Useless Conversation

[RhyssaFireheart]

Are you wanting US to fix it ?

That will not end well.

Well, at this point, it can't end any worse that it has been.  I've been going back and forth trying to get the proper access straightened out for over a week now.

I just wanted to vent.  It helps keep me awake.

[murdoc]

Where is that Murdoc?

Calgary. It's really Goddamn cold right now.

[Chimpy]

Fuck this yo-yo weather. It was in the 20s on Saturday with snow on the ground, and at 2am today it was 52 degrees with a THUNDERSTORM. It needs to get cold and stay cold. This is fucking Illinois, I am supposed to have winter god damnit.

[Ironwood]

Actually, No-one will get that joke.

[Minvaren]

Where is that Murdoc?

Calgary. It's really Goddamn cold right now.

"...and I leave my entire estate of $10 million to the people of Calgary so they can afford to move somewhere decent!"   

[Sky]

Calgary. It's really Goddamn cold right now.

Decided to jump over the freezing line in time to dump a ton of rain on us. I'll take freezing, thanks. I'd like it to duck under freezing in the middle of December and not come back out until the middle of March. Any variance gets messy and floody and generally unpleasant. Also, might be a bit too warm for a fire tonight. Tomorrow is looking much nicer.


(I love NWS's graph feature)

[Yegolev]

I just wanted to vent.  It helps keep me awake.

Any escalation path?  Worst case, when you get someone on the phone you can demand to be given over to a manager.

[Nebu]

I'm in 60 degrees right now and would move to Calgary tomorrow if I could keep the same or similar job.  I grew up in Minnesota.  I'm no stranger to -40 temperatures and ridiculous wind chills.

[Salamok]

It only makes sense if you assume I'm the daftest cunt to come up the Clyde.

You can't do it via the command line/Powershell because Microsoft broke it for 2010 and Office365.  You're essentially fucked.

And his comment reminded me of the Microsoft Joke about the Hot Air Balloon.

I wasn't thinking of using the CLI, I was suggesting that a program could be written to do it using ADO/ODBC or some such.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa579226%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx

[Ironwood]

Not for Exchange 2010.  Which is what 365 is based on.

Bugger.

Seriously, mightier minds than mine are bashing heads off this one and I've only seen one person who's got anywhere.  He's selling the secret for lots.

:-(

[Ingmar]

I'll take all your rain and snow. California is on the path to a drought this year it looks like, and the ski resorts are apparently in pretty bad shape too. Allegedly it will start raining tomorrow but we'll see.

[Ironwood]

We have tons to spare.  Come get it anytime.

Please.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I just wanted to vent.  It helps keep me awake.

Any escalation path?  Worst case, when you get someone on the phone you can demand to be given over to a manager.

I wish.  I was finally sent a list of the "OCM Leads" for various divisions, none of which listed mine and none of the names I recognized.  And now other names are being copied on emails (again, names I don't recognize and which aren't on the list) as part of "can you help" chains.  This whole SAP roll-out has been a clusterfuck so far and I shouldn't be surprised considering it's IBM implementing it.  I learned how IBM "works" when I had to manage an integrated maintenance support project for a company where IBM won the IT outsourcing and HP was doing all the server/desktop/printer support.  That was funtiemz.

[Strazos]

80s to low 90s year-round. 

[Arthur_Parker]

Not for Exchange 2010.  Which is what 365 is based on.

Bugger.

Seriously, mightier minds than mine are bashing heads off this one and I've only seen one person who's got anywhere.  He's selling the secret for lots.

:-(

You probably already know this, but just in case, there's a pst capture tool due for release "soon".  We don't have office 365, just exchange 2010 which doesn't suffer from the problem.

[murdoc]

I'm in 60 degrees right now and would move to Calgary tomorrow if I could keep the same or similar job.  I grew up in Minnesota.  I'm no stranger to -40 temperatures and ridiculous wind chills.

What is it you do again? I know I should know that.

These cold snaps don't bother me too much, as the sun almost always is shining during them. It's awesome to be -40 but bright and sunny, especially when you're prone to depression. It's just too bad that it's only light out for about 8 hours.

[Ironwood]

Yes, I did thanks Arthur, but MS are like Blizzard.  'Coming Soon' means 'This is not gonna help you for a long time.'

To be honest, they don't even NEED to have this shit about scanning for PSTS and arranging them and all that shit.  They just need a better way to push that crap into their new product because the current way either breaks your system, doesn't work, or is just so slow you may as well wank endlessly while waiting.

[Ingmar]

How did you end up picking 365 over Google Apps by the way? When I did the cost analysis for our company 365 was over twice as expensive per year. Granted we wouldn't have been using the Sharepoint part of it. Exchange just too ingrained into the culture?

