Absolutely. Murray's game on Wednesday was amazing. Not sure about British commentators, here in Britain we're currently having Jim Courier. I find him a bit odd. For Wimbledon we have McEnroe who is a brilliant commentator. The main Brit co-commentator here is Tim Henman who is rubbish. I might sneak a watch of the semis today at work.

@Gabi said:

No CDN yet as Scott has pointed out, plus the hosting is in the UK, with a company I (and my colleague) have around 300 sites with, but will be changing from, as I am finding extra performance issue and support is not as what it used to be.

Two questions.

1. What is CDN?
2. Who are you currently using and who are you moving to? I'm about to setup some websites for some new projects and I've signed up with tsohost.com. I've heard some good things about them, but they are suspiciously cheap - 4 Windows sites for £2.99 a month in total.

Possibly not, because I don't think you should have a website "advertising" your skills, I think you should have a website "demonstrating" your skills. I think there is a subtle, but crucial difference between advertising and demonstrating, if you see what I mean. I'd see blatant advertising as a bit tacky - your website should provide information and the quality of the site will speak for itself.

Yes, I'm being a bit pedantic, but I hope you see what I mean.

It seems that Microsoft now make it easy to upgrade, but difficult or impossible to downgrade. How convenient for them.

@technobabble said:

If I wanted to go to O365 SB Premium, I would have had to shut down my account, sign up for a new account. Connect to SharePoint/OneDrive for Business and upload all my files ect ect.

This is what I'm talking about! It's nuts!!

I was the other way round, I wanted to go from Small Business to Enterprise, but couldn't. I thought they'd simplified it from when I first took out a subscription (and got my fingers burnt) but it still sounds like a nightmare. I really don't see how anyone can argue that Google Apps isn't a whole lot easier.

I dunno, a still find a lot of the pre-internet stuff quite shocking, even though I was there at the time. One of my best mates as a kid didn't have a phone in their house. So if I wanted to see him, I'd have to walk a mile to his house and knock on his door. Only to find he was out, and I'd have to walk home and try again later. Even though this was a part of my childhood, it still seems weird when I think back on it.

Or in my first job, if I had a problem with Windows, I'd have to phone Microsoft, wait on hold for twenty minutes, then describe the problem to them and they'd give me the answer (or not!).

Even sitting at a desk and feeding in 150 floppy disks in order to install Microsoft Office now seems totally weird.

On the other hand, I'm still supporting dBase III applications, which is equally weird.

"VCP5 – Practice Exam – 1
Congratulations – you have completed VCP5_practice_exam_test_1.

You scored 14 points out of 19 points total. Your performance have been rated as Good."*

Yay! What do I win?

Great looking site by the way, what's it written with?

@scottalanmiller said:

@Carnival-Boy said:

I really hate plans. Especially Microsoft ones. Why can't everything just be à la carte? It's the one area where I really prefer Google.

But.... Office 365 is a la carte and Google Apps is not. I'm confused

Google don't have plans. Well, they market Apps plus Vault as a plan, but it's not really as you can add Vault at any time to a normal user for exactly the same price. I have a number of Google users and they all use different services - Maps Engine Pro, Maps Coordinate, Vault. Adding services couldn't be simpler. You go to admin.google.com, purchase licences for whatever services you want, then assign the licences to whichever users you want. At the end of the month you are billed for whichever services you have used. It is very much a la carte.

With Google I have one admin console, one invoice and one group of users. With Microsoft, I currently have to maintain 3 different environments - a Small Business plan (previously called P1 plan), a Small Business Premium plan and an InTune plan. All are managed separately with 3 different invoices.

Now I appreciate that if you ignore all Microsoft plans other than the three enterprise ones, you are in a similar position with O365 that you are with Google Apps. And I appreciate that Microsoft have a more extensive product range, so I'm not comparing like with like. So don't take everything I say too literally.

I use Microsoft and Google, and have no loyalty to either. I just think Google services are easier to manage than Microsoft ones and the licencing is simpler and more transparent, as I've said many times before. I guess you prefer Microsoft. It comes down to personal preference. I like apples. You like pears. We can debate this until the cows come home but there is no right and wrong answer (but I'm right ).

@scottalanmiller said:

You hate that they save you money?

Combo deals or plans are designed by marketing teams to encourage customers to spend more money. They're not designed to save customers money. A lot of SMEs will sign up for an Enterprise plan rather than a MidSize business plan even though it may cost them more money initially, because they want to avoid any hassle further down the line. This is a bit like buying a Happy Meal even when you don't want fries.

@alexntg said:

Everything is available a la carte with Microsoft. If you wanted to pick up Exchange, SharePoint, and Office, but not Lync, you can. Much like a combo meal at a fast food place, it'll cost you more individually, but it's completely doable.

That's part of what I hate about plans.

I really hate plans. Especially Microsoft ones. Why can't everything just be à la carte? It's the one area where I really prefer Google.

I'm thinking of swimming over. I'll be setting off tomorrow.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Carnival-Boy they are too wide for that. One on top of the other might be better. Too much head movement is bad.

Electronically controlled swivel chair linked to mouse movements FTW

I hoped this would be an interesting thread on Google Apps, but it turns out to be another Spiceworks slag-fest

For me, there's an open source feel about Google Apps, with all the third-party scripts available as well as a pretty powerful API that let's you write your own applications. I've spent some time on this trying to get our ERP application to update jobs on Google Maps Coordinate, with limited success. There's a good site here https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ where you can see what API features are available with all of Google's products. I find it all a bit of a mess and the documentation is pretty limited. There's an assumption that you have a high degree of competency already when developing Google apps, which I don't have as I'm not a web developer and have no prior experience of OAuth. I think I'm in far too deep trying to develop Google Maps Coordinate, but if you're a professional developer I imagine Google app development is a lot of fun.

Does O365 have similar?

@scottalanmiller said:

That is SUPER wide. Would be amazing for video games, but I prefer two monitors. I like having the two discrete screens.

So? You could have two of these babies! That would be super, super wide.

Walking meetings: Anyone have these? I.e. instead of having a meeting in your office, you go outside and walk and talk.

Article on it here http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/02/walking-meetings-work

In the West Wing they did this all the time: "Walk with me, Josh". I don't imagine the White House is actually like that though.

I know Steve Jobs used to do it all the time as well.

I really like the concept, though I can see it would only work well with two people meetings, any more and it could be difficult to hear everyone. I also fear it would result in less focussed meetings - you know the ones where you put the world to rights but don't actually make any decisions or plan any real actions? Taking notes would be next to impossible.

I love walking anyway, so this would be great for me. But I don't have the courage to suggest it to any of my colleagues as I think they'd think I was weird. Plus, I'm no Steve Jobs.

Anyone do this already? I suspect they sound great in principle but are useless in reality.

The main benefit is that you can massively customise Excel according to your needs.

At the moment, I only run KeePass on my PCs, and store the files on a Microsoft OneDrive account for syncing across devices. I don't use password management on my iPhone or iPad. I need to try MiniKeePass for iOS, but haven't got round to it and I'm not sure if it would work with my OneDrive file location?

So, I used to keep passwords in an Excel file, which was pretty dumb. I now use KeePass, which is pretty smart, right?

However, I've just found out that since 2010, Excel now offers proper encryption, (I discovered this when searching for a way to crack a password protected spreadsheet).

So, I'm wondering about going back to using Excel. Any views?

Egonomics?

^ Failed.