Rock IT Blog

In the 3^rd of this series we look at how Exchange 2010 might reduce costs by improving performance and allowing a wider choice of storage options. Pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing business conditions requires you to be agile, so investing in solutions that provide reliability and choice is critical. Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment to your unique needs and provides a simplified way to help keep e-mail continuously available for your users.

This flexibility and simplified availability comes from innovations to the core platform that Exchange is built on. These innovations deliver numerous advances in performance, scalability, and reliability advancements, while lowering the total cost of ownership 50-80%.

A new, unified approach to high availability and disaster recovery helps achieve new levels of reliability as it reduces the complexity and cost of delivering business continuity up to 80%. With new features, such as Database Availability Groups and online mailbox moves, you can more easily and confidently implement mailbox resiliency with database-level replication and failover, all with familiar Exchange management tools. 

Greater choice of storage hardware options, allows you to tailor your Exchange infrastructure to your organization’s specific business or technology needs while lowering the overall storage costs 50-70%. Storage options range from support for traditional Storage Area Networks (SAN) to low-cost, desktop class Direct Attached Storage (DAS). Larger mailbox size ensures that employees can access the information they need to do their jobs in a quick and efficient manner, without spending time deleting messages and managing their inbox to stay under the imposed limit.

Learn more about mailbox resiliency.

Administrative advances in Exchange 2010 can help you save time and lower operational costs 15-20% by reducing the burden on your IT staff. A new role-based security model, self-service capabilities, and the Web-based Exchange Control Panel, allow you to delegate common or specialized tasks to your users without providing them full administrative rights or increasing help desk call volume.

Learn more about management tools.

In conclusion then the 3 areas discussed in this series, mobility; archiving and lowering of ownership costs look to make Exchange 2010 a winner. If you would like to know more click here to contact us.

Rock IT's dev team have just won the business to design and develop a content managed web site for Jonker Sailplanes is South Africa. The web site will allow JS to add and change content. In addition the site will also provide the ability for their world wide agents to update their own sections of the site. The content managed web site will also allow JS to manage the interest and contact forms into a mailing engine for newsletters and specific targeted marketing. The site is expected to launch at the end of April 2010.

In the second of this series we cast an eye over the new email management features in Exchange 2010. Ask an IT Manager what the biggest problem with email is and many will tell you archiving and PST files. PST files contain your archived emails. They are often on your local hard drive, may not be backed up and are prone to corruption as they grow.

As the volume of e-mail continues to increase, the need to preserve and discover this information has become critical. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 introduces integrated e-mail archiving, retention, and discovery capabilities that can help you simplify this process without changing how you or your users work.

A new Personal Archive is available seamlessly in both Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web App, so your users can easily interact with archived e-mail by using existing skills and familiar clients.

Exchange 2010 adds retention management policies, enabling you to automate archiving and deleting e-mail. This feature includes a Legal Hold feature that retains and places on hold e-mail that a user has edited or deleted.

A new Web-based, multi-mailbox search in Exchange 2010 can be delegated to specialist users, such as a compliance officer, to make it easier to conduct e-Discovery across Exchange message types, whether they are in the user’s primary or archive mailbox.

Archiving, Retention, and Discovery Features
Key new archiving, retention, and discovery features in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 include:

Personal Archive. This is a specialized mailbox that is associated with a user’s primary mailbox. It appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App, so users have direct access to e-mail within the archive just as they would their primary mailboxes. Users can drag e-mail from .pst files into the Personal Archive to make them easier to access online. E-mail items from the primary mailbox can also be moved to the Personal Archive automatically using Retention Polices, which reduces the mailbox size and improves application and network performance. In addition, users can search both their Personal Archives and primary mailboxes in Outlook or Outlook Web App.

Retention policies. With retention policies, you can apply retention settings to specific items, conversations, or folders in an e-mail mailbox. The Exchange administrator configures policies, which are displayed in Outlook 2010 inside each e-mail message, along with a header that states the applied policy and delete date. Two types of policies are available to users: delete policies and archive policies. Both types of policies can be combined on the same item or folder. For example, an e-mail message can be tagged so that it is automatically moved to the Personal Archive in a specified number of days and deleted within a specified number of days. Administrators can also use archive policies to control when messages are automatically moved from a primary mailbox to the Personal Archive.

