BEI Blog
Are you still receiving faxes on a traditional fax machine? It might be time to think about replacing it with a fax service that will send those faxes to an email address as an attachment. This has a number of benefits:
- It may end up being less expensive than the phone line you are currently using
- Paper faxes get jammed or lost – it is much easier to track and store electronic files
- Electronic faxes can be easily forwarded, stored, etc.
We have used and like the following options.
There are many more – if you have one you like let us know! We don’t resell these services but are happy to help you set them up if you need assistance.
We have had a number of questions about recovering deleted email in Office 365 and wanted to clarify how it works.
Recovering Deleted Items
Summary – when using Office 365 you have 14 days to recover any items that are deleted from your deleted items in Outlook.
Details – when you delete an email in Outlook it is placed in your Deleted Items Folder. It stays there until you manually delete it or until it is deleted by rules or archiving. In Office 365 items that are then deleted from the Deleted Items Folder are placed in the Recoverable Items folder for an additional 14 days before being permanently removed. Users can recover these items using the Recover Deleted Items feature in Outlook Web App or Outlook. If a user has manually purged an item from the Recoverable Items folder, an administrator can recover the item within the same 14 day window, through a feature called Single Item Recovery.
Recovering Deleted Mailboxes
Summary – you can recover deleted mailboxes within 30 days of the date the mailbox was deleted, after that they are deleted permanently..
Details – When an Exchange Online mailbox is deleted, its contents are recoverable for 30 days. A recovered mailbox contains all of the data stored in it at the time it was deleted. After 30 days, the mailbox is not recoverable. Administrators can recover a deleted mailbox using the Exchange Control Panel.
May, 2012
FISMA Certification
FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) is the latest security certification for Office 365. FISMA is important to our customers because it creates a process for federal agencies to certify and accredit the security of their information management systems. Many BEI clients are government contractors who are required to meet specific standards for their internal networking and applications.
Office 365 Trust Center
You can learn about FISMA Certification and more at the Office 365 Trust Center.
Office 365 Data Center Tour
This video tour takes you through a tour of Microsoft Data Centers that support their online, cloud-based services.
Big Easy Rebate
The Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.
Office 365 Trust Center
You can learn about FISMA Certification and more at the Office 365 Trust Center.
Office 365 Data Center Tour
This video tour takes you through a tour of Microsoft Data Centers that support their online, cloud-based services.
Big Easy Rebate
The Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.
Major flooding during the monsoon season in Thailand have resulted in over 600 deaths, the destruction of entire towns, the loss of homes, farmland and industrial facilities. Certainly not the worst result of the flooding but one that directly impacts our business and our clients is the destruction of many factories (Western Digital, Toshiba, Nidec) that manufacture hard drives as well as component manufacturers (experts estimate that Nidec manufactures up to 80% of the small motors used in hard drives.) Dell has advised us to check with them when placing orders (particularly servers) as changing the hard drive specified in a server configuration can often impact the lead time for that server. We are working with our clients to minimize the impact of this shortage.
We discussed LiveOffice in the August BE Eye, but thought the Continuity aspect was worth reinforcing. If our email server or internet connection to our data center happens to go down, we can send and receive email via our Live Office email archive. How does this work? BEI Email is sent first to Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, our hosted email filtering service. The BEI Exchange server is then setup as the primary DNS entry, but the Live Office network is backup. So if email can’t be delivered to our server for any reason, it is sent to Live Office. Sent and received email is automatically flushed back to Exchange when the Exchange server comes back up. want to know more? Give Kurt Duesterdick a call at 703-528-8300
x101 or kurt@beinetworks.com.
We have set up a number of iPads to connect to our client’s corporate networks, using either Microsoft Terminal Services or Citrix to connect to a wide variety of applications (Office, accounting, databases, etc.). There are free apps that can be installed for both of these services. The clients who are using the iPads this way are doing light work at home or while traveling and are generally pleased. The major caveat to consider is that the interface is relatively small and everything is done using touch options, which can be a little awkward for some corporate applications. If you are interested in this option let us know and we’d be glad to talk through your requirements.
