SystemWise is a Microsoft Cloud Partner and can advise you on how cloud technologies can benefit to your company.

This year, SystemWise has been training on Office 365 and have also attended a Microsoft course on the subject so that we can confidently sell and support the product. So far we’ve been impressed.

Cloud based email systems are not a perfect fit for all companies though and we’ll see a split of companies using cloud based email systems and on-premise email servers.

Anyway, this blog post is really just to highlight a couple of pros and cons experienced by SystemWise in the last week.

We recently took on a new client who had a requirement to move away from their ISP’s POP email system. The cost involved of installing an on-premise email server was too great for a five user network so Microsoft’s Office 365 product was chosen.

For just over £10 ex VAT per month, the client got all the functionality they required. The setup of the mailboxes was straightforward but the client had requirements to have a shared mailbox, share calendars, disable webmail, disable smartphone integration and a few other bits and pieces. Now these changes would have taken only a few minutes if the client had an on-premise email server, a few mouse clicks and away we go. However, in Office 365, the administration is mostly done using a command shell (typing code). This is a step back into the dark ages really. The whole point of graphical user interfaces (GUI) was to get away from command line interfaces and make administration simpler on a day to day basis.

Microsoft doesn’t really have a manual or guide on the most common commands so Google is your best bet at learning. So what should have taken only five or ten minutes at most, turned into a three hour research and experimentation exercise. As it stands, Office 365 administration is not something that a non-IT pro can easily do. We have started to build a library of commands here so that in future, any non-simple changes should take considerably less time.

On the flip side…….

Another one of our clients has an on-premise email server which affords them ultimate flexibility in terms of configuring the email system to their requirements. During some routine maintenance, they experienced some downtime that wouldn’t have happened were they “in the cloud”!

A routine anti virus and anti spam upgrade on the email server, which had worked perfectly at four other clients, failed. This led to the server not being able to send or receive emails. The anti virus protection was then disabled which allowed emails to flow but they were not being scanned for viruses or spam. Not ideal!

The fix involved a few calls to the anti virus vendor, several reboots and taking down the email system for a good couple of hours. Total disruption was about four hours and fortunately there was no serious harm. Had this particular client been using Microsoft Office 365 for their email then the anti virus/anti spam upgrade wouldn’t have been necessary. With Office 365 it is Microsoft’s responsibility to ensure that the security systems are up to date.

So what does this tell us…… there are pros and cons to both types of systems and having a good IT support company to assist in times of need is essential.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/contents/made

Cookies are used by almost all websites, for a variety of purposes:

• Analysis of visitor behaviour (known as ‘analytics’)
• To personalise pages and remember visitor preferences
• To manage shopping carts in online stores
• To track people across websites and deliver targeted advertising

More info can be found here.   This is perhaps the clearest explanation which I have read.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2012/04/27/the-cookie-law-clarity-at-last-but-not-from-the-ico

SystemWise can help make your website EU Compliant, why not contact us today.

This weekend we were running through a SBS2003 to SBS2011 swing migration. Traditionally when we move clients away from their SBS2003 servers we would go in at a weekend, remove the old server, install the new one, transfer the data and then reconfigure every single computer on the network. This was a very time consuming and mentally draining excercise especially when you have 30+ PCs to reconfigure. Not something i’d like to do every month!

Microsoft have released an official migration path to SBS2011 but this has its pitfalls to; the need to carry out some reconfiguration at all PCs and the fact that you have 7 days to do complete the migration. If you over run this time frame due to technical issues you then need to do a bare metal restore to before the migration started and all the hassle that that entails.

The method that we have just started to use is the Swing Migration by Jeff Middleton. Jeff is a bit of a legend in the SBS community and I had the pleasure of meeting him recently at the Edinburgh Microsoft/HP SBS community roadshow. The swing migration allows you to perform the bulk of the SBS2003 to SBS2011 migration offline with the client still working away on their old SBS2003 server. After this, there is minimal client reconfiguration needed and it’s much simpler on transition day. The downtime comes when we need to actually move the client’s data from the old server to the new one. Swing Migration is something that we’ll definately be using more of.

It was during a swing migration that we had a problem that really threw us. We were preparing the client’s new Dell PowerEdge T410 server here in our office getting ready to install it the next day. While installing Microsoft updates on the client’s new SBS2011 server here in our office, we installed a SharePoint patch http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2553413 ran PSConfig (as it seems we have to after all sharepoint updates) and then rebooted. After the reboot we tested sharepoint and got a “Service Unavailable, HTTP error 503″ (how come we always get errors with sharepoint???!!!). We troubleshooted this issue for over an hour but didn’t get anywhere really so we we decided to restore the server to a point a couple of hours earlier using the normally excellent Windows Server Backup utility that is part of the operating system. One hour later and the server boots back up but instead of getting a log in screen we get a black screen with a white mouse curser. We wait and wait and wait but nothing happens. A bit of researching and we find the cause of the problem. As part of the Swing Migration, you are advised to install http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974674 Windows NT Restore Utility which allows you to transfer the client’s data from the old server to the new server. It seems that once this utility is installed subsequent backups are corrupt preventing a full bare metal restore. This is disastrous!!! it’s a pretty rare issue but one that I feel we’ll see cropping up on blog sites soon enough. I’m just glad we found it in a pre-production environment and not in two years time during a disaster!

I’ll be contacting Microsoft to let them know about this issue and will also contact Jeff Middleton so that their procedure can warn against this. Hopefully this will save someone’s business somewhere down the line.

For us, it means a failed Swing Migration, a few lost a few days worth of work and a delay to the client for getting their new server but we learned a very good lesson so in the end it was kind of worth all the hassle. So the moral of the story? test your backups regularly, not just restoring a single file, but the whole server. I also like to use two backup methods to counter a single bizarre issues like this. I’ve been in enough disaster recovery situations to know that the more backups and backup types the better!

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