Real food for thought?

Without a secure data backup program that works as your safety net how do you know you will not loose your data in the event of theft, fire, flooding, virus, power cut or a technical malfunction. This would be a disaster! On such a moment a backup or offsite backup is of the most essential importance to your business to ensure continuity of service to your clients and customers and to ensure you still have a business you can run.

Sometimes businesses and SME’s undervalue the importance of the data they have. If you are a service based business it could be your most valuable asset. If you are driven by sales without your customer records how can you keep the turnover your require to maintain your business?

At SafetyNet IT we understand the value of your data. So put your most valuable asset in safe hands by letting us provide you with a foolproof backup system. We can provide simple on-line backup solutions through to managed backup server solutions dependent on your business data requirements.

Contact Jake Harrop on 0845 869 8451 to arrange a business data consultation.

SafetyNet IT provide data backup solutions to businesss in Altrincham, Warrington, Cheshire and Manchester.

They specialise in working with businesses who like having their IT people close at hand. For larger organisation they can provide you with a full outsourced IT Solution and for smaller businesses you can use them on a pay as you go basis or if you have a few staff in your office or a server than needs managing then the timebank plan may be more cost effective.

Types of businesses Safetynet IT support in the Cheshire region include:

• Dental Practices
• Logistic Companies
• Accountancy Practicies
• Advertising Agencies
• Tax Consultants
• Legal Companies including Solicitors

To find out how they can support your business effectively call or email Safetynet IT for a free consultation.

They specialise in working with companies who like having their IT people close at hand. Your company can use them on a pay as you go basis or if you have a few staff in your office or a server than needs managing then the timebank plan may be more cost effective. For companies that want to outsource their IT the Total Support package maybe the most beneficial.

Types of companies Safetynet IT support in the Manchester area include:

• Advertising Agencies
• Tax Consultants
• Legal Companies including Solicitors
• Dental Practices
• Logistic Companies
• Accountancy Practicies

To find out how they can support your business effectively call or email them for a free consultation.

Providing a solution for your IT Company Manchester needs.

They specialise in working with businesses who like having their IT people close at hand. For larger organisation they can provide you with a full outsourced IT Solution and for smaller businesses you can use them on a pay as you go basis or if you have a few staff in your office or a server than needs managing then the timebank plan may be more cost effective.

Types of businesses Safetynet IT support in the Warrington region include:

• Dental Practices
• Logistic Companies
• Accountancy Practicies
• Advertising Agencies
• Tax Consultants
• Legal Companies including Solicitors

To find out how they can support your business effectively call or email Safetynet IT for a free consultation.

They specialise in working with businesses who like having their IT people close at hand. You can use them on a pay as you go basis or if you have a few staff in your office or a server than needs managing then the timebank plan may be more cost effective. For businesses that want to outsource their IT the Total Support package maybe the most beneficial.

Types of businesses Safetynet IT support in the Altrincham area include:

• Advertising Agencies
• Tax Consultants
• Legal Companies including Solicitors
• Dental Practices
• Logistic Companies
• Accountancy Practicies

To find out how we can support your business effectively call or email us for a free consultation.

One of our Creative / Design clients exclusively use Apple kit for all their IT hardware – server is an Xserve, all the clients are Mac Pro’s, MacBooks etc, and the setup has been thus for donkeys years. We ‘inherited’ the setup about 18 months ago when were engaged as their IT services provider, and one of the weaknesses we perceived from the start was a reliance on Kerio Mailserver (now Kerio Connect) as their mail server software of choice.

The other ‘biggie’ was that pretty much everyone used Office 2004 and specifically Entourage for their email client (integrated groupware is important for these guys – swapping in and out of Mac Mail and iCal was a no-no).

