I got a reply from Zoho. "The usual delay in email fetching should be around 1-3 minutes. If you are consistently facing higher delay times in email fetching. Please send the respective email headers and ticket ID details to support"

To be honest, 3 minutes is too long for me. FreshDesk is a few seconds. I prefer to do support via e-mail rather than a browser portal so maybe that's why it's a big issue for me but not others.

Freshdesk is awesome. Support is ok, reasonably quick (for free), but I don't think English is their first language.

My main concern with any hosted solution like this is how do you backup your data? It doesn't look like you can. You can export tickets to a CSV file, but you're severely limited as to how much data will fit in a CSV file, so that's not a backup.

I'm nervous about trusting potentially years of data to a company providing me a service for free. It's not like trusting Microsoft or Google with your data, I don't know anything about Freshdesk.

Until I somehow overcome that fear, I'm not sure a hosted solution is for me. Especially a free hosted solution. How do you deal with this @Breffni-Potter?

Limited as in text only, whereas a ticket system contains pictures and attachments.

Pretty much all my tickets are picture based. The Snipping Tool is far and away my favourite piece of software ever!! And my users have gotten to love it to.

So now, instead of a ticket like:

Dear Carnival Boy

I'm trying to post a purchase order but it says the dimensions used in Order PO00084 are invalid. What should I do?

Regards

Sue in Accounts
..........................................................................................

I get

Dear Carnival Boy

???

Sue in Accounts

As an aside, I now use Chrome as my default PDF reader and don't bother installing Acrobat Reader. It's not bad, the only thing it's missing is an e-mail function. I haven't tried it with PDFs I have to fill in though.

@Jason said:

I've had 2016 Pro Plus and 2016 Business Premium (0365) on the same system before with no issues.

That's probably because they're both Click-to-run. It's trying to install Click-to-run and Windows-installer versions of the same suite that seems to be the issue.

We have got 2013 versions of Office 365 and standalone Access 2013 installed, so this seems to be a 2016 issue.

@Carnival-Boy said:

I thought they were now? I though Microsoft changed its mind (again)?

https://blogs.office.com/2013/03/06/office-2013-now-transferable/

But they look cool!

Microsoft's advice is to install an old version of Office (2013) which doesn't have this issue. I think that's a pretty disappointing response.

I'm just going to install Access 2013 which is fine for what I need. I suspect that by the time I want to upgrade Microsoft will have changed everything around again.

I've never experienced anything similar in all my years in IT. You can't install the latest products of a vendor's software together because they are incompatible with each other.

Worse still, there is a click-to-run version of Access that would work perfectly and is identical in almost every way to the MSI version of Access, but it isn't available under Volume Licence.

You basically need to decide if you are a volume licence customer or an O365 customer - you can't be both.

@scottalanmiller said:

What's also important is that people jump on these threads and see "issue with hosted" and start to assume that on premises never breaks and that hosted always breaks.

I wouldn't have thought so. Everything breaks. It would be a very naive IT bod who claims that on-premise never breaks. It's about which breaks the most, or which is more likely to break.

The best thing about hosted is that when it breaks it's normally someone else's fault, whereas when on-premise breaks it is usually my fault. And I always like the ability to deflect blame away from myself!

@RamblingBiped said:

I'm heading North to spend a week and a half hitting breweries and wineries across Wisconsin and Michigan. THAT will hopefully help my attitude and outlook.

That would help anybody's attitude and outlook! Be sure to post on here at 2am when you've just got back to your room and you're drunk and happy.

@scottalanmiller said:

Google Picasa was their competition to Flickr. From what I can tell, it failed. I'm loathe to depend on any Google systems as they don't tend to have any longevity. I've already been justified in avoiding Picasa and I wasn't even aware that they replaced it with something new. And that something new has a fraction of the press and attention that Picasa had... so the chances that it is going to stick around seems low.

I wouldn't say it failed. It was a desktop app and Google (and to a large degree, the world) has moved on from desktop apps to pure cloud based solutions. There was also Picassa Web Albums which has been superceded by Google Photos. The world moves on. That's a good thing, right?

