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The UK doesn’t have extreme weather normally and when we do, well we’re not great at coping with it…no doubt we’ve all seen the pictures of the country grinding to a halt (bit like the ducks on the Canal at the end of my road). As we move into 2010 nothing’s changed.. Heavy snowfall and lots of things stop working, however it happens so infrequently it’s almost impossible to plan for.

One thing that has changed has been how technology now allows business to continue to operate in lots of cases pretty much unhampered, amazing how many people can now simply “work from home”, so although it may be difficult for the UK to handle the big infrastructure things, such as transport for rare occurrences such as the snow we are currently getting, the technology available today makes it much easier for many businesses to deploy solutions that allow great flexibility for its staff to make work “an activity not a destination”. We’ve done that here and have been able to keep ticking over pretty easily regardless of whether our team are snowed in or in the office, so what are the technologies we’ve used and what could you use in your business.

· Broadband – one of the biggest changes to the IT world over the last 10 years has become the ubiquity of high speed broadband access, pretty much every home in the country and probably everyone in commuter belt country have access to speeds more than enough to operate your normal office apps.

· Mobile Broadband – a useful addition is the ability to get mobile broadband services, more limited that their landline equivalent, but the major conurbations have good wide ranging coverage.

· Wireless access – again the shift in attitude to use of laptops and wireless access around the house as well as public wireless/Internet access from Starbucks to McDonalds, means for many people that flicking open the laptop and it just connecting to the Internet is no longer “techie magic” and is just expected by everyone be they 7 or 70.

But how do these technologies allow business to continue and although we are talking about the effect of the snow, what we are actually talking about is a business continuity plan, that allows you to continue when access to your business has been affected by a major event…or 5 inches of snow!

So here’s what we have done with our systems to keep the business moving.

As a Microsoft partner, our business systems are based around their technology, so apologies if you don’t use Microsoft stuff, but of course there are other ways to do all of these, just the plus with most of the MS technology we use, is the functions are out of the box and included in the price, so no need for gateways or 3^rd party extra apps to deliver it.

One of the technology changes we have seen from Microsoft and other software companies as faster remote access has become the norm, is the realisation that applications have to take into account the new reality of how people work, that is flexibly and often remotely. Microsoft have responded to that, taking many applications and ensuring they work well over limited bandwidth. But not only technically they work, but more importantly that these work pretty much seamlessly for the users. That is one area we’ve seen a real good improvement, apps just working regardless of location.

· Email – with our Exchange Server we have used the excellent Outlook Anywhere facility that allows our Outlook clients to connect securely to Exchange, using encrypted ports and certificates to ensure security, the Outlook Client automatically connects based on whether local or remote and makes the decision for the user. The introduction of Outlook Cache mode also helps to enhance this experience, allowing users to continue working with Outlook data even without a connection the Exchange server.

· Outlook Web Access with secure document access – Outlook Web access was enhanced in Exchange 2007 not just to include a web email client, but also introduced document access, allowing users to connect to folders shares and SharePoint sites, directly from their OWA client, without the need for any other software. Lots of clients have loved this, some deploying Exchange 2007 just for this…and yes…still there in 2010.

· SharePoint – A great collaboration tool…and important in our day to day use, SharePoint can also be accessed securely from the Internet and allows document collaboration for our currently geographically spread staff! Also has the option to access it via Outlook and OWA.

· Outlook Mobile access – our staff armed with the Windows Phone and iPhones (as well as trialling some software which puts active sync on a Blackberry…allowing you to get email to it, without the need for unnecessary Blackberry costs and BES technical overhead!) have been able to pick up their email without the need to even access a laptop, great for those quick messages and triage of email.

That’s what we currently have used, but that’s not all, we are enhancing this, in 2010 by deploying some new Microsoft technology that has shipped in the Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 releases;

· Terminal Server remote App publishing – for some of our Apps that don’t work so well over slow links, Sage Accounts springs to mind, we’ve always been able to run this as a TS app…however the problem with that, is you end up logging on, getting a new desktop etc…remote app publishing will allow us to just publish SAGE as an app. That will still run in TS but to the user will look like a local desktop app… so the look and feel of been local…but the performance of been sat in the office. These can be securely web published, so still no need for VPN.

