Windows Explorer's GUI is really bad at long file names and folder structures - Don't trust it!

I am actually in a bit of shock at this one - I've hit the long file name problem in Windows a few times in the past, but it has never been that much of an issue.

A client came to me with a project to move a huge Dropbox repository (Millions of files, about 150,000 folders) to a new server. During this project and moving a few folders, I got the standard Windows long file name problem:

I've only ever come across this when I really thought I was at the limitations - however, I took a step back and tried to understand this.

My client used Dropbox - the location was originally "c:\users\username\dropbox\xxx\yyy\...[lots]...\zzz\file.doc" and the new location is "c:\temp\xxx\yyy\...[lots]...\zzz\file.doc"

Thanks then to a few people in Server Fault chat, it seems that the Windows GUI just lies and doesn't handle this at all well.

In fact, if I look at a folder that has ~750 folders and ~450 files, I see the following:

Moving the files with xcopy or robocopy works fine, or even using Terracopy.

In addition, some tools such as winmerge also fail at comparing looking at the large folder structure where as Beyond Compare was able to do it fine.

Luckily I decided to take extra care and manually verify these files - granted I have never dealt with so many large files on a single job before, but, I have always trusted the Windows property box and this has been a scary lesson for me.

Exchange Management Console Initialization failed upon opening

So, been messing around with SSL certificates trying to renew all your Exchange certificates and you have this as a side effect? Or, you just open Exchange Management Console and get Initialization failed message?

For the sake of people Googling:

"The following error occurred while attempting to connect to the specified exchange server

The attempt to connect to using "kerberos" authentication failed: Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client sent a request to an HTTP server and got a response saying the requested HTTP URL was not available. This is usually returned by a HTTP server that does not support the WS-Management protocol. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic."


So...

Simply open IIS and make sure your default site has an additional host header setup that matches in the error above.

I have no idea why this is caused - the default site on the machine is set to listen on all interfaces/ips and is the default site, and server name resolves to the machine - however, specifically putting the FQDN of the server in a host header fixed the issue instantly.

If you are not sure how to do this - you open IIS, go to the default site, click bindings then add and type the server there:

Hope this helps you.

How to activate Windows 10 after a reinstall on (Tier 1) OEM licensed hardware

I've recently been buying a lot of Dell hardware for my clients, then performing aftermarket upgrades as it is very cost effective. After installing a new SSD and reinstalling Windows, it reports as not activated.

To fix this, run the following command:

wmic path SoftwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey

It outputs the key straight away, and you can copy/paste this to the regular activation window.

And done - this is ridiculously simple and I am not at all sure why Windows doesn't do this automatically.

(I usually install from a ISO acquired from VLSC. I have not tested using a Dell branded disk, or even a standard OEM edition)

=====update=====

I had a client purchase 10 machines that were upgraded - 9 worked fine, then the 10th said that the key had already been used (I did the above steps each time, didn't reuse once).

The solution was to go to the (elevated) command prompt and type "slui 4"

I then did the old phone activation which went through fine.

I have no idea why 9 were successful and 1 failed.

Office 2016 problems

After many months of Office 2016 being available on Office 365 to some customers, it was finally added to mine and I finally upgraded around 2 months ago.

With a single exception being a really nice feature in Outlook where the attach file button shows the most recently edited files, I have yet to see any killer feature or improvement in day to day usage.

To start, my start menu keeps losing associations with all the Office programs.

Doing a repair install seems to fix this temporarily, but, give it a few hours and it breaks again.

The biggest annoyance I have at the moment is that Excel and Word just seem to be so buggy - it is unreal.

I have been trying to do various accounting work for the past 2 days involving having two spreadsheets open. I worked for 2 hours, making various marks on the spreadsheet - and when I clicked save, absolutely nothing happened.

I then tried to highlight to do copy and I got a weird out of memory warning (despite having ~40% free on a 16GB system). I tried so many things, but, it was, in official terms "buggered". Upon restarting, the worst thing was there was no auto recovery.

This has unfortunately happened so many times now that whenever I am doing work, I find myself saving a lot more often than I previously used to (after each row sometimes) and just restart the moment I see an error.

