Mark Thompson's blog

Newsflash July 2010
We are now Microsoft BPOS partners.

After having successfully passed more Microsoft exams Thompson Consultants Ltd are now Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) partners.

This means that we can now advise on and resell the range of Microsoft Online services. See here for details on the Microsoft website.

What is in this for our clients?

Well, increasingly our smaller clients are looking to use the internet cloud to host all their data and applications and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite will provide most of the tools and applications they need. BPOS provides hosted Exchange 2007, hosted SharePoint and Microsoft Communicator and Live Meeting.

The hosted Exchange in BPOS provides a generous 25Gb mailbox and you can also share Calendars, Tasks and Contacts with the other users in your group. Microsoft pickup all the tedious but necessary effor involved in managing and backing up Exchange so the users only need to worry about their email.

Similarly with Sharepoint you let Microsoft take the strain of maintaining the system while you get on with uploading content.

The obvious target of these services are small workgroups/businesses/organisations that do not currently have a central server for file and mail services. Rather than investing in on-premise solutions – as would have been the case up until now – clients can save their capital and instead move to a monthly fixed payment model.

Also perhaps larger businesses that have small, distributed groups working on projects might look at this as the ideal short term solution.

As well as the Microsoft suite we will also be provinding hosted online storage for when SharePoint is not the required solution.

With our hosted Asterisk VoIP services, Microsoft BPOS and online storage and backup Thompson Consultants are poised to offer the SME a complete hosted office solution.

We can’t be the only reseller to have been negatively affected the the December changes to the Eopen licensing site.

Microsoft replaced EOpen with Microsoft Volume Licensing Serivce Centre in early December and from the very start the change has been a disaster. Firstly the whole site went down and was unavailable for the best part of two weeks. That meant that if you wanted to add new agreememts, like we did, you simply couldn’t.

Then when the site came backup it had been replaced by VLSC. The idea of this seems to be to lock partners out of the volume licensing process as far as possible. Microsoft even in essence accuse resellers of being untrustworthy and a responsible for piracy of volume licenced products and therefore in need of being removed from the licensing process as far as possible. Now Microsoft want end users to be responsible for volume licence agreements directly and to then grant their reseller permission to access their agreement.

On the face of it, from Microsoft’s perspective, this seems a resonable idea. However in the real world the licensing process (their licensing process!) is too complex for the majority of end users to either want to, or be able to, complete it. The new process involves and end user logging on to a website, creating a Microsoft Live ID (“but I don’t want a Hotmail address”), registering a ‘business’ email address, accepting the licence agreement and then navigating through the deeply confusing web site to find a section where they can then grant their reseller permission, by adding another email address, to administer the licence. Then wait for a few days while you work out the process had failed somewhere.

The end user details we tend to include in the licence registrion process are senior decision makers – directors, owners, manager – just the kind of people who don’t want any involvment in signing up to Microsoft Hotmail accounts, licensing sites and the whole nine yards. Their first reaction to us is that this is exactly the kind of nonsense they pay us to look after. They simply want nothing to do with it. They want to purchase software from us and have us install it.

The other problem with the new site is that the process is simply not working. I spent the best part of 8 hours on the phone and emailing various MS staff over the last 10 days just trying to get 5 Windows 7 licences added to an existing agreement. Eopen just worked. You added the agreement number, authorisation ID and then the keys just appeared in your control panel. Now, we at least, are having to phone the VLSC call centre in India to try and get licences added to the control panel. The staff there seem completely unbothered by the urgency of these requests, clueless as to the new process, unintelligible, and have a stock answer of ‘try again in 24 hours’.

I see this weekend the site is down again. Being re-engineered by any chance Microsoft? Please bring back EOpen or just face up to the fact the end users pay their resellers to provide a service. Let us provide that service and get back to selling licences.

I personally am blogging, complaining and giving grief to any Microsoft employee I can find in order to get this changed.

