Management tools are your friend

Hi folks! I know this is a train of thought I bring up a lot, but I find it funny that more people aren’t implementing something like this. After all the money someone invests in technology, sometimes I find it mind boggling as to why someone wouldn’t invest in management tools to help manage that investment.

After all if you’re not managing all the items in your IT environment, how do you know if it’s performing? How do you know if you’re over or underutilizing, and in turn how do you know if you’re even budgeting properly for future growth?

These are all things that management tools can help with you. They can put a magnifying glass on your IT infrastructure and help you make sense of the whole thing. There are many products out there, and that is definitely a discussion for another day, but all I ask is that people think about looking at management tools.

-RP

Using Microsoft Lync on a Wireless Network

Hi folks! So Microsoft Lync is great in that you can use it as a soft phone on your laptop when roaming around places. But this does pose a problem. How do you apply QoS to that traffic when it’s on the same subnet as the rest of your data traffic when communicating through wireless networks?

The easy way is to make sure you have a wireless network that can classify that traffic and prioritize it based on application, not on subnet. Meru Networks does a great job of this with their centralized wireless lan controllers that allows for Microsoft Lync calls to work seamlessly in wireless environments.

You can read more about it here.

-RP

SonicWALL NetExtender Windows 8 VPN Client

Hi folks! Some quick tips for you. When reinstalling your computer with Windows 8, you might run into issues with VPN clients. Last month I spoke about getting the correct client for Cisco AnyConnect.

This month I wanted to talk about SonicWALL. Any of you who are in the SonicWALL world know that the client of choice is the SonicWALL NetExtender software. This product is easy to configure and use. Make sure that you have version 6.0.181 of the SonicWALL NetExtender software and install that on your Windows 8 machine.

If you do this, then everything will work fine. You can easily download the VPN client from the SonicWALL support site.

-RP

Document Management

Hi folks! So you invested in that shiny new Exchange server and Lync server, but feel like you’re missing a piece of the puzzle? That’s probably because you’re not using Sharepoint yet!

Microsoft Sharepoint is great for collaborating with your colleagues or external contacts with document management. Making it very easy to keep track of documents and to share information. Combining that with the power of Microsoft’s Exchange and Lync products, you end up with a full featured collaboration solution.

Unfortunately for most people, Sharepoint can be a gargantuan undertaking. You can dip your toe in the water by experimenting with a basic version of Sharepoint through Office 365. Then if you like what you see, you can move to an on premise solution with a higher end version. The higher end versions typically sport better features such as advanced searching functionality.

-RP

Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 Update

Hi folks! So as I mentioned earlier, I recommended Kaspersky for Windows 8. I have been using Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 on my laptop that I recently installed Windows 8 on.

Just wanted to update you folks after having used it for a while. So far so good! I run the Kaspersky product with the internal Kaspersky firewall turned on and it’s been great! I can highly recommend this product to Windows 8 users. The product runs quickly and does not intrude on my daily use of my laptop. It quitely does it’s thing in the background.

-RP

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite

Hi folks! The VMware vCenter Operations Management suite is ideal for IT departments with little time on their hands. Having a suite like this is a boon to an IT guys existence.

The suite consists of the following:

• vCenter Operations Manager
• vCenter Configuration Manager
• vFabric Hyperic
• vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
• vCenter Chargeback Manager

The suite helps out IT admins by providing a comprehensive set of management tools that automates and integrates into your virtual environment. You can read more about it here.

-RP

Baby 3PAR SAN

Hi folks! So for all of you SAN users out there, you have probably drooled over the 3PAR from HP for quite some time now. After the big HP buy of 3PAR, everyone has been salivating to get their hands on one.

Now the 3PAR has entered a cheaper market and is now more easily available to the masses. Granted you can buy the base 3PAR for cheap but it won’t come at that cost with all the features in. It still makes sense though as you can grow and scale as you need to.

You can read more about the baby 3PAR here.

-RP

Traveling down the Microsoft Certification Path

Hi folks! So what did you resolve to do in the New Year? Did anyone resolve to do more certs? Well if you did, may I suggest going down the Microsoft path?

Microsoft has come a long way since the “paper MCSE” days, and now their certs actually do have value. You learn a lot from training and certification and with all the new Microsoft products out there, it helps to get trained up.

Microsoft has a great learning web site that makes it easy for people to figure out their path to learning and certification. You can go to this link to figure out how you want to plan out your learning!

-RP

Netflix down on Christmas Eve

Hi folks, so Netflix is down on Christmas eve. This is apparently due to the Amazon’s AWS. This brought a thought to my mind.

When you decide on who to host your cloud services with, do you have a checklist? Do you do your due diligence? Do they take proper backups, have failover power capabilities and treat your data with privacy?

These are all important questions for the cloud, and when we’re talking about your business, it’s best you pay heed to the answers. After all, Netflix being down is one thing, but your business being down is a whole different ball game.

-RP

Microsoft Learning Second Shot Retake Exam Offer

Hi folks! Once again Microsoft is helping out all you IT folks out there by offering up the Second Shot offer!

You can basically register for Second Shot before you take your exam, and then go register for your exam. If you fail the exam, you can retake your exam for free!

This is a great way to get back on the horse and start passing exams! You can signup for the offer here.

-RP