I wish I could say it was a failed installation, but, I have the same on my home machine and two of my laptops (I don't use any out of the ordinary add-ons).

There was an Office 365 addon today - running it fixed the file associations for about 6 hours - but, they are broken again and I have already had the Excel bug a few minutes ago.

It was a very similar bug (freeze on saving) that got me to leave my year long experiment with OpenOffice many years ago - I wonder how that or Libre Office is coming along?! I just can't put up with this much longer - or, maybe I should just go back to Office 2013.

Years on, I've sold so many Office licensing deals to companies because it is the right thing to do from an IT standpoint (deployment/growth etc. is so much easier), but, the IT cynic in me wonders if people are just best off buying boxed copies/OEM with the huge release cycle Microsoft seem to have - and how lackluster the improvements seem to be in every version.

... Still waiting for the version of Word that can type a dissertation or other long document for you!

Migrating Gmail to Office 365: MigrationPermanentException Error with user name and password

Have you been pulling your hair out for the past few hours (or days?) and not found anything online that can help?

Yep... Same here - been driving me mad! I've checked, double checked, triple checked all username and passwords which are all correct, but every migration comes up with the same error:

"Error:MigrationPermanentException: We had trouble signing in to this account. Please confirm that you‎'re using the correct user name and password."

Well, after a bit of digging, this is actually an easy one to fix -

1. Login to Gmail as the user
2. Go to account options (as of writing, click the name in the top right corner then "My account").
3. Click on the big "Sign-in & Security" button
4. Go to "Connected apps & sites"
5. Turn on "Allow less secure apps"

And, try the migration again - please note, you will have to delete any other migration in progress that has the same mailbox, or, it may skip over it without giving feedback.

I hope this helps and saves you hours of time!

If it does and you do not currently have a partner, please add EZPC Limited as your partner of record (the ID is 612026) for your Office 365 account and we will be happy to assist you in the future!

To anyone else thinking of signing up to Office 365, here is a link to a no obligation 25 user, 30 day trial:

Too Long :(

It's been over a year since my last blog post :(

Where has the time gone - and wow, what a year! There has been some very big changes which I'm sure I'll be blogging about later!

I just want to say a big thank you to all my friends and ex-coworkers for the support you continue to give.

That you to the people who have been answering comments left by others, and sorry for all the spam here :( I thought Blogger was better than this - I've cleared well over 1,000 entries, but there is loads more to do.

Anyway... I've been adding topics to my todo list and I'll get around to blogging regularly again soon!

Getting an "Error Verifying Request Signature or Signing Certificate" message on Windows Server (0x800b0101 (-2146762495))

I went through hours of trying to fix this, without finding anything on Google... I hope this gets rated high on the search results for the terms :0x800b0101 (-2146762495)

The short story is simply, don't try to renew an already expired certificate - just issue a new one in the same name.

You can only renew non-expired certificates, otherwise you get the message:

 “Error Verifying Request Signature or Signing Certificate. A required certificate is not within its validity period when verifying against the current system clock or the timestamp in the signed file. 0x800b0101 (-2146762495).”


... Sorry if you have just had to run through tonnes of useless patching that hasn't fixed it!

How to fix Apple Iphone/IOS asking for your password when connecting to ActiveSync (Exchange or Hotmail).

A lot of users at my company appear to be continually asked for their user name and password credentials when trying to retrieve emails (From Exchange) on their iPhones since updating to version 7.1.1

It looks like Apple have somehow screwed something up again!

A three point solution that seems to have fixed the vast majority of these cases within the company:

1) Delete the email account
2) Hold down the power and home button (as if you are taking a screenshot) until the Apple logo comes up (can be a good 10-15 seconds). Let go straight after seeing the Apple logo.
3) When restarted, re add the email account using your correct credentials

Please note from my testing, 50% of phones were fixed after just doing the reset as per step 2. For the ones where this didn't work, I added steps 1 and 3. There are still a few phones that won't save the password - I believe something else is the problem and if I find out, I'll update this post.... It is more than likely this will be stealthy fixed in a future update.