I think Google Photos is much better than Flickr. Flickr's looking a bit dated now.

This is really winding me up today. I went on to Techradar.com at lunchtime for a bit of light reading and the headline was "Microsoft tightens Office 2016 security with anti-macro measures". "Cool", I thought.

The headline and article was based on a new blog post from Microsoft here:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2016/03/22/new-feature-in-office-2016-can-block-macros-and-help-prevent-infection/ with the headline "New feature in Office 2016 can block macros and help prevent infection"

At no point in either article does it point out that these group policy features aren't available to several versions of Office 2016. It is only available to O365 Enterprise versions (and ProPlus and Volume Licence). Sure, it talks about "Enterprise Administrators", but it's not obvious that enterprise administration means an enterprise plan.

You have to go to this document to actually find out which versions of Office support group policy:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-applications-service-description.aspx

I think it's a disgrace that a plan that is advertised as supporting up to 300 users doesn't include group policy support. 300 Office users is a fairly sizeable company in my book.

@Dashrender said:

FYI - Currently we limit non admin users to 200 MB of Mail, and admin are more or less unlimited. our current Exchange DB is 40 GB

Wow, that's tiny. Surely at that size it doesn't really matter what you do, you'll never have any issues? How do users cope with just 200mb?

Rightly or wrongly, I've always believed calculation tools always massively over-spec. I've always started small with the knowledge that I can expand later if I hit any problems (I never do). So for example, is there any reason you can't start with one DB and add another at a later date if you're unhappy?

I'm no expert, just an interested by-stander, by the way.

It's kind of in a blogger's interest to make things as complicated as possible isn't it? The more complicated it is, the more he has to explain...

I find the same with cookery writers (my other interest) - why use one pan when you can write complicated recipes that use three?

@scottalanmiller said:

Your other interest is cookery, or writing about cookery?

Both. I cook and I collect cookbooks.

@Breffni-Potter said:

Hi @kennym

If cold calling does work, why do so many vendors lose my business when they do it?

I've got a company, I want to generate more sales, how do I do it with cold calling then without

• Turning people off
• Annoying people
• Getting added to a phone black list.

I don't answer my phone any more, but when I did you're probably the kind of caller who I would be receptive to - a senior IT guy not a salesman, and a small business owner. Companies like that have been succesful with me in the past.

What I really hate is firms who outsource their cold calling to specialist marketing firms (which is about 90% of cold calls). If you can't be bothered to talk to me and outsource it, why should I. I've thought about outsourcing my call answering to someone else so two call centre monkeys can have endless conversations with each other.

@scottalanmiller said:

But if a company wants to cold call politely, there is SPAM for that. No matter how hated SPAM is, it is far more polite than cold calling.

I have two problems with e-mail marketing versus phone marketing:

1. E-mail is my primary communication channel, so I can't choose to ignore it. I will always read e-mail within minutes of it being received, whereas I have the option to simply not answer my phone. I can ignore my phone but I can't ignore e-mail. I appreciate everyone is different, but this is how I work.
2. I check my e-mail when I'm at home or on vacation. So having to receive spam is a really pain. Whereas cold calls are to my office phone, and therefore only interrupt me when I'm in the office.

I've tried getting around this by having a separate e-mail address to give to people who I don't want to hassle me, but somehow spammers always get hold of my primary e-mail address.

But the absolute worse is firms that do both.
"Hi Carnival Boy, I just thought I'd phone you to see if you got the e-mail I sent you last week about our exciting deals on Cisco products. Did you get it?"
And then they get offended when I politely tell them that no, I don't read spam.

One thing that has always bugged me, that you might have an answer for:
In Outlook, right-click Junk, there are three options:
Block sender
Never block sender
Never block sender's domain

Where is the option to block sender's domain?

This would be really useful, as a lot of spam has a unique e-mail address but always comes from a single domain (the domain of the marketing company). I believe the official reason Outlook doesn't give me the option is that Microsoft thinks I'm an idiot and need protecting from accidentally blocking a domain.