The relevance of Microsoft Office in the Cloud based work environment

In the last few months several of my clients have made the jump from using Microsoft Exchange to using Google Apps. Initially this has just been for email, calendar and contacts but has since morphed into using Drive as well. At my office we have also made the change, but our split in staff - half telephony and half IT, means that the IT guys have really taken it on board, more so in fact than the telephony chaps.

Recently I was working with some gents from another organisation still using Office - we were using tethered laptops to exchange spreadsheets with simple data in them - at least they were doing it that way. I was getting the spreadsheet, importing it to Apps, updating it and sending it off. The beautiful thing was - I was doing it from my iPhone, HTC and my Google Nexus - same file, updating straight away and then emailing back to the guys - brilliant! And with offline files enabled it was even easier - I could still access files via Chrome and makes changes. The sync worked very well once networking was restored.

As more of my clients use Google Apps, more of them are questioning the need of having Microsoft Office on their PCs. After all, for the relatively low price of $5 per month per user for Google Apps Business software updates are included and the end user is always on the latest version of the office software - a definite advantage over the constant upgrade process one goes through with the various offices... not just Microsoft Office. Sharing files between people, both within the organisation and outside the organisation are quite easy. Even sending it to people without Google Apps is easy - files can be sent as PDF's or converted to Microsoft office files. 

Sharing and modifying files at the same time with people is easy, Apps notifies you of what is being altered and who is connected to it - a handy feature if, for example, two colleagues are updating a Sheet with details of different computers, without accidentally over writing the other person's data. Very useful. 

Anyway, this has been a musing - just something to ponder in quiet moments....

Lenovo L430 Review

Recently to replace my HP6560b notebook, I purchased a Lenovo L430. It looks like this:

Lenovo L430 Notebook

and it's specifications are:

• 14" AntiGlare LCD monitor
• i5-2520M Processor,
• 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM (upgraded to 8GB),
• 320/7200 HDD,
• Multi-Burner,
• HD Graphics 3000,
• Bluetooth,
• Fingerprint reader,
• 720p Camera,
• ABGN Wireless,
• WWAN,
• Card Reader,
• Windows 7Professional 64,
• 6 Cell battery (max 7.5 hours run time),
• 1 Year return to depot warranty
• GPS 

It has the same sturdy feel and build that all Lenovo notebooks do, a legacy of the IBM heritage Lenovo has successfully perpetuated. I'm absolutely delighted by the keyboard on this device - it is the best notebook keyboard I have ever used. I'm comparing it to the following notebooks: HP 6560b, HP tc4400, Lenovo R500, MacBook Air, various ASUS laptops, various Toshiba laptops, Lenovo X1 and HP 6730b. Obviously I get around on the notebook scene :-)

The touchpad and other pointing device are efficient and work well. I was surprised and impressed also by the efficacy of the wireless - it has been more efficient and connects at higher speed than my other notebooks, including the HP6560b. The built in GPS is pretty neat too - although I'm not sure what the hell I'm going to do with it :-) Generally I remove a lot of the pre-installed software, but I have of course left the Lenovo software, which is gradually improving all the time and it's usefulness is improving as well. I installed 1.6GB of updates in the first two hours of having this laptop which is indicative of Windows 7 out of the box. I had a spare 4GB of RAM laying around so I installed that for fun.

Overall I've found this notebook to be quite fast in general usage, quick to boot and efficient in it's power usage. I've used this notebook all day, and by the time I left the office still had 20% of battery available. This is doing web browsing, Excel, file moves etc. The L430 also has USB3 and an always on USB port I used to good example as I travelled between client offices today to charge my HTC One X. I'm looking forward to my docking station arriving so I can plug it into my dual 22" LED monitors. For about $1200 for the laptop and the docking station together these laptops are great value. I'm not sure how long they'll be around for - pretty they'll be discontinued soon in this trend of everything going to Windows 8. Grab one if you can :-)

Adventures in backups and restores - StorageCraft Shadow Protect

After taking a new client over recently I have been working with StorageCraft's Shadow Protect backup solution for servers: http://www.storagecraft.com.au/  Initially I was just checking that the damn thing was backing stuff up to somewhere and trying to work through a multitude of other issues. Since these problems have settled down I've had more leisure to examine this product. 

