I'm not recommending it. Depends on the OP's circumstances. But you could probably get the whole thing, installed, migrated and live in a couple of hours (he says, having never actually done it). Sure, there's a massive element of kicking the can down the road by sticking with free Sharepoint, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is a good idea. Only sometimes though!

@scottalanmiller said in Free SharePoint?:

@momurda said in Free SharePoint?:

@scottalanmiller That's really great. Now my boss wont ask me to make a SP server if i tell him itll cost thousands of dollars. And i will be happy.

Yup, the last, highly limited free version was FOUR years ago. At this point, even that one is old enough that it sounds like a bad idea for a new deployment.

That's not that old. I don't think it deserves writing in upper case It's under mainstream support until 2018. I'd be more concerned about still using SQL Server 2008 with it. Now that is old, and expensive to upgrade.

We're using 2013 Foundation. I've never ran into limitations that bother me, it's a great product. We are moving to Sharepoint Online in the next 12 months though. If you're used to free, and you don't use O365 already, the $60 per user per year may sting a bit, especially if you don't really need the extra features versus Foundation and you already have SQL Server on-premise.

I imagine that migrating a 250+ user Sharepoint server to Alfresco is a massive project. Good luck.

So, I think the answer to the question is no, it's not needed. There are a lot of alternative products that will perform a similar function. Perhaps the question should be is AD desirable? Of all the alternatives, AD is arguably the best, the most comprehensive, the most mature, the most stable, but it's probably also the most expensive. So perhaps the question should be is AD worth the cost?

Well, I'm glad that's been cleared up. You can probably delete the thread now

I don't understand what's going on with Dynamics. The transition from Dynamics CRM to the new Dynamics 365 seems to be more than just a re-branding exercise, it feels like an entirely new product. Or rather two products, as Microsoft has been its usual annoying self and decided "why offer one product when we can confuse users by offering two?". So there's Dynamics 365 for Enterprise and Dynamics 365 for Business. Where "Enterprise" is defined, somewhat arbitrarily, as a company with 250+ users.

Worst still, Dynamics 365 for Business isn't even available in Europe yet, and yet neither is the old Dynamics CRM, leaving SMBs seemingly in limbo.

If anyone understands what's going on and can explain it to me, I'd be very grateful, as the concept of Dynamics 365 is pretty appealing.

True, but that's not a problem specific to SaaS. Traditional, on-premise software can become effectively unusable if the software company decides to no longer support it.

@scottalanmiller said in Trusting that cloud based providers (SaaS) will protect your data from theft or loss:

You are right to worry. The size and competence of providers is the same "concern" level across domains. A ten person cloud provider has about the same security skills and potential as a ten person accounting office, insurance agency or doctor's office. Maybe slightly better, just because of the type of business, but same ballpark.

Oh sure. By "small" I'm talking relative terms, not absolute. I'm not trusting my data to a bunch of college grads working out of their parents' garage. But how to judge size? Many of these providers are well funded, but may not have much revenue, due to the nature of startups. Freshdesk has just got $50m funding, which seems a lot to me, but is peanuts in US startup terms. They have 1000 employees, but the definition of "employee" can be confusing in the startup world.

We also rely on Trello. They've just been purchased for $500m. Does that make them big enough to trust? I think so, but I really don't know. These are all startups and I'm old and struggle to see beyond my understanding of traditional firms.

@scottalanmiller said in Trusting that cloud based providers (SaaS) will protect your data from theft or loss:

How does the CEO, CFO, BoD or whatever know that internal IT systems are secure? They can't, not effectively. They mostly just have to trust that their IT team is doing an adequate job

If I was CEO I wouldn't trust my IT team. I'd get them externally audited (eg penetration testing etc etc). My department (IT) is the only department in our company that doesn't get externally audited to some extent.

Well, technically, we do get audited as part of other audits (finance, ISO certification, insurance providers etc etc), but in practice, those auditors don't understand anything about IT, so it's little more than a box ticking exercise and not a robust audit ("Do you keep external backups?" Tick).

I think all IT departments should get properly audited annually by external experts.

We keep a lot of mission critical, highly confidential data in O365, Google Apps and Dropbox. I don't have a problem with this. Their security is significantly better than anything I can provide on-premise as an SMB. There is risk, but it is acceptable risk. It's not something I feel a need to worry about.

