seanachim
Member
I would like to talk about SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) life.
Africa is increasingly becoming a continent where the small to medium business starts and says in a home based office. Professionals who choose this way of life often form a "fractal organisation" by having a loose affiliation with other professionals they can collaborate with and compete as a small effective team against large corporate competitors.
The tools at the SOHO environment have to be low cost and easy to use.
I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer that specialises in Business Intelligence and its value in both the SOHO and corporate space. I use technology extensively to augment my company offerings and thought that I could share some of these thoughts with other professionals with the aim of finding a common set of best practises that can form a little black book of digital tricks, traps, tips and techniques that new entrants into the market may be able to download and save themselves months of nightmares while getting their SOHO to run smoothly and effectively.
To this end I'm asking for comments and discussions about what it takes to set up the lowest possible costing SOHO environment in South Africa.
Specifically, I have set up a home office using Windows Server 2012, with a Telkom ADSL line with uncapped internet access. I have created a Virtual machine within that for a SharePoint 2013 environment.
I'm also investigating/researching creating an Ubuntu VM with Citadel as an Exchange Server replacement.
I currently use DynDNS for my domain name with an updater on my server and each of the VMs. The MAIL DNS pointer will point to the Ubuntu VM, the SharePoint domain will point to the SharePoint VM and I have a basic HTML landing page, using HTML5, CSS & JavaScript on the Host server.
I've configured the Telkom D-Link router's firewall and port forwarding to ensure that the domain pointers allow an external source to find and access the appropriate services.
I find it frustrating that I cannot find a South African competitor to DynDNS that will provide me with equivalent Dynamic DNS services and the cost of getting the same service that I get from DynDNS from local providers is unnecessarily high.
We use 3CX for our VOIP and 1 of 2 separate local providers for 087 numbers.
How has your environment been configured?
Do you use a local service provider for your DNS?
Do you host your own MX (Ports 25, 110, 995, etc) records?
Do you host your own WWW (Port 80)?
Are you using Small Business Server?
Why do you do it this way?
Africa is increasingly becoming a continent where the small to medium business starts and says in a home based office. Professionals who choose this way of life often form a "fractal organisation" by having a loose affiliation with other professionals they can collaborate with and compete as a small effective team against large corporate competitors.
The tools at the SOHO environment have to be low cost and easy to use.
I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer that specialises in Business Intelligence and its value in both the SOHO and corporate space. I use technology extensively to augment my company offerings and thought that I could share some of these thoughts with other professionals with the aim of finding a common set of best practises that can form a little black book of digital tricks, traps, tips and techniques that new entrants into the market may be able to download and save themselves months of nightmares while getting their SOHO to run smoothly and effectively.
To this end I'm asking for comments and discussions about what it takes to set up the lowest possible costing SOHO environment in South Africa.
Specifically, I have set up a home office using Windows Server 2012, with a Telkom ADSL line with uncapped internet access. I have created a Virtual machine within that for a SharePoint 2013 environment.
I'm also investigating/researching creating an Ubuntu VM with Citadel as an Exchange Server replacement.
I currently use DynDNS for my domain name with an updater on my server and each of the VMs. The MAIL DNS pointer will point to the Ubuntu VM, the SharePoint domain will point to the SharePoint VM and I have a basic HTML landing page, using HTML5, CSS & JavaScript on the Host server.
I've configured the Telkom D-Link router's firewall and port forwarding to ensure that the domain pointers allow an external source to find and access the appropriate services.
I find it frustrating that I cannot find a South African competitor to DynDNS that will provide me with equivalent Dynamic DNS services and the cost of getting the same service that I get from DynDNS from local providers is unnecessarily high.
We use 3CX for our VOIP and 1 of 2 separate local providers for 087 numbers.
How has your environment been configured?
Do you use a local service provider for your DNS?
Do you host your own MX (Ports 25, 110, 995, etc) records?
Do you host your own WWW (Port 80)?
Are you using Small Business Server?
Why do you do it this way?
