TEAMAS

There has been a lot in the news recently about the new taxi offering in London called Uber.  The concept is that Uber have a community of vetted drivers who are hailed using a smartphone app.  The app is used as a meter to calculate the charge of the journey.  This unique offering is a slight loophole between 1. Having a physical office taking bookings aka Minicabs 2.  Having a physical meter in the car rather than a prebooked far aka Black Cabs. Personally I loved the sound of the idea and was keen to try it out. So how did it go? I was in Shoreditch on Saturday night and instead of struggling for the last train back we decided to use Uber for the 9 mile journey. The Good Booking was extremely simple!  Click and done.  The driver arrived in about 3 minutes.  His car was immaculate and very comfortable.  The journey was super smooth and not having to have money on my person was much better than having the struggle under the interior ...

Hi Recently we have enabled ActiveSync quaratine rules in our organisation.  This was to stop a member of staff using their own device to access corporate data. We have only enabled AS for users with corporate devices, but some people have worked out that this allows you to use AS on your own device.  This is far from ideal, especially considering that our IT department now have full wipe access on their personal device!  Enabling this quaratine rule will stop people from taking advantage of this setting, unless someone from IT approves their device. On the whole this works pretty well.  The difficulty is that it slows down the process of provisioning multiple devices, especially when you are attempting to complete workshops with users during a handover period. I found a way to pre-approve devices using powershell.  First of all you need to find the deviceID.  On an Apple device you go to Settings > About > Serial Number.  The device...

InfoSecurity Europe 2014 was held this week in London.  This 3 day event was designed for security professionals to network and for companies to display their security wares. Unfortunately the first 2 days were marred by a tube strike in London.  I believe this put many people off visiting Earl's Court for the event until the last day, it certainly did for me! So what did I see? Eric Cole I watched a keynote seminar inducting Dr Eric Cole into the InfoSecurity Europe hall of fame.  He had some wonderful insight into security issues of the day and what areas security professionals should focus on.  He discussed the switch of security from inbound threats to outbound threats.  Many attacks require an outbound connection to allow data to be sent externally and this is an area to focus monitoring on.  Among many things he shared with the audience he issued the Eric Cole challenge. Get a usage report of outbound internet connectivity by host I...

Hi Recently I visited Google's offices in London to talk about using Google Apps in business.  Whilst there I had a chance to play with a few Chromebooks. If  you are not familiar with Chromebooks, they are laptops with an Operating System built around the Google Chrome browser.  It is primarily designed for use whilst "online" only.  This is not a complete representation as there are many apps in the Chrome web store which work offline like Gmail. The OS is lightweight, quick to boot, fast and virus free Google claim (not sure I agree, any platform is vulnerable somehow). http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/chrome/devices/#foreveryone-promo-hp-cb I primarily use an iPad 2 at home for casual browsing and have an Asus laptop with Windows 8.1 for more strenuous tasks.  I could quite easily see myself using a Chromebook because most of my time is spent inside Chrome on the laptop anyway! I saw a few different models at attractive prices including these ...

This week I visited the Google offices near Tottenham Court Road to see how businesses are using the Google Apps Platform. The event was run by a company called Netpremacy.   They have an offering called AppsCare which is specifically designed for helping companies move from a hosted Exchange or Lotus environment to a fully hosted Google Apps environment. Google being Google, the offices couldn't be a simple affair!   They have huge shagpile carpets of the Google Chrome icon and a very industrial effect in the Seminar room the event was held in. Anyway, enough of the fancy dan stuff, how was the day? Well it was great, hugely thought provoking and left me questioning a lot of decisions we as Systems Administrators, Engineers and Architects generally make. I generally like the Google offering, I use Gmail and have recently purchased 100GB of Google Drive space when they announced their huge price cuts. http://lifehacker.com/prices-for-monthly-google-drive-s...

Recently I have been running a proof of concept for XenDesktop 7.1 for my company. This has been really interesting, especially around the XenApp integration into the new architecture. I created a Windows 7 template which I had planned to give to my PoC users. We have spent a lot of time on making sure that every little bit of the Windows UI is tailored for our users in our production environment, so I wanted to ensure the Windows 7 environment was as similar as possible. It seems I am spending a lot of time in GPMC.msc (group policy management console) at the moment! Just before releasing this to our users I noticed that the screensaver wasn't kicking in. We set this to ensure that their desktop session is locked for security purposes. I checked all of the policies and they were spot on??? I even tried setting this manually in the HKCU registry...but nothing? So after exhausted this avenue I did a bit of a Google search. I found that this is a known issue in XenDe...

Hi Today I replaced my V+ box at home to a new shiny Virgin Media Tivo STB.  The user interface and controls will take some getting used to, but there are many new features which I am looking to get my teeth stuck into. One of them is the Virgin TV Anywhere App.  Having the ability to remotely stream and control my Tivo box is really interesting. When trying to use the App it asked me to ensure the STB was connected to the home network.  I dug around for a spare CAT5 cable (everything is wireless these days right?) and plugged it in. Still no joy.... OK so I go to the Tivo settings menu and selected Network and set it to use DHCP.  The result was the following there is a problem with your network settings, the specified IP address is outside the range of allowed IP addresses (C138) What?  My home network is in the 172.16.1.0/24 range.  That is definitely private.  I tried a static IP address, but the same message was displayed. I looked...