Windows Intune provides a simple way to manage many of the day-to-day PC housekeeping tasks that would otherwise go unattended in certain environments. Small to mid-size businesses usually do not have any dedicated IT staff or if they do an IT person employed, that staff member is usually busy with many other things and system security is often way down on that list of priorities. That is where Windows Intune shines, because it is easy to configure and does not require a whole lot of attention once it is up and running. The administrator logs into the admin console and immediately sees alerts and issues related to machines that are being monitored and secured via Windows Intune.

Active Directory’s Group Policy feature is more aimed at larger environments as it allows to go really granular and detailed of how to configure workstations and laptops in an environment. Windows Intune does not go into that detail at this point. When AD Group Policy and Windows Intune meet in the same environment, Group Policy takes higher priority and will set the standards.

There is a lot of management available in Intune that is not available in AD group policy (that’s where larger environments would use Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager). Administrators can push out system updates and Service Packs to client machines based on a pre-defined schedule or manually at any given time. They can also set security policies (as discussed), deploy endpoint and firewall settings, view critical alerts, create and export reports. Windows Intune even allows to check the installed software inventory listings and licensing information of managed PCs. Admins can upload volume license information and match up their licensed inventory accordingly and correct issues.

Windows Intune does not use the Active Directory Organizational Unit structure if deployed in such an environment. Instead administrators will want to create groups and structure machines that way accordingly. Group Policy on the other side makes heavy usage of OUs in Active Directory. In general this shows that Windows Intune is not really targeted towards larger customers with thousands of seats, but more towards small and mid-sized businesses. As there is no minimum requirements, Windows Intune can be used from 1 workstation environments all the way up to 20,000 seats per account. I am sure Microsoft will raise this level beyond 20,000 soon, but I personally think that they will further improve the product with more features before doing so.

I always log into GMail a few times a day to check on email and so it is really annoying to see this kind of message. It reminds how important email is to us these days and how dependent we are on email anyway. A day that starts like that is not a good day for me. I just checked Twitter for “gmail down” and several other people are experiencing the same problems.

I have to say how relieved I am knowing my business email is not hosted by Google. Google to me is sometimes like this big, anonymous company with no interest in being contacted by its customers. I understand that Gmail is a free service and that I am not entitled to support, but on the other side if a company has such a big foot print and reaches out into our life’s as much as Google does, I would think that it is important that there is an easy way to get in touch with the company and notify them about problems.

My business email is hosted with Microsoft Online Services using Microsoft Exchange 2010. I have easy access to my email via Outlook and via the web browser. Microsoft provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee and there is an easy way to contact them about issues. If I would not be a Microsoft partner myself I could also contact my Microsoft partner and notify them about issues and ask for help. So far I have not experienced any issues connecting ever to my email account since it is hosted with Microsoft Online Services.

From a business perspective I am always a little surprised how many small businesses still use free email accounts. It’s a bad move for branding and does not look very professional to me. In addition, many of these small businesses have their own domain name and so it should be really easy to setup an email address under their domain. Is it the lack of knowledge that there are cheap and very reliable solutions out there maybe? If you are using Gmail for your business and want to find what other options there are – contact me (Chris Puetz) through our contact form on this website.

I think this is a great sign how reliable and flexible BPOS is and that small businesses should definitely consider this option as well. Sure, the United States Department of Agriculture will get a larger volume discount just based on the overall size of this contract, but the reduced need for IT management and server hardware makes this a no brainer for many small to mid-size businesses.

BPOS includes the hosted versions of Microsoft Exchange 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Live Meeting, and Office Communicator. BPOS will soon be re-branded to Office 365 and the entire suite will then include a hosted version of Office as well.

If you are interested in a free trial for BPOS yourself, please contact us. DT Advanced is an official Microsoft Partner and we will be happy to set you up with a free 30 day trial for the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. DT Advanced Inc. is based in the Denver Metro area and we do IT Consulting for Denver and the surrounding communities. We use BPOS for our infrastructure as well and love it. The ease of use and the redundancy we get by having Microsoft host it – it’s fantastic. Microsoft offers a 99.9% up-time guarantee which lets me personally sleep much better at night knowing that my customers and my own business can rely on this service 24/7.

While there things I definitely cannot control, there are others that I can control and I think it is important that you know about them. Nobody wants their relatives, especially our aging parents to become victims of Internet crime if we could have prevented it with some really simple and affordable measures.

