Clever business - is what top CEOs say about virtualization. Being smart when it comes to your company is about harnessing the full potential of all the assets working for you. Nowadays, financial outlays on computer systems and server environments can be enormous. Are you are sure you’re not wasting resources and money with poor performances from what you already have? Ask yourself or your CIO if your computer infrastructure is fully utilizing the available CPU, disk, memory and network capabilities.

Companies are increasingly turning to virtualization as a means to cut capital spending on server hardware, and for other benefits. With good reason. Essentially, virtualization software, also called a hypervisor, allows you to run several operating systems on a single physical server. If you haven’t considered how virtualization can benefit your business, now is the time.

You cannot afford to ignore, or be ill informed, about your information technology options. Virtualization is an extremely powerful tool that can allow you to create virtual data centers with your choice of complex applications. As with any business, surely the dramatic cuts in hardware expenditures, electricity costs and space are a reason to investigate the virtualization options, if nothing else. Consolidate your physical servers dramatically, while increasing capacity to take on more and bigger clients without added outlay.
A true hypervisor-based platform, such as Hyper-V, allows you to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems on the same physical server. Each operating system supplies all the hardware device drivers so you have maximum hardware compatibility, providing you with greater flexibility to cope with different projects.

The hypervisor controls the host processor and other resources and allocates what else is needed to each operating system, making sure that the virtual machines cannot disrupt each other. You can test and evaluate new software in an environment that doesn’t threaten to corrupt your established programs or services. An increase over recent years in effective and efficient service plans, security, migration from one physical server to another, and back up, has also increased the attractiveness of virtualization to top CEOs.

You can manage the hypervisor in-house, deploying servers as you see fit, while maintaining full control as well as security and performance.

It is time to realize how you can benefit by going virtual. Listen to the top CEOs who are already reaping the rewards.

How to Track Physical Assets with Hosted SharePoint Template

Managing hundreds of physical assets in an organization can be a daunting task. Organizations can draw multiple benefits from effective management of physical assets. The management of physical assets-their condition, purchase price, current value and retirement date-contribute majorly in increasing operational efficiencies and profitability. As assets directly impact the company’s expenses, asset managers require a system that helps in tracking multiple valuable physical assets across the organization or even across locations. Team members must have a clear visibility of the organization’s assets at all times which as a result, will also help in identifying the need for new assets. Lack of updated asset information results in loss of productive time spent in looking up information from various sources. Organizations need a system that speeds up and simplifies the process of making requisitions and obtaining approvals. read more…

Is your company outsourcing IT services? What are top CEOs outsourcing, and what do they have to say on the subject?
Companies recognize that a good CIO is critical for success, especially to keep up-to-date with the rapid advances in information technology options. IT services range from maintaining operations, to basic support, to delivering new IT applications, and most importantly to constantly researching and providing the best business intelligence.

You are no doubt aware that even a small downtime in email service can cost you much business activity. Such IT services are needed 24 hours a day. Why waste your valuable staff and technology resources on routine IT services? The outsourcing of IT services can provide solutions for these essential elementary services such as e-mail, data storage, and security options. There is no need to spend time and money to struggle with these services internally; source them externally from an expert. Virtualization software for outsourcing IT services has been adopted by experts and top CEOs alike faster than ever imagined.

The trick for success is two-fold. First, think about what services your business has to keep in-house to maintain a competitive advantage. Weigh up which services provide more benefits than risks to outsource, such as efficiency and reducing costs. Clearly, you want your top IT staff to spend their time on specialized business demands, intelligence and strategies. Stay at the forefront of the market with smart decisions about how your staff spends their time and skills.

The second trick is to find the right IT outsourcing provider. Ensure you get the service expertise and state-of-the-art server and data centers that your business relies on. What level of professional IT support does the provider offer? 24 hours, 7 days a week? Do you want the choice of having your own programs supported as well as those on standard lists? Do you get support in a range of areas: installation and infrastructure management as well as important, but time-consuming facets, such as hardware supply, security, backups, and OS patching and maintenance?

Top CEOs stay informed of the options available in the outsourcing of IT services. Expert, experienced virtualization professionals can help you to stay secure, minimize risks and maintain control of your IT system, while you focus on your business.

The importance of a good CIO is increasing as IT becomes indispensable to the business world. Many of the top CIO concerns remain the same over time; to name a few - security, compliance, managing company and technological changes, and importantly, staying at the forefront of where the future of computers is headed.

