If you’re searching for a very low cost email, contacts and calendaring solution and don’t need the power of Microsoft Exchange, you might look at Google Apps. The only challenge you will face is that Google makes it very difficult to find their free version. In fact, when you sign up, you’ll likely be put into a 30 day trial of their paid version. To convert your account, you could hunt and peck around the web or just read my blog for the instructions as I’ve done the hunting for you! Here’s the link on their help site (incredibly hard to find IMHO) Cancel Google Apps for Business 30-day free trial – Google Apps Help.
1st navigate to the Domain tab and click Subscriptions, then click “Cancel Google Apps for Business” at the bottom right. Don’t be alarmed, you aren’t actually undoing all your work, they just want to scare you.
Next, click the Downgrade button
That’s it! You won’t get all the benefits of the paid version, however for a small business just getting started, perhaps this is all you need.
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Small businesses, beware the Office 365 fine print | ZDNet.
If you like to send a lot of email, take a look at this article on ZDNet on the Office 365 sending limits. Details are still emerging and while I ultimately believe this will get fixed if enough people get hurt by it, it doesn’t inspire confidence.
Small business accounts are limited to 500 recipients per 24 hours and enterprise accounts are limited to 1500. Office 365 technical support was unable to tell me when the limitation is reset… They also said it is very difficult to upgrade from a small business to enterprise Office 365 account. I would need to create a whole new account and migrate the domain and users, so that is not an option.
The worst thing about this is that there is no way for support to override it. The user is left to sit without being able to send e-mail for 24 hours with absolutely no recourse. I understand that it is an automated feature put in place to prevent spam, but once the user has spoken to support and it has been verified as a legitimate use, there should be some way to override the limit.
I’ll stick with my hosted exchange, thank you very much.
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Windows 8 Has Finally Updated the Blue Screen of Death.
From Lifehacker.com, the greatest website EVER.
Looking forward the next “consumer” version of the Windows operating system, it seems they got the message that user errors can be teaching tools to the user. I think more transparency in this industry can only be an improvement.
What areas of IT would YOU like to see more transparency in? Can we collectively work toward this goal? Why or why not?
I just wonder who the pop psychologist was that came up with the copy for the new “cute screen of death”?
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One of the most important technical conferences I attend each year is SMB Nation Fall. I am speaking at this year’s conference and I hope you’ll be there too. They are giving away a Harley, so if you’re into that sortof thing, then register today! For our readers, you may receive a 10% discount by entering code “UBERGEEKGIRL” without quotes. And, if you want to carpool, ping me.
I will be doing a mobility session: GS13 – How the $#%@! do I setup email, calendar and contacts on this phone?!
Don’t miss the 9th Annual SMB Nation Fall conference coming up – end of month. Your VERY BEST RATES expire September 9th – this Friday!!! Visit fall.smbnation.com for details.
What’s New?
More MVPs, More Technical Content , More Advanced Sessions…you told us what you wanted and we delivered! If you’re serious about improving yourself as a technical professional, take the first step and visit our Fall site for more information. Topics include Office 365 E3, SBSE, MultiPoint Server (MPS), MSP business models and much more – truly can’t miss content!
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Thank God it’s Friday. Isn’t that what we all say? Well this past Friday, Ryan went to do a fairly routine Blackberry update. The client wanted a new device and this is usually no problem at all. We have standard procedures for most of our processes and this is no exception.
This particular device is wirelessly synced to the user’s mailbox for all functions except contacts, which are manually synced via desktop manager because they are mapped to a different user’s folder. During that sync, the desktop manager crashed after about 90% completion. We looked at the log and it revealed nothing. This was beginning to get ugly as it was after 5pm and the user was anxious to go home.
After several failed attempts to complete this setup, I picked up the device and brought it back to the office for further work. I noticed something very interesting after doing a full wipe of the device – the Address Book was “Not Installed”. 
After researching this error on the Blackberry forums, it is apparently a fairly common issue with no clear resolution.
In this case, the address book portion of the OS on the device was corrupted and there is no resolution. We returned the device.
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It seems that a lot of people are still struggling with spam in their inboxes. I wanted to write this to help you understand the ins and outs of spam, why you still get it despite spam filters and of course, make sure you’re doing all you can to prevent it.
It’s important to understand that if even 1 out of a million people click on the link in email, then the spammers have made a buck. Do you do a lot of shopping or searching on the internet? Then this is going to make you really mad but – most of the spam you get is because you (yes YOU!) gave some site your email address. They turned around and sold it for a buck.
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Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer.
Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer answers your Exchange operations questions, such as:
- Can my Exchange server receive inbound Internet/SMTP email?
- Can my Outlook Anywhere (aka “RPC over HTTP” in Exchange 2003) clients connect from outside the firewall?
- Can my mobile users connect using Exchange ActiveSync phones/devices?
- Does AutoDiscover work for Outlook 2007 clients?
- Does AutoDiscover work for Exchange ActiveSync clients?
- Are the certificates used for these services valid?
I cannot tell you how useful this tool has been in my server admin work. If you haven’t tried it yet, take it for a spin. Let me know if it has helped you! With thanks to Dave Shackelford at ThirdTier for this great resource.
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