http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/hp-elite-x2-1012-g1-1309302/review

Anyone have any experience of them? I've got one on trial at the moment and think I prefer it to the Surface (mainly because I prefer dealing with HP).

Personally, I'm not a fan of 2-in-1 PC/Tablets, preferring to work with a traditional laptop and a seperate iPad Mini - combining the two into one device is too much of a compromise - but other people seem to love them. I do really like the stylus though and could see myself taking handwritten notes in meetings with it (which I've never managed to do with an iPad).

I'm thinking of buying a dozen for our Sales Reps.

I've never understood discussions on the price of e-mail. All offerings seem so trivially cheap to me. I mean in the US you're paying your employees, on average, over $50,000 per year and you're worried about an extra $50 a year for e-mail? We probably spend more on paper towels in the rest room than e-mail but I rarely see the president starting that discussion.

We currently manage around 30 iPhone 5S's under a Vodafone shared data package (40gb). The company wants to ditch Vodafone and move to EE, whilst at the same time replace all the phones with newer models.

I see two options on how to roll this out.
Option 1: activate and setup the new iPhones with an EE sim. Ship the phones to the users. When the switchover day occurs, their old Vodafone phones will stop working, and their new EE phones will start working. So during that day, they need to carry around both phones.

Option 2: get Vodafone to unlock the existing phones. Ship the EE Sim cards to the users. When the switchover day occurs, their old Vodafone phones will stop working. When that happens, they need to remove the Vodafone SIM card and insert the EE SIM card. Their old phone will then continue to work. At some point, they will need to replace their old phone with their new phone, but this can be done at our leisure.

I'm planning on suggesting Option 2. I can't see any big advantages with Option 1. With Option 2, it will be possible to do a backup and restore from iCloud. It will also be possible to do the transfer when the user is next in the office, which makes things easier. The less the users have to do and the more the IT department can do the better, but most users are located remotely.

Second question: My assumption is that it is always best to buy the latest phone rather than a previous generation. Firstly, this allows you to extend the refresh cycle by a few months, and secondly, there are still significant advances with each new generation in terms of processor speed and battery life. The powers that be just see that the 7 is $100 more than the 6S and want to take the money. Any opinions? I haven't done any detailed TCO analysis.

I'm only half involved in this project and am trying to stay out of it as much as possible. Not least because I hear that customer service with EE is worse than Vodafone and I don't want to start having to deal with shoddy customer service (someone else outside of the IT department handles that now). If it was down to me I'd stick with Vodafone but a number of users have been complaining about coverage.

@MattSpeller said in MSP Teams in the SMB:

All of those things are true when MSP's are done right!

I agree. The theory is great, but in my experience, reality is very different. I've never known anyone to have a great experience with an MSP.

I don't know what the business models of MSPs are, I'd love to hear from some. But let me guess at this: I employ one full-time in-house IT guy at $50k pa. Alternatively, let's say an MSP employs 10 IT guys at $50k pa. The owner takes a 20% cut on top of that. So the MSP is costing $600k for 10 support staff. To cover that, the MSP has 12 clients paying $50k each. So each client will get the equivalent of 83% of a full-time IT guy.

That sounds great. I would go for that. I'd rather have 83% of an expert, than 100% of a generalist.

But in reality, the owner is more likely to take a 100% cut on top and buy a Ferrari. At least that's been the experience of all the MSPs I've known. The other issue is that other clients may take more than 83% of an expert, they might take 200% because they're idiots and need lots of support. Because all clients are sharing the same resources, and are paying a fixed fee, there is a free-rider problem. It's the same problem at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Haven't read everything on this thread, but have one question. The OP says the problem with Dropbox is " (slow - downloading,uploadig - internet outage)."

If that's the only problem with the current solution, couldn't the answer be to improve the internet connection? That might not be the cheapest solution but I'd have thought it would be the most simple. I appreciate it might not be possible depending on the location.

Pretty much the same here, but it's a really bad idea.

Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.

It is like moving house, only where you have to leave all your own, cool stuff in your old house and have to make do with whatever the previous tenants of your new house have left you. Even if they're relatively neat and tidy, you'll still be like "uugh, my new closet is full of brown cords, I miss my old blue jeans". And that's the best case. Worst case is they've left a half-eaten, three week old pizza under the sofa.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2928340/ultra-popular-hola-vpn-extension-sold-your-bandwidth-for-use-in-a-botnet-attack.html

Yeah, I love a bit of desk porn. Better, even, than cable porn.

