When attempting to download they recieve the following error:

“Error 0x800700DF: The file size exceeds the limit allowed and cannot be saved.”

We were able to repeat the issue using all versions of windows from Windows XP SP2 so set about trying to resolve it. After some investigation we found that a limit for file downloads from cloud storage solution  was implemented by Microsoft to prevent the client computer being forced into denial of service attack. This limit was set to 50MB so when you try to download any file over 50MB the client computer interprets this as a denial of service attack and stops the download.

Note: On Windows Vista or Windows XP the error is different. “Cannot copy filename: Cannot read from the source file or  disk” 

This limit is controlled by a key in the registry. The key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters\FileSizeLimitinBytes

The default setting is: 50000000 (50MB)

To allow larger files to be downloaded you need to change the value of this key to match the size of the largest file you wish to download.  To do this you need to do the following:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit and then click OK
2. Locate the FileSizeLimitinBytes value and click Modify
3. In the Edit DWORD Value box click to select Decimal option. In the box enter the new value.
4. 
5. Quit the registry editor and restart the computer.

As a guide here are some conversions from bytes to MB:

50000000 bytes = 50MB

100000000 bytes = 100MB

500000000 bytes = 500MB

The ApplicationsAnywhere solution is not just limited to Windows desktop operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7, but can be accessed on Apple MAC OS X and Apple iPad, plus mobile phone operating systems including Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone and Android devices although the screen size of these devices in most cases will be a limiting factor.

The advantage of connecting to a Windows Remote Desktop solution is that sharing data and applications is seamless whether the end user is on Windows XP, MAC OS X or an iPad. Because data is stored centrally in our data centre the shared network drive each customer gets allows all data to be shared amongst all employees (providing they have the permissions to see the data) irrespective of the platform they are using themselves or where they are located in terms of geography. So a user with an Apple MAC OS X can edit an office document in Manchester England which can subsequently be edited by an employee in Spain 5 hours later with only an internet connection and a subscription to our ApplicationsAnywhere solution. The other benefit is that the solution is backed up and more importantly all licenses from Microsoft required to access the servers and run applications are included in the pricing/quotes we supply.

The video is best viewed in HD (720p) and full screen. No sound is required as the video is annotated and describes what is happening at each stage.

When the same customer contacted us again with the very same issue we decided to dig a little deeper and what we found was the application wasn’t actually hanging but had presented the customer with a dialog box. (The kind of Yes/No boxes that most applications present at some point) However, what had happened here is the dialog box had been displayed behind the hosted application rather in the foreground.

Because the application is running as a hosted app rather than a hosted desktop you cannot minimize the application to get to the dialog box, nor can you ALT+TAB or open task manager to get to it because doing this brings up iTunes on your local PC and not the
stupid dialog box that you can’t get to.

As we were helping develop the bespoke SQL based hosted application with the customer we could try various programmatic solutions to try and get round the issue. Unfortunately one of these helped but some investigation revealed that this is a known issue with Windows 2008 remote app that had been around for quite some time without any resolution from Microsoft.   One of the solutions that had been suggested was to change the following registry key:

HKCU\control panel\desktop\ForegroundLockTimeout

Value: 0

What does this mean then: Specifies the time, following user input, during which the system keeps applications from moving into the foreground.

The default setting is 200000 milliseconds which is 200 seconds or just over 3 minutes. If you are as impatient as I am then this is an eternity. Setting the value to 0 will always bring the dialog box to the foreground.

The keen eyed among you will have noticed that this is a user specific setting so needs to be set for every single user that logs into the system and uses the application. If you are using Group Policies then I suggest you use Group Policy Preferences to set this or if you are old school you could create a .REG file that is run each time the user logs into the system.

YourOfficeAnyWhere have now produced a video that shows how Sage Accounts (and this could be ACT!) can be used as either a Remote Application or accessed via full desktop.

The video describes the differences between the two options and it is down to the customer to decide how they want to access their copy of Sage. Note that we build a dedicated server for each customer that uses our systems in our state of the art data centre in Manchester. At the time of this post we have in excess of 1,500 users connecting remotely into their servers to run their apps, and this isn’t just Sage, we host all sorts of systems including Microsoft SQL Server Databases, Microsoft Access Databases, Office Applications, Email and documents.

If you are an IT company please see our reseller page for information on reselling our solution to your customers so you can generate monthly revenue and not miss out on the massive opportunity that is “cloud computing”.

