I think Microsoft made a major mistake with the E2 and E3 plans in Office 365.   While they’re right-on with the E1 plan, but the E2 and E3 plans aren’t quite right – the punch is lost.  (more…)

In the last couple months I’ve been dealing with a number of projects where moving to a Software-as-a-Service solution was an option.  With SaaS solutions, it’s very important to do a proper analysis of the technical, financial and risks for solutions.

While most SaaS solutions claim to be significantly cheaper than their on-premise solutions, doing a full analysis over the life of the product might surprise you.  For commodity services such as email, it’s often safe to assume the hosted solution will be cheaper.  For specialty products, this changes significantly.  At first it may look cheaper, but be sure to look deeper. (more…)

While on paternity leave, I’ve been having some fun playing with SharePoint online.  I’m a big fan of Office 365 and the features it gives (and the price point). GrowthPoint Group is starting to use SharePoint Online internally for document management, project management, super-light CRM and more.

I started playing with workflows and have been getting an interesting error:

User cannot be found

Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Correlation ID: 519442d6-a684-9456-4d94da871808

This happens when I do a number of things:

• Click Workflow Settings in a document library
• Try to enable SharePoint 2007 Workflows in the Site Collection Features (more…)

Anyone who I’ve talked to about cloud services knows I’m a big fan of Office 365.  One of its biggest adoption stumbling blocks is the lack of true Blackberry integration.  We’ve been told “it’s coming” since the first beta (then “60 days after general release”), but have been stood up so far.

When I saw the announcement last week of an open beta for Blackberry Cloud Services for Office 365, I got a little excited.  Several of my clients are anxiously awaiting this so they can retire old Exchange 2003 servers. (more…)

On Tuesday Microsoft announced general availability of Office 365, their next-generation hosted services platform.  The platform can include a range of services, including Exchange Server (email and calendaring), Sharepoint (collaboration), and Lync (instant messaging, voice and video conferencing).  Larger plans include email archiving and even PC-to-phone through Lync. (more…)

Recently I was helping troubleshoot an odd issue for a client.  During that process, I wanted to see the message headers for a meeting request I was sent.

I’m using Outlook 2010.  I opened a calendar entry for a meeting, a looked for message headers.  No obvious place for them.  The little box beside in the Tags area of the toolbar is not there!

After searching around, I found another option.  Under File tab, click the Properties button.  Aha!  A box for message headers.  Which was empty.  On every meeting request I’ve received.  It seems that Outlook 2010 doesn’t save headers with the actual calendar entries.

All was not lost.  In my deleted items I found the original meeting requests.  Upon opening them and clicking the little box beside in the Tags area of the toolbar, I was able to find message headers. Geeky lesson learned.

Warning: this post contains geek content that may be inappropriate for some readers.

Normally I’m not the impatient sort when it comes to gadgetery, but I must admit my patience is running pretty thin.

I’m an avid note taker.  I find it very important in my line of work (and in my personal development).  Often I will come out of meetings with pages of notes.  Unfortunately, that means I have shelves of notebooks, which are incredibly hard to refer back to later.  I often find that when I need to look back, I don’t have the right notebook with me (who wants to carry 3-5 notebooks for a year of notes!). 

When I’m problem solving, I also scribble a lot.  It’s a very good habit, formed early in my programming years.  There’s always a notepad on my desk with only semi-legible thoughts where I have been working through some process or problem.

Needless to say, with where technology is today, pen and paper should be obsolete.  Somehow, it’s not yet. (more…)

This is a posting not about failure, but about the importance of excellent customer service. 

Last week one of my clients had several Lenovo laptops fail (BSOD) due to a bad anti-virus definition file in Vipre Antivirus.  The definition file considered the drivers for the hard drive to be rogue security software and quarantined them, causing the boot drive to be unreadable by Windows.  There’s a full write-up about the problem here and a solution thread here.

For us, the problem wasn’t wide-spread – it only affected a handful laptops (other users clearly don’t reboot that often!).  Of course, this happened at the worst possible time for the client – during a due diligence meeting.  At least two of the laptops involved belonged to people who were in those meetings.  Unfortunately some of the other laptops were in other remote locations and had to be shipped back to Vancouver, but that’s another story. (more…)

Be careful if you’re running TinyTwitter on your Blackberry.  Once you’ve started the program, it continues to connect to the data network in the background, even if you aren’t updating.  I ran into something like 20 megs/day of data usage, just because TinyTwitter was running in the background (and not even being used!). 

This sounds like a pretty serious bug.  Even more serious if you’re not on an unlimited data plan!

I’ve now been using Windows 7 for about a month on both my desktop computer and my laptop.  So far, I’m quite impressed.  Microsoft has actually put together a stable, very functional operating system to replace Windows XP and Vista. 

Please note that this isn’t a review of Windows 7 – just a small gathering of thoughts.  (more…)