Posted by Brady Reiter
Most organizations are looking for ways to cost-effectively manage their Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, Lawson and Kronos applications. Outsourcing applications to a third party to manage is a good option to save money, time and resources. However, choosing an application management provider is not an easy task.
To make the assessment easier, here are top 25 questions to ask a prospective application management provider. This Top 25 will ensure a comparable analysis of providers and will also enable you to lay the framework for a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. Read more…
Posted by Jason Hollenberg
NaviSite engineers have noticed a recent trend in the IT industry to move toward tape-less backup solutions for cost and efficiency reasons. This tends to occur mostly within small organizations where tape backup equipment and managing costs have a higher impact than in larger corporations. IT administrators are forced to balance between backup solutions they can afford and what their backup needs actually are. Many administrators choose to ensure business critical data (email and files) is stored on redundant hardware such as RAID1 (mirrored) or RAID5 (striped with parity) or even automated copy jobs to another physical server and consider that data safe.
Read more…
Posted by Jason Hollenberg
For those who may not be familiar, Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging is an add-on option of the Exchange 2007 email server suite that bridges an IP-based PBX phone system with corporate email. This allows businesses to add exciting new features such as natively-supported voicemails into email; faxes into email; and Outlook Voice Access, i.e., verbal access to emails, calendar, and contacts via a telephone.
Microsoft’s recent foray into the telephony field signals a paradigm shift in how phones and email are viewed and supported. Unified messaging breaks the traditional barriers existing between various messaging systems – changing the way businesses communicate and collaborate. All types of messages are stored in a single system – eliminating the need to manage multiple messaging systems, and hence reducing the cost and complexities associated with a messaging environment. Read more…
Posted by Jason Hollenberg
At times MS Exchange engineers run into network issues with servers that have the DNS Server security update 953230 (MS08-037) applied where services like IAS, IPSEC, and ActiveSync AUTD (Always Up To Date) won’t start after a reboot. This is especially painful if the server is running IPSEC services (PPTP VPN) because the server runs in Block mode and blocks all inbound and outbound network connectivity to itself. Read more…
Posted by Jason Hollenberg
04-15-2009
No longer do MS Exchange users need to worry about what might happen should a worst-case natural disaster scenario occur.
Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 now includes Standby Continuous Replication (or SCR) – an exciting new feature that natively supports site resiliency for Exchange email data. A first in the Microsoft history, this feature ensures that email data is replicated offsite to a standby server, which can be activated with a simple command to get users up and running with minimal downtime, even if the central data center where email data is normally stored goes offline.
Hypothetically, with a primary data center on the East coast of the United States and secondary data center located on the west coast, data can be replicated between the sites using SCR to ensure email stays accessible even if the primary site is lost. Furthermore, data replication can also be configured to delay transaction log processing for a preset amount of time (24 hours by default) – so that if the source email database at the primary data center experiences corruption, the backup copy won’t introduce the corrupted data into the backup database. Read more…
