I hate it, but then I bought some Lenovo gear and found that even more horrible, so I'm back to HP. Better the devil you know, I guess.

Is GoDaddy selling O365 via Open Licence? I looked into that arrangement with another vendor and decided it wasn't a good bet, I'd rather pay direct to Microsoft. I started a thread on it on here a while back.

There's also a balance between following best practice and thinking outside the box. A lot of progress has been made as a result of mavericks who were creative and didn't follow accepted best practice. Indeed, best practice changes over time, often as the result of people trying new ideas. There will always be times when I like to go my own way rather than follow the crowd, even if that often turns out to be a mistake.

I wouldn't be switching as I don't currently have a partner specified. NTG would be my first.

That's what I figured. I suppose I was wondering about accidentally exposing the hypervisor through human error.

It makes no sense to me that Microsoft would operate a two-tier system for its customers that have a partner of record. If NTG was my POR, why would Microsoft care how I originally signed up for O365 all those years ago? They're still getting paid, NTG are getting paid, why bar me from 1st class support? For eternity.

And as for that being Microsoft's preferred sign-up route, that can't be true. Where did you hear that? There is nothing on their website about being 'introduced' by a partner. Quite the opposite, they are encouraging you to sign-up straight away directly with Microsoft, or at least take out a trial directly with Microsoft.

Anyway, sod it. I'll go it alone as a 2nd class customer if that's the way it's got to be. I've survived thus far

It's all about the view for me. So a boring, minimalist office with a massive floor to ceiling window overlooking somewhere awesome, like Hong Kong harbour, would do it for me.

I don't expect consultants to know everything, and I always factor in a element of learning stuff whilst they're working for me. But you've got to get the balance right. Say 80/20 in my favour - so 80% of the time they're doing stuff they know, 20% they're figuring things out as they go along.

Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!

Yeah, that sounds really cool. I had an office on the 15th floor and it overlooked the roof of another building that had a guy that kept pigeons. Every afternoon I'd look out and watch his pigeons flying around and around our building. I found it really relaxing. This was right in the middle of Monk Kok- pretty much the most densely populated place in the world

It also had a KFC on the ground floor and I once went a month getting my lunch from there every day until I realised it was likely to end in an early death.

I loved that office.

@dafyre said:

Better busy, than bored, right?

Not when I need him!

Great stuff! The Pumpkin People! (PumpkinGirl is a better username than NetworkNerdWifey, by the way)

Our electricity is down this Saturday, and need to consider the best way to handle this with regards to shutting down our ESXi hosts and powering them on again. I Googled this and the first result I got was a thread I started on Spiceworks last year. It's always weird when that happens.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/456414-planned-power-outage-procedures

To cut a long story short, what I have done in the past when I know that the power will be out is to leave the hosts running with the firewall VM running. When the power goes off, both the hosts and the firewall VM will have a forced shutdown (I haven't configured the UPS for a clean shutdown). When the power goes on, the hosts and the firewall VM will autostart, allowing me to remotely access the hosts using vShpere Client and manually turn on all the other VMs.

Whilst this plan works, I'm concerned about the forced shutdown of ESXi and whether this gives a risk of corruption. But I have no other way of remotely restarting everything as the firewall is a VM.

Any advice, please?

Its interesting. Its useful to remember the power of photographer in propaganda. I saw a documentary on this and its influence on war photography. The photos of a crying child in Gaza, or a gunman in Syria, paints a powerful image, but without context, or without seeing the wider frame, the photo can create a false image.

There was a photo in the papers last year of a child refugee, walking alone, looking lost and lonely. It was quite an image. A few days later they posted a wider angle image showing about 200 adults walking with her, just a couple of hundred yards away from her. In that image, she didn't look lost and lonely at all. She'd just briefly become disconnected with the group and the photographer pounced.

To be fair, I've spent considerable energy on thinking about this. Also, I'm still having to shutdown all the other VMs and putting the other hosts in maintenance mode, so I'm doing some work.

@art_of_shred said:

No, wait for @scottalanmiller to wake up this morning.

He sleeps?

I agree Dash. In the last 3 years, since I rolled out Exchange 2010, I don't think I've had any downtime during working hours at all. Zero. I've had some planned downtime at the weekends/evenings when I've done reboots, but that's it.

Meanwhile, @scottalanmiller always seems to be posting on here that O365 is experiencing problems. It doesn't sound that reliable at all to me. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that hosted is more reliable than on-premise.

As for cost. I haven't worked it out recently, but I believe licence costs have worked out lower than subscription costs over 3 years. As for the time value of money, keen followers of my posts will probably know by now that I am an extremely lazy systems administrator. I do nothing with Exchange, it just sits there. Rightly, or wrongly, my time investment is practically zero. We also use filtering services to mitigate downtime as Dash suggested. Of course, I may just have been lucky.

That leaves security. I don't know. Our Exchange server is exposed to the internet, so is threatened, but I block OWA and ActiveSync for the majority of users. My fears with O365 security relate to compromised passwords.

I'm moving to O365 this year, but that's partly because of all the other products and services it offers. I'm not sure I migrate if it was just for hosted Exchange.

Internet is still up though, so all good for me as I hate phones anyway.

I've heard people recommend this. I've used Yammer for the first time today and it looks far too basic for project management. It's little more than a crap Facebook isn't it? Fairly pretty, but very basic.

Anyone using it successfully for project management?

I'm still trying to find something for my ERP project. I looked at Trello, which is ok. I'm now considering Basecamp, which is also ok in terms of functionality but doesn't look very nice (aesthetics are important to me).

Get a new job or wait it out in the hope that he'll get fired soon. No good can ever come from having a boss like this.

He may not need to be aware of best practice if it's your job to advise him. But if he isn't listening to your advice then you're screwed.

@Minion-Queen said:

For Project Management have you tried Asana?

Never heard of it, but I will trial it now. I like that it is free for up to 15 members, as we're not likely to exceed that. At least not on this project.