come in two forms, right? One - your work ISP goes down and no one has internet access. Two - SharePoint Online goes down and the whole world can't get to it. While number 2 can certainly happen, think realistically at how possible that really is. Sure it can happen, but it's a long shot, at BEST. Looking at your ISP, I'm sure you have a nice little redundant firewall setup going so if ISP 1 goes down, ISP 2 takes over happily, right?

So to sum up, I think if you've got your head in the game with knowledge about how version history and how the recycle bin structure of SharePoint works, you really should be covered from DATA LOSS. If you've got redundant ISP's, you should be covered from CONNECTIVITY LOSS. So unless you've got some sort of regulatory requirement to back that sh*t up, I think you should be OK.

I'll still be consulting for them, so maybe I can get away with it for a while longer

@scottalanmiller said:

You are going to have to change your persona name everywhere now too! Something like "fomer-avi-networkguy".

Ugh, I know! That's probably the worst part lol.

Hey all - I'm moving on to another position and my company is looking to succeed me (because I can never be replaced lol). Check out the posting here and feel free to apply. Local only and located in Northport, NY. If you're on the Island, give it a look!

http://avi.catsone.com/careers/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrderID=6447066