Soulfish

Love planner - been waiting for this for a while! Lots of people here in my company have been waiting for it as a great alternative to Project for tracking much smaller/agile tasks and teams.

Woo thanks @elsiegee40 - just done this. Fed up of the number of nuisance calls I get through on my mobile asking if I've had an accident, want to relciam PPI or some other big scam! At least my mobile has some directory integration so I can filter some of the more common ones now and just not answer them, but hopefully this will save me ever receiving a lot of those calls.

Also finally decided to stump up the cash for this . I'm "Soulfishy", but did end up getting the steam version as I just really don't like uPlay . Only level 6 at the moment though!

I went from being a generalist to specialising on Unified Comms and Communication (anything to do with Email, Intranets, Instant Messaging or communication in general - Office 365 basically ) and haven't looked back. I've actually found my generalist background very useful and often get pulled into things unrelated to my key areas because of it. When you have an idea of how everything works together you're very useful even if its not your key area/specialism

ITIL for IT/Support processes and PRINCE2 for project management are the two pretty standard IT management style qualifications you'll get asked for in business.

The new sync client is so much better. Been using it for a few months and its fixed 99.99999% of our sync issues

I raised it to our Premier TAM and O365 SDM as it was pretty poor showing from MS that they couldn't even be bothered to update the O365 status page.

I've previously set PaperCut up to generate monthly accounts that went out to the heads of department and director of finance. Those costs came out of each departments budget, so we factored in total IT cost for the per print price (paper, cost per click, PaperCut costs etc) and were typically charging 1-2p/mono side and 20p/colour side. For us the costings for A3 and A4 were the same as cost per click and paper were the same. Costs for the central reprographics machines were probably 25% cheaper than the other floor level MFDs to encourage large jobs to go there instead.

O365 is about to get a new admin portal though - haven't made up my mind about that new portal yet!

O365 users need to have an internet routable UPN i.e [email protected] (see here for more info). If your current on-prem AD uses a non-internet routable domain (i.e. [email protected]) then you'll need to look at either changing the UPNs of your users (which may, or may not be possible. here explains how to change it ) or alternatively looking to setup ADFS 3.0 and using AlternateLoginID - https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2014/04/office-365-configuring-ad-fs-dirsync-with-an-alternate-login/

Other than a Masters degree in Computer Science I don't have any "formal" IT qualifications. I've done plenty of courses, but never bothered to actually do any exams as I've always been too busy to dedicate the time to taking them. Does that mean that I think professional qualifications are worthless? Far from it - I think they help to show that someone should have a good understanding of that particular area of technology and certainly when I interview someone that has particular IT quals I do tend to focus in on them and quiz them to find out quite how much they really know vs how much its purely a paper excise. As others have said a qualification can help get you in the door (as can relevant experience), so are certainly useful for the CV; but they're not the be-all and end-all - any qualification that you want to talk about needs to be able to be backed up with real world experience to really succeed . Actually now I think about it I do have a certification as a Citrix XenServer admin, but I helped write the exam so I don't think it really counts!!

I made the move from being a Director of IT in an Academy to the Private sector a few years ago now and haven't looked back since . I work for a global company as the technical authority for O365. The work and people are great, and there are some very unique challenges in our environment (on top of having 100k users in basically every country in the world!), if I need to go on any training I can (I've been on 15 days of IT training this year), I'm allowed to go to conferences/IT events (from small one day things in the UK/London to large events like Microsoft Ignite), there's travel around the world if I want to visit offshore teams (or need to for project reasons), the pay/benefits/pension/bonus are all as good or better (and to be honest I was well paid in the public sector) and most importantly I'm trusted to be the technical authority for my product stack and have input into anything even vaguely related to it. It isn't all rosy in the private sector though - I was head hunted to go work for a consultancy and while the work was interesting and varied I didn't like the life style. I was lucky in that I was able to move back to my previous company as they wanted me back in my current role, but make sure to research and make sure that any role/company is what you really want. I'd agree with everyone else though, I'd never turn down an interview as they're always good experience

If you think that's expensive you should see the cost of the 30-minute on-site health and safety assessment! I'm in the wrong role I tell you

My work bought me a RH Logic 400 (high back) Ergonomic Office Chair | RH Chairs | Posturite after my home working risk assessment, but I have to say I actually prefer a Steelcase Leap v2. The Leap is the most comfortable chair I've had the pleasure of owning

Gotta get out of the Scotland v South Africa game sharpish on Saturday to try and make it to somewhere that is showing the England v Australia match

Got tickets for the Scotland v South Africa game in Newcastle. Looking forward to that

Nope - OWA is integrated into the product. If Exchange does what you want have you thought of migrating your mailboxes into Office 365? Assuming you're in Education its a zero cost option, and saves having to update/upgrade Exchange .

I have a RB2011UiAS for my home router. It's fine, but Mikrotik takes some getting used to after working with Cisco/Juniper/Palo Alto kit . They're very good value for what they are though!

My home lab uses names of cosmological bodies (stars, galaxies, planets, astroids, moons etc) giving me a fair number to playnwith Work is a standardised naming scheme which includes country, city, datacenter, role and number.

I bought a Mikrotik router from them last month and bits and bobs over the years. Never had any issues with them

You can pickup used 5510's and 5520's on ebay for £25-55 depending on if it's the 24 port or 48 port version. I've just got myself a 5510-24T for £30 via eBay for my home lab. For a layer 3 switch that was still being sold by Avaya until earlier this year that's pretty damm cheap!

Not quite. Think of it a bit like a motorway vs a single lane road. If we assume both have the same speed limit, then for a single car it's going to take the same time no matter the road type. The difference comes when you have multiple cars trying to go down the same road. It's the same with teaming - you get multiple "lanes" that are each capable of 1gbit throughput, so can achieve a max of 4gbps throughput, but no single stream will be any faster. All teaming gives you is additional capacity and redundancy. So for a multi-user server its useful, but for a single point to point application if you need to increase throughput you typically need to look at using 10gb+ adapters.

Another recommendation for TSO. I've been with them for years now, and their support is brilliant. Great when you don't want the hassle of running a server/VPS. Saying that I'm also looking to use OVH (well probably their cheaper Soyoustart subsidiary) for some projects where I need a dedicated server in a datacenter somewhere. They seem to be fairly decent for low price dedicated servers/VPS's where you need more control than basic web hosting

Easy way is to just use WHOIS tool | Nominet

You need to get the nameservers for your domain changed so they point to Vidahost rather than Capita. Fairly straightforward if you're not planning on actually changing any records yet as both locations will have consistent data. Once you make the change everything should be replicated and pointing to Vidahost fairly quickly (typically within 24-48hrs). Your domain registrar should be able to assist with getting the domain nameserver records changed, or alternatively you could look at porting the domain to Vidahost to manage as well as the DNS record.