Lenovo found lacking with lost laptop

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Even though I work in the application services business of a rival PC manufacturer, I’ve always had a soft spot for ThinkPads and Lenovo is (was) one of the quality PC brands I would recommend to friends and colleagues.  Until last week…

Our kids increasingly need to use a computer (a real one with a proper screen, so not a netbook – and not my iPad) for school work.  They can’t use my work PC (against policy) and for similar reasons we don’t really like them using my wife’s (again, it’s her business asset). Add to that the fact that some of the IT policies at work make it increasingly difficult for me to use my corporate laptop for anything (work-related or otherwise!) we decided that our Christmas present to ourselves will be a family computer.

Because a mouse will soon be to my kids what a command-line interface is to most of my peers (not including any IT admins or developers reading this blog), I wanted a touch-screen computer and I didn’t want to spend much over £500, which ruled out any ultrabook. Touchscreen requirement and modest budget means no Macs either.  Then I found Lenovo’s “affordable 15.6″ dual-mode notebook” – the Flex 15 – at a penny under £550 with the note that it “ships within 2-3 business days”. And the form factor means that, whilst a touchscreen desktop failed to pass spousal approval, a laptop that doubles up as a picture frame will quite happily sit in our kitchen/dining/family room without being considered unnecessary gadgetry.

I would have liked to customise the specification but that option wasn’t available so I placed an order for the stock version and it was duly processed by Lenovo’s UK reseller, Digital River (or analogue stream as I will now think of them…).

A couple of hours later I got a confirmation, which said:

“Dear Mark Wilson,

Thank you for ordering from the Lenovo Online Store powered by Digital River.

Please note, systems that are built to order can take 1 to 2 weeks to build and ship, plus 3 – 6 days for delivery.

Systems that are not built to order and were purchased with predefined specifications will ship within 2-3 business days.

Accessory options will typically ship within 2-3 business days and therefore may result in multiple deliveries when purchased with a system.

The following is a summary of your order. If you paid by credit card, please look for DRI*Lenovo on your credit card billing statement.”

[The bold text was added for emphasis by me]

A day or so later, I saw that a mouse I’d ordered for my son (he won’t need it but Mrs W insisted) had been shipped but no word on the PC. The shipping notes suggested the full value had been charged to my credit card (as it happens, only the cost of the mouse has been) but I called the number on the order confirmation email, navigated the IVR system and waited on hold before I was greeted, in German, by someone who doesn’t work on the Lenovo account. She suggested I should call back in 30 minutes as her colleague who does work with Lenovo was busy! I asked if they could call me instead and she took my details.  Surprise, surprise – no call.  Since then I’ve called twice more and each time have been told that they can’t provide an estimated shipping date but will escalate for me. Whatever that means, clearly it wasn’t done because the next time I called, I was told that “no ticket had been opened”.

In parallel, I’ve been communicating with the Lenovo UK social media team (@Lenovo_UK) who were helpful at first but then when I asked for progress told me to be patient, following up a few hours later to say they had tried to call (they did – twice, within two minutes, from a blocked number so I can’t call them back) and advising me that another team will send an email (they haven’t). Sorry guys – that’s not “trying”, that’s a pathetic attempt to contact me once before fobbing me off…

The Lenovo website says it ships in 2-3 days but the reseller (Digital River) don't know when it will shipThe thing is, I don’t mind if I’m told it’s on a ship from China (or wherever) and will take 2 weeks but the website still says “ships in 2-3 business days” and so does the order confirmation, yet the reseller doesn’t know when it will ship.  Which means I don’t know if it will ship.

Perhaps I’d be better off writing a letter to Father Christmas…

[Update, 25 November 2013 16:00 – I received a shipping confirmation from Digital River this afternoon.  Still not had the promised contact from Lenovo, or any explanation as to what caused the delay though]

Side by side installation of Office 2013 – watch out for Outlook

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For a while now, I’ve been running two versions of Office on my corporate laptop with no problems – Office 2007 from our corporate “gold brick” image and Office 2010 (mostly for functionality I’ve got very used to in Outlook).  After a recent “Patch Tuesday” I started to see some strange behaviour whereby, depending on the method of invocation used, sometimes a 2007 version of an Office application would open, and sometimes a 2010 version.

