Replies

Great!!!

As someone who doesn’t support large environments I don’t know what you are trying to prove.  The limit on Exchange accounts is 100GB. My *experience* is that one does not want to be managing 10GB inboxes and larger for a variety of reasons. Have I supported bigger ones? Sure. an ED I supported was at 50GBs. She was experiencing all sorts of odd behavior. She wouldn’t use Archiving. I tried to convince her to modify her behavior but she just wasn’t interested. The old outlook PSTs were (are) known for corruption and anyone who has supported Outlook has used the Microsoft repair tools over and over again. I’ve also seen a President of a company I supported with a huge PST, over 90 GBs, and his Outlook routinely freezing up as it was supposedly syncing his inbox. We swapped computers, traced the network, monitored the server, got Microsoft support on the line for weeks, did everything and could not find out why he was experiencing extremely long sync  download times, when no one else in the org was experiencing them. We finally moved a ton of emails to an archive reducing his 20 years of email to a manageable 3 years and surprise, his Outlook started working fine again. I don’t know why technically, but something was corrupted or just out of control. This ‘support’ cost the company hundreds of dollars in my time and others in the organization. He could have bought two more computers for what it cost us to troubleshoot this stupid issue that I have never seen with Gmail, or any other email. My point is that doing something because it’s possible does not make it a best practice. No matter what OS you are using.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/exchange-online-service-description/exchange-online-limits#mailbox-storage-limits

 

Al Bergstein

Certified Microsoft Consultant

BBearen don’t know what it is you’re  trying to prove here. many of us have worked in similar large environments. that’s not what this is all about.

I don’t think you are hearing me. SMB clients do not have the budget to do what you say. Period. Buying computers, paying me to properly set them up for them, making sure they connect to M365, and that their SharePoint connections are all showing up in File Explorer, printer setup, etc. is all they want to spend.Takes me an hour on either machine.  My time to setup *and manage* Intune and other tools is just not going to happen with their limited budgets. They want me in and out quickly and to call for issues as they arise.  The extra money they pay me is for customizing SharePoint and frankly, fixing OneDrive sync problems on Windows machines.

Your assumption that I don’t know how to do scripting is sort of insulting. But frankly, with Microsoft 365, I rarely have to use scripts anymore for these clients.I haven’t needed to write a script in a long time. One big client I worked with had a man managing scripts (among other jobs)  but they were actually not needed, but the person who managed them didn’t want to hear that. So they stayed, helping him have a job until retirement. My gentle entrities to try new things were met with “we don’t have the budget or time” but he always seemed to spend an hour or two a day watching youtube videos on political issues he liked. So was that headcount a good use of money? I didn’t think so.

In comparison, your company, like the mill locally, likely had at least one IT manager who doubled as needed in other jobs, a  help desk person full time, one network/file server engineer, maybe a security specialist who also helped with networks, file servers, and desktop deployment at times, maybe an application or database analyst to manage the internal web sites and other application based tasks. At probably a minimum of $75k per person, (of course with the burdened overhead as well), your IT budget was more than any SMB would ever price out. Or maybe you out sourced all these jobs to a a 3rd party for even more money.

Recently, a small business I handled (cause I knew the principals) grew to needing a real IT staff. They were at 40 machines and 60 users and were at my limit of help desk calls etc. I helped them through finding a suitable IT org for them. The cost for 5x12hour support like you suggest, (with no special application support, just M365 system setup, security etc. ) was going to come in at around $3k a month. That was after negotiating down from $4500. A month. There is no way any of my clients with 5 to 20 users can expect to pay anything like that. My hourly keeps their costs under $1k a month, and often less.

I do all this because I am retired and like to help NGOs and other small businesses in my rural community. In the big urban centers, it’s likely worse.

Microsoft tools allow us to support both Windows, Apple and Android at a reasonable cost. So there is a level playing field. Yes, some industries have specific Windows (or Linux or Apple) applications they need to have. But since you retired, so many of these apps are going or have gone to the cloud. That’s why I can say that beyond that, Apple is a lot less to support over the life of the machine than the Windows machines are. I’m in the field doing this work weekly, so I think I have a better handle on the pulse of many businesses and not just one company in one locale.

 

Oh Ok. So you aren’t as you stated, “…not in IT”.You prove my point exactly in that you are describing what Microsoft themselves term, “Mid size to enterprise businesses” capable and willing to spend the highest license costs by Microsoft E5 and all the expensive tools Microsoft offers to do that. I know the Msft licensing world very well. It’s unfortunately expensive for SMBs to do the right thing. My mill of 300-400 people  would not even consider that. None of my non profits would either. None of my small businesses SMBs would either. Neither would they ever spend the money that it takes to do the corporate lockdowns you describe. No F****ing way would they. I wouldn’t want them to, because the support costs for a help desk would be a burden on me! (I am a single consultant). And from what I have seen, most SMBs either rely on an in house part time “Excel Guru” but someone with virtually no deep IT experience, or they hire those needs out to a local like me.