I tested this on:

Iphone 4, 5, 5s
Ios version 7.1.1
Connecting to Microsoft Exchange on premis, Office 365, Outlook.com

How to upgrade Windows 8 volume license to Windows 8.1 from the Windows Store

--------
***Update at the bottom***
--------


After searching for ages, I came up with only complaints online and couldn't actually find a solution... So I thought I would make one!

Remember the days of Windows XP where you could upgrade in so many ways? Windows Update, Slipstream, IT Pro Deployment pack... I really miss how easy Microsoft used to make things!

If you have a volume license edition of Windows 8, you will know that you can't easily upgrade to 8.1 without downloading the 8.1 ISO and performing an upgrade, or upgrading your own deployment infrastructure to support it.

Whilst having your own deployment infrstructure is best for large companies, for smaller companies, this is a real big PITA that you really should try to avoid if you can.

Microsoft have taken the decision that you can't upgrade to 8.1 if you have a volume license edition of Windows. Well... There is a simple solution... Don't use a volume edition!

In order to easily upgrade using the store, open an administrative command prompt, and from there type:

c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk V7C3N-3W6CM-PDKR2-KW8DQ-RJMRD

(This is a Microsoft Retail default key used by OEM/System builders to get through setup, it will not activate, but you don't need it to).

Once you have done this, run "wsrest" to delete the windows store cache and restart your computer.

After you have done this, Windows 8.1 will appear on the Windows Store and you can successfully upgrade to it.

Once you are on Windows 8.1, simply change back to a KMS edition via the volume license default codes:

c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk GCRJD-8NW9H-F2CDX-CCM8D-9D6T9

Then activate against your KMS host

c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato


And you are done!



--------
Update: A lot of people are commenting here about activation failing and the key being blocked.

Please note, this is simply meant to be a way to upgrade 8 VLK edition to 8.1 without a reinstall. It is NOT a way to get Windows for free or bypass licensing.

Once you are upgraded, the step I gave above will reapply a default product key that is not able to activate - it is your job to target your KMS (or other) host and activate in the same way as you did before the upgrade. If you do not, Windows will act in an unactivated state (the same as installing without a valid key)
--------

Where has the time gone!

Every time I look at my blog, it pains me that it has been so long since my last post.

I wanted to post about my new job... but I have now been working there for over 2 years and it is taking all my time!

We are just starting 2014 and I have so much to vent! .... If in 2015 I read that this was my last blog post, I'm going to be angry with myself, so, I'm going to write something else straight away! :)

Happy 2014 everyone!

Unable to setup alerts on a Drac / Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 6 Enterprise

If you have a DRAC / Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 6 - Enterprise and are unable to set up alerts via Google Chrome, I have noticed a little bug where the menu simply states "ok" instead of going to the correct page.

The easiest solution is simply to use Internet Explorer, however, I recommend you attempt to upgrade the DRAC to the latest version available, this is a painless process and does not require the server to be reset.

Next, try pressing the Control + F5 to refresh your cache and you should hopefully now be able to get in to the menu.

I have been seeing mixed reports on this - it appears to work for some people and others seem to still have the bug... Hopefully you will be one of the ones it works fine for.

Android error sending email: Unable to sign or encrypt message certificate not installed

Someone in the office came to me with a problem today, saying that every time they tried to send an email, the following message is displayed:

unable to sign or encrypt message certificate not installed

It turns out that, for some reason, the option to sign outgoing messages had been turned on by accident - without any client certificate installed for this feature to actually work.

To fix it - there are two options:

1) Install a client certificate if you actually want to sign outgoing emails.

2) Turn signing off.

Hardly anyone signs emails and I am guessing that most people who want to use it will already know how to!

As for turning signing off, it is pretty straight forward.

1. Go to Email settings (Easiest is in the email client, click the menu button and go to settings).

2. Go down to Security Options

3. Untick sign.


Hope this helps!

How to generate a HTTP 400 error from a client

First blog post in a while! I have hardly had any free time... Will blog about it soon!

Anyway, I have needed to generate a 400 error on a server in order to test something - I tried a few things without success and then I discovered that the easiest way to generate a 400 error from a client is simply to add a percentage symbol (%) to the request.

For example, http://mysite.com/% should generate a 400.

