Microsoft slowly closes Outlook Premium's door while Office 365 winks at you across the street Microsoft has shut down new registrations for the Outlook Premium service, directing customers instead to an Office 365 subscription. The Redmond Hotmail house says that from Monday, those who want to get an Outlook email account with Microsoft's security tools, ad-blocking, and larger storage will need to get Office 365 Home …
I wouldn't really call it bait and switch; Outlook Premium has been around for long enough that this doesn't really count.
Rather it seems to be more a consolidation of services: Outlook Premium and Office365 offer similar features, have the same front-ends, but run on different back-ends. This will allow MS to combine a few servers and save some admin effort and a few bucks.
That said, I got fed up of their constant tweaks to Office365 some while ago (focused in-box?!? I'm the only one who knows which emails are important, thank you!) and now self-host my own email server.
Not being beholden to some corporate behemoth for my email is strangely relaxing.
Yes, especially since it can be automated..
Indeed. Why, in my BSD mailserver, all I need to do is log in every 90 days or so to run "certbot renew"
(I would automate it but I'm old fashioned enough to get twitchy about automating *everything*)
>>>Indeed. Why, in my BSD mailserver, all I need to do is log in every 90 days or so to run "certbot renew"
But when it needs a kernel update or similar that requires a reboot then presumably there is downtime. You don't get that with clustered Exchange servers.
But when it needs a kernel update or similar that requires a reboot then presumably there is downtime. You don't get that with clustered Exchange servers.
You don't say.. You don't get that with properly set up standard email servers either, no need to cluster. Ever heard of MX record preference values? Why do you think they were invented? Of course, you CAN cluster *nix too and then there is no difference at all between Exchange and any Open Source service, other than that a *nix system does not NEED clustering to acquire stability. Simple is better.
I have been dealing with email from before the Internet was developed, so let's just say that I may probably have a mildly better grasp of the fundamentals than your average Exchange administrator.
Backing up and patching an email server is relaxing?
It is. As long as you avoid Microsoft products it's not even hard to do. I've used various systems over the years (just to experiment - choice is one of the benefits of sticking to open standards based email). I could even automate the upkeep, but it's good to occasionally get a terminal window up.
"As long as you avoid Microsoft products it's not even hard to do."
With Exchange it's really easy to do. And with near zero downtime.
Consistent Exchange DB and system state backup snapshots are already a feature of the OS - and will integrate into the backup software of your choice if Windows Backup isn't good enough.
Patching can be completed on all passives hosts, active hosts then failed over and patching repeated on each passive node until every Exchange DAG node is patched.
... Except that Exchange On-Prem is a Microsoft product, and a damned expensive one at that all things considered.
and DAGs add complexity, increased storage costs (not to mention power and rack space) to offset the HA and 'easy' maintenance of them. (sort of- pushing a cumulative update is annoying, but one that can be done with little to no downtime)
With Exchange it's really easy to do. And with near zero downtime.
I don't buy the latter at all, and I don't buy the former because I don't see why I should spend money on licenses and associated management if it's by default present in any Linux and BSD distribution? The latter does not only have a better and more credible price/performance/stability ratio, it also talks open standards - the one thing MS is very keen to avoid. I like IMAP/SMTP/carddav/caldav, and that's a free default with Open Source.
So no, I don't buy the use of Exchange. Literally and figuratively.
Consistent Exchange DB and system state backup snapshots are already a feature of the OS
LOL. And where, pray, did you think they got the idea for those features? It's truly amazing, the sort of features you get cold out of the box with your average Linux distribution. What's more, they've been tested in the field to make things work, not to become mere words in glossy brochures to convince people to spend money on a product that is 100% focused on customer lock in.
No, knowing that the NSA or GCHQ aren't rifling through my emails, or that the corporate behemoth isn't selling my data to the advertising agencies, or that said corporation isn't going to suddenly change its terms or offerings and make me have to move... they're the relaxing things.
Patching: I run Axigen, a mail-server-in-a-box, on an Ubuntu vm; Ubuntu is set to auto-update and drop me an email when it does. Axigen only occasionally release updates, so I install them as needed.
