It's too quiet for me here in the mornings, whilst all you Americans are tucked up in bed.
Posts made by Carnival Boy
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We need more Europeans
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RE: Mozilla CEO quits......
@Bill-Kindle said:
It just seems a little hypocritical to me that you can have someone get fired and shamed for opposing something but as long as you are supporting the 'right' side you are viewed as a righteous champion of a cause.
I don't think it's a case of right or wrong. It's just a controversial cause. And when it's controversial you will get boycotts. And boycotts are bad for business, hence he goes. If Kim Jong-un created a really cool browser, I'd have a hard time using it.
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RE: Cold Call, ISP Surveys?
I just say "Sorry I don't do surveys" and that normally shuts them up.
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Interactive whiteboards
Any one on an expert on these? We're looking at installing a Smart Board M680 in our conference room. I've never used (or even seen) an interactive whiteboard before. I know they're popular in schools now. In my day it was all chalk and blackboards! I'm not convinced ours will actually get used that much, but the MD thinks it will and they're not particularly expensive. Any gotchas to be aware of?
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
@scottalanmiller said:
You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "ridiculously risky" (and whether you think I'm being ridiculously risky).
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
@scottalanmiller said:
SMBs don't do good financial analysis and often don't see where there money is going.
That's a sweeping statement. I think I do pretty well on the financial analysis. It's not easy because our IT infrastructure contains a lot of fixed costs and allocating those costs to onsite Exchange isn't easy. If we migrated to O365 we'd still be paying the same fixed costs to the likes of Microsoft, HP, Veeam and VMware to maintain our onsite infrastructure.
It's impossible to do a definitive comparison between onsite and hosted. There are simply too many variables. But I suspect Microsoft price everything so that there is very little difference in price either way. Onsite Exchange was, and is, such a big revenue earner for them, they're hardly going to have cannibalised their key product by significantly underpricing O365.
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
@scottalanmiller said:
Because SMBs desire these things and ask for them. Same as SBS. You can't blame a vendor for offering both a good and a bad product. If the market didn't demand the bad products they wouldn't sell. Microsoft doesn't push, recommend or require in any way that you avoid the E levels and they provide a partner ecosystem to ensure that you get good advice.
This isn't a true at all. If you look here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-all-office-365-for-business-plans-FX104051403.aspx you see that Microsoft are pretty explicit in what they recommend for small and mid-size business. For an SMB to go with an E plan, they would have to disregard everything Microsoft's website is telling them.
Consider the name. E is for Enterprise. If they were expecting SMBs to use this product, they should have called it something else.
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
@scottalanmiller said:
One major on premise outage often does the trick. What surprises me is how often people get into a blacklisting situation and can't send mail to anyone and still don't realize that they look like they've gone out of business to their clients and it doesn't click in their minds that this would never have happened if they were on Office 365 (or Google Apps or Rackspace, etc.)
It wouldn't happen if they'd use any kind of external filtering for their e-mail. All our e-mail goes via GFI Mailmax. It costs less than $10 a year per user. Postini is even cheaper and does the same thing. I'd never contemplate sending e-mail direct.
I don't know what the risk of a complete crash and burn is. Other than some planned maintenance on a Sunday, we've had 100% uptime on our Exchange 2010 server over the last few years. It's a tough call to recommend going from 100% uptime to Office 365's 99.97% (that's around 8 hours of downtime over a 3 year period, which I think is pretty mediocre) on the grounds of reliability.
Sod's law now says my Exchange server will go down today!
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RE: What are you listening to? What would you recommend?
Currently listening to Angel Olsen's new album. She's from St. Louis, Missouri and is my favourite new artist.
There's a great NPR video of her here:
Youtube Video -
RE: cannot access gmail when bypassing proxy server (sometimes not always !!!!????)
I used to use Squid, but now use Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security installed on all my clients. This handles antivirus and web protection, and the GUI makes it very easy to block specific websites or categories of websites. I haven't implemented any Active Directory integration, which is limiting, but I'm not sure how easy that is with Squid either?
I'm also trialling GFI Webmonitor, which offers a similar service but is cloud based, and therefore easier to manage our home workers.
