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They don't do a ton of email (for communication) and they have no corporate background so I don't see either having the usual "MUST HAVE OUTLOOK" mindset. Thanks for the advice. I'll probably look into the SAN for myself myself but I'll push for Google apps. I may yet get some sort of storage for them because they have a bit of the southern paranoia about things stored "on the Internet" and how anyone can get to it. Honestly I think convincing them that they're in more danger now than if they used cloud storage is probably going to be the hardest part in all this.
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Feb 11, 2016 23:48
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Ugato posted:They don't do a ton of email (for communication) and they have no corporate background so I don't see either having the usual "MUST HAVE OUTLOOK" mindset. Thanks for the advice. I'll probably look into the SAN for myself myself but I'll push for Google apps. I may yet get some sort of storage for them because they have a bit of the southern paranoia about things stored "on the Internet" and how anyone can get to it. The nice thing about using Google Apps for all of their productivity is it makes configuring a new laptop consist of basically "login to Google."
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Feb 12, 2016 01:19
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- firewall - small sonicwall should suit their needs - switch - hp procurve. - wifi - unifi - low end media server thing - I feel like you could just use roku, and plug a USB into it for the local ads (or use plex on an old laptop). That's probably going to be the best thing, and will also let them play angry birds space with the roku remote. - server - they don't need - backup - you should probably have them back up their laptops using something like crashplan or carbonite. make sure they also have some antivirus on their computers. what are they using for phones?
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Feb 16, 2016 19:21
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goobernoodles posted:So I guess people love ZenDesk around here, right? Can anyone give me an idea as to what they use in conjunction with ZenDesk to make it fit their needs? Mainly RMM and documentation side of things. Anyone have any experience with Panorama9 or Autotask? I use a combination of Zendesk for ticketing/helpdesk and Confluence for documentation. Their is a zendesk connector for Confluence that works reasonably well: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/integratecloud.com/server/reviews That will allow you to link knowledge articles or how-to's you've written in Confluence. Overall I'd say Confluence is amazing and I can't say enough about it as an organizational and documentation tool. They integrate overall better with JIRA which I dont have experience with but I know lots of other organizations use and can be customized a million different ways to make it fit your company. It's probably not as turn-key easy as zendesk is though.
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Feb 18, 2016 16:38
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Just want to give a big shout out to HP ~enterprise~ and their horrible web site.
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Feb 18, 2016 17:26
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What you mean you don't like waiting for TCP timeouts to occur when attempting to browse to random web pages?
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Feb 18, 2016 17:55
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:Just want to give a big shout out to HP ~enterprise~ and their horrible web site. it makes Lenovo's website look polished.
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Feb 18, 2016 17:56
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all I want to do is get warranty info for this san and yes I finally found the "product ID" which I need for some reason to go with the serial
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Feb 18, 2016 21:57
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:all I want to do is get warranty info for this san Are you trying to use a web tool? I find just calling and saying the device predates you and where you work and the old person's info usually gets you pretty far most places. They might insist calling the number they have on file to verify you are legit which shouldn't be a problem for you unless the idiot used his person cell phone and wont give it the time of day to say that you replaced them. At the very least he could say "I don't work there anymore" and that should be enough cause to get you your info. I honestly would expect a tech company to have a better web interface but nope, running a small shop is a lot of time on the phone on hold while writing power shell scripts for something else.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:46
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HP's website is the loving worst. What is everyone doing for phones these days? I'm loathe to do cloud-based phone service due to past experience, but I'm also looking to get rid of our Cisco UC system. It's way overkill for us and maintenance / upkeep costs are entirely too expensive for our size. I've used 3CX in the past and it wasn't fantastic. Worth looking into now? Any others?
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Feb 19, 2016 02:30
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We run our management users on RingCentral, then most of our facilities use on-premises PBXes of various flavors, all of which are terrible. I'm tempted to throw Asterisk up in the cloud and buy some cheap SIP lines for our next facility and see how much we save by doing it ourselves. Can't be worse than "the Panasonic PBX is on fire" or "we can't find anyone to service our PBX because it's so old" or whatever the next issue with our on-premises PBX turns out to be. My only real gripe with RingCentral is that you can't set forwarding from the physical handsets themselves, you have to do it via their (kinda crappy) dashboard. Other than that things have been pretty much fine. I do like their auto-provisioning function, I can't see how they could have made it any easier for us to use our old phones with them - it was like three mouse clicks and boom magic.