Before I found out I could use the percentage symbol, I was looking for a method involving telnet/direct connections. Oliver Salzburg on Super User came up with the following -

... I don't know if this will help anyone, but, if I had found a post like this earlier today, it would have saved me quite a bit of time, so, I hope someone will find it useful!

How to remove an additional mailbox from opening with Outlook

I had a client today who's Outlook always opens a second mailbox of someone that they have delegated access over.

However, they no longer need it and it was being a pain to remove - no matter what option I tried, it just wouldn't go!

Trying to "Close" the mailbox results in the error

"This group of folders is associated with an e-mail account. To remove the account, click the File Tab, and on the info tab, click Account Settings. Select the e-mail account, and then click Remove."

After a while, I found that a solution was to go to the Exchange "account settings", then click "More Settings", go to the "Advanced" tab, and click "Add", choose a different Mailbox where the user has permissions.

This seems to refresh the Additional Mailbox section.

Next, click ok/next etc, and go back to that screen. The list should now be populated with the box you just added and the original box. You can remove both as usual.

How to reset a Windows password without third party tools

Whilst there are many tools that can change Windows account passwords, I personally like to do it manually as it doesn't take very long.

This trick will not work if you have Bitlocker full disk encyption - and, if you have EFS (Encrypting File System), your keys will become lost (as with any password resetting method).

Firstly, you need access to your hard drive - this can be from anywhere that has NTFS Write access (The easiest method is a Windows Vista/7 installation disk).

If you chose a Windows installation disk, simply boot from it and then at the first screen (Language/Location/Keyboard) click next, followed by holding Shift+F10. This will launch a command prompt window.

Depending on the amount of partitions and setup you have, Windows may be on a different drive. Try typing the following:

c:

dir

If this doesn't look like your hard drive, try changing c to d, and go through the alphabet until you reach your hard drive.

Once there, type the following:

cd\windows\system32

ren osk.exe osk_old.exe

copy cmd.exe osk.exe

Next, reboot Windows.

From here, click the accessibility\wheelchair icon and then the On Screen Keyboard option.

This will now launch a Command Prompt window as `SYSTEM` (Be careful!).

You have two options : the quickest, to change the password from the command line is:

net user username password

(Change username and password to... well, you can guess!).

There will be no confirmation, it will simply just change.

If you would rather use a UI, type `mmc` and press enter. From here, go to "File" > "Add/Remove Snap-in", Click "add", and choose "Local Users and Groups". click "close", then "ok".

Expand "Local Users and Groups" > "Users", and right click on a user, followed by "Set Password"... Choose whatever you want, and you are done!

To reset the earlier system changes, you have two options.

First, get to the command prompt from the Windows setup disk in the same way and type:

x: (where x is the drive)

cd\windows\system32

del osk.exe

ren osk_old.exe osk.exe

or, if you would rather just do it without the disk, go back to the login screen, launch command prompt and type this:

cd\windows\system32

start cmd

(Close the original command prompt window)

cd\windows\system32

del osk.exe

ren osk_old.exe osk.exe

and done!

How to enable the Start Menu in Windows 8 developer preview

If you want to enable the classic Start Menu on Windows 8, there is a simple registry switch you can use.

It is located at

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer"

Simply change the "RPEnabled" entry from "1" to "0"

Changing this key changes a lot - it seems to put it back to a "Microsoft Internal" state displaying the following warnings on Winver and the desktop:

Please note, as with everything on the preview, this is a sort of "hack" which is not officially supported. It changes a heck of a lot - Pressing the start button in the bottom left corner works as expected... but, the ribbon bar disappears, you get classic Task Manager, and pressing the Windows keyboard key is buggy - the start menu appears, then disappears to reveal the metro interface, then metro interface disappears and the start menu loads!

The start menu really is not officially supported in this release and does seem to have a few bugs (mainly style related). I am not sure if Microsoft have disabled it on purpose from the preview in order to get people to use Metro and it will be there in the final product, or if it will be dropped entirely from final product - (or in the state it is in now for some sort of legacy reason.

A big downside is that apart from seeing a glimpse of the metro interface when you press the Windows key, it does actually break it and the ability to deploy/test applications on it - which is the whole point of the developer preview. So... do this once, have a look around and put it back!