But I used to like the Squid logs for investigating what users were up to at any given point in time. Neither Trend or GFI provides that functionality. So I may go back to Squid.
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
@minion-queen Really sorry for sending the thread off-track. My boss, the Finance Director, doesn't care and would go with whatever I recommended. I'm lucky like that. He actually prefers the subscription model to perpetual licencing. A lot of other bosses I know have a phobia about "the cloud", which is a common reason for not going with O365. I reckon this phobia is more prevalent amongst non-IT people.
I do have a mild phobia about doing any kind of cloud business with non-European providers, rightly or wrongly.
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RE: My side work
@richard I'm gonna try your white pizza recipe this weekend! Do we have enough cooks and photographers here for a separate forum? Nearly all my photos are on my PC, but I'm intending to upload my favourites to 500px soon.
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
@scottalanmiller said:
. As an Office 365 partner we always warn people to only look at E plans and ignore that others exist. Like SBS, they are generally just a bad idea.
Indeed. I wish I'd asked your advice at the time! Getting a good partner seems to be key to Office 365. I don't believe any of the Microsoft partners I work with offer Office 365, so I'll need to head to the market to find someone new. That was another point of annoyance: I assumed that my local Microsoft Gold partner could help me out, but it turned out he couldn't. Why?
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RE: My side work
I've never heard of printing on metal before. It sounds cool, and I will have to investigate further. Some really great photos there, by the way.
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RE: Chromebooks See Huge Growth
A lot of people are using them to connect to virtual Windows desktops - but that's just using them as a thin-client really, isn't it? I can see the appeal if you're already setup for that environment and a looking at refreshing your existing client hardware. But we're not, so I'm more interested in if they can stand alone as a true Windows alternative - which I don't think they can.
What's MA Office? The main problem I have with Office 365 on them, is I believe it requires a permanent internet connection to work, something which is never available. Whereas Google Apps work in offline mode. I'm currently using Quickoffice, which came with my Chromebook, which is ok but flawed.
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RE: Chromebooks See Huge Growth
As I wrote last week, I love the HP Chromebook I've just got. But to use for business you'd need to be running Google Apps rather than Office, and even then I doubt they'll succeed in 90% of cases. I've a few niche applications where they might be a good fit - but ultimately they'll remain just that: a niche product.
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RE: What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
I just find O365 really annoying. It's little things that annoy me. I use it for one of our companies and quickly wanted to upgrade the plan. But I couldn't. What other companies refuses to upgrade you? I would have had to cancelled the plan I was on, created a new plan, and done some jiggery pokery to migrate from the old to the new. And O365 is supposed to be hassle free? It sounded like a logistical nightmare at the time, so didn't bother.
Even today, I went onto Microsoft.com to have a look around, and in the FAQs for O365 Small Business it says "Office 365 Small Business supports a maximum of 25 users. If you have more than 25 users or think you will soon you might want to consider Office 365 Enterprise E1.". No mention of Office 365 Midsize Business which supports up to 300 users? Why not? It's just little things like that that annoy me.
Another annoyance, I have to logon to download invoices every month. Occasionally they change the portal, which throws me. And the portal isn't the most intuitive anyway. And we have to pay by credit card, which is a pain, because there is a minimum monthly spend before Microsoft will allow you to pay on account. Why? Little things, I know, but they all add up.
Meanwhile, my onsite Exchange box sits in the corner and just works.
/rant
Saying that, we'll probably replace our Exchange 2010 box with O365 sometime next year.
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RE: Best Linux firewall
I've been using the open source Smoothwall Express for well over 10 years and love it. It's Linux based and quite configurable, but runs straight out of the box. It's never let me down. Download the ISO, boot an old PC with 2 NICs, tell it which NIC is on the internal side and which is on the external side and it installs. Once it is insalled, you logon to the web interface and use the GUI to configure it (such as opening ports, viewing logs, setting forwarding rules). We have it running as a virtual machine. There is a corporate edition, which isn't free but offers lots of additional features, like VPN. We used the corporate edition for a while but have now gone back to the free edition.