gshaw

MYes according to the MS article some people were using hundreds of TB... so if they scale back just the unlimited bit that's one thing. What logic is taking 10GB off of users who showed good faith in MS consumer offerings? You say financial analysis but can you put a value on reputation and market share? Altering the terms of existing customers with retrospective changes is really shoddy practice imo. As someone else said, bait and switch. After all the work getting Win10 ready two crazy decisions have now painted a picture of MS as a company not to be trusted; first the OTT telemetry enabled by default in Win10 and now removing storage users have had for years. Was interesting to see which cloud provider would blink first, is this the start of the (attempted) monetisation of vendors' consumer cloud platforms?

I think you underestimate what the average user looks for, one provider gives a customer more than the other they'll go for the bigger number. Microsoft argued they made the Windows 8.0 UI based on data and everyone saw that train wreck coming a mile off. I'm always amazed when people defend companies making services more expensive for consumers, you're welcome to give Microsoft your money but I'll shift my data elsewhere and advise others to do the same. Shame really.

Ecosystem, get consumers on one platform then they're more likely to buy other services that integrate with it. It's likely a lot of users will likely move to Google Drive instead and with it Google Docs instead of Office 365 and so on.

If they're failing because of an 10GB per user then something is seriously wrong at Microsoft...

The unlimited > 1TB downgrade isn't great from a marketing point of view but makes sense, was surprised when they made the unlimited announcement in the first place actually. However dropping the free consumer allowance to a measly 5GB and actively removing storage from users is below the belt, really shot yourselves in the foot this time Microsoft. I'll be moving all my backups off the service and either onto Google Drive or something a bit more left-field. They've also managed to wreck the whole "ecosystem" for consumers using MS cloud services for personal use in one ill-advised move, Apple & Google will be very happy right now I imagine.

End of the day it's a question of getting best value for the solution. If a supplier is giving good service and the product fits out needs costs can be justified. However if a supplier tries to be sneaky and push up prices thinking we don't check they'll soon get caught out and our business then goes elsewhere.

Given that Bloxx were trying to sell us into a 3-year renewal very recently I don't think Smoothwall's response is too far off the mark. Very, very glad we gave our 90 days notice in recently while we were testing other solutions. The fact Akamai are only offering 1-year renewals says a lot. Probably hardware support only with minimal product work and likely the (excellent) support team being given their marching orders as corporate structure takes over. Reading articles elsewhere it seems the venture capital behind Bloxx have cashed in on their investment. Not sure how much choice the company had in the takeover but it's happened now so we have to pick up the pieces.

Looks like a dead product walking, some features probably being folded into an Akamai corporate product sometime next year which they'll sell us at an inflated price no doubt.

One less option to choose from in the education filtering product range, sounds like Akamai want Bloxx's tech for corporate products. Doubt education will be high on their priority list reading the gist of the press release.

That's a big if but will be interesting to see how it unfolds

@Boredguy did it come bundled with Office 2016 or as a separate download? Reason being I read some articles where Office 2016 was removing Skype for Business 2015 but not putting anything back in its place.

Beat me to posting that, writing was on the wall with the Pixel C running Android rather than Chrome OS. A couple of years ago this move would've made a lot more sense but it almost seems a bit of a shame now ChromeOS has matured and started taking market share based on its lightweight, secure nature. Can only hope Google manages to keep the same update mechanism where it controls the version on devices, rather than the mess Android is right now with manufacturers holding users to ransom with latest OS revisions.

We found them eventually for ours and working OK with Win10, although it does often seem that MS (and some other companies) need an "attention to detail" department to sort these niggles at source. So often it's left to bloggers making unofficial guides bringing everything together rather than the companies doing it in the first place. Adobe are another one; the only guide to hooking up ADFS to their Federated ID system is written by a random guy on Wordpress whereas their support pages contain nothing of use

Is this a typo on the version, where did you get 2016 from (as opposed to 2015 we have at present)?

