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Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, working from home has become the new normal as many employers and employees have dealt with social distancing, lockdowns and the closure of corporate offices. Advances in technology and computer technology has made this transition relatively smooth, with people able to create a fully connected home office using a suite of hardware and software. In this article we will examine some of the amazing technologies that are in use today that have really come to the forefront since 2020. Read further to find out how you or your company can utilise video conferencing, Office 365, cloud backup solutions, VPNs, managed antivirus, remote IT support, and remote desktop access to work effectively from anywhere in the world.
Here is just one example of how technology has greatly benefited a company during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of our clients was still utilising on premises servers with separated data sets. They did use dropbox in a very basic sense, but the amount and complexity of the data meant that a better solution needed to be found. Luckily just prior to the pandemic OJ Networks recommended and was able to deploy a nationwide Office 365 and SharePoint solution for multiple offices around Australia. This allowed them to seamlessly shift to working from home when the lockdown orders were issued and staff were able to remote in via Office 365 to continue their work without disruption. Staff were able to login to their ‘server’ as if they were in the office and they could work from any location, allowing them to continue their business as usual. We often hear from this client as to how lucky they were to set this up prior to the pandemic as there was no downturn in productivity and they would not have been able to function as a business without it!
Now lets explore some of the options in detail, what benefit they provide and how they may assist your business in working remotely.
Video conferencing hardware: webcams, headsets, microphones, speakers – These allow you to call and have remote video meetings via Skype or Zoom. When working remotely it can be hard to maintain a connection with colleagues. Video conference calls let you stay in touch with co-workers, teammates and managers and maintain the productivity of face to face meetings.
VPN (Virtual Private Network) – A VPN allows you to connect securely to another network over the internet. It creates a secure tunnel between the user computer and office computer or server. Using a VPN allows employees to safely access company data from any network, public or private. These are crucial for businesses to avoid man in the middle attacks. This is where data is unencrypted and can be snooped upon by malicious parties.
Office 365 – Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud based services including emails through Exchange Online, file management and storage through SharePoint and OneDrive, collaboration and chat through Teams along with cloud connected versions of popular applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote). All programs can be used online through a browser, and all files can be accessed from the cloud, wherever and whenever they are needed. With Office 365 employees are able to work together and collaborate together, with the ability to work on the same document even in separate locations.
Third Party Office 365 Backup – Having a third party Office 365 backup system in place allows you to keep important business documents and emails secure and safe. It ensures that you can restore any data quickly in the event of any accidental or malicious deletion, user error, ransomware or data corruption. If there are ever any issues with the Microsoft Servers you have your own completely separate version of all of your files and emails.
Managed Antivirus – Its important to have one of the highest rated Anti-Virus products on the market protecting your workstations, laptops and servers. A managed antivirus solution goes one step further in allowing IT admins to remotely monitor any virus outbreaks on your network and act quickly to respond to any issues.
Remote IT Support – IT Support companies can now effectively monitor and manage your computers and networks remotely. To do this they utilise remote management tools which give insights into any issues that your devices are experiencing. Along with management tools they usually install a remote access client to connect to your device quickly and securely. This saves you time, as there are no travel costs involved. With this scenario it doesn’t matter whether users are working from home or out of the office, the IT support personnel can log on to their computer and fix any issues.
If you are struggling with this shift to working from home, either as a business or an employee we can help you! From something simple such as supplying a webcam, to assisting you to set up remote access to your office through a VPN, setting up cloud emails and applications through Office 365 or anything in between get in touch with us today.
Over the last few weeks, we have seen Windows 10 begin to roll out to computers across the world. As people have begun to take advantage of the free upgrade offered to them, some of our clients have come to us with a peculiar error that prevented Microsoft Outlook from being able to send email after they completed their Windows 10 upgrade.
Users first notice that no emails they send are getting through, and a small SEND/RECEIVE ERROR is displayed in the bottom right of the screen:
When expanded, this error shows itself in more detail:
Sending reported error (0X800CCC13). ‘Cannot connect to the network. Verify your network connection or modem.’
