bruceb news

Microsoft Office 365 has been tremendously successful so far, certainly from a sales perspective (millions of subscriptions, although the exact number is kept under wraps), but more importantly it’s also been successful from a technical perspective. There has been no downtime for the last few months. My clients are ecstatic that I can set passwords not to expire. Smaller businesses are being migrated from the older Microsoft Online Services platform; my clients’ experiences have not been completely smooth but no data has been lost and support for minor glitches has been readily available. Life on Office 365 is good.

So although I’m going to describe a technical issue, it’s a fairly insignificant one that has affected less than a dozen people in my personal experience. […] continued

A few days before Christmas, Microsoft delivered the “Office 365 Integration Module for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials,” a long awaited add-in that integrates Microsoft’s new server software for very small offices with its hosted Office 365 service.

In some respects this is what SBS 2011 Essentials should have included all along, and the combination is a compelling choice for many very small offices considering their first onsite server or a replacement for an aging Small Business Server 2003 tower. You’ll find a full description of Small Business Server 2011 Essentials here:

• Overview
• Remote Access
• Backups

Separately, the two products are already compelling choices for small businesses. […] continued

While we’re talking about the Kindle Fire, it’s worth noting one strange omission: the Kindle Fire does not have a built-in connection to Exchange mailboxes. The picture on the left shows all the built-in mail connectors: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and “other” (which covers POP3 and IMAP accounts). Where’s Exchange? (Or, as it’s quaintly known on Motorola Android phones, “Corporate.”)

Under the hood, a Kindle Fire is running a highly customized version of Google’s Android operating system. Android has always supported ActiveSync, the engine that drives the process of syncing with an Exchange mailbox. All Android phones and tablets can connect to an Exchange mailbox and sync mail, calendar, and contacts. […] continued

It is increasingly necessary to send large file attachments by email. It continues to be a bad idea! It clogs up your mailbox and slows down your mail server and generates endless frustration when messages don’t arrive – but none of that matters. Businesses are creating larger and larger files and email is the way business is done, whether I like it from a technical perspective or not.

Microsoft has bowed to the inevitable and permits Office 365 subscribers to send up to 25Mb of file attachments to a single message. As businesses move to more recent versions of Exchange, mailbox size limits are slowly increasing at big and small companies. […] continued

On August 10, the main data center for Exchange Defender suffered a catastrophic power failure. Clients using the spam filtering service had their incoming and outgoing mail interrupted or massively slowed for most of a day, and hosted mailboxes went offline for as long as two days.

On August 17, Microsoft Office 365 had an outage after an unspecified failure in a major North American server center. Mail was down for 2-3 hours for some subscribers.

On August 7, power equipment failures took a portion of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform in Europe offline for 24-48 hours.

On March 1, 35,000 Gmail users were offline for as long as five days, while Google scrambled to restore data lost in a server snafu. […] continued

Inspired by Small City Law Firm Tech
Saving Email – It’s Just the Right Thing To Do (Outlook – All Versions)
Simply the Best, Better than All the Rest – Saving Email in an Acrobat Pro Package

There is no easy way to gather all of the emails related to a case from all the mailboxes in a small law firm. I have studied this problem endlessly and there is no magic answer. I’m going to suggest one very appealing possibility, though, courtesy of the lovely Vivian Manning, who gave me an “Ah hah!” moment last week.

It is the holy grail for law offices, or small businesses of any kind: gathering all the information about a case or project in a single folder on the server, all the documents and scanned mail and email messages, so anyone can come up to speed on all documents and communication in a single place. […] continued

Microsoft’s hosted Exchange mail service went down again this morning. Apparently service is now restored and most people are able to get back online, as of about 10:45am.

I haven’t lost faith in this service – it has too many advantages for that. But there have been several outages in the last six months, which doesn’t meet my expectations or your needs.

On June 28 Microsoft is going to roll out Office 365, the next generation of this service. It doesn’t bode well to have an outage six days before a product rollout that is meant to define a reliable platform for all businesses of all sizes. […] continued

Apple’s announcement of a collection of services sharing the name “iCloud” has generated endless articles about what it all means. I’ll talk about some of the details in the next few days but let’s step back and look at the bigger picture, because it encapsulates so many things that are happening right before your eyes.

Almost overnight it has become a truism that we are in a “post-PC” world. Instead of a single computer that holds all of our digital files, each of us is surrounded by a multitude of devices that we want to use as interchangeably as possible – computers at home and computers in the office and notebooks in the briefcase, smartphones everywhere, and iPads and other tablets on the coffee table. […] continued

Not everything works with everything else.

Your expectations have changed so quickly that you might not have noticed. It wasn’t long ago that most people used a single PC at a single location and were content to leave the data on that computer behind when they left that desk. When you closed Outlook on the office computer, you didn’t expect to open up the same mailbox at home. If you had files to work on at home, you’d burn them to a CD or copy them to a USB drive or email them to your home email address. You might have gotten a notebook if you expected to be mobile but the data on it was still mostly separate from your other computers and devices. […] continued

Microsoft’s hosted Exchange service wobbled badly this week, with an extended outage on Tuesday and more delays on Thursday. Messages were stuck in outboxes and there were long delays for mail in transit.

The head of the engineering department responsible for BPOS wrote a long apology and explanation this evening with details about the outages. He strikes an appropriately humble tone and promises to do better.

“[O]ver the last few days, we have not satisfied our customer’s needs.  On Tuesday and today we experienced three separate service issues that impacted customers served from our Americas data center.  All of these issues have been resolved and the service is now running smoothly.

[…] continued