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Showing posts from March, 2017

Making Sense of Office 365 Plans

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If you're just starting to look at Office 365 as a solution for your organization, the various plans can be overwhelming and confusing. I'm going to try and boil down all of the Office 365 plan information to just the essentials that allow you to make an informed decision. This is all based on research done March 2017 and the prices I include are Canadian dollars. You should verify that these features and prices are still correct for your scenario before making any decisions. I've includes some links at the bottom of this article to Microsoft documentation for you to verify. Microsoft should be keeping that content up to date. I'm going to focus on Office 365 plans for small business and enterprise. However, whether you are small business, non-profit, enterprise, or education, there are basically three generic Office 365 plans available: Office 365 desktop apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc) Cloud services (Exchange, Skype for Business, etc) Office 365 desktop apps and clo

Exchange 2010 SP3 Hub Transport Upgrade Error

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Ran into a new issue yesterday related to installing Exchange 2010 SP3. I was called in to help when the initial upgrade attempt failed. The error during SP3 installation was: An unexpected error occured while modifying the forms authentication settings for path /LM/W3SVC/1. The error returned was 5506. A screenshot of the error is below: Doing a search didn't come up with much, but it did give this: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/32df8c03-1957-4e8c-8381-4dc4cf26aee9/error-when-installing-exchange-server-2010?forum=exchangesvrgenerallegacy That link seemed to indicate that it could be related to the SSL binding on the default web site in IIS. Taking a look at the SSL binding, it seemed to be missing the certificate assignment. However, when I tried to add the certificate I got a strange error about the session be closed. Ok then, since you won't let me add the SSL certificate to the binding by using IIS Manager, let's try with Exchange Admin Cons

So, You Wanna Be a Computer Geek?

I recently did a presentation for an Introduction to Management Information Systems class at the University of Manitoba Asper School of Business.  Students in this class are just starting to look at how IT and business are interrelated. One of the students asked me for advice on getting into the IT industry and this content grew out of that. I suppose the more polite way to phrase it would be: So, you'd like to work in the IT industry? Areas of IT One of the things that surprises many people looking at IT is that wide range of job roles. When you haven't been working in the industry, you tend to think that there is just the one role of computer geek. And your impression is likely that the computer geek does all computer related stuff including physically repairing computers. In actuality, there are multiple job roles in IT. And, the more you learn about IT, the more you realize that you understand only your little corner of the world. The more you learn, the more you realize ho