Update from the original post:

Our client has been using their Mac Mini’s, Logitech VisionPro webcams with iChat for some months now and our delighted with the results.

Using dedicated ADSL lines for the video conferencing at each site provides enough bandwidth to make sure iChat runs at high resolution. iChat is unusual in that you cannot choose the resolution you run it at, rather iChat tests the available bandwidth to the other iChat session/s and set the screen resolution based upon some algorithm.

We have been using Asterisk in-house now for some months with a view to (a) providing ourselves with a professional phone system and (b) with a view to reselling VoIP services.

This has been quite a steep learning curve on several fronts but I think now after 6-9 months of using VoIP in-house we have now sorted out most of the pitfalls with Asterisk and VoIP in general.

Our first learning curve is getting used to using Linux. We have had it in the office before with a view to building low cost NAS servers based upon a rack mount chassis but we have now got to grips with using it as the platform for Asterisk. We are currently using Fedora although John has actually been off and had training on SUSE Enterprise. We now have a stable Asterisk server/PBX based upon a Fujitsu Siemens Econel 100 server. This has plenty of space for call recording and runs very sweetly. The only downside is that we now know that the Econel 100 SATA RAID drivers are only written for Redhat and SuSE Enterprise and do NOT work with other versions of Linux at all. Still the software RAID works well.

The second learning curve has been working with ITSPs – Internet Telephony Service Providers. We have yet to find the perfect partner but Telappliant and AQL are proving to be reliable. We have tried both SIP trunks and IAX and have now settled on IAX as being more reliable. We have also played with various CODECS and now use GSM. This gives the best compromise between bandwidth and quality. When you call us you will find that the quality of the speech (and on-hold music) is excellant, better than ordinary analogue is most cases.

We now have an Asterisk in-house telephone system that provides the following:

* Call transfer, hold, conference, CLI, etc.
* Out of Office anouncements according to the time and/or day or the week
* Voicemail and voicemail to email
* Easy call diversion to other numbers (mobiles for example)
* Interactive voice menus (IVM)
* Music or messages on hold
*Automatic fallback to an analogue phone line in the event of the internet failing
* Full digital call recording of all calls – internal and external
* Very cheap loca, national and internation calls – from 0.9pence per minute

The features of the system are legion and the benefits it brings are many. For example myself and John have fulltime VPNs to our houses and hardware IP phones at home. The office can now transfer calls to us at home, across the internet, and callers need not know we are many miles away fomr the office. There is no reason why you could not have operators in another country if you have a decent VPN in place.

We now feel confident enough with our systems and our ITSPs to start rolling this out to selected clients.

Target clients will be those how might typically only have up to 10 simultaneous calls, currently rent multiple analogue or ISDN lines and have home workers or branch offices. Also for some the digital call recording will be very important and enough alone to justify the system.

In the near future we will create a hosed Asterisk system so we can provide better services to the micro users who currently just have a basic SIP account.

We are also working as a matter of urgency in creating a unified messaging system that will link Asterisk and our Microsoft Exchange 2008 server. The main stumbling block here is that one system uses UDP protocols and the other IP protocols but we beleive that this is surmountable.

Keep you posted on progress.

We have had several clients affected by the recent flooding here in the UK.

One, from Chelsea in central London, called us in a panic on Friday afternoon as water was starting to flood into their offices. Given that they are next door to the Thames we thought for a minute that the Thames flood barrier had failed but actually it was just storm water from the drains.

They wanted to know how to save the server in a hurry so we gave them an emergency shutdown procedure (i.e. stop the Exchange services and then Shutdown) and told them to lift it as far off the ground as possible. We also got them to lift up external disk drives and the brand new gigabit Switches we had just supplied.

Luckily the flooding only got as deep as three inches/7-8 cm but it has been enough to lift the flooring and no doubt there will be a lot of mopping up and drying to come.

