Frustrating day

Yesterday I attempted to install Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to give it a try.  It is Microsoft’s offering for the IM/Video/Audio collaboration world.  Well I had the bright idea of putting it on our server that runs our Sharepoint 2010 intranet. Don’t do that.

Once the installation finished it broke my access to Sharepoint.  Every page on the site would prompt me for credentials and when I entered my credentials it still wouldn’t let me in. Luckily I was able to recover by first deactivating and then uninstalling OCS.  I had nightmare scenarios running through my head of a tape restore of the box to correct my f up.

I’d still like to see how OCS works but I will either do it on it’s own box or on a virtual server.

I also spent a bunch of time looking into alternatives to process our online credit card transactions for races.  We currently use active.com  Active is a nice site and works well.  The problem is they charge a lot, a minimum of a $3.25 fee tacked on to the race registration.  Based on the survey I did a couple weeks ago, that fee is seen as a major deterrent to many runners to registering online.  They simply don’t want to fork out those extra dollars. There are other race registration sites.  Some of them offer lower fees but less convenience.

I decided I would look into other options.  One option would be to sign up with a merchant account where we would take the credit cards directly.  This option would dramatically drop our costs form $3.25 a runner down to less than 50 cents per.  However this method opens up a whole new bag of worms where I would need to devise some way to handle these transactions in a batch manner, otherwise I am losing much of the advantage of online registration from a timing perspective.

I also looked at some races that use Google checkout for races.  This is a slightly more expensive way to do it although it would probably be less hassle to get files I could import into the timing system.  By the end of last night my head was spinning from looking at so many options.

One by product of this is I think I am going to finally bite the bullet and migrate my various web sites to new servers within the IX Webhosting domain.  They have older servers that run older control panels and have less features and new servers with newer control panels and more features.  My stuff is on the older variety.

I have resisted migrating because frankly it is a large pain in the ass to do so. It requires me to back up and restore everything on my site as well as manually recreate dozens of settings on the new server.  I think I will just bite the bullet and do it finally.

Our new AC is supposed to be installed next Monday/Tuesday with the possibility of it spilling over to Wednesday.  Ali and I are going to split the house sitting duties between us, I plan on taking off Monday and she can stay home Tuesday.

I am a bit nervous about the whole thing.  The communication between myself and Haines has been less than stellar.  I have been the one to call them for information instead of them proactively calling me.