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No. There have been an ongoing series of printer driver issues with various versions of Windows 10 and the vendors.HP has been horrible, between their PCL 5 and 6 drivers. I assume that MSFT made some changes in the way that they handle printers under the covers and HP (and other vendors) have had problems handling the change over programatically. To be clear, all these vendors have labs on MSFT’s campus and get the builds way early. There is no excuse for these random mess ups. I will say I’ve had no problems on any OS with my wifi based Brother printer. And my clients that use Brother have also experienced zero problems. However ALL their HP printers have been so problematic (they were less so with Win7) that I am recommending they replace all their printers with Brother printers.

Problems with various HP laserjets are that they vanish off the network. Drivers go from color to B&W only on the fly (I’ve witnessed this myself numerous times). Very frustrating. The only good thing about COVID is that the office is closed and I don’t have to work on this stupid problem for the time being. Hoping it will be solved by the time we get back in the office.

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Charlie

Add on to my last post. Just did a search and found what I needed about Authenticator backup. Too late for me, but worth knowing next time! Thanks!

 

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alQamar

with all due respect, having worked with Authenticator, I prefer getting a text message. Having to open an app has seemed more frustrating than getting a text message. And when I changed phones (but not numbers) the hassle of recreating the Authenticator was frustrating. I swore I would never use it again if I could help it. Almost better to use a USB key.

 

The catch is in the license of the AD. Unfortunately this client isn’t large enough to justify the enterprise license. sigh. Could this work with a standard Azure license in a different way?

I experienced a problem with my Lenovo Extreme X1 laptop and my many Microsoft bluetooth mice going to sleep and not waking up. I uninstalled the June patch and all is normal again. No updates from Lenovo either on this issue. I assume the bluetooth device is going to sleep mode somehow. It shows its functioning but multiple mice go to sleep and require a reboot to wake up.

A word of warning, there are a number of vendors of printers who REQUIRE PCL 5 to function correctly. I have been plagued by HP printers that work better in PCL 5. I have abandoned PCL 6 in a number of customer locations and would be very leery of upgrading to 6. Also TROY printers, which are often used for check printing, do not use and cannot correctly use PCL 6. So be sure to test first, as always.

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rontpxz81

[8string]

I track spam and phishing attacks for multiple businesses on a daily basis. The notion of reporting one spam or fishing event is absolutely absurd. If you want to do it and it makes you feel better, great, but it’s not gonna change a thing. There are literally hundreds (maybe thousands )of fishing attacks every day on most businesses and individuals. The better email vendors out there like Google, Microsoft and others are filtering much of it before it ever reaches your desk. If you find yourself swimming in spam, Then you might want to find a better email vendor. Personally I’ve used both Gmail and outlook and they filter huge amounts of spam every day out of my inbox. If I had to get a guess as to which was better I’d say that Gmail was better at filtering then outlook but not by a whole lot. If you really are still having problems, then look at installing your own spam filter or paying for one. One of my clients uses Go Daddy for their vendor of Microsoft products, and I’ve set them up with the advanced filtering from Go Daddy at a small price. It is much more effective than the regular spam filtering that Go Daddy provides. It has reduced Spam dramatically though it is catching enough normal Mail that I have to check it every five days or so. so focus on filtering your inbox. I recommend that all my clients turn on outlook junk mail filtering to “high”and then check their junk mail inbox once a day to make sure they’re not having good stuff caught. Good luck on that!

dictated to my iPad. If there’s some spelling errors it’s OK

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by 8string.

[8string]

The only thing I don’t recognize is this issue of choosing the manage security defaults. I’ll have to go back and check, but I don’t remember ever checking that. You don’t mention which version of Outlook your users are using Nor the version of the operating system, nor the  version of office. can you sign in and work affectively without turning the security default on? all the rest of those choices are ones that I’ve made and it works just fine from my clients and I.

there have been problems in the last week with logins with MFA by Microsoft that are now resolved. You might want to double try and see if you really can still generate the same problem set.Members of my team we’re having problems on Wednesday and Tuesday with MFA. Those problems seem to have resolved themselves as of today. Also for the android users I would check to see what version of the operating system of android they are using. Some of my android users are just fine while others who are using older versions of android operating system are having problems.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by 8string.

yes there always is in the back of my mind the question that isn’t virtually every company in Russia capable of being compromised by the government? Then again isn’t virtually every company in this country capable of being compromised by the government? I chose to give Kapersky  try last year because of the reviews and I’ve been by and large been happy with it,

i’ve used Kapersky for the last year now the only issue I’ve ever found with it is that I’m using the plug-in called DIVI with WordPress and it does not allow it to run.

it did find a virus on an email that no other software in our organization found. it was not a false positive. What I’m finding now though is that the new attacks are coming through emails perhaps on people’s cell phones we’ve experienced quite a few attacks like that in the last month and we know that it’s coming from the cell phones because the emails that get sent out by the virus include addresses that are not on the person’s work address list but are on their contacts on your phone. I’m of the belief right now that antivirus software is only mildly effective against the new series of viruses were seeing. also they are targeting people who are not using multi factor authentication. I’m also of the believe that the era of a sole password is about to end.