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Feb 19, 2016 04:02
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Doublepost time! We're looking at moving away from using a shared terminal server as a file server and moving that functionality into the cloud. We presently use Google Apps for a bunch of things so were toying with the idea of just using Drive, but some issues (converting Excel stuff to Sheets isn't an option, for example) remain, so we were kind of considering Sharepoint Online. What are other people doing for these sort of situations? Can anyone comment as to how well the O365 web apps work, especially in regard to crazy macros and functions? Edit: Maybe we can make Drive work with the Google Drive for Office Plugin? Looks promising, at any rate. Sheep fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Feb 19, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 04:55
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Sheep posted:I'm tempted to throw Asterisk up in the cloud and buy some cheap SIP lines for our next facility and see how much we save by doing it ourselves. Full Disc: Hosted VoIP pays my bills. Depending on your needs you can probably save a lot of money, but think about how critical phones are to you before committing to it. To a lot of businesses communication services are critical. If the phones, email, or in certain luddite-laden industries the fax machine are down there are usually a lot of unhappy people looking for someone to yell at. You don't want to be the only person in the company that knows Asterisk when things go wrong. Your company probably doesn't want that either, since that puts a "bus factor" of 1 on their phones. Security is also a constant headache if you need to have your PBX exposed to the internet as a whole (mobile users, home users on DSL connections where the dynamic range is enormous, etc.), you'll be seeing constant attempts to connect to your system and make international calls through it. Fail2ban is your friend here, as well as deny all + whitelist where practical. That said, if you still want to do it, as long as your sites have reliable low-jitter connectivity to wherever the PBX is hosted it works great. I guess if your company is more internet-focused and the phones are more of a formality where forwarding to cell phones is a valid option in the event of problems it might not be too bad of an experience to try a DIY approach. On the plus side unless you go way off the deep end with custom scripts anything you do on a DIY Asterisk setup should be able to be easily replicated by any number of hosted or on-premise VoIP vendors so if you try it and decide down the road that self-hosting isn't for you the migration should be relatively painless.
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Feb 19, 2016 17:27
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What are decent options for Hosted VOIP these days? I really have no intentions of rolling my own Asterix box as phones are critical infrastructure at my company.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:25
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ThinkingPhones, 8x8, any number of BroadCloud partners. I think it massively depends on where you're located as latency is obviously a potential issue, and any on-site element that's required will vary by region as to how competent they are.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:44
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pixaal posted:Are you trying to use a web tool? I find just calling and saying the device predates you and where you work and the old person's info usually gets you pretty far most places. They might insist calling the number they have on file to verify you are legit which shouldn't be a problem for you unless the idiot used his person cell phone and wont give it the time of day to say that you replaced them. At the very least he could say "I don't work there anymore" and that should be enough cause to get you your info. yeah but I don't WANT to call I want to put the serial in the web site and get the info that I deserve
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Feb 19, 2016 20:49
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Internet Explorer posted:What are decent options for Hosted VOIP these days? I really have no intentions of rolling my own Asterix box as phones are critical infrastructure at my company. 8x8 is fine. I don't know anything about phones but when I had a client get them I just had to put a bunch of qos things in my firewall and it works for them okay. This is 25 people on a comcast business line which they also use for data...
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Feb 19, 2016 20:52
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Speaking of VOIP, what are the best options for keeping onsite copies of telephone calls that are searchable by humans? We're looking to switch hosted providers and it's only come to a head that we need to own our own poo poo because we work in legal, since we can access recordings no problem but there's no realistic option to keep a local archive of them. We were on the cusp of getting something on-premise, but the plug was pulled.
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Feb 20, 2016 00:34
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Super Slash posted:Speaking of VOIP, what are the best options for keeping onsite copies of telephone calls that are searchable by humans? It definitely is not perfect, but I like it significantly more than our decades-old PBX POTS.
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Feb 20, 2016 02:44
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Thanks Ants posted:ThinkingPhones, 8x8, any number of BroadCloud partners. I think it massively depends on where you're located as latency is obviously a potential issue, and any on-site element that's required will vary by region as to how competent they are. It looks like ThinkingPhones was rebranded / merged with Fuze and seems fairly interesting, considering we also have a conferencing revamp project on our plates. Seems worth looking into. Thanks!
