FVS offer hosted Exchange

June 26, 2015 Mike Hudson

The clever boffins over at Free Virtual Server head quarters have managed to land a fantastic deal for people just like you! New to the FVS portfolio is hosted Microsoft Exchange mailboxes! FVS have teamed up with a well known company in their field MessageStream to bring you a 50GB mailbox which offers 24/7 accessibility on any platform. Served from the ‘cloud’ the service is fully resilient, which almost guarantees absolutely no time spent without your mail, contacts and calendar items..

A hosted exchange account is much more powerful then an IMAP or POP3 mailbox solution, which most hosting companies offer by default. Exchange mailboxes sync across a myriad of devices using Microsoft standards.

The FVS solution offers you:

Reduced IT infrastructure costs
Exchange 2013
Instant deployment
Massive 50GB per mailbox
Enhanced security
Mobile email ‘push’ technology
No upgrades or repairs
Shared calendars and contacts
Easy mailbox control
Public folders and subfolders
Instant scalability
Multiple UK Based Data Centres

All that starting from just £4.99 a month… You’d be crazy not to really! Whats more for only an extra £1 a month you bag yourself a licensed copy of Microsoft Outlook, which is by far the best application for keeping your mail and calendars organised.

If you’d to find out more check out the FVS website

FVS have been my (MikeSel.info) hosting provider since day of inception 8+ years ago.. They are always on hand to help out, knowledgeable, friendly and genuine guys.. I can’t go far enough in my recommendation of them. Worlds apart from other hosts in my opinion!

Fix: Constant credential prompts in Outlook ’07 using 365

May 10, 2013July 24, 2014 Mike Hudson 4 Comments

Today I have mostly been fighting with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and our Office 365 setup, as we are still in the early stages of deployment we have not yet implemented our ADFS servers. Which means we have are experiencing some pretty frustrating issues with Office and authentication.

One machine in particular decided to really test my patience and blankly refused to authenticate, presenting the user with a constant reoccurrence of the “Welcome back to Outlook.Office365” login box.

As it happened the machine had seemed to avoid the installation of several service packs, including Office 2007 Service Pack 3, and also what turned out to be some pretty important KB hot fixes. Leaving me scratching my head for what seemed like a lifetime… That was until today! When I finally managed to find the relevant KB hot fixes and install them manually..

OFFICE VERSION	NOTES
Latest version of Office	System requirements for Office 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus
Office 2010 with Service Pack 1	Automatic updates: Customers who sign up for Office 365 after February 27, 2013, must apply all automatic updates that were released before December 2012. Customers who signed up for Office 365 before February 27, 2013, must complete the following: By July 1, 2013, apply KB2553248. By April 8, 2014, apply all automatic updates for Office 2010 that were released prior to December 2012.
Office 2007 with Service Pack 3	Automatic updates: Customers who sign up for Office 365 after February 27, 2013, must apply all automatic updates that were released before December 2012. Customers who signed up for Office 365 before February 27, 2013, must complete the following: By October 1, 2013, apply KB2596598. By April 8, 2014, apply all automatic updates for Office 2010 that were released before December 2012.
Office 2003 only through POP and IMAP	For more information, see Office 365 will now support POP and IMAP connections to Outlook 2003.
Office for Mac 2011 with Service Pack 3	Mac OS X 10.6 or later is required.
Office 2008 for Mac 12.2.9	Support ends April 9, 2013.

The journey to 365 has been a long and winding one… This particular highlights the importance of ensuring all machines connecting to 365 are bang up to date with Windows and Office updates and service packs… Lesson learnt.

Pixlr.com the best(?) cloud based image editor

September 25, 2012 Mike Hudson Leave a comment

As more and more applications move to the cloud, and we become less reliant on locally installed apps, I’ve been trying to find an online editor to fulfil my photo editing requirements. Tonight I had a need for a small change to an image for my site, and rather than download and install a clunky app I decided to hit Google.. This is when I stumbled across Pixlr.com, Pixlr is a suite of 3 separate editing suites.

The first, dubbed the ‘Advanced’ editor, called Pixlr Editor which offers most if not all tools needed for most photo editing projects. The layout is much similar to other photo editors on the market. The difference being of course, is that it is 100% web browser-based, meaning no hefty downloads and no apps to install..

The ‘Advanced’ editor sports a feature packed toolbox, with all the tools you need to perform most image editing tasks.. From the touch up tool, to the blur tool and the image stamp and sharpen tool, really does put it in the same ring as local apps such as GIMP

If you don’t need all the powerful features from the advanced editor, Pixlr also offer an ‘Efficient‘ image editor. An although it’s got less tools in its toolbox, it’s by no way limited in its ability to do just what you want. The ‘efficient’ editor makes it as simple as clicking your mouse button or track pad to apply some pretty professional looking photo effects, or borders etc.

Screen Shot 2012-09-25 at 20.59.16 — (click to enlarge)

Then for the more simple image editing projects, Pixlr offer a ‘Playful‘, which makes it dead simple to add some pretty cool effects to your images. With a similar designlayout to iPhoto on the iPhone or iPad the toolbox takes the pain out of spicing up your images a little.

What’s more… Not only is Pixlr available in a web browser near you it also has a feature packed iOS and Android client, available for download in the respective app stores..

So what are you waiting for?? Dump your local photo editing clients and switch to the cloud!

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