Today I want to tell you about Windows InTune. Windows InTune is a brand-new Microsoft product that takes computer security and computer management to a new level. No longer are these options only available to large corporations. Today remove management and computer security are available to consumers like you and me.  With Windows InTune I am able to remotely manage the computer security on a remote computer – a perfect solution to take of your parents computers. Here is what Windows InTune will allow you to do:

• Deploy Windows Security Patches remotely
• Malware Protection
• Receive Threat Alerts
• Remote Assistance
• Apply Security Policies

How does the remote assistance feature works? Mom or Dad would initiate the remote assistance session from their computer – then allowing you to remotely access their PC or laptop and to manage it and to address any issues. This is a great tool. Let’s say your Mom accidentally deletes her email configuration and no longer receives your emails. You remote into her machine and reconfigure the email client and Mom is back on track immediately. Or Dad finally wants to get onto Facebook and so you already setup an account for him. Now you remote into his machine and do a live presentation and explain to him how Facebook works and how he can access his new account on Facebook.

While Windows InTune was initially designed for small to mid-size businesses, it is a great solution for consumers that want to manage a remote computer as well. The price is very affordable. Microsoft charges $11.00 per month for this service. Even better, Windows InTune includes an upgrade license to Windows 7. So, the next time you visit Mom and Dad you could upgrade their machines to Windows 7 and therefore provide an even greater level of security for them. Windows InTune does not require a minimum number of licenses to be purchased, so it is a perfect for consumers who want to buy just 1 or 2 licenses. Purchases need to be associated with Microsoft and DT Advanced is happy to set you up with a free 30 day trial as needed.

Resources

Official Microsoft Windows InTune Website

At the moment my personal opinion about this new Internet package from Comcast is split. For one the speed is faster than what many web servers are able to deliver. Also, you need to keep in mind that this is the so-called “last mile” of access to the Internet and even though you have the speed option, the limitations that will slow you down are beyond your control. An additional concern that I have is that Comcast is known to limit the overall amount of data that you can download. On their traditional high-speed Internet options this limit is fairly low with 250 GB. Faster Internet speeds might just push you closer to this artificial ceiling faster. And then my main concern is how is Comcast going to treat the different types of data or traffic that you are using?

As an example I use Netflix for watching movies that I stream from the Internet onto my TV at home. Many movies and shows are available in HD (High Definition) and that creates quite some data volume. I am barely watching cable TV at all and so my concern is how Comcast will treat traffic related to competing products like Netflix. Comcast does not earn a single cent from me if I watch Netflix, Hulu, or TV Shows through iTunes. In the past Comcast is known to limit traffic speeds for certain types of traffic and would Comcast do the same to traffic coming from sources like Netflix?

There were also discussions in the past where Comcast and other (mainly) cable Internet providers want extra money from companies like Netflix to have their traffic being carried on their Internet infrastructure. What this really means is that the Internet Service Provider can charge content providers extra fees or completely prevent them from being accessible from their infrastructure. In that moment it is not your choice anymore, but the choice of your ISP of what you can do or not do with your Internet connection. And to close the loop, companies like Comcast make more money by selling you over-priced cable TV packages or On-Demand content than from selling you a high-speed Internet connection. For me, that is an obvious conflict of interest and makes me concerned about using Comcast as my Internet Service Provider.

Back to the question if you really need such fast Internet connections as the Extreme 105? In a few years, you definitely want one of those. Right now the speed benefits are minimal and you are over-paying for what you get in return. I personally think that this product is over-priced. Let’s take a look over the pond to Europe. One of the largest ISPs in Germany just announced a similar product with actually better speeds for roughly half the price of what Comcast is asking for. Even if you would buy the premium package over there, you still pay 30%-40% less and you get extra On-Demand content and even faster speeds, too.

Conclusion: Hold off from spending your money on Comcast’s Extreme 105 for now unless you really have a very specific need to justify the steep price. While I personally like higher Internet speeds, for one there are too many unknowns in regards to Comcast and at the current time there is not enough value coming out of this. Let’s revisit in 6-12 months and take a second stab at it.

Patching machines with such a large number of updates can be quite a task. Did you know that DT Advanced offers a new product in combination with Microsoft? Windows InTune is a new service offering that allows remote patch management of your computers. But Windows InTune is more than just a remote patch management tool. Windows InTune helps to protect PCs from malware. It allows to remotely apply certain security policies that will make your work environment more secure. Windows InTune allows providers like DT Advanced to provide remove support assistance – dramatically cutting down on potential downtime for your businesses. Microsoft InTune is also a great tool to keep track of your hardware and software inventory and to proactively monitor your PCs and Laptops.

Windows InTune works with existing Microsoft Operating Systems like Windows XP (SP3), Windows Vista, and of course Windows 7. One of the best benefits by subscribing to Windows InTune is that you get a free upgrade license to Windows 7 Enterprise from Microsoft.

Please contact DT Advanced if you are interested in hearing more about Windows InTune. We are also able to set you up with a free 30 Day Trial of Windows InTune.

