@pete-s said in Need MS Access app re-written to something else.:

@scottalanmiller said in Need MS Access app re-written to something else.:

@dashrender said in Need MS Access app re-written to something else.:

This is where the lay person (and myself included at times) gets totally wallooped. The lay person has no idea what's needed - they only know they have a problem and want it fixed...

Exactly, even pretty seasoned IT departments may have little to no knowledge of what is needed here. IT should know that software engineering is needed. But beyond that, there is nothing in the IT realm that should help.

Sure, IT should know something about database options and that SQLite is likely their preferred solution for lots of reasons (I know IT should know this because it's in the book I just wrote last week, lol.) But will SQLite handle the data best for the application? IT can't know that, because IT doesn't know how the software is written, what drivers are used by the framework, and so forth. IT can't know enough to be useful. Not doesn't, but can't.

None of the decisions, like language, database, framework, hardware, etc. can be talked about individually, it's one large decision that has a lot of factors. So talking about them before the engineering team is engaged might be interesting, but pointless.

I agree with everything you say.

Wearing my software engineering hat, there is another dimension to this as well. IT should understand, but for some odd reason seldom do, that custom software has a life cycle too.

IT have no problem understanding the need for patching an OS, migrating to a new OS, upgrading old hardware etc, etc. But often fail to understand the need to do the same with everything custom built they manage.

So getting a bespoke solution is not a one-time project or a one-time expense. Software needs to be taken care of from the cradle to the grave. As the OS is updated, packages deprecated, frameworks have become obsolete, etc - the software needs to be updated as well. Even if no new functionally is added or removed.

This is also come of the consideration that goes in to selecting what technology to use.

This is why I'm confused a little I guess...Both yourself and Scott reference having software engineering knowledge/background, and you even said up above in your response to the original post that you've done many similar custom projects (probably close to 100), but then then you give no info such as we tend to use MariaDB and python, or we find that this combination has worked really well for us in our similar projects, etc. Instead you give him the info that he should talk to a software engineer, but here two software engineers are telling him to talk to a software engineer.

@scottalanmiller said in Need MS Access app re-written to something else.:

@pete-s said in Need MS Access app re-written to something else.:

@JasGot

Also if I wanted to have this project done, I wouldn't waste my time trying to make some kind of program specification. Or make up answers for every possible question that the might come up. Or even figure out what hardware, software, database, programming language etc to use.

Use the developers expertise instead. Part of every project is to figure out what the goal, scope and expectations are and also potential problems and alternative solutions. The developer should be able to ask what he/she needs to know to accomplish your goals with the project. And come up with a solution for you.

Many customers waste their time trying to come up with some kind of specification that is not relevant or just completely unusable.

Yes, totally agreed. That stuff is for the engineers, not the customers. If I want a bridge built, I just have to know from where and to where and what kind of traffic it needs to handle. Trying to decide on the building materials and design is 100% wasted by me. A year of me doing research would not yield anything usable and a real engineer would throw out my work in the first 30 seconds and in two hours have real answers ready when I just wasted a year for nothing.

So I'm a little confused here...Are you saying that it's not an IT issue that @JasGot is trying to solve here? If one of your customers came to you with this exact question, you would tell them that they need to find a software engineer to get them their answer? Or do you employee software engineers that would tell you how they would move that solution off of Windows and MS Access to a different platform?

With perfect line of sight and that distance I'd also look at the NanoBeam AC Gen2. NanoBeam is probably quite a bit less expensive than the AF5, and also a lot smaller footprint so easier to mount, etc., but still should cover that distance with pretty good performance.

@Dashrender said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

We just recently brought in fiber 100/100 for about $20 a month more.

the upload will be loved by our medical records department, uploading into our EHR.

We moved from Coax 100/20.

If we could get 100/100 for $20 a month more I would do that without hesitation. 50/50 for us on a 3 year term looks to be about $160 per month more than what we currently pay for our 200/12 coax connection.

@Dashrender said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

Yeah, you could really find yourself and your employees extremely unhappy cutting download from 200 to 30.
What kinds of things do you do on the internet?

All the really important stuff like streaming music so we can work without the noise of the office bothering us. It's really general usage as of right now. File download from vendors or customers, WebEx/GoToMeeting/Zoom meetings, SIP trunks, site-to-site VPN with the branch offices, general web browsing, etc. Download would still appear to be the more important piece for our purposes as there's just not that much traffic going the other way as of now, but I wanted to see if others were trading speed for reliability and if it was worth it for them.

@JaredBusch said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

It will not make any real difference since you said you are not having any issues now at 12mbps up.

But 30 mbps down is a huge change from 200 mbps down.

A simple example: 5GB Windows 10 ISO file would take
30mbps = 24 minutes
200mbps = 4 minutes.

That's my biggest concern. We used to be mostly all download as we would only have a few employees at a time out and traveling and everyone else was in the office. Now there's a some who work remote either 1/2 time or full time, but still a majority in the office.

