Blog Archives
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Syndication
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February 3, 2012
Hunting PST Files
By Reed Wiedower
Nothing causes more consternation for Exchange administrators than mail downloaded from the main system into a local archive. An Outlook Personal Folder, better known as a “PST” (the file extension), is difficult to support in an enterprise environment for four reasons:1. The technology underpinning them isn’t terribly robust, causing performance problems at best, and data loss at worst.
2. When an organization is hit with an e-discovery motion, every single pst in the environment (including USB keys, old tapes in closets, etc.) must be located and searched by an often expensive legal team.
3. They are typically stored on a local workstation, so aren’t backed-up. When stored on a network server, they tend to take up far more space than the original emails would’ve in Exchange itself.
4. Because they are independent of Exchange, there is no centralized way to search them or locate information in them.
For all of these reasons, Exchange admins over the last few years have been attempting to reduce or eliminate PST usage, through a combination of higher storage limits (storage is cheap!) and what are known as “online archives” in Exchange 2010. Online archive folders allow inexpensive storage to be used in the server environment, while ensuring searching and e-discovery goals are not impacted. Now that the full functionality of a PST can be had in Exchange itself, the final impediment is a small logistical one: tracking down every single PST in your environment, determining which files belong to which mailboxes and finally moving the mail into Exchange.
Notice I said “small”.
The reason this is now a far more trivial task than a few weeks ago is that Microsoft has released, for free, the Exchange PST Capture tool. This tool allows a small agent to be installed on all workstations in an environment, locates the dreaded mail archive files themselves, and pulls them into Exchange. It also makes an easy map of which individuals own specific files, allowing the mail to be properly imported into the correct Exchange mailbox. For files stored on shared drives or for machines with multiple staff members on them, this is the single greatest way to save time during a large PST import process.
Interested in the latest tools and automation techniques for Exchange Server 2010? Come chat with us. New Signature is the leading Microsoft Exchange partner in the DC metro area and we’re happy to assist your IT staff in saving time through automation while increasing staff satisfaction.
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February 2, 2012
New Signature Achieves Microsoft Gold Midmarket Solution Provider Competency
By New SignatureThe Gold Midmarket Solution Provider competency demonstrates New Signature’s expertise in providing solutions based on the most current Microsoft solutions to help midmarket businesses with their unique challenges. New Signature deeply understands the business processes, infrastructure needs, and future growth costs of midmarket-businesses. We partner with these firms to build critical infrastructure solutions based on Microsoft desktop, business-management, and server technologies that can expand on midmarket customers’ current system foundations.
New Signature now holds seven gold competencies and nine silver competencies from Microsoft. These include: Gold Midmarket Solution Provider, Gold Communications, Gold Desktop, Gold Hosting, Gold Server Platform, Gold Systems Management, Gold Virtualization, Silver Content Management, Silver Data Platform, Silver Identity and Security, Silver Learning, Silver Messaging, Silver Mobility, Silver Portals and Collaboration, Silver Software Asset Management, and Silver Volume Licensing.
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January 30, 2012
RIM Launches BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365
By Christopher HertzResearch In Motion (RIM) today announced general availability of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. BlackBerry service had been available for some time in an open and public beta for Office 365. However, this move means that BlackBerry devices are now fully and officially supported for business and government organizations using or considering Microsoft Exchange Online. The service is available at no additional charge to current medium-sized or enterprise subscribers of the Office 365 suite or standalone Exchange Online and works with BlackBerry smartphones on business or consumer data plans.
“RIM is pleased to launch BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. This new cloud-based option allows customers to cost-effectively support mobility across their organizations and easily manage and secure their BlackBerry deployments,” said Alan Panezic, Vice President, Enterprise Product Management and Marketing at Research In Motion. “We continue to build upon the end-to-end BlackBerry solution for our business and government customers with both on-premise and cloud-based solutions, a range of technical support options to suit any size organization, and a growing ecosystem of apps and services for users.”
“Microsoft’s partnership with RIM exemplifies our commitment to providing customers with the best productivity experience across the PC, browser and phone,” said Julia White, Senior Director of Microsoft’s Exchange Product Management Group. “The availability of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is great news for Office 365 and BlackBerry customers who want to get the maximum benefit from these two business collaboration services.”
