Real World Computing

Over the past few months, I've been looking at a whole range of options to do with file storage on the basis that Microsoft's OneDrive simply doesn't do what we need. The whole time of course, I've been unable to shake the feeling that Microsoft should be offering something that already covers this space. After all, file sharing is one of the major "tentpoles" in most Windows networks.  As it turns out, SharePoint is the answer to this - and it works well if it's playing nicely with OneDrive.  My initial investigation of SharePoint was flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it appears that I was looking at an "old version".  The "new" version has really only started to come out over the last few months but it's light years ahead of its predecessor. The second reason that SharePoint was overlooked was because I really didn't have a great understanding of how (or why) it works. I was trying to compare it to IBM Domino a...

Last time on Real World Computing, I talked about migrating mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Office 365 . Now it's time for Part 2.  Mail Routing We did routing in two parts. Initially we had MX records for both IBM and Microsoft with Microsoft having the higher number (which means lower priority). After the cutover date we switched the priorities so that Microsoft Office 365 had the higher priority. One of the cool things about Microsoft’s setup is that they give you two domains, one is your own and the other is an @mycompany.onmicrosoft.com one. When we first saw this we thought it was a “bit wanky” but as it turned out, it was very useful indeed.we quickly discovered that we couldn't send mail to our internal colleagues on outlook from notes and that all of the agents in our Domino applications were only delivering internally. Changing these to point to the onmicrosoft addresses fixed that problem. As far internal mail, we just added a mail rule to f...

It was always just a matter of time. Eventually we were going to have to make the jump from IBM to Microsoft. It's not that IBMs software isn't good. It's very good. It's simply that IBM is the Beta to Microsoft's VHS. Technically the IBM product line is far superior but on the surface, IBMs poor UI will never match the incredible pull of Microsoft's polished Office 365 offerings. We're just finishing a mail migration from IBM Notes/Verse to Microsoft Outlook, which we did entirely in-house and I thought it would be worthwhile going over the method we used. The Before Status Prior to the migration, all of our users had the IBM Notes client on their desktops. We had three production servers and two test/dev servers. All of our user mailboxes were on the IBM Cloud and we had a split with some users on Verse and some on Notes. We were also running an extensive extranet with a myriad of centrally controlled expansive security options. Our address books...