Upon verifying that all the SMTP, username and password settings, were correct, we eventually came across the solution; running a command in order to correct missing or corrupt system files in Windows. This command is known as the System File Checker, and below I will run through the process involved in invoking the program using a command prompt command:
sfc /scannow
Once completed, you will receive a message confirming that Windows found some corrupt or missing files, and that it has repaired them successfully.
Load up Outlook, and check that your emails are now sending!
If you are still having issues, there is still hope. Another command that other users have found helped them out is using the NetShell utility from the command prompt, similar to the solution we provided above.
netshwinsock reset
This handy set of commands will reset your network adapter to its default settings, and hopefully get you going again.
Are your emails different on your phone to your work computer? Do you have two different sent items? If you are experiencing this frustration you may still be running POP3 mail.
POP3 works by storing the messages from your inbox on an internet server. When you “pop” the mail out of your inbox it comes down to your PC or device. Most devices nowadays are setup to leave the messages on the server for 7 or 14 days which means you can retrieve the same messages on multiple devices. However, if you read a message on one device it doesn’t update on the other one. You can never sync your sent items in a POP3 setup either.
IMAP is slightly better. It stores your Inbox, sent items and other folders on an internet server and you synchronize the folders when you send/receive. This means you can see your sent items on multiple devices. The problem with IMAP is that it is normally hosted by the people who host your website and you can run out of space fast. The alternative is Exchange Online. This product gives you complete synchronization of all your email folders and contacts, calendars and reminders. It works on apple, android and windows devices and computers and comes with a massive 50gb of storage per mailbox. There are numerous other benefits such as sharing calendars with colleagues.
At $4.40 per mailbox per month there is no reason you need to feel frustrated anymore. If you are look for Exchange Email on the Sunshine Coast then give us a call or email to discuss your upgrade options.
Microsoft has announced that it will be doubling the storage provided to 50GB from the current 25GB provided. Most users probably haven’t reached the ceiling of 25GB yet however it makes what is already a very attractive enterprise-grade email solution even better.
The mailbox size will be automatically implemented so Exchange Online Users will not have to do anything in order to benefit. If you are currently holding your old emails in a local archive PST, it might be a great time to upload all that content into the cloud so it is easily accessible from all your devices.
For more information on Exchange Online, please see our dedicated Exchange Online page. We are reseller for Microsoft Cloud Solutions and experts in converting businesses over to Exchange Online – the best hosted cloud email solution. We have found it makes the world of difference to businesses still running traditional POP or IMAP email services. If your business is still running on POP mail give us a call and find out about the many benefits.
Exchange is a Corporate Email and Communication solution created by Microsoft that offers many benefits over traditional “POP” email accounts.
Contacts, Emails, Calendar and Reminders can all be automatically synced to mobile devices such as phones and tablets. It works perfectly with Microsoft Outlook, as Outlook was designed to work with Exchange in a corporate environment.
Imagine seeing the same email folders on every device wherever you go. Not only your inbox but all the subfolders too. You don’t have to plug your devices in to sync them either. It is all done via push technology through the internet via wi-fi or 3g. Send an email on your iPad and it will be in your Sent Items in your Outlook back at work.
The solution works with Outlook 2003/2007 and 2010 and almost all popular mobile devices including Android, iPhone and iPad.
Another benefit is that Calendars and Contacts can be shared between people in an organization. For example, a Secretary could take a call at the office and after viewing a Manager’s calendar from their own Outlook, they could enter an appointment into an available time on his/her calendar and have a reminder appear on the Manager’s mobile phone a few minutes later.
A shared contacts folder can also be created for all company contacts. This prevents the need for an extra CRM solution in small businesses. With shared contacts, if a staff member in the company updates a contact with some new details, it updates for everyone.