BlackBerry Business Cloud Services offers advanced administration and flexible smartphone self-service features to support an organization’s BlackBerry deployment in the cloud. Key features include:
- Wireless synchronization with Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data from a BlackBerry smartphone
- BlackBerry® Balance™ technology, which presents a unified view of work and personal content on a BlackBerry smartphone while keeping the content separate and secure
- An intuitive web-based console for IT administrators to provision, manage and secure BlackBerry smartphones from anywhere
- Online access to employee self-service smartphone security functions, allowing users to easily reset a device password or remotely lock or wipe a device in the event of loss or theft
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Microsoft “Office 15″ Begins Technical Preview
By Reed WiedowerPJ Hough, CVP of Development, Microsoft Office Division announced today that Microsoft is making available to select testers the technical preview of Office 15 client, server and services as of today (January 30, 2012). PJ writes:
This morning, we reached an important development milestone: the beginning of the “Office 15″ Technical Preview Program. Office 15 is the codename for the next generation of the Microsoft Office products and services, and the Technical Preview is the first time we share our work with a select group of customers under non-disclosure agreements. These customers play a key role in our development process by testing early builds and providing feedback, which we incorporate into the final release.
At this early point in our development cycle, I’m not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.
While the Technical Preview program is already full, everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer, and we’ll have more to share about the release then. In the meantime, I do want to thank everyone who is participating in the Technical Preview for their contributions and all our customers for their continued support.
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January 28, 2012
Dell Announces Largest Pre-configured Private Cloud Package
By New Signature
Over at ZDNet David Chernicoff posted on an entry on his Five Nines: The Next Gen Datacenter blog that gives a quick overview of Dell’s vStart 200 package that supports up to 200 VMs (using Microsoft or VMware technologies) right out of the box. The vStart 200 is a fully integrated, modular system that simplify virtualization infrastructure. The system includes the servers, storage, networking and management tools you need to create or enhance a virtualization environment. Dell vStart solutions are validated to run on both vSphere from VMware and Hyper-V from Microsoft. Importantly, Dell vStart 200 is a validated offering in the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.As David summarizes, “The vStart products show up at your site preconfigured to your specifications and ready to run. The installation support includes a Dell field service engineer to assist in the installation. Dell’s goal is to deliver a system that fits seamlessly into your existing environment. The system is self-contained in a rack mount that hosts the Dell servers, Dell EqualLogic storage, UPS, pre-labeled cabling, all neatly wired and attached, and all the networking interconnects for the hardware devices that make up the pre-packaged cloud.”
New Signature has substantial expertise in using Microsoft and Dell solutions to build private cloud solutions for customers. We are uniquely positioned as both a Microsoft Managed Partner and Dell Geo Partner to help you deploy vStart products in your data center.
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January 27, 2012
System Center Advisor Released
By Reed Wiedower
Following last week’s announcements, there has been some big news on the System Center front this week as well: System Center Advisor has now graduated to a full release.In addition, System Center Advisor is now tied to the Software Assurance benefits for server operating systems, meaning most customers can begin using it, for free, immediately! It has undergone a number of changes since we last covered it here, while it was in beta mode. Over the past few months, as roles were added, we’ve been testing it in our development environment, and now with the full release, are ready to begin deploying to customers. As we predicted, Microsoft has expanded the number of workloads and now supports the following items:
* SQL Server 2008 + R2
* Windows Server 2008 + R2
* Hyper-V Hosts
* Active Directory
In addition, Microsoft released a series of PowerShell cmdlets to allow you to manage the hosts themselves, built a great set of dashboards (and server health views, seen at right, click to expand), added additional documentation and troubleshooting information and even greater alerts.
The full list of changes goes over each item in detail, and is updated each month. For those new to Advisor, it’s a server-level cloud management tool which complements desktop-management technologies such as Windows Intune. Advisor allows you to centrally manage all the servers in your environment and discover when they deviate from best practices. Unlike Intune, Advisor only polls on a daily basis, and is designed at the moment to be a “reporting” tool rather than a full management tool. Given that SCA’s agent is lightweight and resembles the Intune agent, a rapid release cycle is likely, meaning that future features and workloads should be added every 3-4 months.
If you haven’t kicked the tires of System Center Advisor yet, give New Signature a call. We expect that most customers will be excited to verify the capabilities of their servers for no added cost for hardware or software licenses.