Currently we have coax cable internet service to our building with 200 x 12 service. We don't do a ton of upload, although that has gotten to be a little bit more with more people working remotely. We haven't had any big issues with service, speed, etc. to speak of. Potentially looking at switching to a 30x30 fiber connection which then comes with the enterprise level SLA. The fiber connection would run about $20 / month more than our current costs, and being that we haven't really had any issues to speak of I'm wondering if it's worth it to make the switch. I'm sure some of our remote folks may see some better file transfer speeds but I'm not sure how much of a difference that will make overall going from 12 mb to 30 mb. Opinions?

Sounds good. It seems like a nice, easy, free way to go about conducting meetings that one would maybe otherwise have to use a paid service for and there's always going to be some people who get nervous that they don't know the company, you don't have to have an account with a username/password, etc.

@JaredBusch said in Zoom meeting access::

@Dragon3303 said in Zoom meeting access::

How does one go about verifying the security of a service like the one you linked above? Is that a secure solution that someone could feel comfortable with sending out the link and sharing their screen with others, etc.?

Like any software application. You research it.
As for the specific solution you quoted, that is simply Jitsi Meet, hosted by VitalPBX.

So first, you research Jitsi and decide if you trust the application.
Then, you research VitalPBX and decide if you trust them not to do something to record the media on the server side.

Sure...I guess that's more my question to those here and particularly to @scottalanmiller as he was the one who linked it. Is VitalPBX reputable enough that this is a trustworthy service to use?

@scottalanmiller said in Zoom meeting access::

@Dashrender said in Zoom meeting access::

@scottalanmiller said in Zoom meeting access::

@WLS-ITGuy said in Zoom meeting access::

I was just told to find an alternative to Zoom. I asked why and they named all the issues that were there.

Zoom is very easy, but any reason to use it over even easier things?

other than your own in house solution - what is easier?

Other than the one that I mentioned in the thread? Just use Jitsi. If you don't want the Jitsi package, use Vitals!

https://meet.vitalpbx.org/

How does one go about verifying the security of a service like the one you linked above? Is that a secure solution that someone could feel comfortable with sending out the link and sharing their screen with others, etc.?

Excellent. Thank you guys. I'll pass the information on and hopefully they'll get in touch and get something good for them.

@scottalanmiller said in Hosted Phone System:

@Dragon3303 said in Hosted Phone System:

Or is RingCentral, Zoom, etc. the place to look for someone who would need just a couple lines and a couple phones?

Define a couple. If two or three, I often say yes, RingCentral or Dialpad kind of is the way to go. Once you get much beyond that, though, they get too costly and limiting.

I can't imagine Zoom for that. And definitely avoid Weave.

I'll have them contact you directly from the contact details on Talkadillo.com and you can flesh out all that information and make a recommendation for them. Thanks.

Are there still a few community members here offering hosted phone solutions for small businesses? Or is RingCentral, Zoom, etc. the place to look for someone who would need just a couple lines and a couple phones? A local mechanic who also does snow removal is looking to add a line and auto-attendant, forwarding, etc. so people can call and get routed properly.

One potential benefit to using Teams is that since it's included in the cost of the Microsoft Business Standard level is that it could maybe replace any other webmeeting/screen sharing software that is currently be used. I don't know that it's always that easy to get anonymous users in the Teams meeting however, so it may not fit the need for that. Our users have not had good experiences with Teams so far when they've had to interact with other organizations utilizing that.

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@Dragon3303 said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

LibreOffice or something similar but we again run into areas where they're using macros to push data across to other applications from their spreadsheets so there would be that to work out.

Have you tested OnlyOffice? That would be my best guess at a chance to directly support that.

Have not tested that yet. I'll have to take a look at it. Thanks.

One other limitation with the Zoho Suite in particular is that it doesn't appear to have the ability to be used offline for Sheets. The spreadsheet functionality is one that users are using offline when they're working with or supporting some of our customers. So that would be a big one where we'd need something. LibreOffice or something similar but we again run into areas where they're using macros to push data across to other applications from their spreadsheets so there would be that to work out.

I've looked at some the different options but part of the challenge is getting the management team onboard when they're all used to using Exchange and Outlook along with Microsoft Office. We also do have a fair amount of macros in use that I don't know what it would take to replicate those types of things in another suite. I'm open for that and have made suggestions to alternatives but there's a pretty good amount of resistance towards the unknown at this point. I don't know if there's a good way to run Zoho or something similar simultaneously with what we have to show how it would work?

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

Another way to look at risk here is that with the on prem solution, you are committing to 5+ years of your chosen solution. You aren't just deciding that on prem is the way to go today, but that it will stay the way to go for a long time. Five years is a really long time in IT terms for any solution to remain something that you are happy with.

With O365, your commitment is by the month or maybe one year at a time, but never close to five years. That's some serious risk prevention right there. Choosing O365 now in now significant way means that you aren't choosing on prem, it just means you aren't choosing it right now. But choosing on prem means you are essentially basing your valuation calculations on having to stick to that decision for a minimum of five years to justify the decision - that's a lot of risk.

