Office 365’s New Wave 15 Management Portal

We received notice that our hosted domain was upgraded earlier in the week.

It is important to note that any company looking to Office 365 for their hosted service provider needs to keep in mind that change-control is completely out of their, the customer’s, hands.

Let’s take a quick peak at the new administration centres for the features we regularly use:

• The new Office 365 Admin Center

There is some reporting available under the current health column with links to INCIDENT IDs however they seem to be protected behind the service’s Microsoft ID logon. So, we will perhaps hold-off publishing the histories found in those reports until we are sure that we can.

Suffice it to say SharePoint Online and Exchange Online have had issues this month. :)

The Exchange admin center is pretty much the same as the one we find in our own Exchange 2013 deploys:

• Exchange admin center

In the EAC we have the ability to finely tune our O365 Exchange experience right down to individual SPAM settings. This is even before we venture into PowerShell for Office 365!

And finally, the SharePoint Admin Center:

The service has most certainly taken a huge step forward . . . in feature set but also in complexity for management.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Stormy Cloud Number 2: ExchangeDefender Australia and an Apology

Karl and Manuel Palachuk called me to task on the previous blog post especially over our qualification mentioning ExchangeDefender Exchange Hosting (xD) not being the vendor of record that killed folk’s mailboxes.

• MPECS Inc. Blog: Stormy Cloud: Vendor Deleted Mailboxes by Mistake and Could NOT Recover Them!

While we had seen bits and pieces about a problem with OWN’s hosted Exchange in Australia we were so busy that there was not enough time to actually let the news settle in:

• ExchangeDefender NOC: Australia 2007 Outage

So, Karl and Manuel, my apologies. I should have been aware of the impact that the OWN catastrophic failure had on the folks of Australia before posting the previous entry.

With the apparent abandonment of the folks that were on the hosted Exchange 2007 platform in Australia that begs the question: What does this mean for folks that have their organization’s mailboxes on Exchange 2007 here in North America? Or, any other geographical area that OWN services with Exchange 2007?

By abandonment we mean leaving the entire Exchange 2007 platform behind. We are not entirely sure where the mailbox recovery stands at this point? Vlad?

One of our clients has their hosted Exchange 2007 with SherWeb based here in Canada. We’ve been discussing the various Cloud vendors available to them including Office 365 and OWN’s hosted Exchange 2010 services. And now, possibly hosted Exchange 2013.

The one place SherWeb has both O365 and OWN beat is in the migration story. Karl mentions documentation in his first comment on the above blog post. SherWeb has a clearly documented migration story among other aspects of their hosting business.

With O365 and OWN that migration story must be handled by the IT Solution Provider or Cloud Support Specialist. :)

In the end, just as the hardware and software story are constantly changing for our on-premises IT Solutions so too must we be evaluating our Cloud Vendor’s wares on an ongoing basis.

Most certainly the situation in Australia is a real Cause For Pause when it comes to OWN’s hosted Exchange.

For us, it means looking further into SherWeb as a possible hosted Exchange and SharePoint vendor partner.

Cloud or On-Premises: A _full_ backup of all data hosted outside of a client’s walls is absolutely mandatory.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Windows Live Writer

ExchangeDefender E-Mail Outage – Our Client E-mail and Some Thoughts

The following is a copy of an e-mail we sent out to all of our clients that are protected by ExchangeDefender and/or using OWN’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint:

Hello and good morning,

First, we do apologize for the mail flow interruption yesterday. Up until now we have had very reliable services with ExchangeDefender. Since our first signing up with OWN about two to three years ago we have experienced a few hiccups along the way with one serious outage for hosted Exchange happening in the last 12 months.

Yesterday, our e-mail sanitation and continuity provider ExchangeDefender experienced a catastrophic power outage in their Dallas data centre (DC). It just so happened that the component that failed was an Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) about the size of a van that is supposed to keep power flowing into the facility by switching between the power grid or a backup generator.

Because that switch failed both power sources were cut off into the facility which eventually caused a system wide shut down. Statistically, the ATS failing is the equivalent to buying a 6/49 and winning the pot. A spare ATS was on-site, but we are talking about Kilo-Volts and Kilo-Amps of current so it is no easy task to switch them out and actually quite deadly.

The long and short of it is that Own Web Now, the owners of the ExchangeDefender services, have learned some lessons on where the system needs improvement. One place improvement will be made will be to set up additional data centres (DCs) to allow mail to continue flowing if Dallas has another outage.

We will also have LiveArchive access, which is your Web based access if our in-house servers go down, at additional DCs so that we can have access to our e-mail again if Dallas has a problem.

And finally, hosted Exchange 2010 will be set up for access across multiple DCs to eliminate the single point of failure in Dallas.

These changes are now in process. It will take about 3-5 months for the changes to be made.

Again, our apologies for the e-mail flow interruption.

While there are certainly other providers of these types of services out there, we prefer to continue our business relationship with OWN and ExchangeDefender. Why? Because we believe that OWN shares our vision, passion, and attitude about providing the best possible products and services for your hard earned money.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Thank you for doing business with us and have a wonderful day! :)

Along the way to where we are today as far as the products and services we at MPECS provide to our clients there have been hiccups, burps and outright failures.

We have come to standardize our server and desktop hardware configurations on certain vendor's products. Those configurations have come as a result of wasting both our client’s time and our time with the cheap stuff. BTDT and no thank you.

We have also come to realize the weaknesses in any given setup that we deploy as a result of unforeseen failures.

