How does the IT department handle fonts? In my case, the answer is badly or not at all.

I've never really understood how to manage and handle the licencing of fonts. Where to buy them from? If you need to buy them? What your licence covers? We buy software packages that come with fonts, but are these fonts usage restricted?

An example case. A user receives an Adobe InDesign document from a third-party and wants to work on that document. The document uses Helvetica because the third-party uses Macs. I believe I have to buy this from Linotype.com. It's around $1500. That seems expensive. Is there a better way.

If I do buy it, how to manage it from an auditing point of view? Is there an easy way to ensure compliance?

I also have users (so called "graphic designers") who insist on using obscure fonts which causes chaos. There are hundreds of Windows fonts they could use for free. Why can't they? Why can't they just use Arial (or Calibri) for everything like normal users? /rant

I hate them. If I had my way everyone would just use Courier New for everything.

Any tips would be appreciated.

@scottalanmiller said in The Sales vs. Expertise Scale:

Maybe you are not getting advice from the right places.

This is not about me, but you raise a good point. It costs time (and thus money) just to find the right place to look. So in your example, a home user might only need 15 minutes of expert advice, but where does he find that advice? The search costs money.

In our dishwasher example, where do you find an expert that will charge 15 minutes of his time to help you out?

Wow, tough crowd on this thread.

@magroover said in Moving from Exchange Online Plan 1 to In House Exchange 2016:

Does everyone here pretty much use Office 365 for email, then?

On-premise still here.

I think some of the ranting against your employers by certain posters on here is way OTT. They haven't asked you to go and club some seals. There was clearly a massive breakdown in trust between your predecessor and your employers and that's going to affect how much they trust you, rightly or wrongly. It's going to take longer than normal for you to build up a good, trusting relationship with them. Once bitten, twice shy and all that.

I wouldn't over analyse your situation. Installing Exchange and AD on a new server should be fun and will make your employers happy. Just enjoy it.

Cripple them? Insane?

We're still talking about on-premise Exchange here?

Our remote workers use OD4B to store their personal work documents because it seemed quicker and more reliable than using offline files and syncing to our file servers over a VPN. However, I'm concerned about backups and disaster recovery - specifically after a cryptolocker type attack.

I was under the impression that Microsoft take daily backups of all OD4B and Sharepoint Online data and that you can get them to restore all files from backup from a certain point in time. It certainly appears that Sharepoint is backed up, as documented here https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/akieft/2012/01/09/restore-options-in-sharepoint-online/ and other places. But what about OD4B? I assumed that would be the same.

However, reading this Spiceworks thread, it appears not:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1861266-did-you-know-one-drive-for-business

I know there's a lot of love and experience for O365 on ML, and am looking for some definitive answers. Do Microsoft backup OD4B, and if not, how do you back it up? There are a number of backup products on the market, but none of them seem that mature. I've heard Veeam is releasing something this year, but based on pricing for their Exchange Online solution, it isn't going to be cheap.

As a more general point, how do you handle O365 in your disaster recovery plan? With our on-premise systems we do regular restores of our servers (Exchange, Sharepoint, File Servers etc etc) into a lab environment to test, but that's not possible with O365. Do you just trust Microsoft without really being able to test?

@JaredBusch said in Backing up OneDrive for Business:

I was in on for Miss solution simple it all has to be backed up everything after he backed up everywhere it does not matter whether posted.

Er...say what?

@DustinB3403 said in Tracking User Active Hours for Better Downtime Planning:

why would anyone need to be up so late except for in the most urgent of issues is insane to me.

That's the problem you have. Defining "urgent". Logging activity gives you a sense of the quantity of work carried out after hours, but not the quality.

An example we might have: our guys are working on a multi-million dollar deal and the client e-mails them from New York in the late afternoon. The client doesn't care that it is midnight where we are in the UK, he expects an immediate answer. That one e-mail is more important than the thousand e-mails we received during the day. In financial terms, it could represent 20% of our revenue. So 0.0001% of IT activity represent 20% of revenue.

You can't analyse that. You can only trust that if your guys say they need 24/7/365 access, they do.

@scottalanmiller said in the missing VoIP, the ERP and the solution in search of a problem:

Just pay whatever the ERP vendor asks. The company has made their decisions.

This. They sound pretty clear about what they want to do and pretty clear that they don't want your advice or to include you in decision making. So why go to all the hassle of keeping your existing phone system when they've already told you to ditch it? You're setting yourself up to fail by that route. If you're already planning on leaving in 2018, just sit back and enjoy the ride for the next 12 months or so.