The video doesn’t require sound and is best viewed in full screen HD.

Blog Post by Michael Carter Cardium Outsourcing Ltd – YourOfficeAnyWhere.

I have just been emailed by a colleague from Microsoft who says they have a customer with a few distributed users (work from home/on the road) and they have opened up an office in Southern Ireland. He asked “What is the YourOfficeAnyWhere USP against Office 365?”

My answer follows:-

• Applications, Applications, Applications! The applications a customer may want access to from multiple locations are not provided or resolved with the Office 365 solution. Office 365 is a one size fits all solution but as we all know businesses are all different shapes and sizes and one size doesn’t fit all. Customers don’t just run office applications such as word and excel, and if they do there is potentially another issue……..
• Internet connectivity. Customers with more than 10-15 users in one location and a relatively small internet connection (2-4mb) will see performance issues opening large documents (and saving them) or sending a large email to “all internal staff” of the company

 Applications

If the customer has applications that users need to access remotely away from the office, for example accounts software, line of business applications with a database back end, CRM applications which are not available over the web and need to work on a company network (for example Sage ACT!) our (Microsoft) solution “web enables”  applications that are usually tied to the company’s internal network and can’t be accessed easily once you are not in the same office as the server and data. I.e. the application needs a fast network to run satisfactorily and Internet access doesn’t provide this at the moment. Office 365 does not address the millions of different applications businesses rely on on a day to day basis.

 Access or SQL database applications  are a good example where SME businesses have developed these over time, become completely reliant on them for business processes, expanded to multiple locations but VPN connections are no good from remote locations as these applications expect RPC at 100mb un-contended and not 2mb (ADSL) shared. These businesses want to be able to access the information from anywhere but don’t want to spend £50K to develop on a web platform? We have many customers where we have published applications for them as a remote application which they click on and it launches as if it is a local application even though it is running in the data centre.  The solution above requires just 64K of bandwidth per user to run as the only data being transferred over the Internet is the screen changes.

 Bandwidth

If there are lots of users in one location then Office 365 is going to hammer band width so they either need a very good ADSL line with decent up and down speeds which is potentially costly or high speed internet might not even be available

A 2 MB email with an attachment to 20 internal company  users is 2mb out 40mb back in using Office 365. On our solution the email is routed internally to Outlook running on the remote desktop so this doesn’t affect the customers ADSL connection or bandwidth. To send this it requires just the 64K ADSL connection (mentioned above) and the email is sent internally on our gigabit network. 

ADSL upload speeds are typically 250K to 500K so saving a large document to an Office 365 system (SharePoint)  is going to be slow. This is even more problematic with multiple users in one location. Using our hosted desktop solution this is no longer a problem because saving a document in word or excel is saving to the server at gigabit speed rather than 250K

The YourOfficeAnyWhere solution is like having your own server on your own internal network in terms of the Internet bandwidth used, without having to purchase it, back it up, patch it and replace it in 3 years time!

Oh and finally Microsoft don’t have any data centres in the UK if this is a problem (you want to know where your data is) then it isn’t a problem on the YourOfficeAnyWhere platform as our data centre is in Manchester.

Background

We were contacted by one of our resellers last week as he needed to apply a Sage patch for all his users (around 10) on his hosted Sage platform. Firstly he wanted to know how he could get the users to do this as they are not administrators – this is a security step we take for all our hosted applications and hosted desktop customers which reduces the risk to viruses and malware as the users can’t install anything on the remote desktop without contacting either us or their reseller who manage their server and applications. Secondly he was concerned that this would be time consuming installing the patch for all the users. At this point I was confused but after speaking to the reseller over the phone I then realised that he was missing something about the solution we offer.

The Solution

In a usual client server environment the PC’s have the Sage software installed (in the case above this would be 10) and the Sage data is saved on a server. To update all software would required each PC to be visited and the patch applied hence the reseller thought this would have to be done for all users on his cloud computing/hosted desktop. However this is NOT the case and something that we had overlooked as a massive selling point/advantage to customers that we just took for granted. In our hosted remote desktop/hosted terminal server environment there is only one copy of the executable (in this case Sage.exe) and once the patch is applied this is applied for every user on the system – the next  time a user launches the hosted cloud application they will get the application with the patch applied. So 10 users running Sage needs just one update on the system for everybody to get the fix. Something we took for granted but is a massive bonus for systems and applications that are patched/fixed on a regular basis.