(Error starting a tile application)

As you can guess, the preview is unfinished and I am sure they will change the start menu (either disable completely or simply modify behaviour) before release.

If you are not comfortable editing the registry, here are some ready made .REG files for you:

Change the key to 0 (Enable the start menu)

Change the key to 1 (Disable the start menu)

UPDATE---

If you force close and reopen Explorer after changing this key, it stops the Metro app from flashing up when pressing the Windows Key - however - tile based apps and running from Visual Studio still do not work. That being said, you can change the target in Visual Studio to an Emulator which runs the tile applications fast. I haven't looked in to this more, but it is a really cool application that allows you to test touch amongst other things.

The Office 365 partner experience. Is Microsoft trying to get rid of us?

I originally wanted one blog post, but, it turns out that I had more to say than I thought, so, I am doing this as a two parter! Click here to read My take on Google Apps Vs Office 365 .

I first heard about Office 365 at a Microsoft partner briefing towards the end of last year, I have been wanting to sign a customer up to it for a while, but, I was simply not willing to do it whilst it was in Beta.

Now it is out, this blog post will give my experiences as a Microsoft Partner. I have already given my experiences as a user comparing it to Google Apps in the first part.

To get started - As I hope it came across in the first part, I really think Office 365 is a good solution, but, for the partner experience - I simply hate it! It is my honest belief that Microsoft are trying to cut partners out and that we are a complete after thought for Office 365.

The only controls available to partners are to send a trial code and to send a purchase offer at the end of the trial.... This is really just about it!

So, with one customer, I sent them a 30 day trial for Office 365 Plan E3. It became clear during the trial that they had no intention of using any of the additional Office 365 features and simply wanted Exchange Online. Here comes the first problem!

Almost no one at Microsoft seems to understand the different plans on offer through Office 365! I rang up the support line three times, firstly I got a "No, not possible", next I got a reassuring "Yes, I think it is possible, You may loose all data during the move", and then the third time I was told that they would look in to it and get back to me.

The same sort of experience can be seen on the official forums where I asked the same question - Someone from MS giving the wrong answer, not understanding what I wrote - but then, eventually someone else from Microsoft answers giving an answer I wanted...

However, I was far from convinced and purchased a licence myself in order to test the scenario - this is one of the major faults with Office 365 - Whilst there is quite a bit of help and support listed, there are not enough real world situations and examples. When I ring up the helpline, all they seem to do is a search of the same knowledge base and if they can't find an answer, I get the impression that they just guess.

In the end, I found out that it is perfectly fine and I was able to migrate my customer easily, without losing any data (or having any down time). But, if so many people from Microsoft do not understand the different subscription levels, I do not know how they expect us to! That being said, it isn't really that hard and I knew the levels, which is why I was so annoyed at Microsoft not knowing and giving me silly answers back.

Again, I just feel that the partner experience was an after though. There is no way that I have seen to manage clients at all.

There is a section about delegated administration - but... it doesn't work at all. The option is simply not there.

So, the best I have been able to do is to create an administrator account for myself under my clients account - it is not ideal, but it works.

Towards the end of the trial, when it came to selling them the license, I went to increase the count on the one I had already purchased. I did nothing special other than to order them, however, I got the following two emails straight after each other:

So quite frankly, without a good administration panel, I haven't a clue what is going on here, or even if I will get a single penny for signing up my client. This takes me straight to the next point:

I feel that Microsoft are really screwing partners in two ways. Firstly, the new hosted Exchange solution costs less and offers more than any hosted solution from any partner I have seen - I simply do not know why any partner will want to offer their own hosted Exchange going forward.

And next, the partner fees for Hosted Exchange are 6% for the time you are the partner on record and a further 12% for the first year of signing a company up, meaning that if you are a partner who signed someone up during the first year, you can earn a combined 18%/ However, once again, due to the way the partner system works, and the fact that there is a 30 day grace period, at the end of one year, you are much better off simply ditching/letting a license expire and signing your customer up to a brand new 1 year licence. This results in the customer getting a free month and the partner getting another 18% for the next year instead of just 6%.

I just have very mixed feelings over Office 365, I believe that it is probably the best solution out there, but, I really hate the partner experience, or complete lack of one.