Now, don’t get me wrong, Kerio can be a brilliant lower-cost option compared to Exchange under certain conditions, but I always think of Kerio as ‘Exchange Lite’. It’s supposed to provide a lot of the same functionality yet have a far cheaper TCO compared to any flavour of Exchange, and for smaller companies who want a centralised email server with support for shared folders / iPhones / Blackberrys it can work really, really well.

The problems come when those companies grow and mailboxes start getting bigger and kerio needs to support more demanding users & processes. In my experience it just doesn’t scale as well as Exchange (especially since Exchange 2007) and beyond about 20 users it needs more intervention to keep it running smoothly. I realise this is totally at odds with what Kerio say is the case, but the last 3 Kerio servers we’ve looked after have been VERY needy, compared to loads of Exchange servers that we maintain that basically just get on with it.

So, added to a slightly flaky mail server, Entourage has a problem with big mail profiles (and I believe it’s a shortcoming in the design of the monolithic database, which is why Microsoft moved away from it for Outlook 2011), which was causing on average 2 or 3 users a week to have to rebuild their databases, and often it was the same user, over and over. Even more problematically, the repeat users tended to be those with the most historical email, i.e. the most senior staff in the business. So we had a situation where the most senior people within the company had the least reliable email. Clearly something had to change.

Happily, Microsoft released Office 2011 just as we were searching for a long-term solution to this mess. The move back to Outlook and its new flat-file structure for email storage was perfect for our requirements. Just one small problem; Outlook 2011 uses EWS for the back end connection to the mail server, not WebDAV. At that point, Kerio ONLY supported WebDAV and not EWS. So we could have the mail client we needed to solve our issues, but the back-end wasn’t compatible.

Fortunately Kerio ‘rushed’ out (7 months after Office 2011 was released, and a couple of years after the move to EWS for Outlook 2011 was announced) a new, fully-compatible release of their Connect mail server software. We duly upgraded Kerio to 7.2 and after testing, rolled out Office 2011 to all 30-odd users. Everything worked, straight out of the box, as long as we installed the Office service pack before configuring an Exchange account in Outlook. Sometimes it was a little slow and sometimes Outlook couldn’t see the Kerio server, but it was a LOT better than Entourage, and most problems could now be resolved by just force-quitting the application and re-launching it.

However, the performance of the server started to be a bit of a problem. More users started to complain that it was simply too slow to work with and things were no better than they were before. Again, Kerio to the rescue – they recognised their performance issues with Outlook 2011 and embarked upon an aggressive patch release schedule to combat the problem, which we installed as soon as they became available.

This was all fine until Kerio Connect 7.3.1 when all hell broke loose. Users started losing access to their mailboxes on the Kerio server, both through Outlook and even through webmail. The mailboxes were just completely inaccessible and the only thing that would fix it was a reboot of the Kerio server – we couldn’t even restart the Kerio services on the server.

The cause? Outlook 2011 not dropping connections to shared folders on the Kerio server and overloading it. The easiest way to track this was through the open folders view in Kerio Admin. According to Kerio’s UK support, there should never be more than about 8 folders open per user. In one instance we saw somewhere over 600 connections to a single users Calendar. After numerous discussions with Kerio Support, we came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to go away, nor was it going to get fixed any time soon, as we were completely reliant on Kerio to release a fix for it, and they were blaming Outlook for the problem.

After a crisis meeting with the Client, we decided to replace the Kerio server with Exchange 2010, as we knew that:

1. Exchange 2010 would be 100% compatible with the Outlook 2011 client
2. Exchange is far better documented that Kerio, and consequently
3. SafetyNet (or indeed any other IT services provider) can support Exchange from within the team to a higher level than that available for Kerio without having to refer to a 3^rd party –
4. We could turn the install and config around in a short timeframe

So, conclusions from all of this ? Don’t expect a product sold as a cheaper version of something else to be as good as the original product, no matter how well it’s marketed. Sometimes you just need to bite the bullet and shell out on the ‘proper’ solution.

