gshaw

Another vote for eStream, does video storage, TV recording, live streaming and digital signage. Also the best product support I've seen from any company, always helpful and quick to find solutions and respond to feature requests.

3 hosts should no way be £15k unless you've got some top-end Enterprise Plus licensing for it? Should be able to get an Essentials Plus bundle for about 1/3 of that from what I remember.

@witch @EvLPhenom @VeryPC_Colin_M do the keyboards flex while typing on your units? Not sure if I've got a dodgy one but it almost seems like it isn't quite held down properly in some places (seems worse around top right hand side)

@VeryPC_Colin_M haven't yet but feel free to quote on similar spec (i5, 4GB RAM, 3yr warranty)

We've got a Fujitsu A544 in on trial at the moment as they're one of very few manufacturers willing to spec an SSD from the factory without putting ridiculous margins on it; is anyone on here using them? If so how good \ bad is the: - long term durability - user feedback - warranty service Initial thoughts seem that they look reasonable enough but the keyboard seems a bit flimsy and screen has a restricted angle on how far you can push it back. Saw some Wi-Fi issues with some BIOS versions mentioned on here as well, have they been resolved now?

You should give it another try, although you're unlikely to use ITIL 100% in the way the book says some elements of it *will* help you run your services more efficiently. The ones that really stuck out to me at the time were Change Management and Processes, went straight back to work after the course and implemented those and can't imagine not doing those now. Interestingly I feel the same way about MS certs, especially the language and scenarios used in exams that are often worlds away from what you experience day-to-day.

OneNote for me as well

Another vote for OneNote, it's made documenting systems so much easier and it's the only native Windows 8 app I prefer over its desktop equivalent. Also means the Surface RT I adopted in work has a purpose in life now

Wake on LAN during the night is the least disruptive, other than that we've tried putting ours to install at shut down without the fixed time schedule.

Yup, as long as you're licensed under EES you can request the additional licenses then activate them against your Office 365 tenancy. I've written down the process from our experiences here Office 365 Student Advantage end-to-end guide | gshaw0

Much better communication from Microsoft on these preview builds compared to the previous OS. It's refreshing to see them being open about design changes and responding to feedback, in stark contrast to the "we know best, you're all wrong" attitude that made such a mess of the initial release of Windows 8.

They've now admitted the issue and updated the admin portal SP10730

We had a Riverbed SteelStore on trial recently, does a similar thing writing straight to Amazon, Azure etc. Nice and easy, the online storage was pretyt cheap as well, just make sure to check the T&C's on the online storage package you choose so you're aware of data charges for storage and retrieval (some really catch you out on the latter)

Not sure around implications of using the service outside of its intended purpose but you'll probably hit issues with file naming if you're taking shared drive data and placing it straight onto OneDrive. Length of paths, special characters and so on cause it problems and won't sync correctly. I also find the desktop client sync quite unreliable and has a habit of not completing syncs properly. Wouldn't trust it for backup tbh unless you;re uploading the compressed backup files to it (bear in mind 10GB limit per file)

It's also not telling half the story, often when these cloud services have issues you wonder if it's your end or a wider issue. I was expecting log off issues based on what was posted but not the more fundamental aspects that aren't mentioned. Degraded status on admin portal can mean anything from a display picture not showing up to the whole service wobbling.

There's much more than that going on, we're hitting random errors all over the place whether it's checking files in and out, working with web parts and so on. Had the sign out error as well, couldn't get back onto the O365 web interface for a while this afternoon after it cropped up. Even worse for me right now as I'm working across 3 browsers all using different accounts in order to build up our new Intranet site

Just had an email from our SharePoint partner - major issues with the platform at the moment which explains what we've been seeing today. Incident ID SP10596 if anyone else is hitting the same issues.

Anyone else having problems with SP Online today? Getting intermittent streams of "an unexpected error has occurred" pages when logging in, navigating around, checking out documents etc. Also SharePoint sites are running very, very slowly. There's a couple of unrelated open issues on the admin portal but nothing about what we're seeing.

@jamesbmarshall we do that anyway, which was why getting A3 just for the iPad apps used to feel like paying twice. Good to hear MS is addressing it. How do we go about activating this for staff, is it something we need to apply for from our reseller like with Student Advantage?

We've moved email to Office 365 for all staff and students, works fine just a couple of caveats to watch out for in terms of firewall rules and client software if you're using proxy servers. Lync as a videoconferencing, IM and add-on to an enterprise VOIP system also working fine. The only exception for Lync would be if you want it to replace your in-house phone system as that's a more complicated setup needing some bare-metal grunt to run. SharePoint is our next project but we've found some unfortunate issues that are very specific to running a) in the cloud and b) as an Office 365 for Education customer that mean you may want to think twice about doing it. @Marshall_IT where did you hear about Office for iPad going onto the free plan? If true that's a massive win for us

£110 for a plastic keyboard that costs peanuts to make, all these manufacturers must be laughing all the way to the bank! The design suggests Microsoft got the folding keyboard cover right with the Surface and others are copying now. Shame MS squandered the opportunity with Windows RT.

That's surprising, I'm a member (MBCS) - 5 years experience and a reference from another professional who has BCS membership will get you in no problem. As for not uunderstanding the techologies behind ADFS and so on Microsoft (and partner blog sites etc.) all put plenty of content out there so at the very least IT professionals in any industry who are using these cloud products should understand the options available and use that to make an informed choice of how they're going to set it up.

Being that Flash is one of the most exploited plugins (along with Java) you'd think Adobe would make life as easy as possible for companies etc. to stay current. Just seems so petty to get an MSI (and often a broken one at that) of something that's free to the public anyway.

Unfortunately SharePoint feels sluggish all round the site, not just our home page where the customisations live. MS need a few more hamsters in their server farm it seems...

@FN-GM seeing as you've got a pretty much textbook setup could you answer a couple of quick questions? - does the OWA app for iOS work OK with ADFS authentication? Suspect it should be fine but it's vital for our users and they'd be most unhappy if we broke it! - have you created smart links so SharePoint goes straight in rather than taking you to an email address screen first? Office 365 – Single Sign-On for SharePoint, Skydrive, CRM, etc. via Smart Links | Jack Stromberg - does Lync automatically sign in on first logon with ADFS or do you have to supply any details in the logon box? - if you're running Office 2013 does it automatically populate the Office 365 \ SharePoint save locations (assuming it signs you into O365 as well as the domain)