BEI’s netEndure is now available in a software-only version (netEndure AA) that lowers the initial price of this business continuity solution. Software is installed on an existing server which backs up server and desktop images to spare disk space (this can be on the local server, another server, network storage or USB drive). The price is approximately $50/server/month. Backed up images can optionally be sent offsite to datacenter storage for about $0.30 per gigabyte/month. Note that this does not include the “instant virtualization” feature that allows you to be back up and running on an alternate device, but it does give you image-based backups at a very attractive price.
Contact Kurt Duesterdick at 703-528-8300 x102, kurt.duesterdick@beinetworks.com for more information.
There has been quite a bit of confusion around the support of Blackberries and Microsoft Exchange Online. We’re going to try to clarify the situation here!
BPOS Exchange Online, the service that Microsoft has been selling and supporting since 2008, provides free BES service. Microsoft does this by hosting a BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server).
Office 365 will NOT include BES support until early 2012 or so. This is because the plan is to use RIM’s online BES service that is currently being tested and is expected to be available in early 2012 (rather than Microsoft hosting a BES).
So if you want to use Exchange Online and need BES service, be aware that you must sign up for Exchange Online and the BES service during June 2011 – we expect Office 365 will be generally available toward the end of June, and once Office 365 is generally available BPOS Exchange Online will not be offered to new accounts. (Generally available just means sold as a standard service, no longer in the testing period.)
BlackBerry users can use BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) with Exchange Online and Office 365 if they only need email. This service is free but will not sync contacts, calendar, tasks, etc.
If you are currently using BPOS Exchange Online and think there is ANY POSSIBILITY that you may want to add and BES users you should purchase one seat (cost = $0) right now. You will then be able to add users any time later. But, if you do not have any BES accounts you won’t be able to add them once Office 365 is generally available.
Questions? Call or email Ellen Jennings at 703-528-8300 x125 or jenningse@beinetworks.com.
Last week Amazon Web Services’ EC2 (Elastic Cloud 2) experienced an outage that lasted for about 30 hours – taking down such websites as Foursquare, Hootsuite, Quora and Reddit. Should this event cause you to reevaluate your plans regarding moving part (or all) of your IT infrastructure to the cloud? Our opinion – use this as input to your decision but it really shouldn’t cause you to change your plans. Here are the key points:
- Outages WILL happen – not every month or even every year – and not 30 hours. But keep in mind that this is the worst wide-scale outage to date. There will be some downtime with any network, or at least periods of reduced functionality.
- You need to understand and manage your risks – many of the Amazon clients who were down had opted for a less expensive redundancy plan. The risks in the cloud are still usually considerably less than hosting applications on your own premise and should be compared with the risks of a private cloud operating at a data center.
- Read and make sure you understand your SLA (Service Level Agreement.) Amazon’s SLA for EC2 is 99.95% for multi-AZ (Availability Zone) deployments, which means that you can have 4.38 hours of downtime before Amazon violates their SLA. In fact, it has been reported that this recent outage did not violate the SLA because the actual services that were down (Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service) were not part of the SLA.
Want to know more? Here are some interesting websites to read and digest:
BEI hosted a Cloud Seminar last fall and will be having another one later this year. “The Cloud” is an often used term and means different things to different people. Each business needs its own cloud strategy to meet its needs and requirements. BEI can walk you through all the pros and cons of different cloud offerings and tailor the one that best suits your business. Give us a call if you would like to explore your options.
Microsoft’s Online Services offerings are evolving over the next several months. Here are some key points to consider:
- BPOS, the current suite of services, will be sold to new clients through early June.
- Office 365, the new suite of services, is currently in “Extended Beta Testing” and will be released for general availability in early June
- Current BPOS clients will be able to transition to Office 365 later this year. Exchange Online “Only” (meaning no other services besides Exchange) will be the first group to make the move. More information about timing and transition plans will be available later this year.
- If you must use Outlook 2003 and you want to use Microsoft Online Services remember that Outlook 2003 will NOT be supported under Office 365. So you either need to upgrade Outlook to 2007/2010 or adopt/stay on BPOS until you are ready to upgrade Outlook.
- If you are using or want to use Microsoft’s BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) with Exchange Online then you should adopt/stay on BPOS until early 2012 when RIM’s online BES offering will be available.
If you’d like to talk over your Microsoft Online plans or options please contact Ellen Jennings (ellen.jennings@beinetworks.com), 703-528-8300 x125.