I have seen one of the biggest annoyances people have been saying about is lack of partner billing support, I do not see this as a big problem as it is easy to simply not give your client access to the license section and buy the licence yourself, then charge your client at the end of every month direct. I personally have no intention of charging my clients over the price set my Microsoft... but... it would be nice to have the option to do so....

... When I say this, I am not talking about ripping off my customers in any way, simply put, I have always been used to giving my clients a single bill at the end of every month or quarter which covers everything I do - email hosting included. I find it annoying to change my business processes to have to fit in to the way that Microsoft thinks is best.

I feel it would be so much better if they simply offered licences to partners for sale at 18% off the retail price and let us do what we like with our clients. I for one would love this and by far think it is a superior solution.

However, again, I do not see Microsoft doing this any time soon, I think they have slapped together the bare minimum to call it a cloud partner program and are going to leave it there.

I signed another client up on a trial and they had a small issue on the control panel - they decided to call Microsoft for help as the control panel has a support link - this is not customisable to partners and they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. Upon speaking to Microsoft, they were asked to go in to PowerShell and type a bunch of commands - they were out of their comfort zone and rang me up to do it for them...

I just don't think Microsoft understands the relationships that support companies have with their clients, I would be willing to get a cheaper licence without end user support thrown in... That line must cost a bit to have and the whole point of being a partner is that we want to be the single point of call for our clients.

I just think within the next few years, we are going to see a lot more of Microsoft targeting end users directly and attempting to cut out partners as much as they can.

Going back to this support line - It is the most stupidest use of VOIP and localisation I have seen - No matter what country you ring from, you get forwarded to the same country/target, but, it is only open during working hours in your country. I had an urgent issue in the middle of the night, so, I rang up the Australian help number and it was the exact same IVR/Option, and I went through to the same help line! Why can't they just keep the number open 24x7?

And... If anyone wants any free trial links to Office 365, here are some for you!

Office 365 E3 25 user trial

Office 365 K2 25 user trial

Office 365 P1 10 user trial

Office Professional Plus 25 user trial

Exchange Online Archiving 25 user trial

If you want to purchase Office 365 and do not have a partner, feel free to get in contact with me and I will be happy to set you up - I would still say I am a Microsoft fan and I really hope they improve the partner program, I for one would love to be proved wrong on many of the points I have made here - I just unfortunately do not see it happening. I still feel Office 365 is a brilliant solution... Just not for partners!

My take on Google Apps Vs Office 365

I am writing this entry as an IT pro who has a few clients on Google Apps now for several months, and has recently switched one client to Office 365. Rather than make this even longer than it is going to be, I will be writing about the partner experience in a separate post.

I believe Google Docs is a nice tool - if you are creating a basic document in it and want to share it with other Google Docs users, or even download and run inside Office, it works well... but... I have had (many) issues with existing complex documents that I have uploaded to it.

On the other side, I have used Microsoft Office Online and believe it is perfect. Documents are preserved entirely.

The above being said, Google Docs offers a few nice features such as surveys/questionnaires that are a really nice touch and I have used several times. I have clocked a lot less time on Office Online, but, from my limited time, I would say that Google also has better sharing/multi user capabilities. I think that Microsoft make up for this with SharePoint, but cannot personally comment.

However, taking in to account the above, the majority of my clients are happy with the way they work - they only want hosted email and the only time they need to write documents is in their Office where they use Dropbox, VPN or network shares to sync things. Whilst Dropbox can get expensive for very large projects/teams, all of these solutions work very well for my clients.

Now, I have never really had a problem with Gmail... until one of my clients did, which cause me to spend many many hours researching it and trying to find a solution.

If you or your company are not big emailers, or are happy with the Gmail web interface, it is a perfectly adequate solution. That being said, IMAP support is just error filled, rubbish, flawed, and annoying.

One of my clients is a recruitment company who pretty much live in Emails - their business depends on it. In addition, they use software for their business that includes an Outlook Add-in and despite following guide upon guide online (and writing one myself), there are just frequent problems.

I do believe a few of these issues I have seen are due to Outlook's IMAP handling, but, some of the issues were also seen during my testing in Thunderbird.

After finally managing to get help from someone in Google, the only solution was to try to go back to pop3, which for sync issues to phone is just a no-go area.

