Tech for Thought

If you are ever faced with moving from one hosted Exchange platform to another or moving from Exchange In-house to hosted. MigrationWiz is the way to go.

Enter your OWA (Outlook Web Access) URL to the existing service and the OWA URL to the new, confirm some credentials and MigrationWiz will migrate your email from one service to the other. It’s fantastic! This is my fourth migration using it.

I actually moved someone from In-house to Office 365 tonight. You might say to me, “well Office 365 will do that on it’s own”. True. But tonight, the O365 utility would not work properly because we were using a “Self-Signed” certificate. Sure I may have been able to figure it out, but for a few dollars a user, MigrationWiz was able to move email without a problem.

My favorite part, the Premium package comes with a “multi-pass” option. Run it once to get the bulk of the email. But then run it a couple more times for changes. And after you have put your users on the new service, run it again in the background for the slower DNS propagation emails you always run into.

Very happy with the product! What a time saver!!

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

After hours of banging my head against the desk on an issue I could not resolve. Light bulb! My user groups!

I am involved in community groups via Yahoo groups, Google groups and others. I am on three IT based boards/Task forces. I try to give knowledge wherever I can because I usually need way more back than I contribute.

Desperate and frustrated. I reached out to a few user groups. I got handed the answer to my client’s problem by a newsgroup friend. Funny enough…miles away from me. Spot on! Thank you!

I can only hope I have provided the same to someone else in the past!

Get involved. Give back. Join groups. Volunteer.

We are all smarter and better together.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

Well, it’s been a few months of using Windows 8 full time on every device. I learn most technology like the rest of us, by playing around with it. But if I have learned one thing about Windows 8, you will never find all the features, shortcuts and navigation without doing some reading. Too many Windows key shortcuts, changes and the plain inability to run common tasks without learning how.

It can be quite frustrating to try and figure out on your own. I just picked up a Windows 8 for IT professionals book and there has been plenty of ‘Oh…..’ reactions.

Read articles, buy a book or magazine, take a class. If you are a home user you will have a much more pleasant experience, if you use Windows 8 at work or your employees do, productivity depends on it.

One thing is for sure, Microsoft has changed navigation on Windows 8 more than any other version upgrade. You could argue Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was as big a shift I suppose. And I think it’s fair to say newer versions of Windows to come, will have a large percentage of these new features carried forward. Therefore training and learning now, will pay dividends into the future!

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

I’m the first one to be critical and weigh the downsides of hosted Exchange. The fact that you have no control over your data, or uptime are just a couple. But recently it hit me while fighting with some related issues, three major risks to hosting Exchange in-house, and how Office 365 doesn’t really alleviate them, but at least takes them off your plate.

Being Blacklisted. No longer being able to send email to certain people due to the RBL(Real Time Blacklist) providers putting you on their list. Whoever has had this happen knows what a pain it can be. And especially frustrating if it a false positive.

Having to open https 443 to your server. Hacking and probing has gone up leaps and bounds over the last few years. It’s pretty scary to have to leave 443 wide open to your server in order for OWA and ActiveSync to work.

Keeping security updates perfect. When you do the above, you better be perfect with your Windows Updates and all other 3rd party products. Hackers are probing the Internet looking for vulnerable servers 24 hours a day. Quite often with little effort on their part using automated tools.

So there there are three huge benefits to moving Exchange off-site. However, if you do go with hosted services, you must trust your hosting company has all that covered for you. As there usually isn’t really away for you to audit that.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

In a meeting the other day, an owner looks to me and says “Bret, we don’t really depend on technology here, we’re probably not like your other clients that really depend on their computers”. In the context of the conversation it sort of made sense. But we walked out of the meeting and the office manager said to me. “He’s got to be off his rocker!”

“If my floor guys don’t have their systems up, we stop production.”
“If my sales guys are down I have every one of them breathing down my neck.”
“Our customer service people do about 80% of their communication via email.”
“Some of our distributors won’t even accept call in orders any more. Web based only.”

“Don’t depend on technology? I tell you what, shut off all the computers for a day and see what happens.”

Ok, so I embellished a bit, and this conversation happened more than “the other day” ago. But it’s “based on a true story” and a great example of the disconnect between ownership, management, sales, customer service and others.

Have meetings about technology, workflow and efficiency. Being on the same page is step one.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services
http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

I was in line at Staples the other day. The cashier was fantastic. One of those “people person”, customer service oriented people you don’t even need to train to handle patrons. As we stood in a growing line, she called out over the intercom. “All cashiers to the front please.”