Until recently exchange solutions were usually reserved for companies that had the resources to install and manage an a on-premises server that runs Microsoft Exchange. For small businesses this would mean installing an SBS 2003, SBS 2008 or SBS 2011 server at the company’s office. The mobile devices then communicate back to the main office through the internet to keep in sync. This is the perfect solution where a file server or database server is also required on-site. Typically OJ Networks installs servers for companies of around 10 users or more. Depending on your company’s needs, you may not need an on-premises server and could consider a hosted exchange solution.
A ‘Hosted’ Exchange Solution simply means that instead of having an email server on your premises to provide this functionality, you host your emails on a Microsoft server on the Internet (cloud). The server doesn’t store files but only the email solution. You get almost all of the benefits of an on-premises solution (except public folders).
OJ Networks are resellers of Hosted Microsoft Exchange Solutions which start at only $7.10 per mailbox per month for 25gb of storage per mailbox. Speak to us today to get a quote for converting your small business over to hosted exchange. Your business will surely benefit from being so in sync.
Don’t you just love it when a client’s exchange server decides to lockup and then fail to mount when it comes back up. Even better when it happens 1 hour before knockoff time…
Well this one had me stumped for a while. It is quite a large database (for SBS 2003) edb+stm = around 60Gb
Here are the steps that I looked at to get it working again.
First things first – check in the event logs…
Heaps of
[message_box title=”MSExchangeSA Event ID: 9175″ color=”red”]The MAPI call ‘OpenMsgStore’ failed with the following error: The Microsoft Exchange Server computer is not available. Either there are network problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server computer is down for maintenance. The MAPI provider failed. Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store[/message_box]
and for every user that uses activesync to sync iPads/iPhones etc…
[message_box title=”Server ActiveSync Event ID: 3005″ icon=”alert.png”]Unexpected Exchange mailbox Server error: Server: [server.fqdn] User: [user@fqdn] HTTP status code: [503]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly. [/message_box]
I tried to Mount the Private store and this error appears…
[message_box title=”MSExchangeIS Event ID: 9518″ icon=”alert.png”]Error Out of memory starting Storage Group /DC=local/DC=dcname/CN=Configuration/CN=Services/CN=Microsoft Exchange/CN=domain/CN=Administrative Groups/CN=first administrative group/CN=Servers/CN=dcname/CN=InformationStore/CN=First Storage Group on the Microsoft Exchange Information Store. Storage Group – Initialization of Jet failed. [/message_box]
I check the consistency of theexchange databases using…
“ESEUTIL /mh priv1.edb”
Dirty Shutdown – OK. There were some un-played log files so I performed a soft recovery which was successful.
An example of this would be “eseutil /r e00 /l [log_path] /d [database_path]”
In this example the logs start with e00. If your logs and database are in different locations you can use the /l and /d parameters.
Clean Shutdown being reported now – great! Still getting 9518 on attempting to mount store. By this stage I knew I had ShadowProtect Backups of the entire server so I decided to recover the exchange from a short while before it locked up.
I stopped the Information Store service. Moved the existing store to another folder and recovered the entire exchange (which sits on a second drive – not the system drive) folder with .stm, .edb, .chk and .log files. If your checkpoint (.chk) files are still located on the C:\ drive you may need to recover those too.
Tried to mount store – failed. Removed checkpoint files, replayed log files. Tried to mount store – same Event ID 9518. Back to the drawing board.
Time to try a defrag on the databases.
eseutil /ms “priv1.edb”
eseutil /ms “pub1.edb”
Both successful. Attempt mount again – failed event ID: 9518. OK – something else going on here. I don’t really want to perform a hard recovery if I don’t have to. The databases actually seem to have pretty good integrity.
This server was running exchange 2003 SP2. So I downloaded the Service Pack again and ran it over the existing install. If your server is only running SP1 then probably run that. It asked for a reboot.
Upon reboot – guess what. Log files replayed and Stores are mounted!
The Moral of the Story…
Never give up.
Even if you can’t find a solution on Google (which I couldn’t in this case) try to think outside the box.
Remember – There is always Microsoft PSS if you are really stuck.