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January 23, 2012
New Signature Featured by Microsoft in Wall Street Journal’s “Cloud Innovators: Profiles of Leadership in Cloud-Based Services”
By New Signature
Microsoft has highlighted New Signature in the Wall Street Journal’s “Cloud Innovators: Profiles of Leadership in Cloud-Based Services” Feature. The article starts by saying, “Businesses facing technology upgrades or migrations are often faced with complicated choices and challenging decisions. New Signature, a Washington, D.C.-based information technology consulting firm, solves these and other IT challenges that businesses face.” -
January 22, 2012
Microsoft Lync Integration with Polycom SIP Phones
By Jim BanachLast month, Jeff Schertz wrote about the great news that Polycom recently announced native Lync support for a wide variety of standard SIP phone devices which all run on the same Polycom Unified Communications (UC) software release and provided technical guidance on configuration. As Jeff mentions, “This means that the large ecosystem of SoundPoint IP, SoundStation IP, SpectraLink Wireless, and VVX Business Media Phones can all now natively register directly to Lync Server, adding a variety of choices beyond the purpose-built CX device family, including the first WiFi endpoint supported for Lync 2010 Server.” This is a big opportunity for organizations that already own Polycom telephony clients to take advantage of Microsoft Lync’s combination of telephony features of a traditional IP PBX with rich presence, instant messaging, and conferencing.
Microsoft Lync is the perfect choice if you are looking for unified communications solution that witll transform your business. Microsoft Lync provides value and has been deployed at a wide range of firms, from small to midsize to very large (more than 10,000) enterprises, in both centralized and distributed configurations. Additionally, for the 6th year in a row Microsoft Lync topped the Gartner Unified Communications Magic Quadrant.
Source: Gartner (August 2011)
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January 17, 2012
Microsoft Building the Next Generation File System for Windows: ReFS
By David TrejoAdvancements in computer file systems in the past decade has seen a wealth of great file system ideas come to fruition. From Hans Reiser’s ReiserFS to Sun Microsystems Zettabyte File System, new technological advancements have pushed the limits of what file systems are capable of including block-level data integrity management, high-performance SSD-aided caching, and efficient B+ Tree–stored metadata.
Now at version v5.1, NTFS has a long and proud history as the primary enterprise file system for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Since its introduction with Windows NT, it has grown into a reliable, secure, and scalable platform for Windows deployments of all workloads and sizes. New features such as Volume Shadow Services (VSS), transactional writes, and on the fly AES Encryption have continued to provide great return on investment for customers in a variety of industries. Over the years NTFS has faced stiff competition from the likes of ZFS, which have delivered faster performance and enhanced reliability. Microsoft customers and vendors have eagerly awaited the successor of NTFS so that the latest advancements in data storage could be leveraged in the Windows world.
This detailed architectural post was authored by Surendra Verma and is a great introduction to ReFS and Storage Spaces, Microsoft’s latest Server 8 file system and storage pooling technologies. ReFS and Storage Spaces will incorporate the robustness of NTFS with the increased data integrity, performance, and scalability that customers have been waiting for and his article is a fantastic read.
Also check out this post by Steven Sinofsky where he provides a deep dive on Windows Server 8 Storage Spaces.
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Microsoft Issues Release Candidate of System Center 2012
By Reed WiedowerNew Signature is excited that Microsoft has issued the release candidate of System Center 2012. Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business announced some big changes during a video conference, including:
- Moving forward, all System Center products will be sold as a full suite, rather than as individual products.
- The suite itself reached release candidate version today for all products.
- The suite will be released in two versions: a Standard and a Datacenter edition, the latter allowing unlimited virtual machine management, with the former for organizations with smaller virtualization requirements.
- Forefront Endpoint Protection is now part of System Center as SC Endpoint Protection.
By recoupling all the System Center products, including Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Orchestrator and Service Manager, Microsoft has increased value to organizations looking to standardize and automate both private and public clouds. Adding in Endpoint protection (Forefront Endpoint Protection is now System Center Endpoint Protection) gives a further reason for organizations to standardize on one single management platform.
Microsoft has detailed licensing FAQs (in pdf format) and others have broken down the overall costs versus competitive offerings. There are even videos for training for all the major components.
New Signature has been working with the SC 2012 suite since the first betas were announced, and we love showing off the new features and capabilities. Give us a call if you would like a demonstration!