But I still stand with the fact that everything you said Windows could do, the iPhones and other devices could do cheaper for the vast array of small businesses. I run all sorts of Windows apps on Apple in a VM, so legacy apps are not a problem, but I totally understand that some legacy apps (written in languages now dead) are widely used in production environments like yours. These specific case uses are often not supported by IT, since they are one offs for specific depts, but maybe in your case they were.

It makes total sense for a company like yours to standardize on one set of machines (or at least one OS, because I doubt they only bought HP or Lenovo in this day and age) but SMBs rarely do,even when I beg them to. The marketing people use Macs, the ED or CIO wants a high end Windows machine, the sales people maybe an iPad or just their phone. And in the manufacturing company of 1000 machines I ran IT in the 90s, there was no way I was going to tell the engineering staff what machines to use. They would have laughed me out of their department. They used Sun and Mac and occassionally an early Windows or DOS machine. We no more could dictate to them as IT was seen as an annoyance to finding the right solution to their job. I doubt that has changed at all since then. I know the mill was the same way too. Mechanical Engineering did whatever they wanted. We simply managed their O365 use.

Anyway, thanks for the input so people can see what we in IT face, both in a perfect world like you claim you had, or the non perfect world I live in every day. But let me leave by saying that Microsoft is doing a very good job these days. M365 and SharePoint has been a great set of tools for my SMBs. And the security tools are great. no complaints here. Just make it cheaper. SMBs are now facing $100 an hour consulting costs even in small towns like mine. They are at the limit of what they will pay, and I often do a bit of work like answer questions for no charge. But all the consultants up here are worried about the squeeze on their ability to make money because insurance costs are up along with everything else.

One last thing. You should know your stats, in your mining business, that a single data point like yours does not prove the rule.

hi great read.. Thank you very much for that. Just to be clear you don’t need this company’s product to do what they do. Microsoft tool set does include the ability to integrate Apple products  into their world without buying third-party products. I assume they have some other features that are worth getting.

BBearen, I feel like your an admitted non-IT person mansplaining IT to me. Let me explain as someone who is in IT, a certified Microsoft consultant,  that Apple is included in Microsoft’s lockdown capabilities. They have an inclusive point of view at this point that if you were running their tools, you can include Apple and android devices in their lockdown capabilities so there is no difference from that point of view. Apple itself has business tools that can also integrate these types of capabilities. If you don’t have a windows environment.

as to your comments that the IT department would not let Google Maps  be loaded on a users machine. I just find that to be pathetic behavior by IT helpdesk. They have no idea what the user may need that to do his job. It’s a major product by a major company. there is no reason not to allow such a product to be loaded at the mill where I was helping out, yes, they had a basic Windows product suite install that was not ever changed, but it was clearly understood that many users had very wide ranges of products that they needed on their machines to do jobs. Trying to limit that software array is a fool’s errand that just drives users to go buy their own machines and bring them in and use them anyway.

Well a full time staff in IT (you now mention you had a mainframe, how many other people managed that?)

Our manufacturing campus in the 90s had a full time staff of 2 of us for 1000 desktops, oh wait, we had two full time people running the Sun workstations, two of us for the Windows and Mac world, and over 20  managing and programming  the AS/400 and connections to the mainframe elsewhere.

I am not arguing that with great small staff and proper budget you can’t do what you describe. I am saying it is the exception not the rule.

Ask Woody exists to offer support to those in the levels below your well run IT shop. I support a lot of those people here on the Olympic Peninsula and know many others that also do so. I can say without equivocation that Windows is far more support needy than Apple. By far. I would not even bother having a business here if all my clients moved to Apple. Really. The issues are almost entirely unique to this crazy old operating system that has layers and layers of complexity, convoluted locations for simple tasks, and a tendency to break with very slight changes. I just do not see that happening on the Mac, and I’ve been living up here for 19 years.

I don’t blame this solely on Microsoft. It’s what they have done. They sold a generic OS to all comers, and this is the outcome of that decision. Apple chose a different way. They control the hardware and software. You pay more, you get a less finicky OS and computer.

Ask around. Ask your friends in your area about their experiences in small businesses with Windows. Then ask your friends using Macs.