But what about smaller providers? We use Freshdesk as our helpdesk ticketing system. I know very little about them. I don't even know what country they're based in. They're not small, but they''re not massive. We keep a lot of sensitive data in some of our helpdesk tickets (passwords, server details etc etc). I'm trusting that Freshdesk servers have adequate security, but I have no way of knowing. How do I manage this?

Data theft would be terrible. Data loss would also be terrible. We don't pay for Freshdesk. Rightly or wrongly, I always feel more confident using a paid service. If nothing else, expectations of support in case of data loss or theft is going to be higher when you're paying for it.

As well as risk of theft or data loss, there is a risk of the provider simply disappearing without notice. You go to use your software and just get a message "Sorry, we're dead. Everything is gone". Or you get a 30 day notice that the service is closing down - this isn't so bad, because you at least have some time to move your data somewhere else, but it's still terrible.

How do you deal with this? Do you sleep ok at night?

@coliver said in Webroot - Malicious autorun scripts on USBs:

Now it asks if you want to run it or do something else.

Exactly. That's my point. It doesn't autorun, it asks you what you want to do.

From Wikipedia:
"Autorun.inf has been used to execute a malicious program automatically, without the user knowing. This functionality was removed in Windows 7 and a patch for Windows XP and Vista was released on August 25, 2009 and included in Microsoft Automatic Updates on February 8, 2011"

What am I missing here?

Opening file explorer is ok though, isn't it? It's executing autorun.inf that's the problem.

@Breffni-Potter said in Webroot - Malicious autorun scripts on USBs:

Triggered before I touched any files.

Perhaps showing my ignorance here, but is autorun still a thing? I somehow thought it was disabled in Windows since about XP?

Yes, it's internal. Sorry, I should have made that clearer in my OP. Although it's actually a list of merchants that sell our products, so I can see that ultimately we may want to make it public and put it on our website. That's at least a year away though.

@TeleFox said in Google Maps API:

@Carnival-Boy Hi Carnival.. is it something that is easy to do? It may seem daunting at first but it is pretty easy. I would start here.. with this tutorial..

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/store-locator

Thanks. I'll take a look. It's not what I'd call easy.

I actually don't even know what you mean by importing the map and a Google Sheet.. I have not done it that way before. Are you referring to Fusion tables? Sort of lost on how you set yours up originally. Sounds time consuming and difficult.

My way is dead easy, but time consuming. It doesn't use Fusion tables. I just open up my Google map, delete the existing layer and add a new layer:

which prompts me to select a Google Sheet:

Absolutely. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but Lucy Kellaway's series of office spaces are great. Like this Lego one

Youtube Video

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

Thought I may as well hijack this thread rather than starting a new one.

I have a Google Map showing customer locations. This is currently updated entirely manually. When we get a new customer, we update a Google sheet with the new details, then in the map we delete the existing layer entirely and re-create it by importing data from the Google sheet. This is obviously a rubbish and time-consuming way of doing it.

Firstly, I can't seem to find a way to dynamically link a Google sheet to the map data. When the Google sheet is modified, it doesn't update the map. You have to delete the layer and re-import the data. Is there a way to dynamically link it? I could just update the map data directly, but it looks very limited compared with a normal Google sheet.

What I really want is a single script that will extract the customer data from our SQL Server database into a .csv file (or Google sheet if possible), and then automatically update the map. I then schedule this script to run once a day.

I've attempted using the Google API in the past but failed miserably (granted I didn't spend long on it, and it was a few years ago). Is this something that is going to be easy to do, and where should I start?

Cached credentials? Temporary files? Browsing history? If you can't wipe it before giving it back to your company, are you confident that it is always clean of all your personal data? I dunno.

@scottalanmiller said in the missing VoIP, the ERP and the solution in search of a problem:

Just pay whatever the ERP vendor asks. The company has made their decisions.

This. They sound pretty clear about what they want to do and pretty clear that they don't want your advice or to include you in decision making. So why go to all the hassle of keeping your existing phone system when they've already told you to ditch it? You're setting yourself up to fail by that route. If you're already planning on leaving in 2018, just sit back and enjoy the ride for the next 12 months or so.