The server solution has a wide range of backup capabilities - full backups, incremental backups and continuous incremental backups. The incremental backups can be performed every 15 minutes and up from there. These are keyed back to an initial full backup of the server and are a sector by sector backup. This means we can mount the backup image as the next free drive on the server. One can simply copy across the lost files and then dismount the backup. It's elegant, simple and works well. There is a very nice extension to this as well - the Granular Recovery for Exchange. When needing to recover a email, a folder or an entire mailbox, the ShadowProtect GRE makes it very easy. Simply mount the backup image of the drive with the Exchange database on it, tell GRE where it is, where the existing Exchange database is and then copy across the items you need to recover. It's awesome because of it's ease and speed, search functions and also as a means of migrating to a newer version of Exchange. The few times I've used this it absolutely blew me away with it's ease of use, speed and simplification of data recovery. 

ShadowProtect uses ShadowControl ImageManager software to help manage all the images and snapshots. It's another neat bit of kit and it's functionality is excellent.

The most impressive part of this backup solution is the ability it has to virtual boot a server from an image. You can boot it as an Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine, or as a HyperV VM. A failed physical server can be up and running in minutes as a virtual server. It will still be running backups as per the physical server and once the hardware is restored, the up to date virtual server can be restored back to the physical hardware and once again full services can be restored.

As with any software though it needs to be carefully set up and configured, with usual ongoing maintenance applied. The install I'm working on currently is a bit of a mess and there are a lot of images that need to be sorted out. As a backup solution it also ties in with the virtual environment, although this is something I'm still exploring - check StorageCraft's ShadowProtect out, it's well worth a look.

Adventures with the HTC One X

Just a week and a half after espousing the wonders of my One X the damn thing had to be replaced. Yep - the autofocus on the camera wasn't working. If I stopped and restarted it several times it might work, but eventually failed completely. After searching the net for "HTC One X autofocus not working" and several other permutations of this, I found it's a hardware error. The local Optus dealer, to whom I'm deeply indebted swapped it without issue.

The new phone works brilliantly and I'm happy to say that I'm taking plenty of snaps with it.

I have also purchased it wallet type cover for it - I think it will protect the screen better than some of the other types of protectors out there. I do of course have a screen protector on it, but this won't necessarily stop keys or change in my pocket from damaging it. On to the next adventure with it!

HTC One X Review

So I have taken possession of my new phone, bidding a fond adieu to my beloved Nokia e72. Originally I was considering getting the One S, not the One X - as a cost thing more than anything else. At any rate, I've chosen the One X on a new plan only marginally more expensive than my previous plan, with slightly more included calls after some excellent selling by an uber efficient sales lass.

Rather than re-type all the specs you can find them here: http://www.htc.com/au/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs

Key things to note are are the Quad core 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. The device itself is quite large - much bigger than the iPhone I use for work and it makes the iPhone seem quite a small phone. It makes the e72 even littler by comparison. The speed and the gorgeous screen make up for those slight detractions though. 4.7" Super LCD2 - oh so very bright, clear and lovely to look at. Reviewing photos taken by the 8 mega pixel camera is a joy, and taking photos with the camera has been excellent, apart from a small issue I have where the camera won't focus. After I leave the camera app and come back in a couple of times it seems to come good, but this can be annoying when I'm trying to get a quick action shot.

The phone is light and thin, it easily sits in a top pocket of a business shirt, or in my case, the side pocket of my cargo pants. Sound is clear and vibrant, music sounds great from the little speaker at the back. For the first time I've actually gotten a top of the line phone and now I see what the hype is about. Although the Samsung Galaxy S3 is a very similar beast in size etc, I find the HTC Sense interface to be comfortable and easy to use - I've used it before with my HTC Aria.

The bad aspects of this phone are as follows:

• the camera focus thing - perhaps this an update or it's something I'm not doing correctly but this irritates the hell out of me
• the size of this phone renders all my accesories obsolete - which while it's good to buy new stuff means that my old faithful phone case is no longer usable.
• Facebook doesn't ding on notifications
• Occasionally I miss the dings of emails etc
• I can automatically tell it not to receive emails/Facebook updates and the like between a given period. The one thing the Nokia e72 has all over this phone, for me, is that it only checked emails between given time periods. Neither the iPhone 4S I have, or the One X do this - always on email means you either manually have to turn the auto-sync off (which is what I do now) OR put up with email dings throughout the damn night. NO. I like to sleep peacefully, but I also rely on my phone as my alarm clock.

All in all, I'm very pleased with this new device and I recommend that if you want a great Android phone - consider it very seriously!