Perhaps the lesson to come from this for any small business is to examine contingency procedures. What would you do if you had to relocate at short notice? Can you work from another location? What equipment would you need to take with you? Can staff work from home?

Actually much of the technology we sell aids this kind of contingency planning. If you can relocate your server to another location where you can get internet access the chances are, if you use Microsoft Small Business Server, you can carry on working to a greater or lesser extent. Todays smart phones can send and receive Exchange email, and using Remote Desktop employees can gain access to data and applications held on the server.

A:When the Blackberry Enterprise server fails and the mobile phone company refuses to support it until it has been formatted and re-installed.

This happened to us this week when a client reported that their Blackberries had stopped receiving email. Initially we pointed the client to the original installers of the BES system. It then transpired that the client no longer dealt with them due to their poor service. We then picked up the baton and called the mobile phone company to get support.

They, to their credit, were quite helpful, at least at first. Once we had sent them various log files that they requested they analysed them and then came to the conclusion that the BES server could not be supported as it had never been setup properly. The only solution to the problem, they said, was to rebuild the server and call them back for instructions as to how to install BES properly once that had been done.

We did an emergency callout to Surrey the next day and did as instructed – formatted the system, reinstalled Windows 2003 with the appropriate service packs, installed Exchange system manager, service packed that and finally downloaded and installed the latest version of BES. We then called the mobile phone company and spent the next three hours on the phone with them to set up BES to their standards.

At the end of the process we started all the BES services, logged in to Blackberry Manager and……….

……exactly the same problem occured – “Unable to retrieve the server’s distinguished name or allocate a MAPI buffer for this server.”

After then googling this error message I found someone else who had had exactly the same message and same experience and as it happened his solution works for us as well.

It turns out that the problem with BES all along had not been anything to do with how it was installed at all or the server. In the end the problem was simply that the service account that BES uses had become corrupt in someway and prevented it from running.

The resolution is quite simple in outline – create a new service account and change all the BES services to use that new service account. In practice this was quite an involved process but at the end the BES services started and we were able to get into the Blackberry Manager. Job done.

Why the mobile phone company Blackberry specialist support team (and we are talking a major, major phone company) were not able to use their own knowledgebase to provide this solution is beyond me and cost the client an emergency callout and two days without emails.

Update – if you think the above applies to your situation you probably need to go to this site RIM support and search for article KB04293

Just got back from an unusual site visit today.

One of our clients is Cumbria Wind Farms, part of EDF energy. They run a number of wind farms around the UK and our mission today was to fix the remote access to the Cold Northcott farm in Cornwall. Having recently installed ADSL at the control building the on-site staff did not know how to setup the required routing.

The problem was quite easily resolved so now the SCADA people can gain access to the telemetry system again. The client is happy as were the SCADA company as they now don’t have to drive from Suffolk to Cornwall. We’re happy because they’re happy and we also get to put some pictures of wind turbines on the website.

The Cold Northcott site is one of the earlier wind farms in the UK and the turbines are quite modest compared to the latest generation that Cumbria Wind Farms are putting in to the Fens. The pictured turbine is rated at only 300Kw whereas the latest units are 2Mw and the blade alone is bigger than the tower and blades together in this picture.

Last week we have problems with one of our DNS providers and that caused some of our hosted domains to be difficult to get hold of. The problem was resolved relatively quickly (by about 1pm Thursday) by moving name servers but did cause inconvenience for some.

We have recently moved office, as you will see from the contacts page, and this has gone relatively smoothly.

However this week has been a nighmare as our partner and hosting provider also moved data centre. Our main web/email and dns server refused to accept its’ new IP address and we hadto spend many hours on the phone to Microsoft support getting the DNS service to start. All cleared now but a hectic couple of days.

Today (Thursday 1st March) just to round off the week we had a 4 hour power cut in the new office. Aplogies to anyone who tried to phone us and got the emergency voicemail service.