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Feb 20, 2016 03:27
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Super Slash posted:Speaking of VOIP, what are the best options for keeping onsite copies of telephone calls that are searchable by humans? We use this VoIPmonitor and I'm a fan. The capture/processing engine is open source and runs on as far as I can tell any *nix-like platform of your choice. They sell a web UI in both cloud and self-hosted forms, and they also sell preinstalled hardware so you can have whatever level of DIY you're comfortable with from zero to almost complete. We built our own simple web UI (just lists calls per day and links to recordings) for those with basic needs and then point our customers at the commercial UI if they want something fancier. Hook it up to a span/mirror port on your switch that the VoIP traffic will show up on or bridge the network ports and hook it up inline and you'll be capturing calls in no time. The oldest of my deployments of these is 3.5 years and in that time the only non-hardware problem we've had was a misconfigured box that wasn't automatically cleaning up old calls as disk space got low. Other than that and a few cases of physical damage to the boxes themselves the only maintenance we ever have to do is logging in from time to time to update the OS.
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Feb 20, 2016 17:38
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Thanatosian posted:We have hosted VOIP, and all voicemail is converted to an audio file (I want to say .wma) and emailed to the recipient. Yeah we have this which works fine, it's also hooked up to our CRM which means every call get automatically logged against a contact. Problem is from a user standpoint you require a supervisor account to access the recording in the first place, but the biggest beef is that all recordings are stored on the providers file servers and not ours, so we could kiss them goodbye if/when we stop using them. However last time we talked they did mention something about setting up some kind of VPN link between us. (Extremely important for months down the line a customer brings up a complaint which we require recorded evidence for) wolrah posted:We use this VoIPmonitor and I'm a fan. Sounds interesting, our provider is even listed in the references.
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Feb 20, 2016 21:01
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Anyone have any experience with Vivantio?
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Feb 22, 2016 20:29
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Super Slash posted:Yeah we have this which works fine, it's also hooked up to our CRM which means every call get automatically logged against a contact. Problem is from a user standpoint you require a supervisor account to access the recording in the first place, but the biggest beef is that all recordings are stored on the providers file servers and not ours, so we could kiss them goodbye if/when we stop using them.
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Feb 22, 2016 20:40
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Anyone have any experience with Logitech GROUP for small office video conferencing? https://secure.logitech.com/en-us/product/conferencecam-group Or have any other recommendations? Seems like there isn't really much in this space.
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Mar 18, 2016 03:11
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Fourteen posted:Anyone have any experience with Logitech GROUP for small office video conferencing? I have some similar Logitech hardware set up, maybe a generation older, and it is great so far.
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Mar 18, 2016 03:43
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Fourteen posted:Anyone have any experience with Logitech GROUP for small office video conferencing? Get ready to hate your life if your company is expecting a really good quality video conferencing device on the cheap. The good stuff costs a ton of money, and the room has to be perfect for whatever hardware you go with. Whats your budget for this? You can go real cheap with a used polycom speaker phone and logitech camera, not sure how well it would work but it'd be something at least.
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Mar 18, 2016 14:02
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The quality on the video and audio both seem great to me. Other than a camera that zooms in to the individual who is talking, I don't really see the need for anything more. And I have implemented very expensive Polycom systems from as recent as 3 years ago. I would say at this point the hardware you use matters less and less, the software that ties it all together is more important. I can't see any reason a small or medium business would do one of the traditional video conferencing systems these days. It's just not worth it.
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Mar 18, 2016 14:45
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Internet Explorer posted:The quality on the video and audio both seem great to me. Other than a camera that zooms in to the individual who is talking, I don't really see the need for anything more. And I have implemented very expensive Polycom systems from as recent as 3 years ago. I would say at this point the hardware you use matters less and less, the software that ties it all together is more important. I can't see any reason a small or medium business would do one of the traditional video conferencing systems these days. It's just not worth it. Maybe it was just the last building I was in but we fought terrible sound all of the time. The video part was easy, it was audio that was hard. Part of that is getting people to not talk into their laptop screen or be facing the projector speaking and the table mics not picking it up. Eventually we outsourced it to some AV company who put in acoustic panels and ceiling mics which somehow still didnt sound great.
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Mar 18, 2016 14:48
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Anyone here using HighFive? Our org is looking into it and I'd be interested in getting some feedback.