But that is not enough. When I talked to my friend it was obvious how ignorant her employer actually was (I don’t mean this in a bad way). But they still file paper into filing cabinets … a lot. The company does not have anything in place to digitalize documents (aka document scanning). They have a basement full with filing cabinets where they move documents that are not needed for current operations. They are slowly running out of physical space, but they are still not really looking for better options. Right now the discussion is more about “Shall we buy additional filing cabinets?”.

In my opinion there are many things wrong with this picture. For one, their approach is fairly old-fashioned. The document scanning technology has evolved dramatically over the last few years and there is no reason not to scan documents and to archive them electronically. In addition, physically storing paper is a) very time consuming and b) expensive. It also poses a major problem when disaster strikes: There are no copies.

Let’s say a water pipe breaks and floods the basement. Unless the filing cabinets are sealed and water-proof (unlikely) anything that gets wet is most-likely a total loss. The clean-up is messy and very time-consuming if one tries to dry the paper and to rescue what is left to rescue. But it is not over after that. By law a business has to keep certain types of data for x amount of years and if the physical archive is destroyed this can pose a major issue for a business.

There are quite a few solutions to this situation. Document scanning and electronic archiving is easily achievable and affordable. It also reduces the amount of time that is needed to file documents and to eventually retrieve them at a later time. Electronic archiving saves money – think less physical space needed as an example. It also makes a business more disaster proof. It is easy to store the archived data on external hard drives or backup tape and to move them offsite. Depending on the size of a business this can be as simple as a safety deposit box at a bank or by using a professional service provider like Iron Mountain.

What can you do for your own business, especially if you are on a budget? I use a $450 document scanner and 2 external hard drives  that I rotate through a safety deposit box at a bank. This solution has reduced my need for paper filing dramatically. I am covered if my house burns down and the overall loss of data should be sustainable with this solution. The document scanner is very small and does not use much space nor is there a big learning curve to operate it.

Conclusion: Disaster Recovery is not just about getting your operations back up and running as fast as possible. It is also affects many other items including simple items like historic data, data filing, and meeting legal requirements. Keep in mind the IRS does not care if water destroyed your archive. If you are being audited they want to see data. DT Advanced is well experienced with disaster recovery, data replication, and electronic storage of documents. Please give us a call and let us help you to make your business more disaster proof.

Internet Explorer 9 has major support for the new HTML 5 standard already build-in and is ahead of its competitors. Graphic-rich websites will perform faster in IE9 and therefore your experience as a user/visitor will dramatically improve on websites that take advantage of the new technology. IE9 is also offering a cleaner user interface. Enjoy easy access to tabs, find websites you visited earlier, or as an example re-open tabs that were closed by accident.

One of the major new features is the new inPrivate Browsing. InPrivate Browsing will not leave a trace of your web browsing activity on your computer. While this feature does not cover your tracks on the Internet itself, it will make your Internet activity hidden on the computer you are on. This is a great option on a publicly shared computer where you want to make sure that your personal usage information is confidential. The new InPrivate Browsing feature helps to prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, any form data, cookies, and even user names and critical passwords from being stored by the browser or retrievable by anyone with access to the local computer with admin rights.

I highly recommend you check out the entire list of features Internet Explorer has to offer. The upgrade is easy and fast and you are back up and running in no time. Even if the features are not necessarily your thing, you should still consider upgrading to IE9 to benefit from the inreased level of security it has to offer.

Many small business owners either do not know anything about disaster recovery options for their business or they assume that a good DR plan is just too expensive to implement for a small business. From experience I can say that this is absolutely wrong and that many small businesses putting them self at the brink of extinction by ignoring even the smallest options to recover from a major disaster.

Believe it or not, but there are many things a small business can do to survive a disaster. I am writing from experience here and can definitely relate to the needs of small businesses. I am an owner of a small business since 2002. This business I am talking about is not related to DT Advanced Inc. and I still own and operate it at the time of this writing.

When my business started growing I had more data to keep track off. First I brought up a server and stored the data on the server, but then realized what if that server went down. How would I be able to access that data? I bought an external hard drive and then used a small script and the Windows Scheduler in Windows 2003 Server to execute the script every night and to copy the data from the server to the external hard drive. Whoohoo, I was all set … so I thought. And you probably guessed it, I was dead wrong. What would happen if the building the server and the external hard drive were in would burn down?! What if a Power Surge would fry the server and the external hard drive? What if thieves would break in and steal the server and the external hard drive?

Quite a few questions and I have quite a few answers for you, too. So, confronting myself I had to come up with other options. I wanted 2 options. I wanted the data offsite and protected from mother nature as much as possible and I wanted quick access to it if something would happen as well as reduce any loss of data as much possible. I found 2 different solutions that up until today let me sleep like a baby at night because I do not have to worry about my data anymore.

