Ever since switching over to Microsoft 365 Business Premium for my personal email, I’ve removed Sophos Home Premium and BitDefender and replaced them with Microsoft Defender XDR. And I’m pretty, pretty, pretty impressed.
Not only does it have a significantly lower footprint and doesn’t slow up disk I/O (which was evident having plugged in an external SSD and measured performance with BitDefender and Microsoft Defender – Microsoft Defender significantly beating BitDefender by some margin), but having adjusted notifications for vulnerabilities on my personal Dell Inspiron Plus 16 (7630), I now get emails whenever I need to update software on my system.
And if I do encounter malware, I get native Windows notifications for it. It’s really well integrated within the OS, and all controlled and managed through the Defender web portal.
Time to update Google Chrome!
Overall, the past two months using Microsoft 365 Business Premium have been terrific, with excellent support that’s easy to find and with quick resolutions. I feel that Microsoft have certainly added value for money here over the Enterprise edition of Google Workspace.
A little less conversation, a little more action, please All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me A little more bite and a little less bark A little less fight and a little more spark…
– Elvis
Well, I’ve made it to the end of another week. This week saw me take on three job interviews (the first already mentioned in the last entry). One of them has already lead to a second interview (in Wimbledon, no less). Plus yesterday evening I had an interview with a Canadian virtual VFX firm. The last one would be a fully remote job with a decent amount of flexibility. I’ve felt positive in all three interviews. I should find out if I have another second interview with the first company I interviewed with sometime mid-next week – I’m really hoping to progress on that one, so please – everything crossed for me.
There was one job position – another remote job – for a games studio in Northern Ireland. But they had such a complex and recruitment process which could potentially last TWO months and 7 interviews. It came accompanied by a diagram. Now, if ANY job – regardless of whatever it may be – requires a diagram, I’m not interested. I get it that a company wants to be sure about who they are hiring (and having to deal with many, many applicants), but it doesn’t make ANY sense to me that so many hoops have been jumped through to do so. It can be a risk for the candidate too! As ABBA once sung, “Take a chance on me!” – especially given there’s always a probation period. So this company was initially interested in me, but then when I saw what they intended to put me through I had to tell them that I’m no longer interested.
But I must admit the whole consultancy process is getting me down a bit. I really can’t go into much detail, but the problem is that I do not think management have thought things through enough when it comes to IT infrastructure and support. For example, this week I’ve been fighting something that which lead to the entire team having to get involved to assist due to the complexity and reach of the problem. It also required getting a vendor involved too and having to keep chasing them to get what we wanted done. And while this is going on, something has to give in delivering the IT service to the company – other projects, technical support, etc. until it was fixed. But that’s what the consultancy is for – to make senior management aware that – at least as a department – we’re ALL going to be be needed, or be prepared to suffer.
But I must still make plans to jump ship. This rat is a survivor.
Nonetheless, this is a rotten position to be in, it really is. I am desperately sad for everybody else in this position at the company and I’ve been reposting my colleagues (not just in my department) #OpenToWork posts on LinkedIn.
But I must give the lovely folks over at Afi.ai a special mention (especially Ingrid) who have waived ALL fees for my Microsoft 365 tenant backup which means that I can keep an online backup of all email, OneDrive and any Teams/Sharepoint sites I have nice and safe. It’s a service that I would highly recommend, and super simple to set-up and maintain. Please do check them out. They also support Google Workspace too.