If you’ve got the capital (or the finance) to do this early on with a business, you’ll reap the benefits later on in the lifecycle of the business as you won’t have to go through a “buy cheap, buy twice” realisation, along with the usual failure of a critical business system to provide the tipping point.

When it comes to long-term IT infrastructure, buy the best you can afford. Buying cheap, unbranded kit really can be a false economy.

Congratulations if you waded through all of that, onto #2 for the technical nitty-gritty.

Problem 1: Kerio needs to be up and operational 24/7 until users are switched over to Exchange

Problem 2: Contacts & Calendar entries need to be brought across too, and we can’t use PST’s like normal.

Problem 3: Some of the Mailboxes are HUGE and trying to pull the 90-odd GB of mail over into Exchange in one night from a RAID1 Mac Pro Kerio server is going to run over time.

How did we address these 3 problems and ensure that the migration was as stressless and easy as possible? Ok, so straight off the bat, our procedure was markedly different than if we’d been doing this in a PC environment as we could have just used PST files and either done the import on the server, or done a client-side import. However, Microsoft in their wisdom haven’t fully extended the PST format to Outlook 2011, and you’re forced to use an .OLM file, which is only just ever-so-slightly better than completely useless, and will NOT work for this kind of operation.

So, instead what we had to do was use the truly excellent imapsync application which worked perfectly. Our use of it was extremely simple, and with a bigger migration we probably would have used a more complex script, but as an example of a quick’n'dirty line of script, see below:

imapsync –host1 Kerio_server –user1 Kerio_username –password1 Kerio_Password –host2 Exchange_server –user2 Exchange_Username –password2 Exchange_Password -port2 993 -ssl2 –-nofoldersizes –skipsize –-fast

We just repeated this line for every user we needed to migrate, making sure that where possible the new username and password for Exchange matched the username and password for Kerio. This gave us a batch file with about 30 similar lines of code, which we then used Task Scheduler on the Exchange server to run every couple of hours.

Because imapsync does an incremental copy, we never encountered any duplication on any of the destination mailboxes, so we could just leave it running continually. So by the end of the week, our destination Exchange server was at most 2 hours out of date relative to the Kerio server. 9PM Friday we changed the firewall rule to redirect SMTP traffic to the Exchange server and started receiving all new email into exchange. A final run of the imapsync script took care of the last few emails sat on the Kerio server in about an hour, and there we were – Exchange server live, with all the old email sat of it with all the received dates correct too. Users were able to login to their webmail immediately (gotta love the new RWW in SBS2011) and all we needed to do was go to site on Monday to set up their new Exchange accounts in Outlook, drag and drop their calendar entries and contacts from Kerio to exchange and migration complete.

Gotcha #1

You CANNOT drag and drop calendar entries from a Kerio account in Outlook 2011 to an Exchange account. No matter what anyone says about changing views in Outlook to grid, or doing an advanced search with certain parameters, it doesn’t work – well it certainly didn’t for us. Fortunately we found the solution; login to the users Kerio Webmail (you did leave that Kerio server up & in service didn’t you?) and click on settings, integration with Mac and download the users calendar .ics file. Drag and drop this file into the Exchange calendar and it populates the calendar for you.

Gotcha #2

When setting up the new user accounts in Exchange (we used SBS2011, so ymmv) make sure that quotas are turned off, or amended from the standard 2Gb for the new user accounts, otherwise you’ll only get a partial copy of the larger email accounts.

As expected, since the migration to Exchange 2010 the email performance issues have been completely resolved, and everything is now working as it always should have done.

The general thinking on this was to produce something that could help someone avoid the IT pitfalls that often beset companies as they grow, and possibly save them ££’s into the bargain.

Having put some thought into it and batted it around the office for a day or two, it boils down to a pretty short list:

• Don’t try and be an IT Consultant. If the thought of doing anything on a computer scares you, don’t try to do all this stuff yourself. You’d probably expect us to say this, but it’s important that things are set up properly as early as possible. Rather than muddling through yourself, pay for an hour or two of a decent IT professionals’ time at the beginnning and it’ll save you hours of faffing around and extra expense later on.

