Real World Computing

You'd think that setting rooms up in Office 365 would be a simple matter of going to the Office 365 Admin console, expanding Resources, clicking on Rooms and Equipment and then using the Add Button This works but it doesn't do everything. If you want your rooms to appear in the Room List (and to show available times), you'll have to use PowerShell to put them there. Finding Answers So... I spent a while trying to find the answers without a whole lot of luck. I think that coming from the Notes/Domino world and not being familiar with the outlook terminology hindered me a bit in this regard.  In any case, big thanks to IT for Dummies btw whose page called " Create Room List Office 365 " made very little sense to me but helped me to explain to Microsoft Support what it was that I was looking for.  BTW: Microsoft support can be reached via the Support and then Service Requests options in the Admin Center. I've found their support to be excel...

We started moving over to Office 365 quite a while before we decided to ditch Notes mail and move to Outlook. It was also my plan to get rid of our internal active directory server and rely solely on the cloud for authentication.  As it turned out, management wanted to keep the AD server a little longer, so we've had to synchronise our onsite accounts with the Office 365 ones. The synchronisation processes immediately created duplicates (and sometimes triplicates) of users.  The journey to resolve this issue was time consuming and data destructive, so I thought I'd let everyone know how to fast-track it. What Causes the Problems Microsoft's Office 365 users have unique ID's much like the objects in the Active Directory. When you create a user from scratch on Office 365, you create them with a unique ID. While there are tools that will let you change these unique IDs, we've found that they generally do more damage than good. Deleted people are another pa...

Microsoft OneDrive is great! It's easy to use too and has some really great integration into Office 2016 - which means that when you go to save or open files, instead of displaying a file dialog, it renders the folder names right into the panel. Sadly the sharepoint integration in Office 2016 is still dialog-based.  On the surface, it looks like a great files storage solution but as it turns out, just like Tolkien's OneRing, beneath that shiny surface, OneDrive is mostly evil.  At work, we're still using an old file server which allows people in the company to save files into public, personal or restricted access areas. It's a great browsable structure with the main drawbacks being that it's on a local file server (which means ageing infrastructure and semi-manual backup procedures) and security because it needs a VPN to get to our internal systems. Many of our users still find a VPN too complex to set up and it's hard to get a VPN that runs on all flavo...