I’ve had the media and keys for Office 2013 for a while (a properly licensed copy but not supported by our IT department) so I decided to remove 2007 and install 2013.  Because I figured the new UI would take a while to get used to (actually, it hasn’t) and because I wasn’t sure if any macros, etc. would run in the latest versions of Word and Excel (still a possibility), I elected to install 2013 alongside the existing 2010 installation.

It all went swimmingly, until I was having issues with Outlook, which is quite happily connected to our Exchange servers but telling me it isn’t when I want to update my out of office settings or view a colleague’s calendar.  I started to look for Outlook 2010, and found it wasn’t there any more…

Of course, being me, the first thing I did was tweet my bemusement and, being Twitter (and despite being 9pm on a Friday night) I quickly got some responses which told me why (thanks Aaron and Garry).

For those who can be bothered to RTFM, check out Microsoft knowledge base article 2784668 (“Information about how to use Office 2013 suites and programs (MSI deployment) on a computer that is running another version of Office”) or, for a workaround, there’s a TechNet forum post called Outlook 2010 gone in side-by-side installation with 2013″.

<tl;dr>

Outlook 2013 cannot coexist with any earlier version of Outlook. Unless you want to try a complex click-to-run setup…

Authentication issues with SharePoint in Windows Explorer mode resolved with browser proxy settings

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Every now and again I get infuriated by our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (2007) platform as it prompts for credentials (before failing to authenticate and repeating the process) when I go to open a document library in Windows Explorer mode.  Today I found the cause of that issue.

I’d been working at Microsoft’s offices yesterday and had disabled the proxy server settings in my browser.  After returning home and VPNing to our network, I was able to access both Internet and intranet resources as normal and I forgot about the proxy server change. Only when trying to work out why I was being asked for authentication as I tried to use SharePoint in Windows Explorer mode did I remember to turn it back on again – after which everything worked as it should.

It may be peculiar to our infrastructure, or it may be a wider issue that’s worth mentioning so, if you experience authentication issues when trying to open a SharePoint library in Windows Explorer mode, double-check your browser’s proxy server settings!

“Rogue” retention policies in Exchange Online after false positive junk mail is moved to the Inbox

Posted on By Mark Wilson

My Office 365 tenant was recently upgraded to the “Wave 15” version of the service, meaning that my email is now hosted on Exchange 2013, rather than 2010 (Microsoft has provided an article that helps users to understand which version of the service they are on).

Unfortunately, since the upgrade, an awful lot of my legitimate email is getting trapped as junk.  After moving it back to the Inbox, I noticed that one of the items displayed a message about retention policies, highlighting that it would expire in 30 days.

I don’t use retention policies (with gigabytes of empty space in my mailbox I don’t need to), so I thought this was a little strange, until I realised that this was a side effect of having been previously flagged as junk, where there is a retention policy set to remove mail after a month.  I then found that the Managed Folder Assistant (which applies the retention policies) only runs every 7 days on Exchange Online but can be forced in PowerShell.

Sure enough, once I’d eventually managed to connect to Office 365 in PowerShell and run the Start-ManagedFolderAssistant -Identity mailboxalias command, the email was no longer flagged for expiry.

There’s more information on setting up and managing retention policies in Exchange Online with Windows PowerShell on the Outlook.com help pages.

Issues connecting to Office 365 using PowerShell? Check the client firewall

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written previously about managing my Office 365 tenant using Windows PowerShell (Microsoft has since provided its own documentation on the topic) but I tried today and found that I couldn’t get a connection.

Every time I tried to create a session, the response came back as:

[ps.outlook.com] Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request because the server name cannot be resolved. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.

+ CategoryInfo : OpenError: (System.Manageme….RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [], PSRemotingTransportExc
eption

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PSSessionOpenFailed

Strangely though, it could resolve the server name as nslookup ps.outlook.com told me:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: pod51000psh.outlook.com
Address: 132.245.1.167
Aliases: ps.outlook.com

Microsoft knowledge base article 2570535 includes steps for troubleshooting Windows PowerShell issues that affect Exchange Online for Office 365 and suggested

This issue occurs if an internal firewall isn’t started or if the Windows Remote Management service isn’t started

I confirmed that WinRM was running and allowing basic authentication but still couldn’t connect.  So I focused on the “internal firewall isn’t started” part.

