Monthly Archives: March 2011
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Syndication
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March 31, 2011
Down Syndrome Network of Montgomery County Unveils New Logo and Website
By New Signature
The Down Syndrome Network of Montgomery County (DSNMC) have unveiled a new logo and website–both designed by New Signature. New Signature provided branding expertise to the DSNMC and re-envisioned the organization’s brand by creating a new logo and brand guidelines. New Signature also conceived and built a new website that helps the Down Syndrome Network of Montgomery County to empower and support individuals with Down syndrome, their families and the community through education, information, public awareness and advocacy. The website is focused on three core audiences: families, health care professionals and educators. To these audiences the website provides online resources, facts about Down syndrome and upcoming events.The website is built on the Word Press 3 publishing platform. WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many powerful features including a plug-in architecture and a template system and can be extended to support practically any website requirement. WordPress is one of the most widely used CMSes and is available free.
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March 29, 2011
Microsoft Windows Thin PC — Repurpose Existing PCs as Thin Clients
By New SignatureWindows Thin PC (WinTPC), which is a locked down version of Windows 7, is designed to help repurpose existing PCs as thin clients extending the life of existing hardware. New Signature is excited that Microsoft has made the Windows Thin PC community technology preview (CTP) available to the general public. This is a technology that New Signature has been testing for some time and it is now available for all Microsoft customers to evaluate. The final release of WinTPC will be provided as a benefit for Software Assurance customers.
This latest CTP version includes some new features, including:
- RemoteFX support for a richer, higher fidelity hosted desktop experience.
- Support for System Center Configuration Manager, to help deploy and manage WinTPC images.
- Write filter support helps prevent user and application writes to disk, thereby improving security at the end point
New Signature is excited to use WinTPC to help clients get the most out of their technology investments. WinTPC can help clients lower their upfront Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) costs by enabling them to repurpose PCs they already own as thin clients. And because WinTPC is an upcoming benefit of Software Assurance (SA), it can help clients eliminate additional Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) licensing costs for VDI. However, if a client doesn’t have SA on their Windows PCs, they can still purchase a VDA license for each device to get access to WinTPC.
Interested in adopting Windows Thin PC for your organization? New Signature can work with you to determine your organization’s requirements and help you evaluate the different desktop scenarios (e.g., centralized, hosted, server based, etc). Contact our team of experts today to get started.
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New Signature Creates State Radio Activism Website
By New Signature
New Signature teamed up with HeadCount, Calling all Crows, State Radio and Rogue Global Solutions to create the “Take Action for Troy Davis” activism website. The website features multiple actions that supporters can take to show their support of Troy Davis, and upon taking action, enables them to download previously-unreleased tracks from the band State Radio. The actions hook into the Salsa platform and provide supporters the ability to sign a petition on Troy’s behalf, write to their local paper about their support for Troy, or email their support to Troy directly.The website also pulls in recent Twitter, Facebook and Google News items to show the vast support the campaign from the social networks and news organizations. In addition, the Disqus module is used to facilitate discussion on the website and to allow supporters to add their comments for the cause.
Troy Davis is currently on death row for a 1991 conviction of murdering a Georgia police officer, though for nearly two decades the case against him as fallen apart. Seven of the nine prosecution eyewitnesses who had linked Davis to the killing have unofficially recanted or contradicted part of their original trial testimony, claiming police coercion and questionable interrogation tactics. However, since none have made a formal recantation as required by law, Davis is still up for execution.
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March 28, 2011
Hosted BlackBerry Service from Microsoft Online Now Starts at $0 Per User Per Month
By New Signature
In big news on the Microsoft Office 365 front, RIM has committed to provide a mobile e-mail service starting at $0 per user per month for Microsoft Office 365 users with hosted BlackBerry service needs, beginning in late 2011. As a prelude to this change, new service pricing of $0/user/month is available now to customers of the Hosted BlackBerry service on Microsoft’s current management platform.The previous cost of $10/month/device had been one of the only financial sticking points for migration to Office 365 for many of New Signature’s customers with a large fleet of Blackberries. This move essentially eliminates the only financial barrier for small and large firms to move their email, calendar, contacts and collaboration from an on-premises solution to the cloud-based Office 365 solution.
Microsoft also announced that after significant collaboration between Microsoft and RIM the two firms have created a better, single-sign-on experience for Office 365 customers with BlackBerry devices. This new service will be hosted, managed and supported by RIM and is intended to provide superior functionality to the current Microsoft Hosted BlackBerry service for BPOS. With more capabilities than today’s Microsoft Hosted BlackBerry service, administrators will be able to create and manage more device policies, change device passwords and settings, and search across large numbers of BlackBerry users at one time.
Microsoft Office 365 offers a paradigm shift in cost savings, agility and scalability that is simply too powerful for any company to ignore. New Signature is the perfect partner to help you understand cloud computing, develop strategy and take advantage of the reliability, flexibility and security of the cloud. New Signature customers are achieving the following benefits of moving to cloud-based email:
- Eliminate Capital Expenditures
- Reduce Complexity
- Increase Staff Productivity and Collaboration
- Achieve Robust Business Continuity
- Gain Enterprise-class Security
- Acquire IT Agility and Scalability
- Improve IT Control and Efficiency
With the release of Office 365 just around the corner, please contact New Signature to discover cloud power possibilities. We will guide you through our process-based approach, that starts with a cloud-based email feasibility study and planning process.