Backups: as I mentioned, its all in a vm; I have Veeam backing up the entire vm nightly, and again emailing me the result.
All I have to do is sit back, swig my coffee and keep an eye on the notification emails. Bear in mind of course that this is for personal email for me, not mission critical stuff for an enterprise.
"In addition to the removal of ads, the mailbox capacity will be bumped up to 50GB "
Outlook mailboxes have a maximum capacity? Maybe mine is just that old, but I've never ran in to that. The inbox seems to do infinite scrolling so I'm not sure how many emails are in there, but to give an idea I have over 57,000 unread.
The inbox seems to do infinite scrolling so I'm not sure how many emails are in there, but to give an idea I have over 57,000 unread.
I've given up on that idea. I only keep 2 years worth of email, anything before that gets sorted - what is worth keeping is archived (in an iMAP "archive" folder so I still have search access to it) and the rest is zapped. I set up 5GB capacity mailboxes on my servers, but I have yet to see anyone go over 2GB.
Anyone who has been in this business awhile will surely be aware of the historical limitations of PST mailbox files. The email that took it over the 2Gb limit would cause Outlook to die horribly. Instead of preventing the problem before it occurred (will this email cause a breach of the 2Gb limit? Yes, reject and flag an "over quota" error), Microsoft's solution was to provide tools to repair the inadequacy after the event - possibly rendering important messages irretrievable, and causing downtime whilst the repair was effected. Users were given lessons in checking the sizes of the mailbox, and the result was often a list of PST's in the folder list with complaints about it being difficult to search for old emails if you didn't know the date they were sent/received.
It'd help if MS didn't call everything Outlook or Office. Their marketing department seem to think a client, a webmail website, and a subscription service all should be called the same thing and everyone will somehow magically know the difference.
Most companies need a version of Office that actually works and that supports MS Office Addins and Macros.
1 - in 20+ years of work on sometimes pretty complex documents, I have yet to use an add-on. I have, however, frequently had the need to deploy OpenOffice and later LibreOffice to sort out the mess that Word makes of its OWN documents because some f*ckwit in the dim and distant past thought it to be fun to include formatting codes to text cut & pasted, but forgot to make sure the codes remained paired instead of orphaned which confuses the f*ck out of Word. The more you work on a document (i.e. the closer to the deadline you are), the more certain it is that it becomes unstable to the point that Word itself can no longer load it and you need LO/OO to sort out the mess. So don't talk to me about "stuff that actually works", because code from Microsoft left that category years ago.
2 - macros. Ah yes, that unsafe idea that lies at the root of many, many infections, probably because it was coded by Microsoft for whom functionality and security are merely optional. Here again, never had the need, but if I do, I am in the happy situation that infected native LO documents are hard to come by. "Because it's less used"? So? It still means less risk. Not that it matters much, we have abandoned Microsoft altogether, and I was literally this evening asked if I want to help set up a new group of journalists' IT so that it's secure, but low cost. Well, that rules out Microsoft..
The only real justification for MS software is complex Excel work, and if it's that complex you'll find it's a swine to audit - which marks it again as not for us as we have compliance demands.
You're welcome to using MS Office. Just try to sell it me using BS arguments. I have written so many documents and rescued so many from colleagues that it is by now quite impossible to convince me that MS has a flaming clue on how to write code that actually delivers. No wonder they need so much BS to sell it.
Well, that takes care of my rant quota for the month. Thankfully it's the 31st :).
Spot on.
The number of times - seems with increasing frequency - I have to open a Word document in LibreOffice (actually I am on macOS so it is NeoOffice) to clear out the accumulated crap.
In a worst-case scenario I save the wretched document as rtf (!) as the nuclear option.
The number of times - seems with increasing frequency - I have to open a Word document in LibreOffice (actually I am on macOS so it is NeoOffice) to clear out the accumulated crap.
Oh, they don't get away Scott free either, though. Some drunk idiot in the OpenOffice camp came up with the brilliant idea to make "paste as text only" a function you could only access via a submenu of "Paste special", thus making it impossible to reach it with a simple menu command or keyboard shortcut.