Google basically gave us a 2/3 discount as existing Postini customers on a 3 year deal, Microsoft told me straight up, "we don't try to compete with them on price, so no discount or price negotiation, sorry."

[Ironwood]

This is consultancy for clients who have picked 365.  I have 6 Office365 migrations and 4 BPOS transitions to endure in the next couple of months.  It's turning brutal and it's all about the fucking data.

Also, it's all about the Sharepoint.

(Further, I really, really don't like Postini compared to FOPE, but that's a personal thing.)

[Ingmar]

On the BPOS ones, are they going from BPOS back to in-house, or just BPOS to 365? It seems like the latter one should be pretty painless.

[Hammond]

So a general question for those folks that have switched to hosted 365 or google aps.  Did you switch due to management and if so why? Cost savings, Simplicity?  Personally at my current employer we will never outsource anything like email outside our company.  They like to keep control of it internal.  That being said I have ran and supported outsourced google aps, exchange, qmail, sendmail, postfix, and several more oddball servers over the years.

[Ingmar]

Google Apps isn't cheaper than doing it internally for us (about the same cost) but we get a much more robust system for the same price. We're much better off in terms of off-hours support, backup/restore, uptime, etc., with a hosted solution, as we have a very small IT staff and can't do 24/7 support in house. Since we have employees globally that has been a bit of an issue in recent years.

I won't deny that I have a little bit of trepidation about the prospect of outsourcing one of the primary systems for which I'm responsible, but the amount of admin time it requires won't really be changing much in the end.

[Nebu]

What is it you do again? I know I should know that.

These cold snaps don't bother me too much, as the sun almost always is shining during them. It's awesome to be -40 but bright and sunny, especially when you're prone to depression. It's just too bad that it's only light out for about 8 hours.

I'm a chemistry professor.  I'd move to Canada and become a citizen tomorrow if I could find a job.  Weather be damned.

I know how to ice fish, damnit!

[Ironwood]

On the BPOS ones, are they going from BPOS back to in-house, or just BPOS to 365? It seems like the latter one should be pretty painless.

BPOS to 365.  First one was at the weekend there and it went fairly smoothly.  Just a couple of hiccups.  We were all just nervous because Microsoft tried it back in November and fucking it so hard they cancelled and reverted.

[Chimpy]

or is just so slow you may as well wank endlessly while waiting.

I had lunch with my friend who is one of the Exchange admins at the University. He was telling me about the fun 4 nights of working his team has to do just to patch their exchange 2010 clusters (~30k mailboxes) this week.

[Ironwood]

Which is another reason that Cloud is compelling.  Who wants to do that shit anymore ?

[Hammond]

Don't get me wrong the public cloud (god I hate that buzzword) is not a bad idea.  But from a security standpoint it is a nightmare.  You are essentially outsourcing your security and infrastructure to the lowest bidder.  And lets not forget that Google's business is data and that they use inbound email as just one more source of information. 

Also as far as the patching goes why the fuck in this day and age cannot Microsoft build software that when you patch it you do not have to reboot the stupid device.   

[Ironwood]

I used to subscribe to that argument.  But it's usually shit.

I'd take security from Google Apps and Microsoft and Amazon over 99.9% of the shit that businesses cobble together for themselves.  Or, as is usually the case, ignore because they don't understand it.

As to your other point, it's not the restarting I mind it's the self-restarting that fucks me off.  "Good morning, there was an update last night so I restarted, shame about the 2.5Gb you were copying."

 

[Hammond]

True when you host it yourself you have a whole different set of security holes.  The difference is you can actually see and fix it vs whatever holes are out there on a hosted platform that they are not telling you about and glossing over.  I could tell you horror stories about hosted servers and the lack of updates / security holes.    I can only imagine whatever is being glossed over from microsoft / google. 

Plus you never know what kind of person is administrator on the other end. You could get someone like this.

http://gawker.com/5637234/

[Ironwood]

There was a certain Salesforce app on the app exchange that everyone loved and was recomended to us.  We looked at it and then looked again and then logged in as Guest and looked at everyone elses stuff.

We then got money from the owner to shut up while they patched.

True Story.  An Actual Ironwood True Story.

[Cyrrex]

I became a dad yesterday for the third time.  Big boy...8 pounds, 12 ounces give or take.

Scary.

[Ironwood]

Congratulations.

[Bunk]

I became a dad yesterday for the third time.  Big boy...8 pounds, 12 ounces give or take.

Scary.

Congrats.

Didn't I see you log in ToR last night? How the hell did you pull that off?

[Paelos]

"Honey? How you feeling? Ok great let me send out my companions and I'll brb."

[Lantyssa]

She probably couldn't get out of bed to stop him.

Congrats, dud!