Technical bit here – stop reading now if you aren’t interested in how it works!

Although there is only one copy of the application executable when we interrogate the system what we actually see on the server are multiple copies of the executable running under the name of each user on the system. E.g. user1/SBDDesktop.exe, user2/SBDDesktop.exe etc. So the system runs multiple copies of the application (in this case Sage) but there is only one copy of the application and associated DLL’s to update for the administrator of the system.

Hopefully this has explained one of the major advantages of our hosted applications and cloud computing desktop solution that we just take for granted.

This was only affecting them and it had only starting this morning. The shortcuts are delivered using Group Policy Preferences along with their drive mappings so the first thing I checked was to see if their drives were being mapped. A lack of drive mappings would indicate an issue with the GPO.  The drives were being mapped OK so the next stop was the event log.  The following event was logged:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Group Policy Shortcuts
Date:          11/10/2011 13:59:30
Event ID:      8194
Task Category: (2)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          SYSTEM
Computer:    �
Description:
The client-side extension could not remove user policy settings for ‘Policy Name Here {C928243D-09BB-4D45-8BAD-563AA82A02B2} ‘ because it failed with error code ’0x8007000d The data is invalid.’ See trace file for more details.

A quick Google returned a number of results but the most promising was this one posted by Tom Popov. However there was still some work to do as my issue was to do with shortcuts not power options.

First step was to browse to C:\Program Data\Microsoft\Group Policy\History. Inside this folder there are is a list of all the group policies with preference settings that are applied to users who log into the server.  There should be a folder with the same GUID ID as the the GUID listed in Event ID 8194. 

Drilling down into this folder reveals a further list of cryptic folders. The list is the SID’s of all the users who log into the server and get the preferences applied to them. In my case the list was a reasonable size (around 25 folders).

Next I had to find the SID for the user who had reported the issue.  The easiest way to do this is using the registry editor.

1. Open Regedit

2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion \ProfileList

3. Scroll through the list of SIDs (left hand pane) whilst looking the “ProfileImagePath” in the right hand pane. When you see the user you want. Bingo. Make a note of the last 5 numbers of the SID and return to the Windows Explorer window

Armed with the correct SID I then browsed through the folder structure until I came across Shortcuts.xml. Normally this file contains a list of all possible shortcuts that could be applied through the group policy preferences but for the user in question this file was zero bytes. I simply renamed the file and ran GPUPDATE /Force and the user’s drive maps were restored.

It is on a day like today when British Telecom the biggest provider of internet connectivity in the UK experienced a huge outage on its broadband network that will affect thousands of customers. The presence of a second means of connecting to the internet will save some businesses thousands of pounds in lost productivity.

More and more organisations are moving applications into a hosted cloud environment to meet the demands of a more mobile workforce or to reduce internal IT expenditure. However in a lot of cases very little thought is given to the weakest link in the chain, the connection to the internet. Hosted Apps or Cloud Applications are 100% reliant on a good internet connection at both ends. The provider of the hosted application should have a very resilient network with multiple high speed connections. However the customer will more than likely have a broadband connection from one of the big providers that has no resilience at their office. This is usually not a problem because for the most part broadband connections tend to be fairly reliable so it is really quite hard to justify spending the extra money on a secondary connection when it is never going to be used.

That is until something happens like it did today.  A complete outage on a scale like today can cost companies thousands and thousands of pounds.

Carl in Bedford contacted the BBC, saying: “We have lost both our business lines at work causing us lots of lost revenue as we can no longer do our scheduled remote work on our customer sites.

“It is shocking that a small power issue 150 miles away in Birmingham can have such a huge effect on business customers elsewhere.”

There is a very simple solution to this problem. Provide another means of connecting to the internet, this could either be a second broadband connection terminated in the same building or even USB 3G dongle. I have a dongle from Vodafone at home that I use in emergencies. The only problem with the 3G dongle is that you will need a 3G connection to use hosted applications or cloud based applications as trying to use hosted applications over GPRS would be more frustrating than having no access at all.