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March 21, 2011
New Signature — Washington DC’s Premier Microsoft Gold Certified Partner
By New SignatureOver the past year, Microsoft has tightened the requirements significantly for entry into its highest level of partnership, the “Gold” partnership.
Under this new partner system, New Signature has excelled due to our highly skilled and highly trained bench of experts, and our organizational commitment to learning and excellence. To date, New Signature has attained four Gold and ten Silver competency designations.
- Gold Hosting (Cloud)
- Gold Server Platform
- Gold Virtualization
- Gold Desktop
- Silver Identity and Security
- Silver Mobility
- Silver Systems Management
- Silver Content Management
- Silver Data Platform
- Silver Volume Licensing
- Silver Learning
- Silver Midmarket Solution Provider
- Silver Portals and Collaboration
- Silver Search
New Signature is also a Microsoft Small Business Specialist and is a member of the Cloud Essentials and Cloud Accelerate partner program.
In the Microsoft Partner Network, 29 competencies map to specific solution areas. With Gold competencies, partners demonstrate the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to a particular Microsoft business solution area.
Attaining a Gold designation in a specific competency is now much more challenging. The partner must dedicate four unique Microsoft Certified Professionals with credentials, not assigned to any other gold competency and demonstrate a substantial investment to excellence within the competency to earn the Gold designation.
New Signature is actively helping organizations consolidate servers, transition to highly available cloud-based services, increasing up-time and reducing operational costs in the process. Our highly skilled staff has continued to push the boundaries, enabling us to gain higher levels of support within Microsoft itself, as well as test Microsoft products that have not been released yet to identify bugs and new features so that when they are released, we’re already experts.
Contact New Signature today if you interested in working with a Microsoft partner with a deep and broad skill-set that can deliver high quality solutions to your business.
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March 8, 2011
“I Am Working America” Website Launches
By New Signature
Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, launched the I Am Working America campaign website today. New Signature provided strategic recommendations, helped develop the campaign concept, then worked to design and produce the website. The site is powered by the Drupal publishing platform, and is supported by the JQuery JavaScript library and utilizes HTML5 and CSS3. In addition, we leverage JSON integration with Drupal to poll for site content updates, and dynamically show updates in real time.This timely and engaging website asks visitors to stand up and declare their support for the rights of working Americans, and empowers visitors to make their own statement on the website about how they participate in the American workforce that will then be shared with the social world through seamless social networking integration.
Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, is a powerful force for working people. They combine the strength of 10 million union men and women and millions of workers without the benefit of a workplace union who share common challenges and goals to fight in communities, states and nationally for what really matters–good jobs, affordable health care, world-class education, secure retirements, real homeland security and more.
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March 5, 2011
Book Review: 21 Recipes for Mining Twitter
By New Signature
“21 Recipes for Mining Twitter” by Matthew A. Russell is written for a technical audience and specifically programmers that use or are comfortable with the Python programming language. The bulk of the book is a collection of Python code samples (a.k.a., recipes), and suggested tools, that will help you develop the code that you need to extract data from Twitter and present this information for analysis.Matthew Russell presents a clear description of the problem that each recipe solves and discusses some of the finer points of the recipe before diving into the code. This concise writing style makes the concepts easy to understand, which begin with more basic concepts such as using OAuth to access Twitter APIs to more complex topics such as visualizing geodata with a Dorling cartogram.
The author also provides useful recommendations for tools to utilize in conjunction with the data that you are able to collect from Twitter. For example, using Protovis (JavaScript visualization toolkit) or the WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin for web visualization, or Apache CouchDB to natively store JSON data.
One substantial benefit of reading this relatively short book–it is only 72 pages in length–is that it identifies and will therefore help you avoid common pitfalls. For example, one section focuses on writing robust requests that can handle the more common issues, such as Twitter’s rate enforcement.
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March 2, 2011
Microsoft Launches Windows Intune — Cloud-based Desktop Management Service
By New Signature
Microsoft has officially launched Windows Intune. Intune is Microsoft’s cloud-based desktop management service and is targeted towards small, midsize and large companies. The service includes management and anti-malware tools and upgrade rights to Windows 7 Enterprise.New Signature has developed extensive experience leveraging Intune to better management our client networks by participating in the beta testing of the service. We have found that Intune deployed properly and actively managed can decrease the cost of maintenance for Windows PCs. In addition, Intune can help eliminate problems with multiple Windows versions, Windows patch and malware administration, data backup and recovery and inventory and maintenance of systems in branch offices or laptops in the field. As a Microsoft Gold Partner and a member of the Microsoft Cloud Accelerate program New Signature is ideally positioned to help firms take advantage of emerging cloud technologies such as Windows Intune.
Much of the technology available with Intune is already available through other Microsoft products, such as Windows Server Update Services, Forefront Endpoint and Security Essentials, and Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. However, with Intune Microsoft has bundled these products together, more tightly integrated them, and made them available as a cloud-based service available through a flat rate monthly subscription.
The release of Windows Intune is great development for New Signature’s customers. New Signature is already using this product to help drive down the overhead cost associated with maintenance of desktops and laptops running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
New Signature is the perfect partner to help you understand cloud computing, develop strategy and take advantage of the reliability, flexibility and security of the cloud.
Contact us today to discover all the possibilities that the cloud can offer your firm!