Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

There are many ways to receive email to your devices with POP3 being about the most basic one. It’s also one of the oldest internet protocols and is perfect for just getting emails off a server to your PC.

Its problems come from the fact that its about all you can do with it. So when you use your email client to receive you emails they pull them off the server onto your desktop or laptop. That’s then their only location, inside your chosen email client. So how many people bother to backup that local email store ? How many people know where it is ? How many people have even thought about that ? Even when you do think about backups and carry them out it’s a laborious task that gets more complex the more users you have.

Another thought is that all of POP3 is done in plain text. What that means is that if someone (say a college) wants to, they can load a simple network tool to gather information from the network. Not only will they see the content of your emails they’ll also see the username and password you use to connect to it ! (Yes there’s an SSL’ed version of POP3 but it’s very rarely used).

Now consider that you can now get fully hosted Exchange services from £3.36 per month per mailbox. So for your 5 user business you can get arguably the industry standard email platform with 25GB of hosted storage for only £201.60 per year ! That’s fully managed servers with no need to buy a server, no need to worry about backups, no need to think about DR (Disaster Recovery). And of course you get all the benefits of the an Exchange server like shared calenders, Outlook Web Access (Outlook Anywhere), Exchange Active Sync (for iPhone and mobile devices) and many more.

Or there’s the likes of a gmail service for your business. When we last put it in for a customer it was about £33 per user per year for the Google Apps Premier Edition. Of course there’s also the free gmail account that you could use !

Surely knowing all that you’d say that there’s no place in business for POP3. If you’re still using POP3 for your business emails we’ll happily help you change to something that’s more suited. Ask nicely we may even do it for free !

Posted by Chris in Applications, Desktops and Laptops, Servers, Software | No Comments »

We’ve recently started selling Microsoft Online Services. A great set of services that allows a business to offer email and file services without the need to worry about storing, backing up and maintanence. Yup that means no worrying out DR (Disaster Recovery) or servers in your building ! We particularly like the look of Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). You can link it to your existing Active Directory using the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization, great lets give it a go.

On setup I get a werid error ‘The Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool must be installed on a domain joined computer running Windows Server 2003 Serivce Pack 2 or greater.’. Hangon the server’s a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise server and is a domain controler, so what’s the problem ? On digging around the MS site I find that it’s fine with Windows 2008 server but come accross this -

Installation on 64-bit environments not supported.

No way … surely not. Are we supposed to be using 64bit OSs now or not ? Exchange has been 64bit only for 2 versions or since early 2007 ! Even small hardware vendors are on the 64bit bandwagon.

Obviously now we know it’s not the end of the world but come on guys try to help us out just a little bit !

Posted by Chris in Applications, Operating Systems, Servers | 1 Comment »

Or should I say new install? At the weekend we upgraded Glo Networks Exchange server from 2007 to 2010, it didnt go with out a hitch and thought we should blog about what we found.

One of the main problems is the upgrade path to 2010 is not an easy one, because there are so many changes do the way the database works, you cannot simply un-install Exchange 2007 (leaving the databases) then install exchange 2010 and mount them again.

Some of the problems we came across -

• No in-place upgrade option
• Public folders replica issue
• Users mailbox permissions when moving a mailbox
• Unable to uninstall due to public folders being left behind

We manged to fix all the problems that we found while doing the upgrade and now have a full functioning Exchange 2010 server.

If you would like more information about Exchange 2010 or about the problems we came across and how to fix them please contact us on +44 845 5210 140. The entire thing was done remotely on Hyper-V Virtual Servers, so we can help out pretty much anyone who may need it.

Posted by Dave in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

Exchange 2010 has just been released. Well it’s on MSDN and the like right now.

As expected there are many benefits to Exchange 2010 over it’s predecessors. Of which the one we at Glo Networks will probably notice right away is the rich OWA (Outlook Web Access) experience out of IE ! There are of course many other benefits which we’ll post about when we are happy with their commercial usefulness.

We’ll be upgrading our Exchange 2007 production server over the coming weekend. It shouldn’t be to much trouble as we have been playing with the test versions.

Posted by Chris in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

As a follow up to our previous post on Exchange 2010 Beta, if you’ve not been using Exchange 2007 (which many haven’t), you might be surprised to know that 2010 is 64 bit only.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if you’re still using Exchange 2003 or earlier, were you really planning on using the same hardware? We hope not!

Posted by Karl in Applications, General, Servers | No Comments »