Legal Hold. Exchange 2010 enables you to immediately preserve users’ deleted and edited mailbox items (including e-mail, appointments, and tasks) from both their primary mailboxes and Personal Archives. Legal Hold can be set on individual mailboxes or across the enterprise and can be set for a specific time period (for example, you can place a mailbox on hold for 90 days). Legal Hold also includes an option that automatically alerts users through Outlook 2010 that a hold has been placed on their mailboxes.

Single item restore. With Exchange 2010, administrators can control how long deleted and edited e-mail is kept in the Recoverable Items folder.

Multi-Mailbox Search. Users can search a variety of mailbox items, including e-mail, attachments, calendar appointments, tasks, and contacts, as well as Information Rights Management-protected content. Multi-mailbox search can work simultaneously across both primary mailboxes and Personal Archives with an easy-to-use, Web-based console. For legal discovery purposes, e-mail located through search can be copied and moved to a specified mailbox, as defined by the administrator, for further investigation. Rich filtering capabilities include sender, receiver, message type, sent/receive date, and cc/bcc, along with advanced regular expressions.

Role-based access Control (RBAC). With Exchange 2010, administrators can grant specific rights to users, such as records managers, compliance officers, and litigators perform multi-mailbox searches and other role-specific tasks.

In summary then Microsoft seem to have made huge improvements to email management in this release, giving a good set of reasons to justify upgrading to 2010.

Watch out for the 3rd in this series – will Exchange 2010 help reduce storage costs?

Useful links:
IT Reviews 1st look
Top 10 reasons to upgrade

Steve Ashdown joins Rock IT today (Monday) to add his project management skills and knowledge of hosted services deployment. Steve used to work with The Lapworth Consultance Ltd over 10 years ago and is well known for his work hard play hard attitude. Steve will be working on site at Trainline helping the Rock IT team to deliver over £ 250,000 worth of projects. In addition to this, Steve will be helping us develope and deliver more services for our Black Box hosting services. I am sure you wil join me in welcoming Steve back to Rock IT!

The new Chelmsford YMCA and YMCA Children's Centre sites have been launched in the last week. Both sites have been built with tightly integrated content management systems to allow the YMCA to manage their own sites easily, quickly and simply.

With the old sites the YMCA had virtually no control over the content - this led to the sites getting rapidly out of date making them less useful to the public.

We particularly like the Children's Centre site because it has a very cute monkey!!

Exchange 2010 is on the way promising as usual a whole host of reasons to upgrade. Are the differences significant enough to make the hassle of upgrading worthwhile? In the 1^st of a series, here we look at mobile users.

Mobile e-mail is no longer a novelty—it is a business necessity. Exchange 2010 gives users full-featured, real-time access to their communications on hundreds of compatible devices with Exchange ActiveSync and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.  

E-mail, contacts, and calendar are automatically synced to mobile devices over the air, so users can act on communications more quickly. Although you can do this now a real benefit is that Outlook Mobile is now an upgradable client on every Windows Mobile 6.1 or higher device, so no need to change your handset to get the latest features.

A truly universal inbox breaks down the barriers between communication modes with e-mail, voice mail, rights-protected messages, calendar requests, RSS feeds, and saved instant message conversations—all in one place.  This version introduces “conversation view”, this allows you to quickly view a string of related messages and responses in one place. You can now look up free and busy information from within contact information allowing appointment booking without clashes.

The user interface has been significantly improved and now works well with touch screen devices, allowing users to easily delete, mark as read, search for and flag messages. Flagging of messages improves productivity by allowing flagged messages to be followed up further when users return to their PC.

Mobile devices can only hold a certain amount of data and typically this might equate to a couple of weeks email. What happens when you need to look at something older? Server search allows users to search their Exchange mailbox and return resulting data to their phones for action.

You get more control over device access with block/allow/quarantine lists, including exceptions down to the individual user level. Best of all, you don’t have to purchase or manage a separate system or purchase additional licenses for mobile access—it’s all included with Exchange 2010

So – worth upgrading? If you are a mobile user I’d say yes, these changes will make Windows mobile devices  easier to use, more secure and simple to upgrade.

 Watch out for the next in this series on Exchange archiving.

Useful links:

IT Reviews 1^st look

Top 10 reasons to upgrade

One of our engineers, Lee Caller, is once again celebrating Movember, growing a moustache in aid of The Prostate Cancer Charity.

So far, as you can see from the picture below, it's becoming more of a handle-bar style than last year.

If you would like to sponsor Lee in his efforts, or find out more about this very worthy charity, please click here

I watched the video on Google Wave the other day, and since then I've been wondering how it might be used.

