Sunday, April 27, 2008

Postini - ROI on SPAM protection


We converted from Symantec(Brightmail) SPAM filtering about three months ago with expectations to improve our 70% filtering ratio. I'm am extremly pleased with thier filtering service. We are now filtering over 92% of all our email as SPAM. Unbelieveable! Here is something to think about for calculating ROI. We had a total of 354,078 spam emails deleted over the last 30 days. If a staff person would take about five seconds to view and delete each of the SPAM emails, then we have saved about 492 staff hours or $9,835 in staff productivity. (Using an arbituary $20 per hour per staff) Now that's ROI.

Arena CHMS update

We have been working over the last year or so on migrating from Shelby Version 5 and all our custom .NET applications over to Shelby ARENA. We are making steady progress. ARENA is both elagant and powerful. No software program is perfect but we are very happy with our ARENA decision.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

New technology to watch


Microsoft is acquiring Kidaro to enhance thier ability for desktop virtualization. This is exciting technology and could radically change the way desktops are used and managed. Microsoft will be including this new technology in the Desktop Optimization Pack or MDOP. https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/enterprise/default.mspx
This technology allows a master image to boot clean every time . This technology could dramaticaly change our ServiceDesk operations.

Cisco Wireless controller....awesome


We have the Cisco 4400 Series wireless LAN controller at our Gilbert Campus. We have been amazed at the broadcast range of the light-weight access points.
We are now adding more access points at our Mesa Campus that will be controlled from the wireless contoller at our Gilbert Campus. We are gradually replacing all the standalone Linksys AP's in Mesa that are not centrally managed or monitored. One of our best technology investments was getting a centrally managed wireless infrastructure.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Blog update!



Here is my new feedburner address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/adventuresinit

A new era...64bit technology


We just ordered our first 64bit Dell 2950 server. We will be using Windows Server 2008 Data Center edition as a virtual host server using HyperVisor. We are very excited about this new technology. We hope to eventually move all our virtual servers to this new platform over the next year. We currently have three virtual host servers running Windows 2003 Server Data Center with about 15 virtual servers in production. We have been very satisfied with Microsoft Virtual technology especially Virtual Machine Manager. I'll keep you posted on our progress. These are exciting times.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Microsoft Groove....killer ap?


Sometimes we need to step away from a problem in order to find a better solution to the problem.
We are setting up a Groove Server to improve file collaboration among the staff. We have many laptops that depend on offline syncing of server-based files. The Groove sofware solves this problem by sending just the file changes to all Groove Workspace members automatically wheneverthe document is saved. the transmition of the changes is encrpted to all Workspace members. This is not sent by email. So everyone can see the latest changes...very cool. The Groove client software comes with Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.
Could this be a killer ap?