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Here at New Signature we’re extremely excited about the next round of System Center products emerging from Microsoft. In addition to the products we know and love (Data Protection Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager) there will be major updates to the new kids on the block, System Center Service Manager and System Center Orchestrator (a.k.a., Opalis). Microsoft will also be expanding the suite to include two new products: System Center Advisor and System Center Project Codename “Concero”.

With so many new products, it can be difficult to keep track of what product fits a particular need. We’ll review the new and improved products in this series of posts, starting with System Center Orchestrator.

In the past, many of Microsoft’s System Center products ran fairly autonomously. Data Protection Manager would take backups regularly, Ops Manager would detect if services were working and Configuration Manager would help with deployment scenarios of applications and operating systems. Although all three products worked well, there was relatively little “glue” tying them to each other.

System Center Orchestrator ties all of the products in the suite together with a concept known as a “runbook”. The easy way to think of a runbook is as a system level workflow that executes a series of linked activities to complete a specific, defined set of actions. An example can help clarify.

Let’s discuss deploying a virtual machine. Such a request typically crosses multiple teams with varying levels of responsibility, from service desks to networking, storage to security. Because that process could take several days in your network (think about the last time you needed a server to test a new software package and how long it took!) SCO allows true integration across multiple silos to allow the process to be fully automated.

Some IT professionals view these processes as “their job”. Here at New Signature, we view any sort of manual task that can be safely and consistently automated as a task that can free up IT professionals to focus on more strategic work. Why spend time pressing buttons when you could be aligning technology with business needs? It’s one of our core strengths as an organization: by removing the time spent keeping systems running, or doing “busy work”, we enable organizations to stay nimble and mission-focused.

Out of the box, SCO integration packs for Data Protection Manager, Service Manager, Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) allow you to rapidly build a series of activities that include common tasks. The VMM management pack, for instance, includes common activities such as “create disk from vhd” or “Create network switch” or “create virtual machine from virtual machine”. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, IT professionals can quickly build a custom runbook without developer experience. For those of us with PowerShell experience, you can even customize activities to include items that aren’t included in the standard integration packs for all the products that support PowerShell integration.

Minutes from installation, you could be saving your organization hours of busy work with System Center Orchestrator. If you’re interested in seeing a video demonstration of the capabilities, watch Channel 9 to see it in action and then give New Signature a call to see how we can help your organization today!

New Signature is proud to be the title sponsor of Café Saint-Ex’s 3rd Annual Memorial Day Chili Cook-Off on Monday, May 30, 2011 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The New Signature event management team has helped plan and execute the cook-off so we can promise it is going to be great!

The Chili Cook-Off promises great food, lots of fun and all proceeds will be donated to Garrison Elementary School (DCPS).  What could be better?

Full event details are below.

• Event date: Monday, May 30, 2011
• Time: 11 a.m. until 5 p.m.
• Location: 1300 block of T Street, NW (We will be closing T Street between 13th – 14th Streets)
• Expected attendance: 1000+ people
• Featured event: Chili Smack Down competition featuring 14th Streets best chefs.  Chefs will present unique chili recipes for a panel of judges including Amanda McClements of Metrocurean and Alejandra Owens of Borderstan
  2011
• Beneficiary: All event proceeds will be donated to Garrison Elementary School (DCPS)
• Other activities: Chili tastings, chili dog eating contest, outdoor grills serving hot dogs and burgers, flowing brews from an on-site Peroni truck, lemonade stands, cotton  candy machine, dunk tank, and a family-friendly interactive Kids Zone
• Entertainment: Live music from local bands and DJ

Come join New Signature for great food, a good time and help make a difference for the students at Garrison Elementary School.

2011 Gold Award of Excellence (Websites - Environmental Awareness)

New Signature is proud to announce that we took home top honors at the 17th Annual Communicator Awards.  Websites that we designed and built won one gold and five silver awards in categories ranging from best Activism website to best Restaurant website.

With thousands of entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring the creative excellence for communications professionals.