For those of you who simply go about your business every day, Google Wave is Google's new baby. Some people have been touting it as a 'Sharepoint Killer', others (like me) have been a bit confused about how it might be used in real life.

Let's get back to basics a little bit. What actually is Google Wave?

Google Wave is a bit like a combined instant-messenger (like MSN), with some email combined, and some collaborative working.

The concept is, let's say me and a few colleagues wanted to work together to create a new proposal for a client. I'd create a 'Wave', invite my colleagues to it. We could then all start writing bits of the document at the same time. On all of our screens, that document would be updated live - so, rather than everyone crowding around my screen as would have happened previously, we can all use our own computer but edit the same document at the same time.

During the document editing, you can have little conversations with the others, maybe marking points in the document and having a chat about what might be best.

One of the clever bits is that it's all entirely web-based, so no-one needs any extra software installed. Secondly, you can collaborate in exactly the same way with people 'outside' of your company, as well as 'inside'. There's no distinction, and you can invite a work colleague into a 'Wave' just as easily as you can invite your mate Dave.

Google Wave is currently in limited release, as developers work out how to use it and what to use it for. I'm still a little confused, but I predict that in 6 months time we'll start seeing 'Waves' popping up all over the place, perhaps within sites like Facebook.

It certainly isn't a Sharepoint killer - Sharepoint is a great document management tool, with workflow and other functions that aren't apparent in 'Wave'. However, we might see 'Wave' add-ins for Sharepoint I reckon, to help collaborative working...

Some useful links:

• Google Wave on Wikipedia
• Review of Google Wave on Mashable
• Google Wave First Look on IT Pro

Microsoft’s latest operating system is all over the press, TV and in the shops for Christmas but is it any good?

Well let’s first of all put this Windows 7 stuff in perspective and establish Dr Del’s credentials.

Should you care if Windows 7 is or is not the best thing since sliced bread?

Well actually yes. The likelihood is that 8 out of 10 of you who have got this far down the article are using Windows XP and two of you have dipped a toe in the water and tried Vista. Eventually all of you will have to upgrade at some stage as support for XP is withdrawn in the coming months. (Service packs and upgrades have already come to an end for XP and Vista was poor and will have no further development.) So Windows 7 is really important as it is the next logical (and in some cases only) step.

So why should we listen to Dr Del?

Well he and the rest of the Rock IT team have been using it for the last 6 months to take the pain or experience the gain of what Windows 7 have to offer. The overall result for Windows 7 from Dr Del and the rest of the team? Well it’s a resounding Hit!

Half the office and Dr Del had already been suffering with Windows Vista so when Windows 7 came along we treated it with a bit of suspicion but the early signs were good. It was easy to install a fresh and even easier to upgrade. The next big thing we noticed is it booted up quicker and seemed to use the memory and processor more efficiently. So at last, the claims were indeed true! The rest of the wise old owls in the office who had stuck with trusty XP having been very smug about the rest of us jumping at Vista started to take an interest and one by one they have now all moved to Windows 7. The key to winning these guys over was the surprising compatibility with old windows programs and some legacy hardware. The support was right there out of the box and pretty much everything worked first time or with a downloaded patch form the manufacturer.

Having now established Windows 7 was not a backward step we could explore the goodies under the hood.

Apart from all the flashy snap to screen and disco like previews of what you have open, two of the best business bits here have to be the search and inbuilt data security. Trying to find stuff on your desktop or laptop is always a nightmare whether its data, emails, programs or printers and scanners. Windows 7 gives you a search bar right on the start button and finds stuff really quickly. This is such a great time saving tool, Dr Del recons this is worth the upgrade on its own!

For the more security conscious of you, Windows 7 comes complete with Bit locker.

It's Microsoft’s disk encryption tool and is installed from start up. This effectively encrypts all of the data on the hard drive so if you get your laptop nicked, all your local business data is encrypted. This functionality can be extended to memory sticks, CD’s and DVD’s using Bit locker to go. Finally, you can now manage all of your remote laptops with Windows 7 and Server 2008 with System Centre and even remotely wipe a laptop if it disappears from your network.

If you would like to find out how you can step up to Windows 7, please give your Windows 7 enabled account manager a call or email. 01635 567756 sales@rockitg.com

Congrats to Karl who pased all 4 Centennial exams today, including a 98% score in the Discovery Master Technician test.

This bolsters our Centennial qualifications and further improves our Software Asset Management team

Well done Karl.