They are desperate. I literally had a sales person reach out to ask how she could help us use copilot more because they can see literally nobody is using it despite a limited amount of usage is included in our M365 business standard licences. This after me already making a ticket to stop the behaviour of the home page automatically loading the copilot page instead of the classic home page with the overview I want to land on.
Honestly if anything he should focus on creating a solution where he can have DKIM active. He has dmarc and SPF, but not DKIM.
I’ve read through the post and the comments again, and it’s also that he doesn’t seem to want to train his users. They’re familiar with Gmail so he wants them to be able to use it. His users probably use their mailbox as an archive, and he doesn’t want to train them into understanding this is a bad idea, and he doesn’t want the hassle of dealing with ever increasing mail storage. At my previous job, we had Exchange Online, so 50 GB of storage. I was still explaining to my users, they should store their handled mails in archives if they wanted to be sure they would always have them. (Obviously stored on parts of their hard drives set up to synch to the fileserver which had daily backups)
All of these things are normal parts of an admin’s responsibilities. The only reason he’s getting away with his setup is because he owns the business and there’s been nobody there for the past 20 years to explain this would lead to problems down the line. (Or if there have been, he’s conveniently ignoring that)
Now they’re here, he’s blaming Google for what is probably the least evil thing they’ve done this year.
I admit I know nothing about him apart from the linked wiki page elsewhere. But nothing I read there seems to indicate he can be a good admin.
What you state he wants to achieve is what ignorant managers sometimes say they want without understanding how silly it is. I was in IT twenty years ago already, while still being green and unbearded, and even then this would have been an extremely bad and dumb idea.
You forgot to add that he obviously refuses to hire an actual IT admin to do IT admin stuff.
Being good in one thing doesn’t make you good in something else. He is an inexcusably bad IT admin. The devs I work with don’t ask for my opinion on code and if they would, it would probably sound nice to someone who doesn’t know shit, but it’d still be a dumb opinion. Likewise I don’t ask for their opinion on how to create our IT infrastructure (beyond of course asking their requirements for testing servers and such). If they have an opinion on it, it’s generally not very coherent or founded in reality. Like the complaints of this guy. Though they’re generally not this dumb.
What a damn moron to both have this setup and the audacity to complain that it will stop ‘working’.
But is that problem caused by Google or by the objectively worse service that won’t allow you to change your address?
It will be (and already is) much, much worse than just an embarrassment.
To be clear, I’m Belgian and in favour of abolishing monarchy. But as the news about her is unavoidable: she did study at the royal military academy as all in line for the throne have too. Then she went to Oxford for her Bachelor degree. Plan was to get the master at Harvard.
The justification is partly elitism for those schools, partly getting exposed to other environments, and partly getting too avoid being to isolated in Belgian schools where the attention would be inevitable and security too hard.
I would agree that right now there are more choices. I don’t entirely agree they’re inherently safer. Nor that this choice would have been available as a choice when the original decision was made. (At a time when the US was at the very least considered to be an ally to Europe)
If you think security of infrastructure has anything to do with PGP you’re misunderstanding what I mean. Self hosting mail for an organisation like the ICC would require multiple FTE’s. In the same vein that the current US administration is retaliating against them other rogue nations are constantly specifically targeting them. It’s already hard to deal with this without being specifically targeted and a couple times being targeted usually causes you to be compromised, dealing with it full time is almost impossible. Unless your team is monstrously big and securing your groupware is one of your core activities.
I’ve literally had jobs like this, and the idea that the average university that self hosts is more secure than Exchange Online is just plain wrong. I’m sure you can point to a couple of them that are safer of course, but they 'll be the exception.
Which is why I specifically phrased the part you didn’t quote in that specific way.
If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.
It just turns out that the US has become a rogue state that alligns with the type of war criminals and dictators that the ICC wants to prosecute. I really don’t think anyone would have predicted this 10 to 15 years ago when this mail choice was made.
Indeed, and the environmental factors aren’t the only problem with gas turbines. I’m not going to pretend I am an expert at what is the best solution but interviews I’ve read with experts that speak about the Belgian context. (Which is so densely built there’s not much room for anything) It was the best way balance the grid if more investments were made in solar and wind energy. The reason it didn’t happen is because it was deemed uninteresting because not profitable enough.
So the alternative that was chosen was doing nothing an extending the life of nuclear plants that are working way beyond their planned life and giving the commercial company managing them guarantees they’ll continue making money. Building new nuclear capacity will take longer than a gas turbine and they can’t just be shut down and torn down for something else when better alternatives come along. And this is usually cheered on by people who think they’re smart by pointing out that if you’re in favour of renewables you can’t be pragmatic about dealing with it’s current problems. While those people very often are against more renewables and just want unending nuclear as if that’s a magic bullet.
The fact that making money is one of the, if not the most important, considerations in this equation is the main problem with this. It simply should be a public service.
That won’t automatically solve all of the other problems but many of the solutions to this problems aren’t considered because they are not profitable, even though they exist. An easy example being gas turbine plants which are much easier to spin up and down as required. But perfectly meeting the needs of all people means there’s no artificial scarcity and thus lower profits.
And your arguments have the strength of the hobbyist with the homelab he’s constantly having to reinstall, not understanding why companies are so stupid to not do the same thing as him.
If you think SSO and easy profile migration doesn’t save time, there’s simply no point in discussing it with you. I don’t like MS and their near monopoly position as a company much either. But that doesn’t mean every product they make is utter trash for every situation.
There are undoubtedly other solutions but to pretend every one is too dumb to use them shows how little actual experience working in a variety of companies is.
Back in the nineties you might have had Novell NetWare or just plain old LDAP instead of AD, but unlike those competitors AD kept working and offered upgrade trajectories. And it offered decent integration with a decent mailserver (that ofcourse sucked to set up securely for outside access), and that mailserver was fantastic versus the utterly terror that was Domino combined with Notes. I don’t like MS for basically forcing you to go to their cloud now, but pretending it’s a bad product through and through on a functional level is just being willingly blind.
It integrates very well with your M365 you need at work, and it saves a ton of time when people can use SSO to basically get everything up and running immediately on a new laptop. Including bookmarks and passwords.
By default I install unblock on any user machine I touch because it’s equal parts user experience and security.
That sounds like GitHub Copilot though.