The good and bad experiences in our industry are a fact of life. And, as a result of those experiences we have come where we are today providing products and services that our clients can count on to run without virtually any interruption.

We will continue to stand by OWN and ExchangeDefender because they do share the same attitude as us. They, and thus we, will grow as a result of this experience.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

OWN ExchangeDefender Outage – Begs The Question: Where Is the Redundancy?

Currently, OWN’s services are all down. _All_ down.

• ExchangeDefender
• Own Web Now Site
• ExchangeDefender NOC Blog

We are able to get status updates from OWN’s NOC Twitter account here:

• Twitter: ExchangeDefender NOC
• http://twitter.com/#!/xdnoc

Note that the last tweet indicated above points to a power plant being offline thus hitting the Data Centre (DC). Given the heat wave going on in some parts of the USA having a power plant go offline is not an unexpected event anymore.

Even our own power systems here in the province of Alberta are running close to their limits.

With ExchangeDefender’s user base growing at such a high rate over the last number of years, having a single point of failure for the services here in North America becomes a drawback.

Not to be harsh, but this outage truly begs the questions:

• Where is ExchangeDefender’s service redundancy?
• And, if there is indeed a redundant DC located elsewhere what happened to the failover sequences?

As more and more folks sign up for the ExchangeDefender service, this has to be a question asked at the highest levels. Given Vlad Mazek’s business acumen and past responsiveness to service issues we sure hope that this incident will bring about a solution that will virtually eliminate the possibility of the whole service going offline again.

Perhaps this will be a “growing pain” experience.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Office 365 Beta – Go Live Time Here

We signed up for the Office 365 Beta a while back but never heard back from the program until very recently.

Well, after receiving the sign-up e-mail we went about creating a new domain and a new LiveID for this project. We have seen situations where existing LiveIDs used for multiple services can get mixed up or have that LiveID’s connection to other than Office 365 services broken.

So, we are in!

We are going to add our new domain:

We need to wait until the newly registered domain and DNS setup hits the Internet before we can go any further. Once we do have everything lined up we will publish the e-mail address(es) here to make sure we get _lots_ of traffic! :)

Creating a user:

We will utilize the E3 plan to gain access to all of the O365 features that we can.

And, now that our domain has come online:

And, here we are about an hour later this is our new domain e-mail found in my Inbox:

The reply back to the mailbox has not arrived yet, but that may because ExchangeDefender has not picked up the new MX record for the domain.

One blip so far:

When we head into the Domain properties page we see:

Okay, we jumped into the help resources and ended up here:

• Office 365 Jump Start (13): SharePoint Online Administration

So far, nothing seems to be coming up for SharePoint:

We went in and created a service ticket at 1400Hrs:

The setup was brought online around 1320 Hours. 40 minutes should be more than enough time for the service to be provisioned.

1411 Hours: Still no ticket:

Well, that’s about all the time we have for this today folks! :|

We may need to go in after the fact and set up a domain for SharePoint as mentioned earlier. But, we should get the out of the box SharePoint site once provisioned. That has not happened as of yet.

For now our hands are tied.

OWN 1 –  O365 0

At least with OWN support we get a response when we open a support ticket after a short period of time. Chalk one up for OWN.

UPDATE 14:28 Hours: The SharePoint site just came up. Go figure.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

The Cloud Caveat – No Service

Some Cloud based issues that we have and are dealing with this week.

Online E-mail Hosting/Sanitation

0800Hrs: Customer: “Dear sir, your money has been sent via e-mail money transfer.”

1330Hrs: Us via phone: “Mr. Client, we still have not received a payment?”

Ah, that’s when we discover that there must be something going on and of course there is the post in the RSS reader that OWN is having issues. The issues continued well past the 1150Hrs EST update time on the above post too.

• OWN NOC: Network Outage Research

Online Banking

We can’t seem to do anything with that EMT?!?

• No money honey!

When we called the 800 number the person on the other end said that they knew about the problem and that there was no ETA on a fix.

Conclusion

We really don’t realize just how much impact a service outage can have on us until it actually happens.

As much as we can have the risk evaluation conversation with a client about moving their infrastructure to the Cloud the reality is that they may not become cognizant of the true cost of an outage until it happens.

That missed deposit could create havoc on a business running on the wire! :|

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Office 365 Beta Sign Up

Okay, so we clicked the link:

• Join the Office 365 Beta (Link to actual site without all the e-mail tracking stuff)

After clicking the JOIN THE BETA button we filled out the form and we were presented with two options:

We chose the Enterprise level Beta so we could look at what was happening there.

Now, probably the number one stopping point for us and Microsoft’s hosted services is the fact that we are not the ones to bill the client _they_ are.

We resell a fair amount of Microsoft licensing as our primary way of licensing Microsoft products at client sites. So, Microsoft gets our client’s names. Thus, this is not the sticking point.

The sticking point is that we have _no control_ over billing, pricing, services, support, and other aspects of the online services. We also have no control over the very _small_ residual that comes to our company as a result of our signing up say a 250 seat customer.

Much of the feedback that we have heard from fellow SMB IT focused providers on Microsoft’s hosted services follows along the same lines. We have no real relationship with the customer/client.

Own Web Now

We stand by our decision to resell OWN’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint services. The service is excellent, the support folks are pretty good about getting things going when there is a need, and we get to be the face behind the product.

On another note, we have signed up for OWN’s SBS 2011 Essentials integration beta with an HP ProLiant MicroServer on its way to be a part of this beta in a small client setting. So, we will see OWN’s hosted Exchange services integrate into Microsoft’s new SBS product!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer