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Hi, long time lurker here. My workplace needs a lot of improvements in terms of IT Infrastructure, primarily our e-mails/workstations.

Currently:
-E-mails are hosted on GoDaddy server (not exchange, not 365, just basic e-mail…)
-We don’t have Windows Server, Active Directory, or any other management tool.
–I manually remote into each PC and make changes to each as needed…

My question is, what product or services would ya’ll recommend we work towards to better centralize everything?

It would be great if each workstation was a virtual machine, where there’s very little down time if things go wrong or if data needs to be restored.

It would be great if we had more control of our e-mail’s spam filters.

Not quite sure if this is Active Directory, Exchange, and Windows Server, or if there’s a service that bundles this for us.

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I would start with moving over to Microsoft 365. You get Email, Teams, and more. A great start.

After that, you could look into Azure AD.

What is your new hardware budget like?

Let us know how you get on.

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Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it! I’ll check out 365 on GoDaddy’s end and also look into Azure AD, too, thanks!

No real budget set, but most likely not much. To be honest, this is a long shot of a proposal that I hope my workplace seriously considers.

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I’m in GoDaddy hell with my O365 and highly suggest you move to Microsoft directly for your O365 environment. GoDaddy has various limitations if you buy O365 through them. Also GoDaddy pricing is not discounted after the initial license purchase so your not saving money by using GoDaddy to tenant your O365. Do yourself a favor if you can and do not use GoDaddy as your tenant for O365.

some limitations of GoDaddy

You cannot convert a users mailbox to a shared mailbox used mostly when users leave the company. GoDaddy requires you to delete the account then make a new shared mailbox, otherwise you continue to pay for the mailbox.

Accessing Legal hold stuff is funky and limited

Teams toll free numbers and licensing are direct through MS so GoDaddy gets in the way

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I agree, look into moving into Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, or even Zoho’s platforms for your collaboration and communication needs. I don’t have any experience with GoDaddy, but from what I see in the community, it is hit or miss.

Also, take some time and chat with people here in the community to decide what management you need. How large is the company?

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Hey, Jimmy, thanks! Very small company. Around 30 workstations and 15 laptops/smartphones.

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Avast can handle AV and patch management superbly.

And you need an AD. We moved ourselves to Azure and love it.

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For 30 workstations, I wouldn’t build up a huge infrastructure of expensive programs that you will have to learn to use and bring in many more failure points.

Keep it as simple as possible.

On the other hand, if you have money to burn, go for all the hosted, centralized services that have been described.

I’ll add that if you enjoy not having any control over your current email’s spam filters, you’ll love not having any control over most of the operation of those off-site services. I especially love the part where they raise the price and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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Hey @jonathonyi ​ - Just wanted to hop in and offer up help in anything Microsoft licensing wise. Trusted Tech Team has a pretty great team of experts who can point you in the right direction on what’s the best set up for ya. Here’s a little bit about us if this is the first time hearing about us too! Feel free to reach out through our contact page if you’d like to chat.

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when switching to office 365 ,please remember that the hacker are hacking them very easily. We all know about end users and weak passwords . if you want to monitor what you have try prtg . it has 100 free sensors. other than that good luck ​

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Trusted Tech Team was great to work with when we needed licensing for our recent upgrade/virtualization project. I would work with them again.

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Words to live by!

From my recent upgrade/virtualization experience…

Years ago, installing the Certificate Authority role on one of our servers seemed like a awesome idea. Yeah!

Never used it and what a @#@#$$$%$% to clear out and get rid of when putting in your new domain controllers and decommissioning your old ones.

Keep it simple indeed!

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With that size, you may not necessarily need standard AD. Azure AD could handle that, or something similar if you look at a different cloud provider. Unless you have a business need to keep equipment on-site, something hosted would be the way to go. Get support to go with it and it would be more flexible.

If you did go with on-site equipment, you wouldn’t need beefy systems, though I would suggest keeping email on a hosted platform. Managing Exchange on-site is a PITA.

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With 30 workstations I would be looking at ManageEngine Desktop Central or Pulseway. I understand 30 workstations will be above the free options, but I think this could be a good option if you are avoiding the costs of Azure AD or On-prem AD.

ManageEngine pricing shows on-prem and cloud options which would be very small dollars compared to building out an on-prem infrastructure. Cloud option for a single technician to support 50 workstations $1,045 (Cloud Pro) $1,245 (Cloud Enterprise)

https://www.manageengine.com/products/desktop-central/pricing.html

Beyond the support of the workstations a few other important items that come to mind are:

Are there any regulatory requirements in your industry for your area that you need to take into consideration?

What if any backups are in place for user data on the workstations or on the email system?

I would love to hear how you decide to proceed, and how it works out for you!

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Well, of course I would suggest JumpCloud… This is pretty much a very common use case with our customers. You get 10 free users right from the jump to test. But it offers all of the things you are needing with system management. However, I will say that VDI is something that wouldn’t be a good fit within JumpCloud as the product is aimed at managing the identity of local user accounts on your machines.

I would definitely at least give it a look. It’s designed to solve a lot of those hurdles you are looking at. Of course, like with anything there is no silver bullet and going with AzureAD might be a better solution depending on your full scope of needs. AzureAD is a swiss army knife for sure!

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Personally I would not do anything in the cloud. It starts with not having any control. At all! Yes, most people think they have control, but just think it over. Connection problems? You’re more or less down. Problems with the provider from the services? Again, nothing you can do but wait. Safe? Well… think again. Those companies attrack criminals / hackers. The more information is there (as in, the more customers are using the services), the more interesting to infiltrate.