Interestingly enough I've wanted to put our Windows 10 tablets on Azure AD pretty much in the manner being discussed here. Seems a bit flaky at the moment but would be easier for roaming devices. Shame MS are being so stubborn on the Azure AD side of the EMS bundle licensing or I'd have it by now along with InTune

MS will want people on Azure AD (you're able to join machines to it now) and products like the EMS Suite. That's where the subscription money is. Interestingly the OneDrive sync controls still use an internal domain as the boundary line but I guess that's a holding pattern until more advanced technology becomes available.

The thing I don't get about IAM Cloud Drive is if it works that well why didn't MS buy it up and build the functionality into the native product? So many people have complained at the useless sync client and the most common request is a "drive" feature. I did hear at another event that MS wanted to discontinue WebDAV at some point so that could be one reason perhaps. What's the performance like using the drive mapper? Mapping via script never seemed particularly speedy and again have anecdotally heard that there's an upload \ download cap on file transfers. At present we tell people to use the web UI and Office 2013 inegration. The new file management UI can't come soon enough in that regard.

Thanks for this, all set up and working now That said if you know of anyone who's got a Dell update to remove the irritating lizard on the login screen on the Chromebook 11 I'd love to know!

There's no way anyone could ever know every single product and possible usage scenario so a "don't know" moment is inevitable. Even more so with the rapid rate of change that comes in with cloud services these days. As said above it's how you handle the situation and follow-up with the query (and finding a solution) that's important. Back in the early days of my career I did try and bluff a question on an interview and soon got shot down Fortunately the rest of the questions went well and I still got offered the job but made a mental note for the future to be honest and hold my hands up in the future in a similar scenario. If your other skills are good then the people who matter will appreciate your honesty, that's my take on it anyway.

We've just signed up for Google Apps for Edu to manage a batch of Chromebooks we've ordered in recently (Dell Chromebook 11, nice bit of kit) I've set up policies in the management console that's working well but can't spot a couple of options - am I missing something or is is not possible to do the following: 1) specify which icons appear in the taskbar launcher (we're not using GMail at present so want to remove it and make Drive more prominent instead) 2) same as #1 but also for the search screen (has a drawer of 5 apps at the bottom) 3) remove certain shortcuts from the All Apps window e.g. Play Music, Play Movies etc. As a quick aside, am I right in assuming that if one user adds some apps to their login they'll follow that user if they login to another device? In a similar vein I'm guessing the additional apps won't then appear for the next user who logs into the device?

@localzuk have you tried domain logins on the LTSB image you were making? Just wondering if the initial profile creation is any quicker given there's no Metro apps installed as they seem to be the time hog from what I've read?

Funny enough I've just come on Edugeek to have a look if anyone else had weird proxy behaviour on their Chromebooks The first run I connected them to our internal SSID (no proxy, direct connection to web) and all was wonderful. Putting them onto the internal proxied network turned the experience into a very ropey one with random sign-in errors and DHCP connection errors. All the more reason I want to dump the whole proxy thing and go bridged mode. Noticed the same as others mentioned with the software versions - out the box had a few on v44, some on 41 and others on 40. The subtly different login screens are the only real giveaway. Btw remember when enrolling to do the CTRL+ALT+E straight away when the login screen appears else you'll have to wipe the device via Developer mode (found that one out after using a generic Google account for a quick demo last week) And don't get me started on that lizard on the Chromebook 11's - brilliant devices apart from whatever numpty made the logon wallpaper non-customisable Edit: I've changed the proxy settings on the managed network from Auto Configuration to Manual and the sign in screen is appearing now. Seems like another application that doesn't play nicely with WPAD files...

You usually get a code with your EES renewal (it's never changed) which is the one you enter at renewal to get Dreamspark for free

Did the AppLocker rules take long to generate? Can I get away with creating them directly as a GPO (only applied to a couple of test machines) or does it really need the whole "reference computer" scenario the MS documentation talks about? The pre-installed apps and lack of a clean Start Menu is one area where I agree with @localzuk about the LTSB build, would've expected the Education SKU to have a clean install without all the consumer apps. Lazy from MS there I think.

@Michael is it fairly safe to say that the managed Start Menu tiles method (XML file) isn't working on Win10 at present?