I went and bought a second, identical hard drive to match up with the external hard drive mentioned earlier. I took the external hard drive that I already had and put it into my existing safety deposit box at my local bank. I hooked up the new drive for daily backups. Now once a quarter I rotate these 2 hard drives. The one from the office goes into the safety deposit box and the other one comes back to the office and takes on the daily backups. So, if something would happen the max I could lose would be roughly 3 months of data.

But this was not enough. I needed a more current copy of my data and this time I turned to the cloud. By using Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) and a 3rd party application I am replicating my data out to the cloud. This happens automatically and in real time and my data is in a secure location in a different geographic region. This actually might be overkill, but over the years having a good backup and DR strategy has saved my a few times that I just don’t want to go with less protection.

Now you might wonder how much does this cost and will this work for other small businesses, too?! The answer to this is “It depends” and “Yes”. Lets answer the second question first: Will this work for other small businesses, too? You bet it does. This solution is actually scalable and can be easily modified and customized. How much will it cost? That question is more difficult to answer, but I will try to give you the necessary data. In my case I bought two external hard drives (1 TB storage) for $99.00 each (~ today’s pricing). My safety deposit box costs $75.00 per year and the script is freeware. For the cloud storage the cost is a little different. I am not replicating all the data, just the essentials to keep the cost low. In my case I am getting away with roughly $10.00 per month which represents roughly 80-100 GB of data.

Conclusion: You can see that this is a fairly easy setup and not very complex. My data is backed up several times and located in different locations (including an entire different geographic area). The initial setup did not require more than 15 minutes and maintenance is very low. DT Advanced is well experienced with small DR configurations, but also with solutions and options that are used at Fortune 500 companies today. So, if you are interested in how you can help to make your business more disaster proof, talk to us.

By making a detailed assessment of a situation with virtualization as one of the main drivers it allows you really determine the best solution for a situation. The key is to plan to use virtualization and then to eventually work your way back down to dedicated hardware. This will allow you make virtualization your primary option and to reap the benefits accordingly. This plan of attack also helps you to eventually justify the purchase of dedicated hardware for a solution without having to wonder if virtualization would have been better in this situation.

So, under what circumstances is it really critical to decide between virtualization and dedicated computer hardware? If your funds are unlimited you could pretty much virtualize almost anything because you could put enough memory, CPU, and disk spindles behind a solution. In real life this is not always feasible. For one who has unlimited funds available anyway and second if you get to that point dedicated hardware is most likely the better option. Virtualization would just add an additional layer of complexity that you do not want.

Let’s step away from the large corporate world and let’s look at this from a perspective for small to mid-size businesses. Most file and print servers are prime candidates for virtualization. The overall system load is very manageable and the requirements especially for disk I/O are limited. From experience I can tell you that CPU is often the least concern when it comes to virtualization and file and print servers are not heavy users there anyway.

The next item to look at now is the typical database and application server. In the old days of virtualization (3-5 years ago) the mantra was not to virtualize your database servers as performance would suffer. This statement was independent from the overall load and performance of each database server. Now things have changed and improved virtualization technologies (ESX, Hyper-V, etc) definitely allow to virtualize SQL database servers. Key is to allocate appropriate resources – especially when it comes to spindles for improved disk i/o. Depending on the load by using enough disk drives underneath SQL should perform just fine when being virtualized. It is important to note that you need to do proper SQL tuning and configuration for optimum performance. An example would be to separate out the different portions of SQL into different virtual hard drives and to eventually spread those out onto different physical disk. This is even possible in small to mid-size business environments without adding too much additional cost. The benefits would be increased system uptime and higher availability when using virtual cluster setups. And depending on how old the existing hardware is that you plan on replacing, you will actually see dramatic improvements in performance.

Conclusion: DT Advanced is well experienced with virtualization and we have had the opportunity to work on quite a few virtualization projects. From our experience virtualization should be your first choice when time comes to replace old hardware or when a new project requires additional resources. We have seen a lot of hesitation when it comes to virtualizing work loads for the first time. By doing the appropriate research and planning we have been able to show and prove that virtualization is a business-proof technology. However, it is very important to understand that virtualization projects will look a little different compared to one where you just buy server hardware, install an OS and an application and walk away. The initial investment in virtualization is a little higher and the big money savings are coming in afterwards. Some people see a positive ROI after just a few months, while other might see them after a year. However, considering that the average lifecycle of a new server can easily be between 3-7 years, a huge amount of savings will usually be accomplished anyway. It is definitely worth spending a little time in calculating out the savings. In one project we were able to accomplish savings of over $1,400.000.00 over a 3 year period just from hardware and software cost – not even putting the savings on labor into consideration.