What continually changes is the available technology that provides new options to companies. A top CIO is required to keep up with the latest advances: to continually provide the best IT solutions to meet the company’s goals within a budget.
Tough economic times have brought increasing pressure on CIOs to prove that any IT expenses aid business growth: whether by delivering business intelligence or processes, or by pleasing customers. Additionally, CEOs expect reliable and robust IT services within the organization. CIOs need to know the smartest way to use their IT staff and resources to benefit the company.
Outsourcing IT services can dramatically reduce costs. Currently, a pertinent business question is which IT services can be outsourced and how? Your CIO must be able to inform you about the latest options in outsourcing. For example, is virtualization or cloud computing better for your company’s needs? Top CIOs must stay aware of current benefits and drawbacks.

Whatever the decision, security is always a top concern for CIOs. One challenge today is the increase in social networking sites, like Facebook, which risk potentially exposing company data. Ensuring security of virtualized infrastructures and servers is also of upmost concern for CIOs.

Cloud computing is now fundamental for many companies. One way to save money is to outsource low-risk applications such as document storage and management. Storage space requirements can be enormous if you have to manage escalating data growth from clients.

Top CIOs see storage as a time-consuming task that they can safely outsource to experts with few concerns, allowing time to focus on specialized business projects. With sensitive information, virtualization technology is more secure since your own staff manages the virtual computers. Virtualization can provide much relief by decreasing the amount of physical hardware and space you require to do the same jobs.

A concern for a CIO is to assure that a company’s IT choices will suit growth into the future. What are potential capacity needs in the next three years, and do the investments you choose today allow growth?

If you own an iPhone and you’ve ever tried to sift through the tons of junk on the App Store to find an app or game that was worth having, you know how frustrating it can be. When you’re a steady gamer who takes his entertainment seriously, it can be even more of a pain. If you settle on a relatively unknown title because of good reviews, you often soon find out that the good scores came from casual users, and the game you just shilled out $1-$10 for is actually a flop.

In an attempt to save you a bit of time and moo-lah, we’ve put together a quick list of must have games for those that must have games. This is by no means all the good games on the iPhone/iPod, just a few of the coolest.

Assassin’s Creed: Altairs Chronicles

Although it is not the open-world blockbuster game that came out for the X-box 360, PS3, or PC, this game does manage to keep you involved. For half of what you would pay for the Nintendo DS version, you do get a deeper-than-expected, busy and fun platformer that is reminiscent of Prince of Persia. This offering provides you with a solid six to eight hours of mobile gaming entertainment.

Spore Origins

This is a great introductory adaptation of Will Wright’s original Spore experience. Although it has been greatly stripped down, it still gives great and addictive gameplay. In this version, you only have to concentrate on the development of one single-celled organism in a petri dish, but it’s hard to put down after you’ve spent some time tilting around to feed on other spores. It’s just as fun customizing your critter’s body for greater offense and defense, affording great replay value. You can even use photos stored on your iPhone to create patterns for your spore. Loads of gamer fun for the five bucks they are charging.

Metal Gear Solid Touch

Don’t expect too much of the original series in this iPhone version of Metal Gear. This franchise has been putting out espionage-fueled adventures of Solid Snake and compadres for twenty years, and have not stopped here. MGST is set in environments from Metal Gear Solid 4, and the bad guys are out of the same game. Essentially, the game is a shooting gallery, but the graphic and gun play mechanics are so good, you’ll be stuck for a while. You can also earn up to 50 wallpapers in gameplay rewards. 8 bucks makes this one worth it.

Need for Speed Undercover

This is by far the best racing game for the iPhone. That is saying a lot, considering the sheer amount of racing games for the iPhone. Use the touch screen to brake or get a nitrous boost, and like most other iPhone racers, use your accelerometer to steer. Where this games is tops is in challenging gameplay, awesome cut scenes and a decent story line. Worth it at 10 bucks.

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution

Last be definitely not least is my personal iPhone favorite, Civilization Revolution. This game was put together with a lot of thought. The gesture-based controls are easy to get used to, using flicks, drags and pinches to navigate and order troops around. There isn’t anything to miss in this iPhone version either. It comes complete with 16 civilizations, 3 levels of difficulty, a built in tutorial, and many other features that make this one of the most in-depth games for the iPhone.

As you can see, not all iPhone apps are hit and miss. Some of them have definitely put forth the effort to deserve your attention, so check them out, and see if you agree.

I don’t know about you, but every once in a while I get an urge to take off, say “forget everything”, and head into the northern wilderness. Then sanity sets in, and I am reminded that I wouldn’t fare well, having spent the past several years at my desk instead of keeping healthy.

Then the next site in our SharePoint hi-light series reminds me that it’s not always an all or nothing prospect, and that the adventure of the northern wilderness can be experienced like a normal person, by moving to or visiting Anchorage, Alaska.