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Mar 18, 2016 15:23
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Our company has a wide range of software that we've used over the years... and it's just a giant kludge that all kinda works together... Before we had just Miva Merchant 4.x & Shipworks. Other company here uses MAS 200 (version is from around 2001? 2002?) and an online inventory search based around the information in MAS. There was a change in the company where now there's an importer which takes any Miva orders (as well as from amazon/ebay) and imports every order into MAS (so everyone has a MAS order #/Customer #). E-mail is handled via Outlook/Exchange server & other e-mails (as well as MAS RMAs) are done via Cerberus Helpdesk. Last November we upgraded the store after all these years to the latest Miva 9. So online orders directly are Miva, phone orders are put in by our sales team via Miva or MAS (it's not strictly enforced but they are highly encouraged to use Miva for them). Everything ends up in Shipworks as well and ships via that. (Shipworks shipping the orders from MAS that didn't originate in Miva/eBay/Amazon is slow because it handles multiple storefronts.) Now the division I work in is changing around for the better and after many years of struggling with ancient hardware/software we finally have the funds to upgrade to something current! Hooray! Someone higher up suggested the latest MAS because that's what they've been using from before but it's crazy expensive - for around 10 people to access it it would be between $50-60k. We are maybe using 20-30% of the features at most in the software (it's supposed to be for accounting but we use it for orders and other stuff...) so I've been tasked in my spare time at work to find a viable alternative but I'm not even sure what type of software I should be looking for. If we can find something that integrates with our Miva Merchant 9 storefront that can also handle orders, inventory (real time and so we could also put in things there such as what PO and tracking # incoming parts are coming in with since we have lead times across multiple vendors), shipping (so we wouldn't have to separately use Shipworks), maybe some CRM built-in?... not sure what else to ask for... Any suggestions? Not sure what to specifically call the software I'm looking for... Priz fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Mar 18, 2016 |
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Mar 18, 2016 20:50
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BaseballPCHiker posted:polycom speaker phone and logitech camera This is pretty much what they're using now, I think they're ready for the next step up. But I was relieved to hear at least someone else here had good things to say about the GROUP system. i think the plan is either to get that, or at least just get the camera from that system separately and use the existing Polycom for audio.
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Mar 20, 2016 00:50
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My company used to be certified to sell Polycom conference video solutions, until a few years ago they added some demo hardware requirements we couldn't meet. Recently we got an email saying they no longer required that. I get the feeling the market's shrinking and they're trying whatever they can to get more people pushing the stuff. We have no interest in getting back in to it, they're a pain in the rear end to set up and interoperability is still a nightmare. I second the recommendation of a good speakerphone (which Polycom is great for) and a standard PC-based webcam if you really want to do the video thing.
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Mar 20, 2016 01:12
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What solution do you guys recommend these days for offline backups? I used to roll my offsite backups to my many datacenters but now I am down to one as my company dumps it's illusion of being Enterprise and embraces Small Business. We have Veeam and I need an offsite solution for about 500GB or less of data. I would probably have Veeam backup to one server and then let whatever back that up. If I can't get approval for anything, I'll probably end up taking a drive home at the end of the day because I don't know what to do if the place burns down. edit: Rewrote my post as it was poo poo. ghostinmyshell fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Mar 24, 2016 |
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Mar 24, 2016 04:49
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... Why?
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Mar 24, 2016 05:39
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ghostinmyshell posted:What solution do you guys recommend these days for offline backups? Amazon Storage Gateway might fit your needs and would be quite cheap at your data requirement level.
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Mar 24, 2016 11:59
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Find a Veeam Cloud provider
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Mar 24, 2016 12:08
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ghostinmyshell posted:What solution do you guys recommend these days for offline backups? Is it considered acceptable losses if the place goes down? Cloud storage was viewed as "I'm just going to shut everything down if the site burns down". Okay then glad we have a plan of pocketing the insurance money.
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Mar 24, 2016 14:16
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ghostinmyshell posted:What solution do you guys recommend these days for offline backups? If you don't want to use an Amazon Storage Gateway, you can set up an EC2 instance with a 500GB drive, in a VPC with a VPN back to you, running as a Veeam proxy. Setup a backup copy job in Veeam to copy your backups to it, and be sure to set up a snapshot schedule of the instance so it persists to s3. Run it on another continent and call it a day. RTO is going to be weeks anyway if your office blows up and you have to buy new stuff.
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Mar 24, 2016 14:52
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Cool, thanks for the suggestions. I had no idea about the veeam cloud solution.
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Mar 25, 2016 01:09
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