It has taken until LibreOffice 5 to finally undo that idiotic idea, so now you can finally swap out the "Paste" keyboard shortcut with "Paste as text" which I have thus done for both LO and NeoOffice.
Next challenge: getting the LO camp to use the Mac keyboard input routines for handling of accented characters like é,ä et al instead of their own, frankly dreadful implementation. I work in multiple languages and that is perfectly possible with an English language keyboard on a Mac - unless I use LibreOffice. I'm pretty much forced to use NeoOffice which is designed to actually use good platform and UI functions.
It's almost like neither developers actually *use* their own software, but at least I don't get blackmailed into installing a new version with a different UI every year. Would you believe some LO devs even implemented a clone of the *barf* *choke* Microsoft Ribbon *cough*? Thankfully it's still well hidden - the benefit of LO is precisely that its UI is stable. I guess this is planning forward for situations where there is a need to totally destroy productivity like, say, in Government..
So, LO is much better, but far from perfect.
Tangential but one of best features - one of the all-time best features in any program - is top notch support built in to NeoOffice for WordPerfect documents (of which I have archives going back many years).
The mention of WordPerfect in these forums usually gets a number of upvotes, which presumably corresponds to the continuing popularity at least of 5.1. (although I last used 6.1 - I am talking DOS. Microsoft strained every sinew to kill WordPerfect for Windows, building special code into Windows (I am convinced) to make it explode every time). So any punter who is a WordPerfect fan needs to know about this feature.
Have an upvote for WordPerfect, I found it a lot easier to use than Word which I still can't indent a single paragraph on without every other one in the document indenting by a random number of tabs...
Using LibreOffice on my other laptop now (with Linux Mint) and found it more than good enough, looks like I'll be jumping that way when windows 7 updates end...
Tangential but one of best features - one of the all-time best features in any program - is top notch support built in to NeoOffice for WordPerfect documents (of which I have archives going back many years).
Wow, I didn't know that. Not that I have a need for it, but we do sometimes get customers with old archives. Is that an explicit NeoOffice feature or would LibreOffice have it as well? We like NeoOffice because it's better matched to macOS than LO's compilation is, and it's far easier to install for our end users (one installer, instead of a base package and UI language package that needs to be set up every single time you run an upgrade).
I worked for quite a while with WP for DOS (basically because there wasn't anything else usable for decent writing other than Wordstar which was more for one page letters), but when WP for Windows arrived and the whole WYSIWY(S)G started (the "(S)" stands for "sometimes") I'm afraid I strayed, mostly to things that Borland came up with. Then Word came, but a sideways entrant via the OS/2 camp was far more interesting: StarOffice, which later became OO => LO :).
It's been quite a journey..
Fairly sure it is explicit to NeoOffice. The history, if memory serves, is that WordPerfect was popular with academics, some of whom (obviously) were familiar also with Unix > BSD > macOS. So there is a happy band of fans watching over (I hesitate to say "maintaining" in the Linux sense) this feature.
Frankly it is a godsend.
The only (minor) wrinkle is that NeoOffice expects to see ".wpd" at the end of the file name. I used to use all 11 slots of the 8.3 filename system to make it easier to recognise the file, so the .3 portion could be anything. Now, it is dead easy to add .wpd at the end. I only have to do it occasionally, but for a large archive someone with the skills (not me) could presumably write a small program to add .wpd to all the file names.
Once that is done, assuming you have macOS primed to open .wpd files in NeoOffice the file icon automatically changes to NeoOffice. Job done!
>Only for home users or the least sophisticated of small business.
You're a bit behind the times and not in line with UK Gov policy:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-uk-government/avoid-macros-in-documents
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/sharing-or-collaborating-with-government-documents
You're a bit behind the times and not in line with UK Gov policy:
You have no idea how hard MS lobbied to prevent this from happening - I reckon this was the core reason for them breaking ISO just to get their "open" standard ratified via straight bribery and process rigging. MS was pretty much given free reign of Government IT by Tony Blair & friends (you know, the man who had to set up his own private bank afterwards to manage the loot?), so whoever managed to pull this off must have had considerable political power to go up against that infestation.