Sure enough, the issue was Symentec Endpoint Prevention on my corporate laptop.  I used my wife’s PC instead, and connected with no issues at all…

Migrating SMS messages from iOS to Android

Posted on By Mark Wilson

The iPhone 3GS that I use for work is now getting a little long in the tooth, no longer eligible for updates (read security risk) and the battery often runs out before the end of the day.  I still have a 4S that I use (with iOS 7) in my personal life but the company iPhone was replaced today with an Android handset (Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini).  This is my first Android phone – and will be an interesting experience because I want to see how this Google platform gets on with Microsoft Exchange (my previous experience with ActiveSync has been with iOS and Windows Phone 7).

Initial impressions are mixed and it may take me some time to get used to Android (or maybe it’s the O2/Samsung customisations) but I do have one observation: Google Play seems much faster than iTunes for app downloads…

The first apps installed on my phone were iSMS2droid, Dropbox and Spotify. Two of those apps seem pretty obvious, but “what’s iSMS2droid?”, you might ask.  It’s a handy app for importing SMS messages extracted from an iPhone backup to Android format.

The mechanics of transferring SMS messages from iPhone to Android are described in a hongkiat.com blog post but, in short, the steps are:

  1. Backup the iPhone in iTunes
  2. Locate the backup file in %appdata%/Apple Computer/Mobile Sync/Backup/ on Windows or ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ on a Mac
  3. Open the folder with the most recent timestamp (one per synced device, I think)
  4. Search for the file called 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 and copy it to your Android phone (I did this via Dropbox)
  5. Open iSMS2droid and tap “Select iPhone SMS Database”, then point the app at the file you transferred from the iPhone backup. This will allow the message database to be converted and will save a file called iSMS2droid.xml (on my phone, it was in /storage/sdcard0/SMSBackupRestore).
  6. At this stage you’ll need another app, called SMS Backup & Restore, which can read the iSMS2droid.xml file (on my phone, it was in /storage/sdcard0/SMSBackupRestore) and import the messages.  All but one of my SMS messages were then restored and availble in the Android app.

Unfortunately, I did have a couple of issues to resolve along the way.

With SMS messages transferred, next step is contacts.  I can see these in Outlook, so pretty sure ActiveSync is handling them for me… let’s see what happens when I connect the ‘droid to the company servers…

Be safe, be seen #cyclesafe

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Listen to a cycling podcast or read a cycling campaign website and you’d be forgiven for thinking that all of the issues with cycling in the UK are down to motorists, poor road design, and the mixture of large vehicles and vulnerable cyclists.

So, as I wandered from Vauxhall station in South West London to my hotel this evening, I was flabbergasted to see just how few cyclists had adequate lighting.  Perhaps as many as a quarter of the cyclists I saw on the Albert Embankment just after dusk had either no lights, or lights that were so dim as to be useless. I even saw one rider, in black clothes and with no illumination, concentrating more on operating his mobile phone than watching the road ahead.  I also watched as a concrete mixer truck pulled out of a petrol station, then waited for a barely-visible cyclist who appeared a few feet away: nice road bike; nice gear; no lights; death wish?

It’s not an isolated incident either. This morning, I had a ringside seat from the top deck of a bus as I watched a cyclist cut down the inside of a construction lorry, despite large warning signs on the rear of the vehicle warning cyclists of the danger (and the tragic loss of life earlier this week when another cyclist was killed after a collision with a tipper truck – for the record, I’m not suggesting that the cyclist who died was at fault – we simply don’t know – but that there are clear and evident dangers and the cyclist this morning was being reckless).  This is in spite of the efforts of organisations like TfL and RoadPeace with campaigns like See Me Save Me trying to warn of the danger presented by large vehicles. There was an excellent piece on ITV’s The Cycle Show about the issues that truck drivers have in seeing cyclists – and even the dangers that advanced cycle stop lines can present (it’s a pity it’s not been released as a public safety film).

