A fun trick with the signatures is to add some random garbage text to the end of the disclaimer and then you can trap for that in your transport rule so that you're not appending the signature at the bottom of a reply chain.

@tim_g said in Alternatives to Facebook:

The entire concept of Facebook is just bad. If someone is using it, they can keep using it. No need for an alternative.

If it's for collaboration regarding a specific interest, there are forums for that and other services like Reddit. Sharing pictures? Instagram. Update statuses? Twitter.

Again, the concept of Facebook is terrible, and yes I have it, but don't need it.

Why do you need Facebook to stay in touch with someone? So you can stalk them without them knowing? Give them a call. Send them an email with photos. Text them a link to your Instagram and Twitter.

Thanks @Tim_G this was very helpful. /s

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@kelly said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@kelly said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@kelly said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@kelly said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@dustinb3403 said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

The easiest way I've found to get a GPO to update, is to one, set it to "update" and in cases like screensavers (backgrounds etc), literally just name the anything else.

"bg.jpg" the new one gets changed to "bg1.jpg" etc.

Trying to do this without the user touching GPO. I'm still fuzzy on how to set the GPO to update?

You only change the file copy GPO. I would have a different file name in your source file like 20180907_info.jpg. That way the GPO will process because it detects a change event. You can have the same destination file.

That would require editing of the GPO that applies the wallpaper.

It depends on how you set it up. My preferred method, and I believe best practice, is that you split your policies. The User policy applies the wallpaper based on <localpath>\picture.jpg. The computer policy copies the wallpaper from <remotepath>\20180907_picture.jpg to <localpath>\picture.jpg. When you need to update the wallpaper you place 2018xxxxx_picture.jpg in <remotepath> and update the policy to the new file name. When the machine reboots or refreshes its policies it copies the file from <remotepath> to <localpath>. When the user logs in the user policy is applied which uses the same file name (because as far as it is concerned nothing changed), but the new wallpaper is loaded because it is a different image.

Does that make sense?

Yes, so I need to point the wallpaper to load it from the computer not the server?

Yes, for the user policy it is the local path on the computer.

Kelly, when you move the file will it update if you don't update the policy with the new file name but instead keep the name the same in the wallpaper gpo?

So if you move photo.jpg from C:\Users\Public\ to C:\Temp\Shared? I'm not completely sure I understand the scenario you're describing?

What I want to do is to put a photo names info.jpg either on the server and have a GPO to point to that file to use as wallpaper.

Without touching the GPO that points to info.jpg I want the end user to be able to replace info.jpg with another file called info.jpg that has the same name but it's a different photo with the same name. Then the desktop updates on each workstation.

It seems like either copying the file from the server to the local workstation or pointing to the file on the server both require that you change the GPO for wallpaper and do a info1.jpg, info2.jpg to update the wallpaper GPO each time you change the photo.

I don't want the end user to mess with GPO but do trust them to simply save another file with the same name.

If you are allowing end users to change their desktop images why are you setting it via GPO? That is a lot of effort for little return.

As for your third paragraph I'm not sure how to answer what you're stating without restating my posts above. I guess I don't understand what you want to achieve as your end goal and what you want to avoid along the way.

@scottalanmiller said in Alternatives to Facebook:

I signed up...

https://mewe.com/i/scottalanmiller

Likewise: https://mewe.com/i/kelly.schroeder1

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

Without touching the GPO that points to info.jpg I want the end user to be able to replace info.jpg with another file called info.jpg that has the same name but it's a different photo with the same name..

Here's the source of my confusion.

If you do allow the office manager to do that it will work fine until the file copy GPO needs to run, and then if you are setting it with a REPLACE then it will overwrite the info.jpg. If you have a specific site where you are allowing an office manager to do this and it is properly configured in sites and settings then you can exclude that site from the GPO (either one).

@dafyre said in Alternatives to Facebook:

MeWe seems to be a decent option.

I'm piddling around on a Diaspora pod (https://diasp.org/)... Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) aims to be a decentralized Facebook.. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.

My concern about Diaspora is that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of controls for guaranteeing the privacy of users. It appears that user privacy is dependent on the honesty of the ones running the pods. I haven't dug in to it very far, so I might be missing something.

Those are list prices, but Microsoft always incentivizes the channel by making their MSRP much higher than it needs to be.

I've always liked the idea of a keyboard mounted on the arms of a chair like in Seaquest DSV or here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060414235432/http://www.kinesis-ergo.com:80/evol_chair.htm. I don't know if it would actually be that great though. Mousing wouldn't be a problem for me because I use a thumb trackball for everything short of FPSs.

The period notation is really annoying for me. I signed up [email protected] when it was in beta and this "feature" wasn't publicized. Years later someone else was able to register [email protected] and now I get DoTerra order details and the like. I have no idea what I don't get at this point.

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just put in my order for some Weekend Pizza!