Very impressive. Didn't change a thing though, they're still using MS Office although MS is now forced to plant people with the message that MS Office is "best at handling Open Document" - yeah, right, better than the word processor it was developed with. Sure.
Meanwhile, those who currently have a HOTMAIL subscription... what? Not that I care about ads (thunderbird does a job half-ok of pulling mail from hotmail servers without having to put up with web browser "experience"). Although the marketing (*****) [frothing from the mouth] that had the genius idea of allowing emoti-fucking-cons in the mail title - curse be on you, your wife, your neighbours and your cat, likewise on your children, your children's children, and your children's pet hamsters (Artificial? Of course it is. Have you ever terminated a hamster by mistake?)
and your cat
Oi! Leave our feline overlords out of this!
Have you ever terminated a hamster by mistake?
Not personally. But I might, theoretically, know some small furry quadropeds that might, theoretically, have done so. Allegedly.
The evidence of absense was very much absense of evidence.
Google just dropped all email scanning for ads on the consumer version of Gmail. True you only get 15 GB instead of 50 GB with free Gmail, but 15 GB is a huge number of emails. I have never had to clear my Gmail in 10 years, have 10s of thousands of emails... using something like 4 GB. Easily searchable in Gmail. Google also provides productivity apps with Drive and their slick co-editing tech. You can use Hangouts or any... Why would any consumer ever go pay $100 a year for the same thing, or worse, in Office365?
This is just a 1990s business model. Asking people, consumers, to go out and pay for basic email and productivity. Sell the email and productivity to businesses to cover the costs and then some. Give it away to consumers for free. MSFT is trying to double dip... just because they could for years when people had no choice.
"rent a hosted server in a country that is a bit more careful with personal data. Much more cost effective."
No comparable. G Suite runs on the Google network with fiber laid around the world, under the ocean, etc. PoPs everywhere. That is why it works on anything with next to no latency. Not going to work to have someone in Paris and someone in LA collaboratively editing a doc in real time on a box in a closet.
"Google has its paid offers as well - see G.Suite - which doesn't cost less than Office365 despite the lack of local, native applications."
Yes, it does cost less. G Suite is about half the cost of any of the comparable E SKUs on Office365. There are business SKUs which are less, but you need E SKUs if you have over 300 users... which makes absolutely no sense. Why would MSFT sell someone who was buying 20,000 seats O365 for less, per seat, than someone who is buying 20 seats? The answer is because Google is eating their lunch in SMB so they have to bring the prices more in line with the market... large enterprises tend to favor whatever the status quo happens to be.
Local native applications... who cares? Is Salesforce a worse CRM than Siebel because it doesn't offer a Windows thick client? I prefer the browser and light weight apps that don't need to be updated locally. Basically everything works via the browser, SAP, Oracle, Workday, etc. MSFT is the only company that insists on Windows local apps... it's almost as though they have some vested interest is people continuing to use Windows vs any OS.
Google just dropped all email scanning for ads on the consumer version of Gmail.
At least, that's what they want you + world to think so you don't come after them with pesky privacy law issues. When it comes to Google I will only believe what can be verified by an independent party, which is to date absolutely nothing (say it again: truth, what is it good for - sorry, digressed slightly there :) ).
Never bought Outlook premium. But I hate MS Office enough that that's made me a permanent non-customer of that nonsense. Same as it has for OneDrive.
No, I don't want Office 2016. Given how well it works at work, I have no desire to pay for software that is literally so bug ridden I've just wasted an entire morning to make a simple change because Excel is no longer a reliable work tool for me, thank you.
No, I don't want Office 2016. Given how well it works at work, I have no desire to pay for software that is literally so bug ridden I've just wasted an entire morning to make a simple change because Excel is no longer a reliable work tool for me, thank you.
I wanted to test Outlook, and that is so screwed up that I gave up in the end. The problem lies with its habit of paying no attention whatsoever to the hostname that you have provided, it will ALWAYS try to go to the root of the email domain first which is then falls over and dies. Honestly, we're in the 21st century and configs are STILL an issue?
Anyway, happy with LO. It has been doing the job for ages and just works.
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