• Run some antivirus. To be honest, in the beginning it doesn’t matter what you use, as long as it’s from a reputable provider – free (legally free, not pirated free) is fine. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials; it does the job, doesn’t slow your machine down too much and it’s free for commercial use for up to 10 PC’s in a Small Business. You will need to upgrade this to a managed product when your business grows, but for a free option to get you started, it’s fine.

• Perform a daily backup* OUT OF EVERYTHING ON THIS LIST THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT !! Even if you don’t have a Server and you’re running the business from your laptop, you still need to be backing up every day without fail. Don’t bother backing up the entire contents of your C:\ drive, just backup the important stuff. If you’re just starting up, a USB memory stick is better than nothing and is cheap as chips. If you have a little bit of spare cash floating about, sign up for our unlimited online backup for £15 per month to backup up to 5 machines.

Hard drives die far more often that you would think, laptops get stolen from cars, kids accidentally format entire computers ‘just to see what happens’. Don’t leave it to chance – small businesses fold all the time because they lose all their data. Don’t let your dreams of running a successful business fail, just because you never bothered backing up.

• If you use Sage for your accounts, do a seperate Sage backup. Make sure that you use the backup functionality built into Sage, and backup everything, including reports and stationery to an external backup; do not just save it into My Documents, as that’s barely better than no backup at all.

• Get your email address sorted right from the beginning. Don’t start off using a free gmail/yahoo/hotmail account for your business; take it from me, it looks sloppy, and when you take on staff it’ll look even worse. Domain registrations cost next to nothing and even if you’re not getting a website done just yet, it’ll make your email address (and therefore you) look far more professional.

• Get your email sorted #2. Until 12 months ago, we probably would have advised new startups to use the free, bundled POP3 accounts that would have come with the domain you purchased after reading the previous point. Not any more though; hosted Exchange is now so cheap, you shouldn’t even think about using anything else. Full integration with iPhone / BlackBerry / iPad, shared calendars and contacts, huge storage capacity…the list goes on. If you’re using Exchange for the email back-end, you need to be using Outlook as your email client. Quite a few of the hosted mailboxes come with a free Outlook licence anyway, so shop around.

• Don’t rely on wireless for all your networking. Ok, so a slight caveat to this – if you’re working from home and it’s just you and all you do is send emails and create word documents or excel spreadsheets on an laptop, then you’ll be fine. However, if you’re a small business with a few members of staff and some shared storage somewhere, either on a NAS or a Server or even on one of the PC’s, all running off a cheap D-Link or Belkin wireless router, then your network is going to be slooooow. There’s a very good technical reason for this to do with the amount of shared bandwidth a cheap wireless device can provide, but the upshot is this – if it’s a PC or a laptop that lives on a desk and you use it as your primary computer day to day, it should be wired in. You don’t need to worry about proper network points, or trunking or any of that stuff – just get enough network cables (from Amazon, ebay, wherever) ands plug yourself into the network ports on the back of the router. If there’s a few of you in the office, you’ll see a massive improvement.

*Not all backups are equal. In descending order of preference, here’s the list – pick the best one you can afford:

Tape Based backup – ££££
Online Backup – £varies from £ to ££££ on provider and amount of data
RSYNC to Offsite NAS – ££
USB Flash Drive – £
USB Hard Drive – £

Yes that’s right, a USB Hard Drive is bottom of the list. Why ? Because they fail, they’re fragile and no matter how nice they look, there’s only ever a single disk in there, so when it dies, it takes all your data with it. I know they’re relatively cheap and have massive capacity, but in my opinion they’re not a good option. If you really have to use a USB Hard Drive, you need to be rotating at least 2, so that you don’t have a single point of failure.