It may be a minority that give the rest of us a bad name (I’m a cyclist as well as a motorist – and I can recount stories of idiot drivers too) but it’s a significant minority and the consequences could be fatal. Maybe the Times’ Cities Safe for Cycling campaign should focus on educating cyclists on the dangers they present for themselves and others, rather than just on the dangers that they face from other traffic.

[Updated 21:56 with reference to yesterday’s tragic death]

The “wheel of fortune”

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week, I wrote about the White Book of Big Data – a publication I co-authored last year at Fujitsu.

One of the more interesting (for me) sections of the document was an idea from one of my colleagues, providing a model to determine next steps in forming a strategy for embracing a new approach (in this case to move forward towards gaining value from the use of a big data solution but it can be applied to other scenarios too).

The model starts with a “wheel” diagram and, at the centre is the first decision point. All organisations exist to generate profit (even non-profits work on the same principles, they just don’t return those profits to shareholders).  There are two ways to increase profit: reducing cost; or increasing revenue.

For each of the reduce cost/increase revenue sectors, there are two more options: direct or indirect.

These four selections lead to a number of other opportunities and these may be prioritised to determine which areas to focus on in a particular business scenario.

With those priorities highlighted, a lookup table can be used to suggest appropriate courses of action to take next.

It’s one of those models that’s simple and, I think, quite elegant. I’ll be looking to adopt this in other scenarios in future and I thought that readers of this blog might find it useful too…

Take a look at the book if you want to see this working in practice – “the wheel” is on page 37.

The White Book of Big Data

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Almost exactly a year ago, I was part of a team at Fujitsu that wrote a short publication called the White Book of Big Data.

This was the third book in the successful “white book” series, aimed at helping CIOs to cut through vendor hype on technology and business trends, following on from the White Book of Cloud Adoption and the White Book of Cloud Security.

At the time, I was keen to shout about this work but couldn’t track down an externally-visible link (and I was asked not to publish it directly myself).  Now, when big data has become such an incredibly over-hyped term (so much so that I try not to use the term myself), I’ve found that the book has been available for some time via the Cloud Solutions page on the Fujitus website!

Irrespective of the time it’s taken for me to be able to write about this (and any bias I may have as one of the authors) I still think it’s a useful resource for anyone trying to cut through the vendor hype.  At no point does it try to directly sell Fujitsu products – and I’d be interested in any feedback that anyone has after reading it.  If you’d like to read the book, you can download a PDF.

As I’ve changed roles since the book was published, I think it’s unlikely I’ll be involved in any future publications of this type (I always wanted to create a White Book of “Bring Your Own” Computing) – unless I can encourage any of my marketing colleagues to sponsor a White Book of Messaging!

MK Geek Night again – and I still haven’t blogged about the last one!

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This week sees the sixth quarterly Milton Keynes Geek Night (MKGN).  I’ve attended every one so far and always blogged about them – except the last one.  The simple fact is, I’ve been too busy – but I’m also just a little bit obsessive about these things and wanted to write something before it’s too late…

The last event was fantastic as ever but I’ve lost my notes. I know it sounds a bit like “the dog ate my homework” but I think iA Writer has put them somewhere strange… not on Dropbox (where I expected) but in iCloud, I think – except I can’t find any documents in iCloud (I’m sure I have to use an iDevice of some sort and it will all be fine…). I really should standardise on using one app for this – not the current combination of OneNote/Evernote/iA Writer, depending on the device I’m using…

Anyway, you can catch the audio from the last MK Geek Night on SoundCloud including:

  • Sarah Parmenter (@Sazzy) on designing for the responsive web.
  • Westley Knight (@Meteoracle) on life behind the curve.
  • Michael Fox (@IdleMichael) on how boardgames can make you awesome.
  • Ben Ward (@CrouchingBadger) on setting whitespace spectrum free.
  • Andrew Spooner (@AndSpo) on why mobile audio sucks.

MK Geek Night number 5 was David Hughes’ (@DavidHughes) last night as co-host and organiser but Richard Wiggins (@RichardWiggins) continues to organise these fantastic evenings.  You can find out more on the MK Geek Night website or on Twitter (@MKGeekNight) – but you’ll have to be quick. Tickets “sold” out for this free event in under an hour this time around!