· Windows 7 Direct access – as we roll out Windows 7 to our users the new direct access feature will be implemented, similar to that discussed in Outlook anywhere, our users will be open their Windows 7 laptops and connect straight in to all internal resources (well those we allow) and access them, securely, again without separate VPN overhead and invisible to the users, true anywhere access to resources, going to be a feature that changes the way many people work!

· Office Communications Server – we are going to extend the use of our real time comms application to allow users presence, IM and voice so we can communicate easily irrelevant of geography.

The important thing with all of these is that they are all relatively easy to deploy, all as part of the applications and from the end user point of view pretty much seamless, with the user able to open their laptop, whether in the office or at home, wired or wireless and their software OS and Apps will make the decisions that allow them to connect to key business applications with the user just been able to concentrate on doing their work and not worrying about remote technologies.

And that’s key in any continuity solution, that users are quickly and easily able to access their key business apps, without needing to wait for the helpdesk or the technical team to speak to them because the continuity solution is convoluted and separate from the day to day running of the business.

That’s just an example of what we’ve done, that’s allowed us to keep moving regardless of the current bad weather.

Think it’s time to build a snowman!!!

This press release from NetApp really caught my attention, we’ve been working with Microsoft and NetApp jointly over the last 13-14 months or so on Hyper-V and how to have it work with and take advantage of some really clever NetApp technology, such as cloning, dedupe and application aware backups of the Hyper-V server.

NetApp and Microsoft Announce Three-Year Pact Spanning Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Storage Management

Strategic Alliance to Deliver Highly Efficient and Optimized IT Solutions to Enterprise Customers

Sunnyvale, Calif. and REDMOND, Wash.—Dec. 8, 2009— NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide. Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility.

Over that time as both Hyper-V has become more mature, culminating in the recent R2 release, and NetApp’s understanding of where Hyper-V sits and how it works, has brought increasing levels of integration and ability to take advantage of the key NetApp value technologies.

When you start to bolt on things like Microsoft’s System Centre, SnapManager for Hyper-V and AppWatchPro from NetApp, you really are getting into the realms of a fully “Dynamic Datacentre” type solution, providing a very efficient (no duplication either dedupe or cloning) and flexible solution (rapid provisioning, using cloning technology).

We are seeing many clients we speak to now, really starting to appreciate the value of this dynamic approach to IT, the ability to have complete flexibility to quickly scale up and scale back their infrastructure, to quickly and without service disruption, move machines not only across hosts in a datacentre, but across datacentres.

And yes, this is not unique to NetApp and Microsoft as NetApp deliver lots of this functionality with VMWare and some of the VMWare plug ins are more mature, however what this announcement says to me, is that when major vendors like NetApp are making this kind of commitment, they appreciate that Hyper-V is very much a player and when you tie into it the power of what you can achieve with System Centre in terms of managing and automating your datacentre, there is a real choice for people to make in terms of delivering Dynamic Datacentre facilities.

Looking forward to seeing what kinds of MS/NetApp developments we get…exciting times ahead!

if you want to see the rest of the NetApp announcement go check it out click here want to see how NetApp and Microsoft work well together, check out Matt McSpirit’s Hyper-V/NetApp BLOG posts and videos

 

Monday 7^th December – 9 a.m. until 11.30 a.m.

Gardner is please to present the first of our “No Brainer” IT consultancy days. Now that the worst of the recession is hopefully behind us, what are the obvious IT strategies and tactics we can adopt to improve and grow our businesses at last? Our presenters will be drawn from current industry leaders who will give you the best advice on how to get the best from your IT, with specific reference to the significant technology changes taking place in 2009/2010.

If you are just a bit confused or bewildered about what it all the challenges mean to you, then come along and have things explained simply. Our agenda will include:-

 

• Microsoft “The New Efficiency” including Virtualisation, Business Management
• NetApp Storage Efficient Technologies
• IBM Energy Efficiency Servers
• Hosted Services
• Cost Effective Security through IP cameras
• Power and cost saving tools including PC PowerDown and DocSense

 

The venue is the Blue Planet Aquarium in Ellesmere Port. The only sharks present will be those in the aquarium! Much of the advice offered on the day is around energy and cost saving, so we will all be doing a lot towards saving the planet. The session will finish around 11-30 am, leaving you plenty of time to network with the advisors or just take the opportunity to wander around Blue Planet and add to the enjoyment of your morning.

