Best posts made by Carnival Boy

As per the title. Whenever I browse a website at the office, it thinks we're in France. For example, if I go to audible.co.uk it redirects to audible.fr. This is on all devices on our LAN. It's connection related not device related, because mobile devices are fine when connecting via a different internet connection.

If I go to, say, http://whatismyipaddress.com/ it correctly identifies our geolocation as Northampton, United Kingdom, so the IP address settings look correct.

I don't know what else could be indicating France. The router? The firewall? I'm not aware the country can be set on those?

This has only started happening recently, and I'm not aware of anything that has changed on-site that could have caused it. I'm completely flummoxed. Don't websites use the geolocation details of the IP address to identify the country, or is there another setting that some are using to (incorrectly) identify us as being in France?

How rude! I believe imaging would take me longer - obviously.

It's not that I think it isn't bad, it is that I think it is trivial to uninstall it. And that uninstalling it may be an easier process than doing a fresh Windows install from a volume licence image.

@scottalanmiller said:

Bloatware would be, to me, anything that is installed that is not needed or desired

So would you include IE as bloatware?

There is quite a bit of security stuff, yeah. Can't remember what it is called. And you have to uninstall it in a particular order.

@Jason said:

HP and Dell both have driver packs. Dells are better though IMO with driver packs.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/clientmanagement/drivers-pack.html

Cheers. That's pretty cool. I hadn't seen that before.

It's worth pointing out that Office integrates really nicely with Google Drive via the Drive plug-in for Microsoft Office, available to download from Google. I've tested it and it works pretty well.

From a financial point of view, it may not make sense to pay for an O365 subscription AND a Google Drive subscription. You'd probably have to really prefer Drive to want use Office but not not use ODfB.

On the other hand, smaller companies may prefer to buy Office retail licences and use Drive, which would be a cost effective solution. If I was a SOHO then that is what I'd do.

Can I have a unicorn as well please.

My company bought another company a few years ago. I setup an Office 365 account on their behalf but in the name of my company. The other company recently went bust and the employees bought the company and its assets from the liquidators. As a goodwill gesture we allowed them to continue using our Office 365 account so they had business continuity with e-mail. I now need to transfer our Office 365 account over to their company and dissolve myself of any responsibility for it.

I haven't spoken to Microsoft yet, I was just wondering if anyone has done anything similar and if there any things I should be wary of. I want the transition to be seamless. I'm pretty sure it's not just as simple as changing the billing address, but maybe it is?

It doesn't sound like this is going to be possible. The only option appears to be to create a new account for the new company, then remove the domain from the old company, then attach the domain to the new company. However, I am concerned about what would happen to e-mail during this transition period.

At the moment, I think the best solution would be for the new company to use Google Apps, as I believe it will be easier and safer to migrate from O365 to Google than it would be to migrate from one O365 account to another O365 account.

I'm surprised this isn't more common, as companies are bought and sold all the time.

@coliver said:

I found this. Not sure if it helps you or not.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/How-to-migrate-mailboxes-from-one-Office-365-tenant-to-another-65af7d77-3e79-44d4-9173-04fd991358b7

It helps me think "wow, I really don't want to go through this"
.

I trust no-one.

All Microsoft need to do is to delete our credit card. They could do that right now. There is nothing technical about it, they just choose not to (or in the words of Customer Service it isn't "in my support boundaries").

I used to give them girl's names but now I just name them after their role, plus a number.
So
SQL01, SQL02, EXCH01, ESXCH02, DC01, DC02, FILESERV01, SHAREPT01 etc etc

In the age of virualisation and rapid deployment of new servers, this seems to be only practical approach in my opinion.

@BRRABill said:

I assume a lot of places just look the other way, because it makes no sense to follow the licensing. Kind of like doing 56 in a 55.

I imagine this is generally the case. (Although here in Europe it's more like 90 in a 70 as we're generally less law abiding)

Datacenter may cover your Windows licences, but a proper DR test requires you to run your applications, so you would need SA or additional licences to cover these (SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint etc etc).

You've could have just messaged him since you're the only one who is really complaining

My issue is that it will take me at least 2 weeks before I even get around to doing a proper trial. If companies want me to trial their software then they really need to make it 6 months.

But I'll let you know how I get on, if anyone is interested. My first impressions are pretty positive.

I use Meraki. It's pretty basic. I'm happy with it for free but I doubt it will solve your problem. I think a lot of issues are at Apple's end and how restrictive they make their OS, as a lot of these MDM solutions appear to work much better on Android devices.

Update. I'm not getting on too well with Zoho Support. There are areas that feel a bit half-baked. Like the data import routine. I tried to import a spreadsheet of our existing tickets and it errored with "mandatory field omitted" but it didn't tell me what field that was and there appears to be no documentation. So I was having to guess and use trial and error. That feels a bit sloppy.

But the killer is that there is a delay between e-mailing a ticket and it appearing as a new ticket. The delay varies between 5 minutes and 20 minutes. That doesn't seem right, we obviously need tickets submitted by users to be created instantaneously.

It may be an issue with our setup. However, I posted a question in the forum (which appears to be the only way you can contact Zoho support) but after 19 hours my question is still "In Moderation". It hasn't even appeared in the forum yet, never mind been answered. Free products can be great, but they need an active forum to make up for the lack of paid support.

I really like the product, but feel it is a bit too rough at the edges and the lack of support is a big problem.

I'm about to start another trial of Zendesk because they've made some changes since I last looked at them.

Failing that, it looks like we'll be using RT because my colleague really likes it. I'm not too keen on having to run a in-house server with Sendmail and Apache when there are free or low-cost cloud based alternatives, but if it does the job and is easy to maintain I'm happy enough.

Sure. What I meant was it's not configured to poll our mail server. I can't see anywhere to set the polling interval, though surely it can't be set to 5 minutes or longer by default? I'd expect it to poll every few seconds.

Why is polling the only reasonable way anyway? Why wouldn't a large cloud provider like Zoho use a more real time solution?

@Dashrender said:

People who don't use a password management utility (be it digital like Lastpass or paper, like a notebook) don't use different passwords everywhere. Period.

Not necessarily. Before I used one, for a lot of sites, I would click on "reset password" every single time I wanted to the use the site. I'd then generate a new password, use the site, then forget the password. The next time I wanted to use the site, I'd click on "reset password", and so on and so on.