New Signature took home the following awards:

• Oceana Adopt Marine Wildlife Ecommerce Store – 2011 Gold Award of Excellence (Websites – Environmental Awareness)
• Bar Pilar – 2011 Silver Award of Distinction (Websites – Restaurant)
• AAAS MemberCentral – 2011 Silver Award of Distinction (Websites – Associations)
• Spill the Truth – 2011 Silver Award of Distinction (Websites – Activism)
• Food & Water Watch – 2011 Silver Award of Distinction (Websites – Charitable Organizations / Non-Profit)
• I Am Working America – 2011 Silver Award of Distinction (Websites – Activism)

The Communicator Awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), a 550+ member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media. Current IAVA membership represents a “Who’s Who” of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms including: Condè Nast, Coach, Disney, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Estee Lauder, HBO, Keller Crescent, Monster.com, MTV, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Tribal DDB, Victoria’s Secret, Wired, Yahoo!, and many others.

At the May Webuquerque event–The Changing Face of Web Typography–New Signature strategist and web engineer Ben Byrne provided a great presentation on the challenges and changes in the wonderful world of web typography.  Luckily this presentation was recorded and we can share it with the world!

You can also see a great written summary, video and slides at the The Changing Face of Web Typography recap page.

Webuquerque is a New Mexico Adobe User Group geared entirely toward web professionals and folks interested in learning more about the web. While they are an Adobe User Group, their primary agenda is not an Adobe agenda. The mission of Webuquerque is to promote standards and best practices in web design and development, while helping support and grow the local web community. To that aim, they host free, monthly events that begin with a presentation on a web topic, followed by socializing and networking.

(The recap of Ben’s January 2010 presentation on the difference between web and print design, mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, can be found here.)

Microsoft Lync 2010 is the next generation of Unified Communications Server. This robust software platform unites voice communications, instant messaging, and audio, video and Web conferencing. Microsoft Lync ushers in a new connected user experience transforming every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative, engaging, and accessible from anywhere.

Managers and users need communications tools that make their work easier and are available anywhere, anytime.  IT departments need a solution that is highly secure and reliable system that works with existing tools and systems for easier management, lower cost of ownership, smoother deployment and migration, and greater choice and flexibility.  The financial and administrative departments are interested in a solution that controls costs and manages compliance.

Microsoft Lync delivers on all these needs with a single unified software solution.  New Signature is the perfect partner to help you understand Microsoft Lync, develop strategy and take advantage of the business benefits, which include:

• Control costs Voice over IP (VoIP) enables communications among geographically dispersed company locations without long distance charges. Integrated audio, video, and Web conferencing helps reduce travel costs as well as the cost of third-party conferencing solutions.
• Improve productivity Rich presence information helps employees find each other and choose the most effective way to communicate at a given time. Instead of e-mailing documents back and forth for approval, workers can rely on real-time collaboration through enhanced conferencing with desktop, application, and virtual whiteboard sharing—or contact a collaborator from within Microsoft Office or other applications. The unified Microsoft Lync 2010 client provides access to enterprise voice, enterprise messaging, and conferencing from one simplified interface.
• Support the mobile workforce Mobile workers get access to rich Unified Communications tools from practically anywhere with an Internet connection, no VPN needed. An updated Lync Mobile client makes joining and managing conferences, searching the Global Address List, and viewing presence information easy. Rich presence in Lync Server 2010 has been updated with mobile location information, making on-the-go workers easier to find and contact. A single user experience across PC, phone, mobile phone, and browser gives workers more ways to stay in touch.
• Gain operational efficiencies By integrating Unified Communications and rich presence into business workflows, latency and delays can be reduced or eliminated. For geographically dispersed teams, group chat can enable efficient, topic-specific, multi-party discussions that persist over time.
• Be more responsive to customers, partners, and employees Enhanced delegation through Lync 2010, one-click call routing and management features in Microsoft Lync 2010 Attendant for receptionists, and rich presence information in both help ensure that opportunities are routed to the right person at the right time.
• Maintain regulatory compliance Built-in security, encryption, archiving, and call detail records help meet regulatory requirements. By using your own servers and network, you maintain control over sensitive data that would otherwise be transmitted over public telephone networks and third-party conferencing platforms.

(more…)

Most people know that at New Signature we’re excited about cloud computing solutions.  What’s great is that we’ve been able to successfully help many of our clients understand cloud computing, develop strategy and take advantage of the reliability, flexibility and security of the cloud.  Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune are two of the cloud services that has provided tremendous value to our clients.

Office 365 is a robust cloud-based productivity solution for businesses both large and small.  For a low monthly cost, it combines Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online (a service that provides instant messaging, video conferencing, PC phone calling and enterprise social networking) and Office Web Apps.