So... I wanted to find an alternate solution and since Office 365 has just launched, I decided to switch to it - and email now works perfectly.

Personally as an administrator and someone who is responsible for support, I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Exchange. Exchange is a behemoth of a solution! It is quite expensive, requires a lot of planning, seems to touch everything... but... works very well indeed (once up!). I truly believe that there is nothing better for a business than Exchange with Outlook as a client.. One of my favourite words, but the only word that can really describe Exchange and Outlook is "Flawless".

The downside though is whilst the base functionality is there, it really lacks a lot of features that makes Exchange truly great. If you want some of the advanced features, you really need to learn PowerShell. An example is mailbox delegation which requires manually going in to a persons Outlook and setting (or using a PowerShell script). Annoyingly, this is a very easy task to perform in Google Apps.

When Gmail launched, it was sort of revolutionary - Very good anti spam, enormous storage space and labels instead of folders, but a few years on and I would say anti spam in Office 365 is just as good, Storage in Gmail is the same as Office 365 and... Labels are a fad... this was one of the big problems with IMAP Gmail access - deleting emails only removed the label. There are options, but without a central way to set it - it was annoyingly difficult.

Whilst I can not give a full account of Office 365 Vs Google Apps, I can give a fair review of Gmail Vs Hosted Exchange (which I believe is the main component people will be using).

With Microsoft offering the Kiosk worker plan and Hosted Exchange on its own, I think this is the way forward and I will no longer be offering any Google Apps services to my clients for the foreseeable future.

I feel that Microsoft have a truly superior product that simply lacks a good enough control interface and real world scenario/support - I can only hope they improve this soon. Whilst I am writing this in brief here, this is actually a major point, but will cover it in my next part which is about Microsoft abandoning partners on Office 365.

How to speed up Gmail IMAP in Outlook... No more hangs, not responding or timeouts!

I have now switched 4 clients over to Google Apps for Domains and they have all noticed various speed issues from time to time.

The most common is Google Mail hanging or not responding when doing various operations such as deleting or sending email.

I have tried to contact Google several times and have been getting no where, and searching the internet has come up pretty blank.

Anyway, straight to it... Examples/Pictures are based on Outlook 2010, but, you should be able to adapt to other versions.

The problem is because of both Gmail IMAP being bad, and Oulook's IMAP handling not being as good as it could be.

Firstly, Go to the "Send / Receive" Tab, and "Define Send/Receive Groups"

Next, tick all the boxes and change the send/receive timer down to one minute (or whatever you want).

Then, double click on the account, and whilst you can use any settings you like, I recommend ticking Inbox and choosing "Download complete item including attachments", then unticking all the other boxes.

Lastly and most importantly, put Outlook in to Offline mode.

And we are done!

The reason for this, as far as I can see, is that Outlook attempts to do all operations live on the server, however, Google's IMAP server constantly disconnects, and generally does not play nice with Outlook. This means that every time you try to do an operation, it has to reconnect - but it does this on the UI thread and causes everything to hang.

By forcing Outlook in to Offline Mode, it does every operation locally and instantly on your machine then because we set the account to send/receive whilst in offline mode, everything will still work as expected and because the send/receive happens in the background, nothing freezes!

The only downside is that this countdown to the minute is always running in the background, if you send an email, it will not actually go until the next cycle, so if on the phone or doing something urgent, you may want to click send/receive instead of waiting.

I have been racking my brain out on this, I really hope it helps you and please leave a comment/pass it on if it has!

How to clear a whiteboard that has dried ink / without scrubbing!

I really have no idea why I am blogging this!

As a geek, I have so many whiteboards around me - they come in so handy!

As many people know, if you leave the ink on for a while, it is possible for it to dry out and require a lot of elbow grease in order remove.

Instead, a little hint - just get out your dry wipe pen and go over the top of the text!

This techniques add another layer of the chemical carrier and allow you to remove the original ink as if you had only just written it!

I went to a client that hadn't used their meeting room in a while and they had this problem - They did not know this technique and I could see the bloke trying to scrub really hard! I hope I didn't come across big headed but this is something that a lot of people just don't realise you can do!

Hope it helps others!