@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:

1. Perform a P2V of the server and host it in our existing VMware environment.
2. Build a new virtual member server in our existing VMware environment and migrate the data from the existing WSS 3.0 server to the new VM (using the same versions of everything; Server 2008 R2, WSS 3.0 and SQL Server 2008).

Option 2 might be easier than you think. Use the "Backup and Restore" feature in the Sharepoint Central Administration. As others have said, you don't want Sharepoint running on a DC, so this would be a good opportunity to fix that issue. It's probably the easiest and cheapest solution.

Most of my users have learnt that tickets they raise themselves via e-mail tend to get resolved quicker than ones they submit verbally. Also, I often tell them to submit a ticket even when they're in my office, and explain that I might forget to resolve the problem otherwise with my terrible memory.

I buy my couches from Ikea. And call them settees.

@pchiodo said in MSP or VAR or just avoid:

A true MSP is product agnostic. They don't really care if you use Microsoft, or Linux, or Oracle, or whatever. They don't have an interest in the brand of equipment, or the software platform. All they really care about is providing service to their client in the best possible way.

Realistically, I don't believe you can ever be product agnostic. A typical MSP will have in-house expertise in SQL Server but not in Oracle. So they're absolutely going to care about whether you should use Oracle or SQL Server, because they're not going to be in a position to support you in Oracle (just to use your example).

For an MSP to be truly agnostic it would either have to massive (to be able to employ both Oracle and SQL Server experts), or it is full of generalists who can support both but lack expertise in either.

@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:

@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:

I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/

Not too many people agree with or like the post...

Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.

MSP says "SMBs should employ MSPs", internal IT says "SMBs should employ internal IT". There's no point being proven either way, just different viewpoints and lots of confirmation bias from both sides.

If you're only using SQL for a single, third-party application, you may be able to purchase a Runtime licence via the third-party, which is considerably cheaper. Its not something I've ever done, so don't know the specifics.

I use Teams, OneNote and Sharepoint. Documentation in OneNote, then mange them via Teams, which creates the relevant Sharepoint sites in the background.

I like Teams, it takes a lot of the burden out of managing Sharepoint.

What kind and quantity of documentation are you looking at?

@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:

Yes, it integrates with O365 which is nice, if you have O365 which they do with the customer that uses it. They don't like it, though. But they put up with it for the integration and price.

Integration with O365 is the only reason to use Teams IMO. But it is crap. I introduced it in our organisation and now most people hate me

However, Microsoft have spent a lot of money on slick TV adverts in the UK for it, so hopefully they'll invest in it and make it good.

We use it as a user-friendly front-end for Sharepoint, but I still end up opening Sharepoint if I want to do anything other than rudimentary document management, as Teams struggles.

We use it as a replacement for (consumer) Skype for messaging and screen sharing, but getting people to use it instead of Skype is a struggle. Skype is not great, but it's better. We use it for meetings, but free Zoom is much better.

I've never managed to get the calendar working correctly when organising Teams meetings. The chat is confusing, and we have lots of examples of people missing messages. To the extent that users sometimes send a Skype message that says "Did you get my Teams message?" Although I don't always get my Skype messages, so....

The embedded document editor is flaky, to the extent that I tell users to always select "Open in Desktop App" rather than "Edit in Teams".

I've tried using Microsoft Planner for project management (separate product but integrates nicely within Teams), but it's just not as good as the free version of Trello.

But, but, but.....I like the concept of a unified front-end interface to all our apps (Sharepoint, Planner, Word, IM etc etc), it's just not there yet. But it's still relatively new, and Microsoft have enough money to throw at it to make it work, eventually. I'm hoping my colleagues will eventually like me again

Bought the wife and kids new Fire tablets to replace the tablets they got for Christmas 3 years ago which are now dog slow. Didn't really want to but they were half price. They use them for several hours a week so they're not bad value.

@JaredBusch said in Yet another way Azure sucks:

Ah, here we go, it made a group and that lets you delete everything.

So you started a thread titled "Azure sucks" based on the fact that you just didn't really know how to use it properly?

This never happens with on-premise