I wish it weren’t so, Windows machines are cheap and getting cheaper, but time is money. Pay me now or pay me later.

There is no doubt that a well managed IT org can handle the scenario you describe. I myself ran a 1000 node network like that in the 90’s. But the average small business today, with no paid full time staff, and not even a consultant to call on, is not going to able to afford this kind of support. I often get calls from people struggling with unexplainable Windows problems. That just rarely if ever happens with my Mac clients. Blue screens of death? Just saw one yesterday on Windows 11. When it happens, I often spend long hours trying to figure out why. Can I charge clients for that? No. Often I just change out the machine for them.  I cannot remember the last time I saw a Mac that didn’t boot up properly. I’ve seen it, but  very few and far between. And the large paper mill near me, where I have occassionally helped out their IT org, will not spend the money to setup like your well run mining operation. They have over 300 machine on three shifts a day and their IT budget is miniscule. They still are running Windows 95 in some places because they can’t get the budget to rewrite the app. They struggle to provide proper security.  The requirement to properly setup an org like you describe requires budget and an IT leader that is capable of selling that budget to upper management.

I like the article and it’s warning that Microsoft still continues to use us as beta testers for features that are clearly not ready for rolling out to the general .

I would disagree though with the following:

“Windows is an affordable and accessible platform for the vast majority of us, notwithstanding its annoyances and privacy concerns. In most respects, it can be tamed. The Apple ecosystem is expensive.”

As someone who has supported hundreds of users if not thousands over the last 10 years in small businesses around my area, the majority with Windows and a minority with Apple, and as a heavy technical user of both systems for the last 20 years of my life, I would say that Apple is expensive only if you don’t value your time. the windows users I support, including myself have vastly more problems with Windows than the Apple users.  Apple computers have lasted longer than the majority of Windows machines I support, not only Hardware wise, but software wise as well. I know that Windows is used because it’s cheap to buy a machine and companies Don’t like to include their labor costs in their calculations. But that’s a false economy. however, it is reality and I continue to support Windows machines and recommend them because companies don’t want to hear that they need to spend more money to get a more reliable computer it cost less and support costs to me at my hourly rate or to their internal employees . thanks for your great columns. I look forward to them every week.

5 users thanked author for this post.

rizzquery, Rand Alonin, windbg, satrow, PKCano

I appreciate your comment about seeing more problems with AMD than Intel, and I tend to agree. recently one of my companies I support bought an AMD machine, and it started blue screening right out of the box. It’s a Lenovo. I spent a number of months sending the machine back to Lenovo getting it back and having a blue screen randomly again. I told the company and all of my companies to not buy any AMD machines. I’ve never seen this happen with any Intel machines on windows.

as a professional consultant to many small businesses I routinely work with Windows and Apple. I agree with your initial assessment. The Apple ecosystem is so much easier to work with and less requiring of convoluted methods to install even a local user. I don’t know why at this late date MICROSOFT insists on leaving a local user off of a machine, forcing us to do a stupidly complex install. When people ask me what computer they should use unless they have a real need for inexpensive computers or Windows products, and then paying me to set them up, I tell them  to just buy a Mac . it is funny how cheap people will be to buy the initial computer and then be willing to pay me my hourly fee to set it up properly. It all ends up in the wash being about the same price. I rarely ever hear from my Macintosh users. It just works.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Evit, windbg

To help clarify:

• Are you using Outlook 365 as a consumer or a business login?
• When you say Outlook 365 that means to me that you are not using the Business version of Outlook (the desktop client).
• Do you have multiple accounts connected under one login? I.e. left side screen showing multiple accounts?
• Logged into Outlook 365 as a consumer account (foo@outlook.com) does not appear to allow me to “copy” a calendar entry to another foo@gmail.com account for example.
• Logged into Outlook 365 as a business account (foo@mybiz.com) allows me to add my personal foo@outlook.com and show my personal calendar as a “busy” block without detail to others. I can turn off the various calendars but cannot cut and paste between them.
• Can you share some screen shots to clarify?

I asked your question to ChatGPT. Here’s what it had to say
https://chat.openai.com/share/df4110c1-48e9-4685-825f-69ea7de265ba

hi. I don’t have a direct answer for your question. I’m sure somebody will come through with someone that does this. You might consider in the future maybe over the next year migrating to power automate for this type of flow to get you out of the VB macro world. That would open up the ability to expand the flow fairly easily to a variety of other things like Teams, and sending reports back out of Outlook . Let us know who you find for the VB scripting as some of my clients occasionally run into needs for that and I no longer do it.

1 user thanked author for this post.

WSEHetherington