Today at a launch event in San Francisco, Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division announced the availability of Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online for businesses of all sizes in the United States.
These subscription services offer businesses a new way to purchase, deploy and manage the industry-leading e-mail and calendaring solution, and the industry-leading solution for portals and collaboration.
Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online (coming soon).
These online services are designed to give your business streamlined communication with high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management. Your business benefits from always up-to-date technologies that are deployed rapidly, maximizing your valuable IT resources and reducing your need for infrastructure investments.
Ingram Micro has expanded their onsite professional BC/DR services. This makes it easier to meet the growing demands for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services.
Ingram Micro Inc. has expanded its professional services offerings to include business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) services.
Available to solution providers in the U.S. and Canada via the Ingram Micro Services Network (IMSN), these new offerings enable partners to quickly build or expand a BC/DR practice without any significant investments in their current infrastructure or engineering and sales staff. Ingram Micro solution providers can also call upon Ingram Micro to secure these new BC/DR services for their own businesses, as well as their clients.
This new release of newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter will give business unit customers and CIO’s more visibility and control over Information Technology spending. This can transform the perception of IT.newScale Inc., maker of IT Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management software solutions, today announced that the era of business frustration and mistrust resulting from the “black box” of IT spend is about to end.
The release of the newScale PortfolioCenter™ 2008 and newScale DemandCenter™ 2008 solutions brings a new level of transparency and control to the services provided by IT, allowing – for the first time – business and IT leaders to share a common understanding and ability to control how IT impacts the efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately profitability of the business.
“In many organizations IT has a lower approval rating than Congress. And like Congress, the problem for IT is most people don’t understand what they do, why it costs so much, and how to get their IT spend under control,” said Scott Hammond, president and CEO, newScale, Inc. “The new releases of newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter take these problems head on by transforming the mystery of the IT function into business-relevant language, by giving IT and its business partners new capabilities to explore alternatives, and by creating accountability for delivering what was promised – at the cost and service levels expected.”
FileVision, a global provider of business productivity software, today announced the immediate availability of FileVision 5, a new software solution that integrates enterprise level document and information management, imaging, workflow and relationship management into a single solution.
A completely re-engineered version of the company’s flagship FileVision software solution, the new software enables enterprises to increase productivity by managing business processes and information within a single, centralized system. For the first time, it is now possible for individual departments to eliminate the need for in-house solutions that disparately store data and are expensive and time-intensive to maintain.
“FileVision 5’s capabilities outpace competitive products in productivity, scalability, quick implementation and cost-effectiveness,” said Tim Martin, president of BankSys Management, Inc. (BMI) and FileVision Professional Partner. “It not only addresses the key concerns of a business investing in technology at a time of economic downturn, but also enables the business to become more profitable by increasing productivity.”
BMC Software today announced the immediate availability of BMC Atrium Configuration Management System (CMS) Essentials, a new solution offering that provides customers a “starter kit” for Business Service Management (BSM) and the adoption of best practices as defined by IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®).
Today’s IT organizations are under great pressure to support their companies’ business-critical applications and services. The industry’s only purpose-built CMS solution and part of BMC’s core architecture, BMC Atrium CMS Essentials increases the rate of successful change implementation, reduces mean time to repair and trouble tickets, and improves IT business responsiveness, while lowering the cost of infrastructure and management tools. The solution’s combination of application programming interfaces (API) and federation allows customers to build upon existing IT investments.
Grounded in ITIL, BSM provides an ideal strategy for ensuring that IT’s mission is aligned to business priorities. BMC Atrium CMS Essentials accelerates that alignment process by bringing together complementary technologies that provide customers a strong foundation for BSM and automation, preventing stalled or failed deployments and maximizing the value of IT investments. By facilitating a streamlined approach, BMC Atrium CMS Essentials enables organizations to integrate even the most diverse IT environment.
Microsoft has renewed their Ultimate Steal promotion. It offers students or anyone with a .EDU email address its Office Ultimate 2007 package for $59.95. The retail for this package is $680.
Microsoft will also add Microsoft Visio Professional 2007 design package, Microsoft Office Language Pack 2007 and Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade beginning September 8, 2008.
Software Specifications
Microsoft® Office Ultimate 2007 (USD$59.95): Perpetual license, which includes the following applications:
- Access® 2007
- Accounting Express 2008 *(see Obtaining Software below)
- Excel® 2007
- InfoPath® 2007
- Groove® 2007
- OneNote® 2007
- Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager
- PowerPoint® 2007
- Publisher 2007
- Word 2007
What do you keep on your USB thumb drive? Project information, company information, client files, personal data? If you have data you want to protect with military grade encryption in a rugged USB thumb drive, take a look at the IronKey lineup of USB drives.
Three Versions
IronKey USB thumb drives come in a variety of sizes from 1 GB to 8 GB. You can pick from three versions depending on your need.
- IronKey Basic is the core technology platform for the IronKey family of secure storage and authentication products.
- IronKey Personal is a revolutionary personal security device designed to protect your data, passwords and online identity on any computer.
- IronKey Enterprise is the world’s most secure hardware-encrypted USB flash drive. IronKey devices are easy to use, and there is no need to install software or drivers. You can remotely administer policies across thousands of IronKey devices with the IronKey Enterprise management service. With its embedded strong authentication capabilities, IronKey Enterprise is also a scalable platform for deploying innovative secure enterprise applications.
Accenture has released the Accenture Green Technology Suite. It is a set of tools to help an organization assess its environmental standing and provide some recommendations to reduce its carbon footprint by improving the way IT is managed.
The flash based tool gives a view across the entire IT organization. It provides detailed assessments of where the company is within a maturity spectrum and suggests IT initiatives to address the company’s carbon footprint.
The tools also help calculate the impact of specific initiatives in terms of workplace environmental efficiency and data center energy savings.
The Accenture Green Technology Suite includes:
The Accenture Green Maturity Model – assesses the environmental efficiency of IT, suggesting actions to improve the organization’s overall environmental standing.
Based on the responses to 300 questions across five key areas – working practice, office environment, data center, procurement, and corporate citizenship – on topics ranging from commitment to reducing CO2 emissions, to type of enterprise network, the maturity model produces a comprehensive scorecard that rates where the organization sits on the green maturity spectrum on a scale from zero to five.
ASG Software Solutions, the originator of ASG’s Business Service Platform™ (BSP™), a true platform for Business Service Management (BSM), has expanded its BSP capabilities to seamlessly integrate key performance information from both distributed and mainframe environments.
The new BSP solutions responsible for this enhanced functionality include specific products for distributed performance management, virtualization performance management, enterprise performance management, and z/OS® performance and reporting management.
These strategic new developments are designed to assist in locating key performance information, federating this data into a meaningful context, and automating the performance management process for a wide range of IT environments. ASG’s BSP solutions for performance management now include seamless integration of both distributed and mainframe environments, plus turnkey support for z/OS, distributed, virtualized, J2EE and .NET systems. Because the open architecture of ASG’s BSP solutions allows integration with third-party vendor and custom-built solutions, it helps users leverage their investment in existing IT assets.
Budget conscious IT departments such as those in smaller organizations may be interested in Nagios. It is an open source network monitoring software solution that operates under the Linux operating system.
Service Detail View Tree Status Map
From their web site
Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external “plug-ins” which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.
