May have to be fair, i tend to shop elsewhere
Even Cities 2? I have been considering getting a gaming PC for it as well as a couple of other things, but if this can do it I might just hold off.
The Forum upgrade has brought the option to see top replies but also an AI Summary for a thread!
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Has the AI summariser stopped working for anyone else?
It’s remembering old summaries that it’s generated in the past (and helpfully states how many posts they’re out of date by) but if I refresh, or try to generate one for a topic for the first time, it either comes up blank or hangs in the process.
Yeah, we ran out of tokens! We’re on the free Google tier and we’ve used them all.
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You are HQAC digital team & I claim my five pounds 
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If we were we’d have some spends to use AI! 
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Just seen the Digital team have done a 2025 stats thing. And our Exchange Server is sitting at 83 TB!!
I think we seriously need to start enforcing the rules around photos in signatures… A 350KB logo in a footer might not seem like much, until it’s being sent to all.region so suddenly is using shed loads of data.
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I have always found photos in signatures incredibly messy, especially across different email platforms that deposit them as an unreadable attachment, making it difficult to find the attachment I’m actually looking for!
Not to mention email chains where several people are replying!
Are photos in signatures really necessary? Especially within internal organisational communications.
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That sounds more like a design problem. A 350KB image should use exactly 350KB of storage for everyone in the same organisation, rather than create duplicates.
I use an image, but it’s hosted externally and includes my whole signature block in a single image. That way, when something changes I can update the image and it changes in any old emails people might refer to.
This is the correct way of doing it. Effectively a live link, not an image!
I think it’s just the nature of exchange servers, and the way email chains work.
If you email 10 people, it now exists in 11 places. 1 sent box and 10 inboxes. Signature or not doesn’t affect the data usage, but obviously if it’s in someone’s signature, then it’s always getting sent.
It’s why we should also be avoiding direct attachments when sending emails to lots of people. Best practise would be to upload to OneDrive and attach a link. Otherwise, that 20MB PPT sent to the whole wing is suddenly taking up 4.4GB on the exchange server, assuming an all.wing is 220 emails. And that’s just role accounts!
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This is encouraged on MODNET, but so many people have trouble with the links that I’ve reverted to attachments (unless it’s a collaborative document and I don’t want multiple versions knocking around).
How do people struggle with the links?! It amazes me sometimes.
I much prefer that way compared to attachments. It means I can ‘insert’ items to the appropriate area in the email. For X see here → for Y see here → etc. Super useful! And then when someone points out that I made an error, I can just quickly change the document on my end, and not have to re-email it all back out.
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I also means you can make corrections after sending!
Edit to add: without drawing attention to your mistake by recalling the email.
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A stat (it might even be from Microsoft) is that there are 7 copies of all data. So in that example it’s 77!
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I wonder how often (if at all) things are archived or wiped? I can imagine they probably aren’t for various reasons*, but equally how many squadrons need somehing that was emailed to their generic account >3 years ago, or the adj account multiple adjutants ago? Setting the default email retention policy to something non-infinite (even very large like 5 years) would get rid of plenty on a rolling basis, and give the option for any important content to be indivually marked as ‘keep longer’, or vice versa.
Perhaps even moving backups of old content to some kind of archival tier of cloud storage like AWS Deep Glacier that trades off a larger time delay for access for a much lower cost, at least that way if something archived was needed many years later at least the Bader team could get at it…
*I was extremely surprised to learn how long hard copies of documents like 3822A/Hs needed to be retained for. I suppose similar rules must apply digitially in case of a FOI or GDPR request or something?
I don’t think there are any wipes to the exchange server.
Looking at my generic account, there are emails going back as far as 2016! Circa 7600 emails… My personal 100 account goes back to 2021 and has circa 2000 emails!
My understanding is that even if an email is deleted from an inbox, or other folder, it is still kept and archived for FOI/GDPR purposes. The organisation has a legal responsibility to keep data for a certain amount of time.
But then the other side of that coin is we’re not meant to hold data longer than required. And yet here I have access to hundreds of emails from 10 years ago, full of data.
Funnily enough, my own personal (@gmail.com) email appears in this data. As back then, I was a CWO running AT stuff, and using my gmail email for that before I got access to my then-Sqns generic account.
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Does anyone have an idea RE what happens to the contents of a CFAV’s OneDrive if they leave the organisation? Presumably that’s all retained too, in some form or another, even after the account might be closed.
I can’t help but wonder how much of that ~150TB figure is information which is actually still relevant or important to the organisation nowadays, or has any future use…
Perhaps I just don’t have the right understanding of how data is managed in large organisations, but the equivalent of ~150GB per squadron seems excessive*. I realise a lot of that figure is going to be on org-wide Sharepoint Sites or at Wing/Region/HQ level so it’s not probably a fair comparison, but still.
*edit: Having thought it back over, I forgot to factor in that plenty of squadrons (mine included!) keep quite large amounts of photo/video etc from events and yeah, that’s gonna ramp up quite a bit!
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I would assume there will be an element of Pareto principle at play. There will be certain users/use cases which are using loads of data, and then the vast majority of us using very little!
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