If you are going to get a second broadband connection make sure you use a different provider that has their own LLU network.  What LLU means in layman terms is that the ISP does not use any part of the BT network to provide their services (they may still use the same building to host the equipment though). Most ISPs use the BT network to provide their services, all they are doing is re-selling access on the BT network so if something happens to the BT network then it will affect the smaller providers that are using the BT network for transit. Another option is CABLE (Virgin Media) or even satellite broadband as these networks are completely independent from the copper infrastructure provided by BT and other ADSL providers.  To ensure your business runs without interruption you will need to connect both connections to a router that can manage multiple types of connectivity at the same time.

An interesting report from Gartner states we are now in “the midst of a fundamental shift, as more enterprises start to use services enabled by cloud technologies”. Gartner goes on to state that “ This will heavily impact IT services providers, who must now consider strategies for coping with profound changes in the marketplace or risk being left behind”.

The Gartner document uses lots of technical speak that an SME business will not necessarily understand however Michael Carter (Director at Cardium Outsourcing who manage and own the “YourOfficeAnyWhere” brand) has addressed this in this blog post.

Historically (and I do mean many years ago) businesses would have provided their own power generation, courier services and accountancy services for example. We don’t call these “outsourced” in fact we would think it odd if someone referred to their postal service as “outsourced” it is just a service provided by another supplier. This is where the IT industry is now heading.

There are lots of providers (just search Google and you will find them) who will offer exactly the same products that YourOfficeAnyWhere offers – EmailAnywhere (Microsoft Hosted Exchange), DocumentsAnywhere (Microsoft SharePoint) TelephonesAnywhere (Hosted VOIP telephone system). The product set above is what we would call a “boxed product”. i.e.. something like Sage software that comes in a box and will do exactly what it states on the box, but nothing else. Setting up an infrastructure like this is fairly straight forward as all email users, document management users and telephony customers (to a lesser extent) all do exactly the same thing. Email users may want to share their calendars or may want to have a shared contact folder for the whole company. This functionality is built into the product and doesn’t require any “specialist” skills to deploy once you know how to do it. Obviously the “cloud service provider” will require a high tech data centre (you want to know your data is safe), enterprise class server hardware (you want to know the system is running on a server that will be running 24/7) and technical skills to fix an issue if it arises however this is a standard “cloud offering”.

Where Cardium believes that there is a gap in these offerings (and this was also confirmed in the Gartner document) is that businesses want more than just email and documents in the cloud. Lots of businesses have technology that won’t sit on a traditional “cloud” solution mentioned above. For example an in house developed database or even Sage for example. These applications require fast connectivity between the user that is inputting this data into the system and the back end file system or database the information is stored in. The application may need to send emails out and create a word document to be printed. Gartner calls this “infrastructure utility” and Gartner expects that 20% of infrastructure utility worldwide (our “ApplicationsAnywhere” product) will be based in the cloud by 2015.

YourOfficeAnyWhere utilising “ApplicationsAnywhere” allows businesses to get the benefits of the “cloud” without having to re-write their internal systems. Gartner lists the following as benefits of the cloud to businesses:-

Pay for what you use (theoretically)

• Costs derive from an operational budget
• More basic functionality that you really need, not bells and whistles that you might need
• No operational management worries
• No infrastructure overhead/management
• Midterm lower total cost of ownership (TCO) (theoretically)
• Faster implementations
• Easier integration (theoretically)
• Less performance (because 80% of people don’t need 80% of the functionality in software)
• Lower potential cost (because people like paying less for things)
• Theoretically, you pay only for what you use (because people are currently paying for a lot of technology they don’t use)
• It’s delivered via the provider’s servers (because people have figured out that they use only 20% of their server capacity)
• It’s managed by the provider’s staff (because people have figured out that the biggest component cost of IT is people).

The YourOfficeAnyWhere view is that SME businesses have invested too much time, money and effort in their “on premise” systems that actually “run” their business. To throw this investment away and invest this in developing new applications that run as pure cloud based solution is not appealing to these businesses. The reasons for this are:-

• Too early to develop new applications based on cloud development platforms such as Microsoft Azure;
• To develop on these platforms is cost prohibitive;
• Cloud based development may not provide all the features currently available to an on premise solution;

So YourOfficeAnyWhere with the ApplicationsAnywhere solution allows any business with pretty much any application[1] to access their business applications in the cloud, with all the benefits of the cloud mentioned by Gartner without the cost/time/issues of redeveloping the application to work as a cloud application. Porting to ApplicationsAnywhere is just like installing the application on a new PC. However the ApplicationsAnywhere customer application is installed once but accessed by multiple users rather than the just one user on the PC.