Monthly Archives: December 2010
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Syndication
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December 29, 2010
Washington Business Journal: Awards honor ethical businesses
By New SignatureAwards honor ethical businesses
Washington Business Journal - by Jill R. Aitoro
Wednesday, December 29, 2010, 8:54am EST“Following a year that brought contracting scandals and promises from the administration to crack down on incidents of fraud, ethical businesses have the opportunity to steal some of the spotlight… After the nomination process, entries will be evaluated by an independent panel of judges. Recipients are named at a black-tie gala event in the fall. Last year’s winners included D.C.-based IT consultancy New Signature, Rockville-based Sparks Personnel Services Inc., Reston-based Helios HR and Noblis Inc., a nonprofit science and technology organization in Falls Church.”
Read the full article here.
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December 20, 2010
Deploying Printers With Group Policy
By New SignatureOver the years, IT administrators have been plagued with having an easy way to manage printers across their organization. Some of the resources that have been used in the past include.
- Manually – In a small environment, this tired and true method has been around forever. However as a global solution it does not scale well and when you leave something in a user’s hands, inevitably something will go wrong.
- Logon Scripts – Logon scripts have existed since the beginning of system administration and have been a great way to accomplish a lot of various tasks. However they are cumbersome to develop and many times do not provide much in the way of logging when things go bad. As you add more granularity to your scripts (segmenting by user groups etc.) the process increases exponentially in complexity.
- Printer Management – Starting with Windows 2003 R2, Microsoft released the printer management role into Windows. Print Management was a great tool for administrators as it allowed them to manage all their print servers from a central console and also introduced the ability to deploy printers with group policy. The policy was a small step forward as it allowed us to push out printers to people based on the mechanisms allowed to us in group policy. However any fine grained control relied on the ability to filter and scope the group policies. There was also no graceful way to remove the deployed printers.
With the release of Windows 2008 Microsoft provided us with Group Policy Preferences. These add-ons to group policy gave administrators the ability to fill in the gaps on many settings that were not gracefully managed with Standard Group policies and also allowed much more granular targeting of the actions. One of the better additions to that was the ability to add printers via Group Policy Preferences, with one policy; administrators would be able to control printers for large portions of an organization with effective logging as well.
In the following post, we’ll go over how to setup printer deployment using Group Policy Preferences in a way that will keep the administrative overhead down and limit the number of calls into your helpdesk when rolling it out. (more…)
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December 14, 2010
New Signature Achieves Microsoft Learning Solutions Partnership
By New SignatureMicrosoft has selected New Signature to become a Learning Solutions partner. New Signature earned this honor by demonstrating our expertise as a leading provider of comprehensive learning solutions for individuals and companies that use Microsoft technologies. New Signature is excited to join the elite group of training providers that meet the Microsoft international standards of excellence.
As technology has become more enmeshed in the workplace, the success of your staff workers has become increasingly reliant on their ability to effectively utilize the software applications that facilitate and empower their efforts. With ever decreasing times between new software releases, the provision of training is an important component of any project. Training can often mean the difference between success and failure of a new strategic technology initiative. New Signature is now more prepared than ever to provide an unparalleled learning experience to our clients that combines real-world scenarios and in-depth content.
As before, New Signature will continue to offer a broad array of hands-on instructor-led training for office workers, managers and experienced IT professionals. With the new certification, we can now offer Microsoft Official Courseware (MOC) developed by engineers with deep technical experience and rigorously tested across the world to ensure the highest quality as well as engagement. The MOC enables New Signature to help our customers gain proficiency through hands-on labs, simulations, and real-world application of skills. Leading these classes are New Signature’s Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT). Our MCTs are product experts who meet Microsoft’s stringent certification requirements and are the only individuals who are authorized to provide training based on Official Microsoft Learning Products.
New Signature will continue to push for higher levels of learning and engagement from all the trainings we give. We’ve become successful at training precisely because our instructors are deeply knowledgeable about their subject matter and uniquely able to translate that knowledge into an exciting learning experience.
If you have staff members that need to learn about a new technology, whether they are an office worker using SharePoint for the first time or an IT professional looking to expand her experience with Exchange Server 2010, we encourage you to contact us to learn how we can help.
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December 13, 2010
Book Review: “The Myths of Innovation”
By New Signature
In “The Myths of Innovation,” author Scott Berkun attempts to debunk the myths and stories surrounding how innovation happens, and presents his findings in a funny, historical and authoritative manner. The book initially sets out to define what innovation is, and how the term “innovation” has become one of the most overused terms in the business world due to overuse by marketing and advertising. In fact, Berkun is so sensitive to overusing the word himself that he challenged himself to use the word as infrequently as possible, and seems to have succeeded in doing so in only using it 65 times in the entire book.The format of the book is setup so that each chapter explores the myths surrounding innovation, then reveals the facts about each breakthrough, followed by practical insight that can be applied to a real-world situation. The book provides many historical stories of innovation and how each breakthrough came about, pointing out that much of what we hear and learn about innovation is in fact either greatly exaggerated or simply false. There was much detail showcasing who was behind various breakthroughs, and insight into how each breakthrough happened – and in most cases there wasn’t the illustrious Eureka! moment. Berkun shows us that in the vast majority of cases there is a lot of very hard work that goes into any successful breakthrough, and there are countless stories of failures along the way to success. Berkun walks the reader through many evidence based examples of both successes and failures ranging from stories of current companies like Flickr and Craigslist to historical legends such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Thomas Jefferson. There are many interesting facts and surprises along the way, and what could be somewhat dry material comes to live through these examples.
