Real World Computing

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...

Teams or SharePoint Both! Teams IS SharePoint. (okay, so we know they're separate applications but I've had to labour this point for the sake of our staff).  Teams and SharePoint are two parts of the same thing and they can't exist without each other.  You'll find that sometimes SharePoint is more appropriate and sometimes teams is.  It doesn't matter. You can switch between the two as needed.  Teams is essential for meetings. SharePoint is best for browsing through files. Why Create a Teams Site? You should create a teams site for any of the following reasons; You want to text-chat regularly with a group of people (internal and/or external) You want to be able to share files regularly with a group of people.  You're collaborating on a project or working group.  You have a group that has regular meetings with, particularly online and ad-hoc meetings.  You want to create a SharePoint site for a group of people to use.  First Steps 1. Go to the Micr...

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...

Attaching files from SharePoint has gotten a little easier of late. I'm not quite sure when the changes happened but they're very welcome.   The new functionality is available in the outlook client and outlook web access. It's available for most SharePoint groups right now, with SharePoint groups created via Yammer following at the end of May 2018. Attachments in the Outlook Client Use the following steps to attach a file via the Outlook client; Create a new Email On the Message Tab, click Attach, Below the list of recent documents, click Browse Web Locations When this expands to show a list, choose Group Files You should see your SharePoint libraries appear in a list. There's a few reasons why you might not see all of your libraries.  If this is the first time that you're using this feature, or if you're using a new installation of Outlook, it may take a while (up to 20 minutes) to fully populate the list of sites. You don't have to w...

It's just over 12 months since we made our first forays into the Office 365 space and I'm convinced that we made the right call at the right time.  Any earlier and it would have been wrong because SharePoint hadn't gained traction and OWA was undeveloped. Any later and we'd have lost our unique position.as innovators in this space.  It hasn't all been smooth sailing and many of our legacy systems are still on IBM Domino. The approach to migration was rushed and flawed but I'm looking forward to 2018 when the dust settles and we can begin to move forward in a more orderly manner.  All things considered though, I'm proud to have been part of the technological achievements of the year which included a complete revamp of the hardware and software in the office; including the replacement of all desktops with Microsoft Surfaces and Apple MacBooks, the replacement of our meeting room systems with Microsoft's Surface Hub technology, an office move, a rebrandi...

So, you've got yourself a few Surface Hubs and now you're having a big meeting. Big enough to need to use both hubs together. So... how do you do it? The Problem In our case, we have two meeting rooms, each with a Microsoft Surface hub on the wall.  The rooms have a removable partition which enables it to be opened up into a large board room. Unfortunately, when this happens, the meeting participants can't always see the "master screen".  The ideal solution to this would be to have the display of the master screen duplicated on a "slave screen".  The diagram below illustrates this need. Two Methods There are two ways in which the screen can be duplicated.  Method 1 involves skype. It's fairly easy to set up and requires no cabling. Unfortunately, because of generally slow internet speeds, it doesn't cope with high motion slideshows -- and it certainly doesn't cope with video. The other method involves cables. In this pos...

I've spent the last couple of months on Microsoft's Surface Book 4 (i7) and I've had enough time to form an opinion. I generally hate laptops but I've found the Surface Book to be fast enough and easy enough to do the majority of my work on. The touchscreen is very responsive and I love being able to detach the tablet from the base - though admittedly, I rarely have a good business reason to do it. We ordered around 45 of the devices all at once. One was DOA and another had batteries in the base that worked but dysfunctional batteries in the screen.  At around 4% failure it's probably still a reasonable return rate for hardware. In terms of general use, the keyboard and trackpad are fine and the display is very clear. The processing power of the device is good and multi-touch on the trackpad and display are great too. The pen is currently a little useless and gimmicky but I've recently discovered that it works with the current version of Corel, so I may ...

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...

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...

2017 marks the beginning of a massive shift in technology at work. We’re re-branding,  we’re moving office and we're changing our technology from IBM to Microsoft. It's going to be a wild ride and I hope that you’ll stay with the blog as I delve into the new world and try to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I've been on Notes/Domino since version 3.0 and I haven't used outlook at all, apart from a week in 1995 when I decided that I hated it (plus of course, the regular interactions with outlook die-hards where I've had to fix their computers). My personal favourite mail client is Gmail though I've been forcing myself to use Google’s inbox for the past three years. Of course I've used a lot of other web based mail systems over the years. IBM Connections Last year our company made the leap to IBM Verse and Connections.  It was a disaster. IBM connections is a very powerful and capable product marred by a terrible and inconsistent interfa...

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...

We have a lot of documents and they go back several decades. Many of them  are still relevant today, even if they're only background to current projects. The problem is that Word doesn't like its own file formats. It won't open documents created with versions of Word earlier than 1997 and it crashes with anything saved as .DOC which contains macros.  There's some solutions to these problems though; Opening Older Documents It's possible to change Word 2016's settings to allow you to open old documents; Click File,  Then Options Then Trust Center Click on the button marked Trust Center Settings Click on File Block settings. UN Tick the document types that you want to be able to open and click Ok Of course, just because you CAN, doesn't mean that you should. Word is less stable with these settings turned on, and it's able to open documents which could be potentially dangerous.  If you're looking at your company's archives t...