Today we are going to visit and review the official site of this Alaskan municipality, and see how they handle passing on the huge amounts of information that the public might need. We will look at how they utilize SharePoint, and find out if they do it well.

At first impression, the home page seems busy, but still somewhat organized. At the top, there is a prominently displayed navigation bar, which surprisingly does not have drop-down menus. Instead, the information has been organized into few enough sections to fit on the bar. The rest of the page is separated into sections that lead you to information based on your needs.

The one thing I find a little odd is the navigation form. I am torn as to whether it is a good thing. It is organized into three drop down menus that give a choice. Lists include “Most Popular,” “How Do I..?”, and “Municipal Departments”, and while not allowing the dynamic nature of a search, does directly address most needs one might have of the city.

If you don’t use the form, there are links organized by area, like all the links a Resident might need, or links for business needs. Not as prominent are links for tourism info, the Mayor’s blog and others like the community calendar. The most notable piece of dynamic content would be the weather widget that is unfortunately buried at the bottom of the page. The lack of heavy dynamic content is not a problem; to the contrary, the site loaded faster than most.

All in all, the site provides the content that is expected, in a way that is reasonably easy to follow. The color scheme is inviting and hints of adventure. If I ever do decide to head North, it will be where I start gathering info. I give this SharePoint site a solid 4 out of 5 stars, definitely worth visiting.

Last month I wrote a review on the Novatel Wireless MiFi, the cool new mobile hotspot. I gave it a generally glowing review, but reserved the right to later judgment based on further testing.

Well, I am calling upon the right of later judgment. Upon further review, this device did not deliver the goods. As I reported before, all the features seemed to work quite well; I had been able to get it up and running with no issues at all. After running steady for a few hours, however, the problems started to appear.

Seemingly at random and for no apparent reason, the MiFi would disconnect and reconnect to the service. This presented somewhat of a problem when I was trying to move a file with no resume capabilities. If the connection bounced at any time during the transfer, I had to start completely over. This is unacceptable as a main connection to the Internet.

After much research and not a few calls to technical support, I came to the conclusion that there is a flaw in either the hardware or the firmware running it. Apparently, this is a regular occurrence, and not yet solved. This forced me to revisit the Sprint store and my solution for connecting to the Internet.

After some paperwork, I settled on the Sierra Wireless 598U as a replacement solution. This nice little piece of hardware is a USB 3G wireless modem. About 3 inches long and an inch wide, it also contains a micro-SD card reader.

This USB modem is compatible with both windows and OSX, but requires proprietary software to be installed. The good thing is that you don’t have to keep track of a CD: the drivers and software are built into the firmware of the device and are installed the first time it is plugged in.

The 598U absolutely blows the MiFi away as far as connection strength and stability, and I am getting better speeds than I ever have on Sprint’s network. Even when my signal is showing at forty percent, I am getting better speeds than the MiFi would with 100% signal strength.

I was easily able to install the USB modem on my Macbook Pro and share the connection wirelessly with the other computers in my house. After a few weeks of testing and moving several Gigabytes of information, I am happy to report that the 598U is handling my needs quit nicely.

Although it would have been nice if the Novatel MiFi had delivered, I can say that the new solution is working quit well, and Sprint has done a reasonable job of customer service in the process.

Thanks for coming back to read the latest. Make sure to check back often for more on SharePoint, new devices, and other cool topics.

As we have seen with our “SharePoint Site Hi-light” series, SharePoint has been embraced by the corporate world as a robust web solution, but there is so much more to discover. Today, I thought we could take a peak under the hood at some of the features that make SharePoint tops in social computing, too.

My Sites

When you create a social network using SharePoint and start adding users, personal spaces on SharePoint are automatically being created for each user you add. These personal spaces are called My Sites, which work like many other social network sites, but with added features and capabilities. Included in each My Site are places to view and manage documents, links, calendar, relationships, and other personal information.

Blogs

Microsoft SharePoint includes several ways to implement blogs. Actually, every My Site has a blog incorporated. In addition, users can create new SharePoint blog sites and attach them to an existing Team Site. This gives the team a blog that adds extra content and value along with their document repositories, calendars and lists. SharePoint blogs can also be archived and indexed for search, which makes them a repository for collective knowledge.

People Search

People Search is an important SharePoint feature for large or growing organizations. It makes finding the right individuals much easier than with most directories. Multiple types of searches can be used, including by expertise. Results can be sorted by fields like job title or by social distance. Once you choose a result, you’re taken to the public profile of that user which will include all public information that they chose to share.

Wikis

Microsoft SharePoint also has built in wikis for sharing information and group collaboration on content. The wikis provided by Microsoft SharePoint include the content management features of SharePoint like version history, document check-in, approval workflows and permissions. One can also upgrade to a low cost dedicated SharePoint server with hyper-v hosting.