We did Domino's. It is hard to compete with the taste/price ratio.

Both O365 and G-Suite are resilient, but not backed up. It can survive failure, but has a limited capability to restore something after a user has done something with it.

Phone screen for a 3 month contract job in about 10 minutes. Doing some research/prep.

Import/Export is best effort. At best. Last I looked into it, the recommended way (not necessarily the MS way) was to Archive the email to PST. This appears to be the best way to move email out of a profile that I found.

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Soaking toes. Fun times gout flare

Have you tried raw cherry juice? I've found that it helps mine a ton.

@ccwtech said in Convert .ost to .pst:

@kelly said in Convert .ost to .pst:

Open the OST in Outlook, then Archive everything to PST.

Do I just add it as a data file in the mail area of control panel?

I don't think you can open it directly, but I could be wrong there.

I'm not 100% sure on that, and I don't have the set up any more to test it, but I thought you could open an OST in Outlook without doing anything odd with it. You just don't want it associated with its original account. Might even need to do it offline.

Not gaming per se, but related:

@wirestyle22 said in What are you using for Documentation?:

@kelly said in What are you using for Documentation?:

I'm not sure I understand the justification for not using Sharepoint. It would be a lot of infrastructure to spin up something fresh. If you have it already because of something else (O365 or a different project) what is the justification for not using it. Documentation doesn't need much. Spinning up a dedicated Sharepoint subsite would be trivial, and assuming that you've built out your permissions and groups already would save you a ton of time setting it up. You don't have to deal with another VM, patches, version conflicts, etc. There are probably things that do it better, if only slightly, but does that minimal (in my perspective) improvement justify the effort?

I'm honestly not sure what we have built out. From what I've seen so far (limited) sharepoint seems unnecessary for what we would want to do with it. It can even be cumbersome but that may be because of how we are using it.

I'd recommend creating a test subsite that is dedicated to what you want rather than adapting the default site. The enterprise wiki webpart does take a little bit to enable - https://www.admin-enclave.com/en/articles/sharepoint/412-howto-create-an-enterprise-wiki-on-sharepoint-online.html, but it would probably do what you need it to.

My 4 year old daughter is outside laughing maniacally.

@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:

@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:

@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:

@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:

If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.

It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.

Wouldn't most of those conversations occur through direct messages rather than channels? I agree that having to sort through requests or information within general channels would be a headache. I encouraged my users to talk to one of my team directly. In a larger environment I might have a "Helpdesk" channel, but I would discourage "chatting" in that channel in general.

On another note, why are you looking at getting off of SfB/Teams? If you're not moving off of O365 entirely that is an expensive decision.

We aren't entirely O365. Everything here is Hybrid and I hate it. Our entire IT team hates our communication tools. I do want the ability to talk in channels because it allows us to discuss things as a group as well as let people know what is going on at certain sites. Instead of reaching out to us to find out they can check the channel for that site. At least if they have questions we can answer them directly there so when someone else checks it they don't need to ask it again. There's a lot of communication breakdown here.

Teams is roughly the equivalent of Slack/Rocketchat/Mattermost in terms of functionality. I'm not trying to dissuade you from using Rocket, just adding to the options for something you don't have to support and maintain the infrastructure on.

As for hybrid, are you using AD Sync or whatever they're calling it now? I found that it takes most of the issues of having local AD and Azure AD out of the equation once you have it up and running. On the Exchange side of things, I haven't found much need for local Exchange. In two different orgs I just handled all the mail functions in O365 either via Powershell or the web UI. There were some annoyances, but most of the "unsolveable" issues originated with users that were trying to use their email for something it was never intended to be used for.

Channel sprawl/exhaustion is a thing. At first people may like having things sorted out, but over time (sometimes very quickly) those additional channels will become a ghost town because people don't like having to maintain all of the different avenues of communication, and will just dump things into the most convenient channel. For example if you have an IT channel and then you have Site A, Site B, Site C, etc. over time people without your vision will stop using the site specific channels and just dump them in the general channel. This is one of the reasons why chat is terrible for documentation and reference.

Did you make any headway with the wiki project? It sounds like that is what you need more in general, perhaps with the ability to take notes on a given job as an adjunct so that the next person can see what was done and who was talked to. Notes should probably be in a ticketing system, so that they're tied to a task and a site.

Sorry for the wall of text. I hope that is helpful. I'm not trying to shoot you down, just trying to see the bigger picture and let you know what I've experienced in the past as successes and failures.

Google's built in backup is decent. I just had to use it recently. It was able to restore pretty much everything without a quibble. As for app specific data, that is reliant upon what the app is using for storing user data. Because there isn't a "right" way for app makers to store that information the burden lies on the consumer to get apps that leverage something to store their information/progress. I like to use apps that tie directly into my Google account, but some of them have their own account system that has been successful for me.