You can go with a simple linux setup for mail and storage. Make sure you have decent backup’s, if possible mirror the whole setup and go.

All depending on budget, knowledge and expectations. My expectations of all those services out there is just one: it will get more and more expensive rapidly! Nothing you can do.

Just take a look at Adobe subscription model for example. They are (are they still?) experimenting with suddenly doubling the prices for example. Those companies only have one goal, making as much money as possible for the stockholders is as little time as possible.

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That does not sound like a cloud scenario to me since running the workstations in a public cloud has a lot of specifics and limitations and may be costly as well.

The most “traditional” setup for small organizations like yours would be establishing two equal servers for high availability (little to no downtime), Windows Server or Hyper-V Hyper-V Server 2019 | Microsoft Evaluation Center server as the foundation, couple of virtual machines that will host your Active Directory (centralized resource and security management), WSUS (updates and patching), File Server and RDS Server (virtual workstations). Free (or commercial) Virtual SAN softer for clustering https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free . And free (or commercial) software Free Backup Software For Windows, VMware, & More - Veeam for backups. A NAS like Synology or QNAP can serve as a perfect backup target and offload the backups to the cloud. E-mail should go to M365 or GMail (up to you).

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My small company was where yours was from a device count standpoint about 10 years ago, and I had a very limited budget at the time to work with.

Here’s what I would suggest to make your life a ton easier, while still being affordable enough to have a chance of getting it approved:

Buy a decent used server on Ebay for around $300. I’ve purchased several Lenovo TS140s from there with the Xeon processor and 16GB of RAM, and they have worked great for running our WSUS, internal PBX phone system, file servers, etc. One of these will work fine for running AD, as well as acting as a file share host and/or backup target. Put an SSD OS drive in there at around 240GB, and whatever other drives you think you may need. Buy a copy of Server 2016 or 2019, and associated CALs and load it up, then set up your domain and get machines attached to it. Set up group policies for centralized management. Set up a file share drive. If you want, use folder redirection on your client stations to migrate desktop and documents folders to this server so that, if that server gets backed up, so does everyone’s stuff. You’ll want to set storage quotas if you do this. Otherwise, you can opt to tell everyone that the central share is the only thing backed up each night, and be certain to keep anything important there. You can set up a folder structure using NFTS permissions for both private employee folders as well as shared folders for groups or global. All of this could be accomplished for about $1000 - $1300. You can back things up to drives internal to the server for immediate access, then set a daily backup of those drives to external USB drives as targets, which you rotate daily and take unused ones offsite for security. Another couple hundred dollars for the drives, and I use Macrium Reflect for my backup software.

For you smartphones, look at EZMDM. Auto enrollment, app deployment, app whitelisting, etc, for $1 per month per device. Being able to lock down what apps users can install on their phones has made my life 10 times easier. If you can’t lock down apps, you can at least leverage the other features. I’ve also found, since we are a solely Android shop, that buying phones which run AndroidOne makes things a lot easier, eliminating the manufacturer’s custom skinning and menus. I have about 85 phones deployed through this method. How you handle any employee-associated Google or iOs/iCloud accounts is up to your environment.

So, this is mostly on-premise, but it can be accomplished for a “one time” upfront cost of around $2000, with recurring monthly expenses of $15 to $20 for your phone management. Is it the latest approach or tech? No. Is is something fairly straight-forward and inexpensive to get going, with a likelihood of getting the funds approved? Probably. Even if it’s not the latest approach, it will still be a huge step up from where you are now.

I’m not a fan of the ongoing expense of O365. Most users don’t ever remotely fully leverage everything that suite comes with. I instead use Office 2016 Standard or Home and Business, which will support us for 10 years without recurring monthly/annual costs. I have our email hosted through Network Solutions on a non-Exchange package. It’s IMAP, which works well for us here, with 150 employees, around 250 devices, and doing $30M a year in revenue, and means I don’t have to deal with email server management, etc.

I’m not sure what your network infrastructure looks like, but I use the Ubiquiti Unifi stuff (router, 5 switches, 8 APs, for a 50,000 square foot office/warehouse space) and have been very happy with it, and the centralized management has been superb.

I’d also recommend an annual subscription of TeamViewer for remote access to PCs and phones. TeamViewer now allows remote connection AND full remote control of many Android phones. For iPhone, it’s still remote view only, which requires walking the end-user through what buttons to press.

There are a 100 ways you might move forward, and mine is only one way, but is designed to be cheap and fairly easy to get set up and manage. Others might view my suggestion as insane, but it’s how we operated for many years, and I was and remain the sole IT person in the company.

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My suggestion would be to move to a fully Microsoft 365 platform. Depending on the applications needed, you can use M365 for your Email, Communications, and storage. Have everyone’s documents redirect to OneDrive for storage. If a computer dies, the user can log into a new machine with their Azure AD creds, and have access to all their files. It also will help prevent long down time in the case of a server going down due to ISP or environmental. Likely will still need some sort of management and anti-virus installed. With the M365 you can also have backups, email filtering, and legal protections.

The biggest caution I would have is if you have unique applications that store data locally. Then that becomes a little trickier for backups.

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Thanks for mentioning StarWind.

Hey,

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) can be an excellent choice for you that will cover all your needs for an on-premises infrastructure. It comes fully preconfigured according to your requirements. We run additional tests before shipping the appliance to verify that it is ready to go live. Also, the ProActive Support feature is included by default, so you will have spare time to work on the infrastructure on top. We will let you know if something can happen to the hardware or software parts of the appliance.

If you need a demo or some ideas about pricing avoiding exhausting negotiations with sales guys, feel free to contact me in DM.

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