This is by far a limited list of the features available through Microsoft SharePoint. Many features that haven’t been discussed here, but we may have given you an idea of the social network and collaboration capabilities of SharePoint. To be honest, there isn’t much you can’t do with this product.

How to Manage Request for Proposals (RFPs) and Vendor Proposal Process with Hosted SharePoint Template

Managing volumes of RFPs can be tough. The process of submitting request for proposals and managing responses is a very important step in the procurement process as it enables an organization in making “preferred supplier” decisions. If handled inappropriately, it can take up a lot of time and effort. Setting up a system to manage this process helps in making sound business decisions that would best suit your organization’s requirements. Organizations need an application that presents RFP information in an orderly manner and helps organize the process of creating your own RFPs and managing proposals received from vendors. Such a system should make available all information specific to a proposal at one central location. Assigning ownership and tracking of tasks pertaining to a proposal should be made easier.

The Request for Proposal SharePoint application template helps team members in creating RFPs and managing proposals submitted by vendors. You can create and upload your RFP documents on the site under the user specific “My RFPs” location where the RFP title, description, owner, due date and status are specified. This template allows you to upload proposals submitted by vendors. It includes functionality to track the status of proposals. Users can specify details such as vendor information, date of submission, and status - whether the proposal is under review, accepted or rejected. Thus, proposals can be organized according to vendors or RFPs. Vendors can be notified about the status of proposals. This template enables you to upload a Statement of Work after a proposal is accepted. The statement of work is helpful in tracking details, milestones and deadlines. Team members can also host discussions on this site pertaining to specific proposals.

Windows SharePoint Services site hosting give you better control over your organization’s data, which otherwise involves high costs and complexity. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is often available with hosted application templates free with hosted SharePoint plans with WSS 3.0. These SharePoint hosting templates are highly scalable, flexible and easy to use. These can be deployed quickly and easily across organizations of different sizes. These templates provide advanced administrative control at minimal costs. They facilitate secure data storage and collaboration. The basic SharePoint hosting pricing plans start at $8.95 per month with access for unlimited users from hosted Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange vendors and one can also upgrade to a low cost dedicated SharePoint server with hyper-v hosting. Also, available additionally are free SharePoint hosting WSS 3.0 templates developed by Microsoft. The SharePoint hosting templates are available instantly after signing up for a basic SharePoint hosting plan.

When it comes to bicycles, there’s high- tech, and then there’s Orbea. With standard features like direct cable routing, carbon gold frame and one piece carbon-fiber monocoque stops, Orbea bicycles are some of the best you can get. Just ask Craig Alexander, the 2009 Iron Man champion.

The question we want to answer today, however, is how their SharePoint Driven web site stacks up. Does it perform well? Is the site pleasing to the senses? Is it easy to find the information I’m looking for? How does this site utilize the Dynamic capabilities of SharePoint? If I were a high- toned, bicycling uber- athlete, would I leave the site with all the info I needed and a desire to buy an Orbea? We shall see.

On first loading up the Orbea site, we are greeted with a splash screen with language options. Since this is an international site, this is expected and well done. Although there is ad material to hype the product, the only option on the splash page is for language choice.

After choosing English, we navigate to the main page, where we are greeted by a black and white color scheme that is heavily supported by photos. As a mater of fact, there are no expanses of color; rather what would have solid colors has photos instead, such as the background. Where you would expect a solid color or a gradient, there is an entire bicycle/ road photo.

Most of the home page is taken up by a flash intro, followed by an interactive presentation of an Alma, one of the bicycles built by Orbea. This is a reasonably interesting, easy to navigate, and unique way to present a product. After spending a few minutes checking it out, I know a lot more about the technology that goes into one of these two-wheeled wonders.

As with most sites, they do use drop down menus, and if you have read any of my earlier reviews, you probably know that it is a pet peeve of mine. It’s a usability thing. However, I do have to point out that they took a newer approach to this as well.

When you roll over the main links, as the menu drops down, the entire page fades to a dark background, and this does make it easier to concentrate on finding the link I’m looking for. I would have to say that although it does not follow best practice rules, it is an improvement over regular drop down menus.

After spending a bit more time perusing the site, I am comfortable giving it 3.5 out of five possible stars. It seems to be a very well put together site, everything in its place, and information where you would expect to find it. The biggest downfall is that there can be some difficulty navigating the drop down menu at times.

That’s all we have for this installment of SharePoint Site Hi- light. One can also upgrade to a low cost dedicated SharePoint server with hyper-v hosting. Check back often for more SharePoint info and news, along with new gadgets, iPhone Apps and other interesting tech topics.