“I’m sorry guys, this thing is so slow!” The crème color of the terminal and look on her face gave away the age and the speed or lack there of on her station. “All cashiers to the front please!”

“This system gives me anxiety, you know.”

Visibly stressed, even though moments earlier, when it was calm, she was a rock star, I felt for her as she went through obligatory, “do you have a Staples card”? “Would you like one?” In her voice you could tell she hoped for a “No Thank You”, as she didn’t have the time nor the speedy process to get it done and keep the line moving.

I’m not saying all Staples are like this, I love Staples. Perhaps it was a slow system day. My point it is, I watched a fantastic asset to the company turn into a ball of stress, and even though still pleasant, not happy in her job.

Streamline and evaluate your workflow. It’s more than just the money saved or lost. It’s the talent you work so hard to find and train. And the customers, you so desperately need, to keep you in business.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

When I sit here tonight. Waiting and waiting for a clients computer…it hit me. If I were a shrewd businessman, why would I ever suggest a new computer? We are hourly. We make money when we are waiting! The 5 minute reboots. All those performance clean-ups. All the errors. Those un-patched machines that end up with viruses for us to clean. And the waiting and waiting and waiting for a slow computer to thrash away through an overloaded registry and thoroughly fragmented hard drive. The perfect time taker!

Because… I am not a shrewd businessman. I am ethical, into good karma, and want to build my business right.

I want to be on my clients team. A member of their staff. A member or their “dream team”. Their success is my success.

If you are at or above 5 years… It is time. Reload it if you don’t feel new hardware is in order. Reload on an SSD drive. Just don’t let your employees or your hourly tech sit and wait for an old slow computer if it is at all possible in your budget.

Read the article, why you should by a $10,000 computer for a lesson on ROI and employee time.

My 2 cents. Or should I say, my $10,000.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @Passkeycs

Just a few years ago it seemed perfectly reasonable to open up Remote Desktop for end users. Open port 3389 on the firewall, make sure you have a solid password, and off you go. If you wanted to be really sneaky, you change the port to something much higher so that the “port scanners” couldn’t find it as easy.

I don’t know if it’s the tools getting better, the availability of Internet growing worldwide, us being targeted overseas or the tremendous spike in profits being raked in with Identity theft and cybercrime, probably all of the above, but the game has changed. We have gone for see 0 bad login attempts to upwards of 8,000 in a 24 hour period. Obviously automated, and unsuccessful if you have a good password, it’s very discomforting.

We are now highly recommending closing off open ports, for anything, not just Remote Desktop, where it is not needed. Use a VPN, lock down access to a specific IP or IPs or use a service such as logmein, though the risks with that warrant another article. If it’s not feasible, due to the amount of users accessing it, and budget constraints to re-configure all, there are now tools and scripts out there to block IP addresses from hitting the machine after 5 bad login attempts. Either way, try and stop the outside world from “trying your door” all day long with remote tools. As always, patch, patch patch!!

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

Windows Deployment Services has been the perfect solution for several of our clients. It automates the install of Windows 7 and combined with the Easy Transfer Tool can cut PC replacement or upgrade in half.

It won’t make sense for everyone. It has to be installed and configured. Added to and tested. And changes to your image will be inevitable. But Microsoft makes that easy as well.

If you have a small office. 1-4 computers to replace. It may not be worth the time. But if you have 20 or more computers that will be replaced over the next so many years, WDS could make a huge difference in deployment time for you. Not to mention the ability to reload a machine quickly if it’s ever needed.

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs

I know, I know. That was bad. But it’s Friday at 5:10, and it just came to me. And I don’t have the energy to censor my cheesiness.

All I’m saying is that I have a 4 year old computer. We put a 3rd generation SSD drive in it. We put a 1GB 3 head video card in and loaded Windows 8 Pro.

This thing flies. I literally don’t wait anymore. No more hour glass. Not even totally sure what the Windows 8 hour glass looks like. The only thing I wait for is pages on the Internet to load. And that’s out of my control. Maybe I should finally splurge for that 50 down by 10 up Internet Comcast connection. We just wired the place with CAT6 cable and a new managed HP switch. Hmmmm…..

I do think Windows 8 is more efficient than versions previous, but two things are helping the speed we are seeing over here. The way Windows 8 splits the processor with the CPU and the GPU. That’s the motherboard and the video card processors. And….SSD. Solid State Drive. No platters and magnets. Just lightning fast read and write times. SSD has downsides to. Topic for another article…

Now…..if only I could type faster!

Written by Bret Erickson of Passkey Computer Services

http://www.passkeyinc.com @passkeycs