Windows Intune is a cloud-based service for Windows PC management and security, and includes a subscription license to Windows 7 Enterprise (and future versions of Windows). The Windows Intune cloud service centrally manages and secures PCs—whether in the main office, at a branch office, or on the road.

Our expertise and success has not gone unnoticed and we are pleased to announce that Microsoft has awarded us the highest level of recognition available to their cloud solution partners—Microsoft SMB Cloud Champion Tier 3 Status. As a Tier 3 Cloud Champions partner, New Signature now has direct access to increased support and resources from Microsoft, and more importantly, our customers do too. The key for New Signature is to help our customers transform their business through services such as Office 365 and Intune so they can be more successful.

We are proud of Microsoft’s recognition of our expertise in cloud-computing solutions.  We are also proud that through our efforts many of customers have realized big time benefits.  With cloud-computing solutions our clients have been able to:

• Eliminate Capital Expenditures
• Reduce IT Complexity
• Increase Staff Productivity and Collaboration
• Achieve Robust Business Continuity
• Gain Enterprise-class Security
• Acquire IT Agility and Scalability
• Improve IT Control and Efficiency

Not sure what products and solutions will best meet your cloud computing needs?  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 New Signature to learn more about how the right cloud computing services can maximize efficiency, reliability and business alignment of your IT resources.

New Signature is thrilled to announce that the Factory Farm Map website, under the Advocacy category, has won the Interactive Media Awards Best in Class Award.  The Best in Class award is the highest honor bestowed by the Interactive Media Awards (IMA). It represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, the FFM site had to successfully pass through the IMA’s comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.

The IMA judges utilize a points-based scoring system which allows each entry to receive a maximum of 500 points. By adhering to the specific guidelines and criteria of this system our judges are able to maintain the highest degree of fairness, accuracy and integrity; competently and effectively evaluate entries; and, deliver clear results.  The Factory Farm Map website was scored using five specific criteria, with a score from 0-100 awarded for each criterion. The total of these five scores establish the overall score for the website up to a maximum of 500. The rare few websites receiving an overall score between 480 and 500 receive the Best in Class award.

The Factory Farm Map scored as follows:

Design: 97
Content: 97
Feature Functionality: 100
Usability: 97
Standards Compliance & Cross-Browser Compatibility: 98
——————————————————
Total: 489

New Signature worked with Food & Water Watch to re-envision their Factory Farm Map website. The Factory Farm Map website compellingly illustrates something that people in rural America have known for a long time: family farms are being replaced by factory farms, and these facilities are overwhelming some regions of the country.  You can read more about the website and the project in New Signature’s “Factory Farm Map Reloaded” post.

Now that we know the benefits of using Bitlocker from part one of this series, the real question is why more organization aren’t using disk encryption. The answer is simple: complexity. The overhead of managing a fleet of laptops with disk encryption proved too much for all but the most security-minded organizations. Complex scripts, finding recovery keys and recording compliance were all sticky points.

Now with the release of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack: 2011 (MDOP), Microsoft has finally brought Bitlocker  into the mainstream for even smaller organizations looking to beef up security. Best of all, for companies who already utilize Microsoft’s cloud management software: Windows Intune, the cost is a low $1 per workstation per month. The solution is called the Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Management tool, or MBAM; informally the technology is called “Malta”.

The product breaks down into several discrete areas: a key recovery database (for recovering drives where the key was lost), a compliance reporting feature (to see how well your organization is protected and whether a particular lost machine was protected after the fact), and an agent that runs on the workstations to ensure they function properly.

Deployment of all the features is surprisingly simple: you’ll need a SQL server in your environment for the reporting and key storage (the keys can be encrypted over the wire when sent and you’ll need to deploy the agent via Group Policy, or imaging.

Once those two prerequisites are met, you can use your new Malta group policy to immediately begin receiving feedback on the status of machines. Nothing’s greater (or more terrifying) to learn than the security status of all your laptops that roam to alternate countries.

As with many Microsoft products, the role administration features are easy to provision (you just add various people into groups to grant functionality) and the rights flow from there.

Deployment worked well in our environment, and should in yours too. The only real caveat we’d offer is that for organizations that have already moved remote staff to Windows Intune, to gain real-time security reporting regardless of being in the corporate network, Malta requires the computer pull a corporate group policy. For enterprises with DirectAccess (whether natively or through Microsoft UAG), this shouldn’t pose a problem. Others that don’t will lose the real-time security reporting that is the greatest feature of Malta. It’s a compelling argument to implement DirectAccess.