Exchange 2007 Send As from a different domain

Imagine this scenario, it may be one you've come across:

• the organisation you're working for / consulting to has a single Exchange Server (be it standalone or part of SBS)
• You have it receiving multiple domains e.g. example1.com and example2.com
• Users would like to send from name@example1.com and from name@example2.com

Exchange does not support this without either adding an additional mailbox for example2.com to each user's Exchange account or implementing some expensive third party software. 

There is an easier way to do this and it has two separate parts to it: creating a relay for example2.com via the Exchange server, and setting up a dummy POP3/SMTP client in outlook to send as the second domain using the "From" drop down in the create email window in Outlook.

Part 1 - Setting up an additional SMTP Relay to avoid the dreaded 550 5.7.1 Unable to Relay

The Exchange server won't necessarily allow mail from a different domain to be relayed through it to the outside world. In Exchange 2007 you don't add a an extra SMTP relay, you have to add a New Receive Connector (because the server is receiving the mail to then send it on). 

Firstly add an IP address to your Network adaptor - don't try to re-use the existing IP address, this will over complicate things. Simply add an extra address - increment your existing address by one, or find a free one. This will be the outgoing SMTP server address we set up later in Outlook so note it down.

Open the Exchange Management Console and go to Server Configuration. Hit Hub Transport and choose "New Receive Connector"

Name it, and choose Custom as the intended use for the Receive Connector. Hit Next and on the Local Network Settings page, click the Add button and type in your new IP Address. Leave the port at 25 - most mail programs don't like this to be messed with.

Remove the "All Available" Local Network address and hit Next again.

The next window should be the Remote Network Settings window - use this to control which addresses can relay through the server. Ensure you put in a range that is meaningful and allows for some security. If you put in too large a range, or do 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 you have created an Open Relay and spammers love these - probably not the best plan to do that. Pick your DHCP range or something similar to lock it down to.

Choose Next and on the Summary screen click New to create the connector. OK so now we need to alter the permissions.

On the properties page of the new Connector (right click and choose Properties), choose the Permissions Groups tab and select the checkbox next to "Exchange Servers" and hit Apply.

Go to the Authentication tab and select the checkbox next to "Externally Secured (for example, with IPsec)", and hit Apply and OK.

Now we can relay through our server.

Part 2: Configure a Dummy Outlook Account to get access to the extra "From" option in Outlook

Open Outlook on your desktop and go to Options, then Accounts and create a new POP account.

Put in the User's name, their email address and then for the POP3 Server address put in a dummy address pop.local for example. Put the IP address you configured above in to the SMTP server and click finish. The Test button won't work - the POP account will fail every time. Because we have only a single mailbox with multiple addresses assigned to it in Exchange, we don't have to worry about where emails sent to example2.com land - the Exchange server will automatically put them in the correct folder.

Open Tools again, Options and go to the Send/Receive section and disable "Receive email items" from our new dummy account. Restart Outlook. 

Now when you open an email to send to someone, you'll see the "From" button beside the sender's address at the top and you can select your example2.com account.

I hope you find this useful - I've cobbled it together from two separate issues that ended up being interrelated.

Samsung Galaxy Tablet 2 Review

Recently, through sheer blind luck, I was able to get a hold of one of these excellent little devices. A friend sent it down (he prefers his iPad) so I was able to play with it a bit before handing over to the wife for her amusement. The Galaxy Tablet is a 7" tablet, much like the Google Nexus I recently reviewed and use almost continually. At first blush here are the differences I noted:

• the user interface is different (naturally). I feel that the Galaxy's is more polished, looks crisper but is a lot more busy. The QWERTY keyboard interface for example has the numbers above it and the keys are smaller on screen than the Nexus.
• SD Card slot - upgradeable storage is a nice thing indeed.

Weight, size and battery life appear comparable. My wife loves it. She wasn't convinced initially about a tablet and didn't think she could find a use for it. As a non-technical person it seemed like another gadget to her. Now though she uses it for Pinterest, Facebook, eBay, email and generally web searching.

The Galaxy Tablet is a fine piece of hardware, but I have to criticize the interface. It is not as user friendly as the Nexus and this was actually a factor that led me to purchase a HTC One X over the Samsung Galaxy SIII recently. Navigating through some of the menus has been a pain, and initially finding in the Yahoo Mail app the Create Email option was not straightforward at all. That being said, now I've played more with it it's quite good.

I recommend the Galaxy Tablet to anyone who needs 3G or LTE connectivity as the Nexus doesn't appear to offer this. WiFi connectivity is very good on both devices and the Galaxy has a bright easy to read screen. Occasionally the light sensitivity gets a bit annoying as it dims the screen unnecessarily, or makes it too dark, but otherwise it's very good.