So both risk approaches tell you that O365 outweights on prem, even if today's calculations put them as relatively close.

Flexibility is one of the biggest business risk protection mechanisms yet is very often ignored.

I agree with that and was mostly leaning that way based on that flexibility and not wanting to feel like we would need to stay with older software to make sure we "got our money's worth". Not that there's usually any real compelling features in Office to make us want to upgrade. With the Microsoft 365 that takes that aspect out of the equation because we're always up to date with the latest. Also, even though we don't currently have Teams or Sharepoint, and I don't think they actually add the value that some of the management folks think they will, it give them to opportunity to show that there will be value in those tools for pretty much the same price we can get on-prem Exchange and Office for without those additional tools that are part the 365 package.

Maybe this needs to be a new thread but since there's background here I'd be looking for recommendations. At 75 users I'm looking at a little over $43,000 for software/licensing costs for on-prem. Microsoft Business Standard at 12.50/month for 75 users puts me at $14,202 annually if I include the cost to use Veeam 0365 backup. I'm not sure that I need that, but I've seen enough stories out there about users losing their mail that I may want to utilize that for backups. So for just the software costs I'm looking at about 3 years before break even. If I add in power, administration, etc. that extends that time frame a little. We just went 10 years though without upgrading Exchange and Office. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, management would like to kick the tires on Teams and Sharepoint. So being that we want to stay with Exchange and the Microsoft Office suite, would you guys lean one way or the other?

@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:

@siringo said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:

I did the maths and it worked out it would take them 4 -5 years on Office 365 before they would reach what they had to outlay for new server h/w, licensing etc. And the other thing was, that at that 4 year point, they may be starting to look at replacing h/w and O/S again, so moving to the cloud (O365) won out.

Exactly, it is a RARE shop that can make on prem cost less than cloud, even with O365 - unless the on prem is cutting a lot of corners, which can be perfectly acceptable depending on the business. At 100 users, that's $400/mo or $4800/year. Not very much considering what you get.

To do that on premises you need a moderate server, nothing crazy, but can't be some old junk just lying around. And to be anything like O365, you'd need at least two servers, not necessary in an HA cluster, but immediately available secondary hardware absolutely. So figure at least $6K for one server, $12K for the pair.

Now add licensing. That's Windows Server and Exchange licenses, then CALs and Exchange CALs. That's many thousands right there. That'll like take you to around $18K or more, and being on the skimpy side at this point.

Now we have to add HVAC and electrical costs for on prem, which isn't huge, but will be hundreds or thousands a year that people tend to overlook.

And now the IT costs. Running those servers, doing updates, supporting them when there is an outage. That stuff adds up, quickly. There's realistically no way that you can do this for under $500/mo and at some point you are getting a full time admin just for this and anyone qualified will be at least $90K a year in loaded costs! We'll ignore what you are "likely to need" and focus on the $500/mo which is $6K a year - just realistically no way to get below that with two Exchange servers, all of the associated infrastructure just for that, patches, updates, hardware, etc.

That puts it at $24K for that first year to have even a modicum of comparability to O365 and doesn't even begin to address things like enterprise hosting or redundant ISPs or anything like that. Figure you will pay that every five years, except the IT cost is annual. So add another 4 years at $6K and that's $30K over 5 years or $6K per year...

That makes it, ignoring all HVAC and electrical costs, real estate costs, ISP costs.... at least $1200/year more than O365 while getting quite a bit less in most cases. If you don't care about uptime or risks, you can shave a lot of costs off of that but only by not trying to match O365 in any way. Which is perfectly fine if that works for your business. But apples to apples, you might be able to match O365 somewhere north of 200 users, but only by taking on risks for trivial savings.

Now if you have thousands of users, of course, it's worth evaluating. But at thousands of users, MS will cut you some slack on the O365 price, too.

I'm confused...Didn't you just say a few posts ago that you agree that cloud is almost never cheaper? And now you say in this post that it's a rare shop that can make cloud cheaper than on-prem? I'm going through the same math and trying to decide which way to recommend for 75-80 users. We're pretty stuck with office due to how a couple of our teams use macros behind Excel for several things. Management folks would potentially like to take advantage of Teams and maybe SharePoint. So it may make sense. We already have all the hardware, hvac, ect. in place because we're already hosting multiple virtual host servers, so the infrastructure is good. We're also one of those places that hasn't had an Exchange outage (specific to the Exchange server) with our on-prem solution. We've had a couple extended power outages or Internet outages over the years, but nothing really to speak of. We've been on Exchange/Office 2010 until now because there's been really no compelling reason to change. The way it looks to me is at 75/80 users the costs over 6-7 years (if you keep your Exchange and Office suite that long) are then starting to equal out, and at that point you're probably looking to upgrade again with a large capital cost so it maybe makes sense to go Microsoft 365 and stay current, have access to Teams and Sharepoint, etc. But your statement on both sides of the aisle there (both on-prem and could almost always being cheaper) was kind of confusing to me.