Absolutely. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but Lucy Kellaway's series of office spaces are great. Like this Lego one

Youtube Video

@Breffni-Potter said in Webroot - Malicious autorun scripts on USBs:

Triggered before I touched any files.

Perhaps showing my ignorance here, but is autorun still a thing? I somehow thought it was disabled in Windows since about XP?

We keep a lot of mission critical, highly confidential data in O365, Google Apps and Dropbox. I don't have a problem with this. Their security is significantly better than anything I can provide on-premise as an SMB. There is risk, but it is acceptable risk. It's not something I feel a need to worry about.

But what about smaller providers? We use Freshdesk as our helpdesk ticketing system. I know very little about them. I don't even know what country they're based in. They're not small, but they''re not massive. We keep a lot of sensitive data in some of our helpdesk tickets (passwords, server details etc etc). I'm trusting that Freshdesk servers have adequate security, but I have no way of knowing. How do I manage this?

Data theft would be terrible. Data loss would also be terrible. We don't pay for Freshdesk. Rightly or wrongly, I always feel more confident using a paid service. If nothing else, expectations of support in case of data loss or theft is going to be higher when you're paying for it.

As well as risk of theft or data loss, there is a risk of the provider simply disappearing without notice. You go to use your software and just get a message "Sorry, we're dead. Everything is gone". Or you get a 30 day notice that the service is closing down - this isn't so bad, because you at least have some time to move your data somewhere else, but it's still terrible.

How do you deal with this? Do you sleep ok at night?

@scottalanmiller said in Free SharePoint?:

@momurda said in Free SharePoint?:

@scottalanmiller That's really great. Now my boss wont ask me to make a SP server if i tell him itll cost thousands of dollars. And i will be happy.

Yup, the last, highly limited free version was FOUR years ago. At this point, even that one is old enough that it sounds like a bad idea for a new deployment.

That's not that old. I don't think it deserves writing in upper case It's under mainstream support until 2018. I'd be more concerned about still using SQL Server 2008 with it. Now that is old, and expensive to upgrade.

We're using 2013 Foundation. I've never ran into limitations that bother me, it's a great product. We are moving to Sharepoint Online in the next 12 months though. If you're used to free, and you don't use O365 already, the $60 per user per year may sting a bit, especially if you don't really need the extra features versus Foundation and you already have SQL Server on-premise.

I imagine that migrating a 250+ user Sharepoint server to Alfresco is a massive project. Good luck.

I'm not recommending it. Depends on the OP's circumstances. But you could probably get the whole thing, installed, migrated and live in a couple of hours (he says, having never actually done it). Sure, there's a massive element of kicking the can down the road by sticking with free Sharepoint, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is a good idea. Only sometimes though!

@dafyre said in Patch Fast:

There is no real reason for businesses of any size to not be able to backup (at bare minimum) and / or snapshot their systems before running patches.

Who here snapshots their systems before patching their Microsoft servers? Scott says it's so easy to snapshot and roll back, so perhaps I'm missing a trick here? I can see that it's easy if you're manually installing patches, but who does that?

The other problem is that you may not realise that a patch has broken something for a couple of days, and by then it's likely to be too late to satisfactorily restore from backup.

That's ok at a larger organisation, but trickier at a smaller one where there's only one or two IT staff, or they use an MSP. Having a maintenance window during the week is nice though.

I've used Veeam Endpoint a bit, which handles bare metal and is also free. Might be worth trying it out.

Meraki is no longer free :(, so I'm looking at other, paid alternatives. To manage around 60 iPhones & iPads, and ideally around 30 laptops. Suggestions, please? I know there are a few Meraki SM users on ML. I'm happy to stick with Meraki but I haven't got any pricing yet.

I joined the ML bandwagon but never actually used it. I just paid my money and then forgot about it.

I only remember it when I got an e-mail this morning:

Hello,
I would like to thank you for choosing us to host your servers.
As we value your business it is important to keep your account up to date.
You currently have an invoice that has not been paid.

I'm glad they don't have my bank details! I've never heard of a company just randomly deciding to invoice someone.

@scottalanmiller said in Is the computer repair business dead?:

@Carnival-Boy said in Is the computer repair business dead?:

Chromebooks are still niche.

Top selling computer category in the US. Anything but niche.

Where do you read that? Everything I've read is that outside of schools Chromebooks still have a tiny market share in the US.

I don't know a single person who owns one. I'd guess that 99% of my friends don't even know what one is.