 

http://www.blueplanetaquarium.com

 

If you are interested in attending this event please register here

Over the last few years we have seen demand for hosted software applications rapidly increase. Due to the success of Microsoft’s online services (Business Productivity Online Suite) they have decided to reduce the price in order to continue to deliver a competitive and compelling offer that will help to drive continued customer adoption. In addition mailbox storage has now been increased from 5B to 25GB. From 3 November 2009 the new price structure for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite is as follows: Offer Original List Price New UK Price BPO Standard Suite £10.04 £6.71 Exchange Online Standard £6.69 £3.35 SharePoint Online Standard £4.85 £3.52 Office Communications Online Standard £1.67 £1.34 Live Meeting Standard £3.01 £3.02 You can visit the BPOS Official Website here Opportunity for Your Business 1. The market is rapidly changing – IDC research forecasts +30% YOY growth, 2007-2011 for hosted applications. We believe that 50% of email seats in the small to medium size business segment and 20% in the enterprise market will be delivered via hosted email within five years. 2. We continue to offer rich cross and up sell opportunities with associated service opportunities. Our Software-plus-Services strategy means you can mix and match our products to deliver the perfect solution to your customers. 3. Selling Online solutions delivers increased sales margins for partners and provides annuity revenues. Microsoft Online Services deliver a 18% fee in the first year and 6% every recurring year. 4. You can earn revenues from implementing, integrating and managing a solution for your customers. A survey of 300 partners found that on average, for every £1 spent on licences, partners made more than £6 in service attach revenue and also benefited from shorter sales and delivery cycles. 5. You can deliver a secure and reliable service to your customers, providing a streamlined communications and collaboration experience, while leveraging economies of scale for infrastructure and utilities costs.

 

Microsoft yesterday announced some new pricing for their excellent BPOS solution, for those who don’t know, Microsoft hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Comms Server and Live Meeting.

These price drops make a very attractive solution, even more so, driven by the market a little, but still some excellent unique point especially with Exchange, the ability to mix on premise and cloud exchange as far as I can see is unique to Microsoft’s offering, nothing forcing you all on premise or all “cloud” for quite a few people we’ve met with regarding “cloud” projects this is a big winner.

Couple of other things where announced a biggy been the increase in mailbox size from 5gb to 25gb, believe this brings it in line with what Google offer.

Also a couple of good new case studies.

you can check them out at http://www.microsoft.com/online/en-gb/about.mspx

Here’s the new prices

From 3 November 2009 the new price structure for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite is as follows: Offer Original List Price New UK Price BPO Standard Suite £10.04 £6.71 Exchange Online Standard £6.69 £3.35 SharePoint Online Standard £4.85 £3.52 Office Communications Online Standard £1.67 £1.34 Live Meeting Standard £3.01 £3.02

If this grabs you attention, why not give us a call here at Gardner’s to share some more detail with you.

With security threats to any computer based enterprise seemingly endless and ever more sophisticated, Gardner has established closer ties with the Symantec Corporation. From Q1 2010 onwards, it is our intention to offer clients regular briefings direct from Symantec but offered at Merseyside locations. Many will be familiar with the Symantec product groups of:-

Top Product Families

· Backup Exec

· Endpoint Security

· NetBackup

· Brightmail

For those users less familiar, these are comprised of the following popular product sets:-

Most Popular Products

· Backup Exec for Windows

· Endpoint Protection

· Ghost Solution Suite

· NetBackup

· Enterprise Vault

· Client Management Suite

All of these will be covered at events throughout 2009 with the additional ability to see new releases of security products designed to counter emerging security threats. For more information, go to the Symantec site at http://norton-symantec.co.uk or contact our sales staff on 0151 220 5552 or email us at info@gardsys.co.uk.

During the summer, Gardner Systems partnered with the world leading IP camera manufacturer Axis to provide IP based security cameras to businesses in the north-west. Based on open IP standards, Axis network cameras connect to any kind of IP network, including the Internet, and enable remote viewing and recording from anywhere in the world. They also provide advanced video analytics features, such as motion detection, audio detection and tampering alarm.