New Signature is excited to announce that the “I Am Working America” campaign website, under the category ‘Advocacy’, has won the IMA Outstanding Achievement Award!  The Outstanding Achievement award is a top honor bestowed by IMA and an extremely challenging award to win.

To win the “I Am Working America” website was judged to excel in all areas of the IMA judging criteria and demonstrate that it represents a very high standard of planning, execution and overall professionalism.  The judging criteria includes design, content, feature functionality, usability and standards compliance and cross-browser compatibility.  This award is further validation that New Signature is a leader in the industry, able to effectively and efficiently develop powerful and appealing advocacy campaign websites for our clients.

Working America, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, launched the I Am Working America campaign website in March 2011.  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.

In our previous blog post about ioby.org, the Social Microfunding website built in Drupal 7, we reviewed the high level goals of the project.  Here, we are going to dive deeper into the technology that we used for the website.

One of the goals of the ioby project was to allow people to fund projects by donating to one or more projects through the website.  For that piece of the application, we used the Drupal 7 Commerce module created by The Commerce Guys.  For those of you new to the Commerce Guys work, you may recognize them as the creators of the ever popular UberCart system, which is the most popular shopping cart system on Drupal6.

New Features using Drupal 7 and Commerce

There are a few key parts of the application that we built for ioby that hadn’t been tried using Drupal 7 or, more importantly, Drupal Commerce previously. Because the site is donation centric and we want supporters to be able to donate an arbitrary amount of money to one or more projects, the first challenge was to make a product to place in the cart that didn’t have a set price associated with it. In order to do this, we create the product ‘on the fly’ as the donation is placed into the cart.  The second challenge was to create a system that allows a user to also give a 20% gratuity directly to ioby so they are able to use the entirety of the donation to the project. The third challenge was  to give the ability for corporations and sponsors to match the donation amount as part of a campaign for matching funds for a project.

The first challenge was handled by using a simple form that allows the user to enter the amount of the donation they want to give to a project. This form submit creates a new commerce product using the Entity API system. The product was created and customized with the donation amount, and then placed into the cart. Each product in the Commerce module requires a unique SKU, so we generate one based on the users name, the project title, and a date reference to assure no products are duplicated. Once created, the product is placed into the users cart, and the user is redirected to the cart page.  One thing we uncovered is that the Commerce module is designed to set up the prices as an integer, instead of a decimal. This requires all prices to be converted back when placing data in or out of the database.  This had us stumped for a little while, and fortunately the developers of the Commerce module were kind enough to assist us in the implementation of updates to resolve this issue.

For the second challenge, gratuity was at first going to be a tax type in the Commerce system.  However, one of the requirements was to also give the user the ability to remove the gratuity if they felt that they didn’t want to cover the costs for it. Since tax isnt usually an optional item in shopping carts, the ability to remove it has not been placed in the Commerce tax module.  To enable that ability, we place the gratuity into a line item that is calculated every time the cart is updated. Once again we used the Entity API to generate a new product, and this time the gratuity type that has an individual SKU, and a price that is a percentage of the order total. Another custom feature we added was to show a popup message when a user removes the gratuity, explaining to them the importance of gratuity for ioby.  Since the view doesn’t discriminate between the different line items, it was necessary to use some front end javascript that handles this feature.  And of course, with items being added and removed from the cart, it was necessary to change the price of the gratuity on the fly, assuming it wasn’t removed.

For the third challenge - giving corporations and sponsors the ability to match the donation amount – we couldn’t just add line items to the donation like how user submitted donations are handled as this would change the donor information.  Instead, we had to add a new panel to the checkout process that let the donator know that the sponsor was helping the cause as well. The sponsor was tied to the project by campaign node and using the new Drupal7 database API to make direct calls to the database and tie the sponsor, campaign, project and donation together. The beauty of the new database API is that it allows the developer to tie together a series of statements together to create a complex SQL statement, making maintenance and updates easier. Once the bond is created, a donation match is created and funds attributed to the project, without charging the donator more.

This was a challenging and fun project for us.  New Signature was lucky to get to work directly with The Commerce Guys on some of the deep elements of the site, and their team was very accommodating with their support.  We were able to launch this  site on an accelerated time line, in conjunction with Earth Day 2011.