The final chapters of the book serve as a how-to guide for making innovation happen. Berkun calls this his ‘simple plan’ and outlines what he feels is the best way to go about making something great. This section of the book alone contains a lot of valuable information and would be a useful read itself for any team lead, manager or business person trying to innovate.
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December 12, 2010
Book Review: “Windows PowerShell Cookbook”
By New Signature
As PowerShell has grown up, the set of canonical texts required to support it has expanded as well. O’Reilly’s “Windows PowerShell Cookbook” is one of those books. Now in the second edition, WPC retains all the utility of the original book but adds new features and topics. The original version’s clean, easy-to-understand syntax and examples carry over into the second edition, allowing readers to use WPC as an all-purpose reference guide. If you have a specific question, just crack open the index, find the tool you need, and leave the book on your digital desktop for the next time.Several changes to PowerShell, from v1 to v2, have increased the utility of the cookbook. Topics like remote access and management, or the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment simply didn’t exist in v1. They are covered in depth in this updated version, making it invaluable. If you’ve wanted to manage multiple remote servers in one easy to use environment, the ISE and remote access together are a perfect fit, and well explicated in the book.
The biggest miss, by far, in the latest version of the cookbook is the chapter on Active Directory. In PowerShell v1, AD cmdlets didn’t exist, and thus, manipulating items was incredibly tedious work through the ADSI provider. In v2, active-directory cmdlets exist for all common tasks, yet the cookbook mentions them only in passing (preferring to explain the dated ADSI ones) and recommends readers visit a website for further questions. It’s a serious miss, and one that will frustrate many systems administrators who perform tasks in AD each day.
Windows PowerShell Cookbook, in the end, still has gaps. In the first version, it was simply because the language was immature and certain features weren’t included. Now that PowerShell has hit 2.0, the language is robust and ready for a solid reference work. WPC gets 85% of the way there, and the primary gaps are now in documenting the numerous applications that build on top of PS. Now that Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, IIS and the System Center suite of Microsoft products use PowerShell, having a solid reference for systems administrators who use those apps may be necessary for a truly “comprehensive” work.
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December 10, 2010
An Overview of @font-face
By New Signature
Not long ago, web designers and developers were seriously hamstrung by the inability to use more than a handful of different typefaces for most text on the web. Whether using the (now deprecated) <font> tag or CSS font declarations, the user had to have the specified font installed in order for things to look right.This resulted in a short list of “web safe” fonts that designers could count on to be installed on most users’ systems, such as Arial, Georgia and Courier.
Over the years, a number of technologies and techniques evolved to address this shortcoming, including images, sIFR and Cufon. While these offered some relief from the usual fare (and were in some cases quite ingenious), they all suffer from different shortcomings that hamper their utility.
The latest, and by far most promising solution to expanding the use of different typefaces on the web is @font-face, a CSS technique for embedding actual font files onto a website. @font-face doesn’t require plugins, javascript or any weird hacks—just a reasonably current browser (specifically, Safari 3.1, Opera 10, IE 4, Firefox 3.5, Chrome 4 and up).
The theory behind @font-face is simple: link to a font file from your CSS, and then reference that font in your code like you would any other typeface.
In practice, though, @font-face is a little more complicated than that, and it’s not without its shortcomings. For one, different browsers support different font file formats. So instead of just embedding, say, a TrueType font, you may also have to embed the font as EOT (for Internet Explorer), WOFF (for new versions of IE, Firefox and Chrome) or SVG (for iPad and iPhone). These font files may be large, slowing page load times like any other asset would, and resulting in the dreaded “flash of unstyled text” (aka FOUT). Still, @font-face is great, and opens up a new world of fonts to designers. (more…)
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December 7, 2010
Spill the Truth Earns an IMA Outstanding Achievement Award
By New Signature
Food and Water Watch’s Spill the Truth website earned a 2010 IMA Outstanding Achievement Award under the category “Politics”. This award demonstrates that the Spill the Truth website excelled in all areas of IMA’s judging criteria and represents a very high standard of planning, execution and overall professionalism.Food & Water Watch turned to New Signature to conceptualize, design and develop the Spill the Truth campaign website. SpilltheTruth.org features a compelling message delivered through multimedia content including a compelling video, interactive timeline, and supporting documentation.
The Interactive Media Awards recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement. This award is further validation that New Signature is a leader in the industry, able to effectively and efficiently develop powerful and appealing websites for our valuable clients.
The Spill the Truth website has also earned the 2010 Silver Davey Award and 2010 Silver W3 Award.
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December 5, 2010
Bar Pilar Website Wins Top Honor at 2010 Interactive Media Awards
By New Signature
BarPilar.com earned an IMA Outstanding Achievement Award under the category “Restaurant”. This award demonstrates that the Bar Pilar website excelled in all areas of IMA’s judging criteria and represents a very high standard of planning, execution and overall professionalism.New Signature created a visual design that extended the culture and energy of the restaurant. The visual design draws heavily on a Hemingway theme to complement the restaurant’s Hemmingway name and motif (the Pilar was Hemingway’s boat). The restaurant acts as a meeting place for locals and as such it made sense to reflect this on the website through the incorporation of social media features. For example, the website promotes customer generated content aggregated from Twitter and Facebook on its homepage and community page.
The Interactive Media Awards recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement. This award is further validation that New Signature is a leader in the industry, able to effectively and efficiently develop powerful and appealing websites for our valuable clients.
The Bar Pilar website has also earned the 2010 Silver Davey Award (Restaurant) and 2010 Web Awards’ Standard of Excellence (Restaurant).