Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Tested: Apple's Airport Extreme

We have many clients whose team members bringing "solutions" into the office in an attempt to extend the WiFi network. Many times, those are Apple Airport Extremes. So we decided to try replacing our office wireless access point with one; here's a quick summary of our findings.
  • The setup was quick and easy.
    • We were surprised that the 5ghz broadcast radio does not come enabled by default!
    • You have to find it in the app's Wireless Options and turn it on.
  • The signals were good and strong, enabling good WiFi connections to every device we connected.
  • We use multiple SSIDs that segregate WiFi traffic into different VLANs, just like most of our clients do.
    • There is not a way for the Airport Extreme to recognize VLANs in its configuration.
    • Thus, all access is the same, with the exception of setting up a guest network in the device configuration; but the guest network does not accomplish what we need and accomplish via VLANs.
The bottom line is that it's an elegant wireless access point, but is only suitable for consumer-grade applications (like at home) vs enterprise applications (like at work).

Monday, January 18, 2016

New Article: Microsoft O365 - What You Need to Know


I just sent an article to the publisher on issues related to migrating to Microsoft's O365. It includes some good news, details some of O365's limitations, and concludes with a creative way to save money!

Interested? Click here to read a free copy!

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

The 2016 ChMS Article is Now Available!



Over the years The Lord has helped me develop a tool that has become the most referenced set of data on church management software. It is completely objective (does not try to persuade you to contact a sponsoring ChMS provider), is simple and easy to use, and it is free!

If you'd like to see this year's article, click here!