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DriftyDonN

[8string]

A European outage. Yes, the infrastructure servicing  Europe used to be physically located there. I assume that it still is. This isn’t a surprising set of outages given the sudden increase in volumes . I was on  Teams for a lot of Sunday doing end user training and there was no outages here in the PNW.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by 8string.

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doriel

As usual, It’s all about what your requirements are. Are you wanting to simply have a one to many or many to many video conferencing with not much additional features being used? Maybe Zoom is your go to. Microsoft has done a *ton* of work on Teams in the last year, have been strengthening it’s infrastructure and has a huge treasure trove of videos on it are on the 2019 Ignite site on Youtube. You can get to it from here.

Ignite Video Sessions

Do you not have a lot of MSFT users at present and want to do text based group chatting? Maybe that’s Slack.

Do you already use MSFT products, have the logins for them, pay for Office 365 and simply want to bind your teams together for project oriented collaboration and some video conferencing and calling? Maybe Teams is the right choice.

I’m using Teams heavily these days, mainly as a project task manager for my projects internal to the company I’m at, so I’m using Planner.  I like having a Wiki built in to capture project specific issues, it’s a place to put files very specifically to the project , and I can easily collaborate with others working remotely. Much more fun than email!

the video conferencing works fine for my limited needs. I can also use Skype to take control of a machine that might not have Teamviewer on it.

All in all, those features are what I need. I don’t spend a lot of time videoconferencing others. If you are getting Teams as part of Office 365 I have no idea why you wouldn’t try it out.

I have no problem with people using Slack if they like it, and many people not using MSFT products regularly seem to favor it. It’s in widespread use in small businesses here in the Pacific NW.

Stay healthy folks!

[8string]

Howard have you used the latest version of Teams? Could you compare/contrast them?

howardagoldberg wrote:

I worked for an organization for about 13 years, and was one of the individuals that often designed, ran and/or moderated webinars/meeting for 10-500+ individuals.

Long story short – both platforms have strengths/weaknesses, but overall Zoom is my go to. A few reasons why:

1 – Superior video/audio quality and stability

2 – Recordings are saved in MP4 format (although I think WebEx can do that now also, they used to only record in a proprietary format that you could convert with their tools) in the cloud or on your local system. So, it easy to put up webinar recordings on social media, etc. Also, you can multi-cast a Zoom meeting live to Facebook and YouTube.

3- Breakout Rooms. You can actually run full blown seminars, trainings, etc. and have small groups work together then bring everyone back. The instructors can visit each room to see what’s going on (equivalent to walking around a physical room). Each breakout room can also record their session.

4 – Support. Overall, Zoom support staff are far more responsive and easy to get to.

5 – Neat Tricks. Buy a $15 green screen, put it behind you, and you can have any background you want. Messy office? No problem, put up a skyline. Want to have the background be your org logo? No problem. Want to do the weather? You get the idea!

6 – Multipurpose. You wouldn’t have a one-on-one ‘Skype’ type call using WebEx, it’s overkill. But the Zoom client for iOS,  Android, Windows, Mac works equally well as a Skype replacement (upgrade!) as it does for joining team meetings or massive webinar presentations. It’s versatile and scaleable.

I have transitioned into another position over the past year, and have not run so many webinars, so it’s possible WebEx continues to play catch-up to Zoom … but Zoom is just a more pleasant platform to run a meeting from or be a participant on.

My two cents!

• This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by 8string.

This was useful. I just tried it, but it seems like the commands are setup for an admin on a server version of AD/Exchange and did not work as hoped on Office 365. However, I did go into the user account in Exchange (cloud admin) and found that the foo1 person who has this happening on his account did show up in each user account as full access permission. Once I removed him from their accounts he still had their names showing in his Outlook (desktop) version but their email no longer showed up. There was still no way to actually remove their names from his outlook, and i’m wondering if there are registry entries that I would have to delete regarding this on the desktop client. We did try reinstalling Outlook but it did not change the situation at all. Thoughts?

Thanks. I was the original poster. I’ll give that a try. It’s the best idea I’ve had presented yet. I have been in their AD trying to find just this kind of thing, but did not think to look there. I’ll try that.

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b

i’m unclear of how you’re using the VPN. If you’re using office 365 on your personal machine let’s say, and you want to VPN into a corporate network and get files off that I don’t see why it would not work. this assumes that you are using office 365 at home on a home machine not tied to an active directory.

If you’re using a machine tied to an active directory, like a corporate laptop, and you VPN into your corporate network, and you’re trying to use office 365 as if you were sitting  inside your corporate network, I don’t see why that would be a problem either.

It may be that Microsoft is not comfortable with trying to support VPN environments, since there’s so many of them, they have no control over them, and they are expecting specific configurations such as either inside the corporate network or outside on a home or open network.