Real World Computing

Lotus Notes is old software and I should know, I've been using it for 30 years. It's so old that it pre-dates the internet and it's considered to be one of the first popular "email" platforms. It's still widely in use today but many users simply don't want to talk about it. A Quick Apology I want to begin with a quick apology for the inflammatory title and the use of the word "Lotus". After all, we don't call PowerPoint "Forethought Presenter" anymore do we? There's a very specific audience that I'm talking to with this post and if you're not calling it HCL Domino, then that's you.  Wormhole Image generated by Stable Diffusion AI Are you still on the platform? A lot of people who believe that they migrated off the Notes/Domino platform many years ago are still using the software. It's so capable that it's hard to replace. It's quite often still running major operations from dusty unloved servers in back r...

We've just emerged from a week of hell in which Azure and Microsoft have completely lost my trust. It's raised a lot of questions about Azure and Marketplace and came very close to making front-page news.  There are obviously certain details that I can't talk about but I'll say this. The upper echelons at Microsoft were made fully aware of the damage they were causing and the impact that our five day outage was having on several very large players and also on hundreds of individuals. They were completely ineffectual and did nothing to resolve the solution.  Image by dexmac from Pixabay A Word About Billing I don't think I've talked about how bad Microsoft's billing systems are, so it's worth spending a little time here. I've dealt with billing from hundreds of companies over the years but nothing has ever approached the complete obscurity of their billing.  It's not just the big things that are obscure either. Even when you obtain a small pay-as...

Understanding MFA In today's world passwords and pin numbers are simply not enough and muti-factor authentication (MFA) is increasingly required to combat fraud. MFA means that you need to use a secondary form of authentication, such as an app on your phone, in addition to a password when signing into systems.  These instructions walk you through the process of setting up MFA for a user. You may need them if your user switches phones or has to have MFA disabled and re-enabled. In the Admin Portal While technically you could skip this step and go directly to the console via its url, it's probably easier for most people to find their way from the Admin portal, so that's where I'll start. Open the Office 365 Admin Portal . ( https://admin.microsoft.com/ ) Click on Users , then on Active Users Click on the dots at the end of the menu and choose Setup Multifactor Authentication . This will take you to the MFA console.  In the MFA console Click on the M...

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...

One of the less obvious trends of the last five years has been the race to own people's "digital identities". It started in earnest with Facebook and Gmail and it soon spread to Apple and LinkedIn. More recently, we've seen Microsoft and IBM jumping on the bandwagon and I think that's when I started to realise that there was much more to this than simply "targeted advertising". Quiet Beginnings  At this point, I'm not sure that all of the founding companies in this revolution fully understand what is going on - and indeed, there are many companies out there today who are still using digital identities simply as a means of easily logging people onto their systems, storing user preferences and targeting advertising. Certainly that was the original plan on our own systems. Taking it to the next level  Digital identity is the cornerstone in any form of electronic ledger system. It's one of the key foundations of commerce. People don...