With our extensive LAN and WAN experience, it has been a straightforward step for us to add IP cameras to our portfolio of products and services. This has seen major results in one of our client IP camera sites being able to offer key assistance to Merseyside Police in combating a very serious crime. In due course we hope to offer more specific details to our clients for them to appreciate just how much more effective is this new technology compared to traditional CCTV systems. It is undoubtedly cheaper, more versatile and easier to deploy than traditional camera systems.

Axis offers the market’s broadest and most consistent range of high-quality network cameras including those suitable for indoor low light use, outdoor all weather models, Pan Tilt Zoom cameras and the latest PTZ High Definition cameras suitable for shopping centre security. We at Gardners have recently progressed through a proof-of-concept where the live images are streamed instantly to our Gardner Systems Cloud Storage to further protect the data being captured.

For more information, contact our technical sales team on 0151 220 5552 or email us at info@gardsys.co.uk.

As we have already announced, we are pleased to have SkillsGen on-site with us at our Wavertree offices.  Skills-Gen is a Microsoft Gold partner and one of the leading training companies in the North-West.  Gardner has an agreed bespoke and also an off-the-shelf training programme for all users. We cater for users who wish to do anything from just familiarising themselves with the new Microsoft technologies up to obtaining professional certified qualifications.  We can jointly agree work “coaching” and enterprise-wide certification.

Following our latest series of Microsoft events covering Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Server 2008 R2 we are pleased to announce that we can now offer training on these subjects.

For a detailed response to your own specific requirements, just call our technical sales team on 0151 220 5552 or email us at info@gardsys.co.uk.

It’s always nice to share stories of clients who use the technology we have implemented for them, fully to address their business challenges.

George McCann of Regenda Group has done just that, using Microsoft Hyper-V, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager and his NetApp storage solution, to build a business continuity solution for one of their key business applications.

George shared with us the business issue and how he used his technology investment to help address it. “As a Housing group our ability to manage our housing stock and provide an excellent service to our customers is key and our system for delivering that is critical to our ability to operate. As a business we identified that we needed to provide a recovery solution should we ever lose our primary data centre and our housing management system with it”

Regenda Group has multiple sites alongside their main site in Bolton, on e of those is in Liverpool and had been identified as their secondary data centre.

George continued “ we realised the key to this was to utilise our secondary data centre, but also look at how the technology we were using allowed us to do this simply. We currently are using replication technology to have copies of our data sat in the secondary site, we have taken advantage of technology inherent in our applications, such as “site continuous replication” in Exchange 2007 or SnapMirror on our NetApp storage, however the challenge presented by our housing management system was that it didn’t easily offer us this”.

This led George to have to consider how he could take advantage of his existing platforms to add replication and DR functionality to his housing management system “ we had two issues with the system, one was it had no inherent DR capabilities and two, it was running on older hardware, which was going to be difficult to replace if we lost it. Because of this, it seemed an ideal solution to virtualise, initially we had considered VMWare as a mechanism for this, but with the help from our technology partners at Gardner Systems and the close link they have helped us to forge with technology specialist such as Matt McSpirit at Microsoft, we quickly realised that Hyper-V especially alongside Systems Centre Virtual Machine Manager, would be the perfect solution for us”.

George goes on to explain “the mix of technology, from Microsoft and NetApp has allowed us to easily provide a twofold solution, firstly by using VMM’s physical to virtual migration technology, we have been able to easily create a virtual version of our live housing management system, utilising the flexibility of our NetApp storage, we could easily then copy live production data into our isolated DR instance, allowing us to test the solution, without impinging on the production environment. By then placing the Hyper-V virtual machine files onto our NetApp storage, we can then use the SnapMirror functionality to replicate these virtual servers to our DR environment, which we can then easily mount on our DR Hyper-V hosts”.

George plans to enhance this further “by presenting to the production server storage from our NetApp SAN, we will then get our housing management system to put its own system backups there, on completion of this, we will then get the NetApp storage to replicate the data over to our DR site, we can then mount this data on our DR site and import it into the recovered version of our system”

“ it’s great to see our technology investment providing us functionality that we had not even thought about when we deployed it, that really shows how the right technology platform gives you tremendous scope and flexibility for your business to be able to meet new challanges.