Dataplex Systems Ltd

Windows 7 Launch Sales up 234% over Vista

2009-11-06T02:03:00.001-08:00

The NPD Group has some figures now from the Windows 7 launch, and are reporting that the new Microsoft operating system is selling well or at least, much better than Vista did at its launch. In the first few days of sales, Windows 7 units in the U.S. moved 234 percent faster than Vista did in its equivalent launch window.

Of course, in many ways the bar wasn't set too high. Still, Microsoft must be feeling relieved at the good sales clip for what is still, after all, its core business.

Unfortunately, thanks to pre-sales discounts and general lack of promotional effort behind the Ultimate version, revenue growth wasn't quite as impressive. Looking strictly at dollar sales, Windows 7 is up 82% over than the equivalent time period for Vista.

The NPD reported the top-selling versions of the software and their average prices for the week ending October 24 as follows:

1. Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade / $76

2. Windows 7 Pro Upgrade / $147

3. Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack 3 User Upgrade / $149

In a tough economic time for packaged software, Windows 7 appears to be faring fairly well. The PC hardware sales picture wasn't nearly as rosy, however. Although total PC sales were up 49 percent in year-over-year sales and a full 95 percent over the previous week, the overall growth rate was not as high as during the Vista launch window, which saw a 68% jump in year-over-year and 170% gain over the week prior to Vista's launch. Vista had a slight advantage with its January release however, which typically shows a larger PC sales footprint than the month of October.

50% of all Workloads will be virtual by 2012

2009-10-28T02:11:00.001-07:00

Last week Gartner released a press announcement disclosing that only 16% of workloads run inside virtual machines at present.

The analysis firm predicted that this amount is going to reach around 50% by 2012, which is equal to 58 million deployed virtual machines.

Gartner also adds:

…by year-end 2010, enterprises with 100-999 employees will have a higher penetration of virtual machines deployed than the Global 500…

In May 2007 for example Gartner predicted that virtualization will be part of nearly every aspect of IT by 2015.

In April 2008 Gartner also said that 4 million virtual machines were expected by 2009, while we would have 611 million virtualized PCs by 2011.

VMware Keeps vSphere Enterprise!

2009-10-28T02:09:00.001-07:00

Citrix is not the only company listening to customers feedbacks. After much debate around the decision to kill the vSphere Enterprise Edition by December 15, VMware decided to keep it.

Those customers coming from VI3.5 were entitled to keep their existing Enterprise license while moving to the new vSphere 4.0 platform. But VMware originally planned to kill this upgrade option by the end of the year.

Exchange 2010

2009-10-28T02:06:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago Microsoft announced that Exchange 2010 was code complete and we thought as it sets a milestone for Microsoft Messaging we would highlight some of the key features of it.

One server, many solutions

One of the things that is interesting is the evolution of Exchange from an e-mail server to a multi-workload communications backbone. Some organisations are now bringing in Exchange to do the job once managed by four or five different systems, and the results are really impressive. With Exchange 2010, you’ve got a full e-mail, calendar and contacts solution, built-in information protection, built-in mobile e-mail and mobile device management, a full voice mail replacement, and a brand new archiving, retention and discovery solution. Exchange administrators have seen their roles grow from simply providing great e-mail to providing an end-to-end communications solutions.

It does e-mail

It always has, but in 2010, it does it better. With the new high availability, disaster recovery and back up capabilities combined with the significant IO reduction a few very cool things become possible. First, what used to take multiple applications to achieve mailbox resiliency becomes possible using just Exchange. Second, a very large mailbox – even 10 gigs+ becomes very affordable and supportable.

It makes everyone mobile

Let’s face it – people want access to e-mail, calendar and contact information from everywhere. Outlook Web App, Outlook Mobile and Exchange Active Sync have long been the leading solutions for web e-mail and mobile phone access for businesses. But, Microsoft didn’t rest with 2010, and it shows in the positive user feedback – from the improved OWA UI with integrated IM/presence, to conversation view in mobile, to EAS device management – every user can now have a rich mobile experience, while you don’t have to pay anything more since it’s all ‘in the box’.

It archives and discovers

At a regional healthcare group, they are able to use the integrated archiving, retention and discovery capabilities of 2010 saving them the cost and maintenance of using third party solutions that resulted in $250,000 they didn’t have to spend – and that was just the first year savings.

It protects people

Using the combination of Exchange 2010 and Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server, a global electronics firm has seen a 90% reduction in unwanted e-mail, meaning less time deleting and more time making new gadgets for you and me.

Since many of our customers have highlighted they intend to move to Exchange 2010, I wanted to take this opportunity to make sure everyone knows the licensing options, so you can plan accordingly. Just like 2007, Exchange 2010 will offer a Standard CAL and an Enterprise CAL. Standard CAL includes all e-mail, calendar and contacts capabilities, mobile messaging with Exchange ActiveSync, plus the new over-the-air updates of Outlook Mobile on Windows Mobile 6.1+, and Outlook Web App. The Exchange Enterprise CAL adds e-mail archiving, discovery and retention functionality, integrated voice mail (i.e. unified messaging) and Forefront Protection for Exchange.

On the server side, Exchange Server Standard will now support high availability, so all customers can take full advantage of the new database availability group capabilities. Exchange Server Enterprise enables configurations with up to 100 databases per server.

Need to know more? Contact us.

Windows 7 Security

2009-10-26T02:41:00.001-07:00

Windows 7 officially launched on October 22nd, which offers so much value and ease of use that even my wife can use it, which is a great testimonial to Microsoft. But apart from all the speed and GUI improvements there are a plethora of Security enhancements too.

And we thought we would highlight a few of them here:

There are a LOT of new and improved security capabilities with Windows 7. Some are completely new – like AppLocker and BitLocker To Go. Others are improved over what shipped with Windows Vista (like BitLocker), but are new to XP users.

Here’s a list of the prioritized features discussed in the note (I’m sure there are more, these are the major ones that I get questions on):

AppLocker
User Account Control
BitLocker
BitLocker To Go
Internet Explorer Version 8 Security
DirectAccess
Windows Services Hardening
Windows Firewall
ASLR, DEP and Safe Unlinking
USB Device Control
Kernel Patch Protection (formerly called PatchGuard) and Signed Device Drivers With 64-Bit
Windows 7 Network Access Protection
Windows Defender
Domain Name Systems Security Extensions Support
Windows Audit Function
Rights Management Services Client

One important note: Because many of the more popular security features such as BitLocker, BitLocker To Go, AppLocker, DirectAccess and so on require EA/SA, the cost of EA/SA must be factored into any cost-benefit analysis of migration. .

System Center Configuration Manager SP2 Released

2009-10-26T02:34:00.001-07:00

As if October 22nd wasn’t busy enough for Microsoft with their release of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, and supporting Dataplex with our heavily subscribed Virtualisation Event, they also release SCCM SP2.

Windows 7 is a fantastic opportunity for Microsoft to drive the love back into the client OS after Vista, and in Server 2008 R2, there are enough Enterprise-class features and capabilities, for this to be classed as a major release, not the minor release suggested by the R2 naming…

Anyway why is SCCM SP2 significant? Well it has the following capabilities:

Full Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support that enables customers to deploy and manage their Windows 7 client and server based systems.
Version 2 of the Intel AMT integration that includes the addition of updated firmware support along with support for key new features such as wireless profile management and 802.1x.
BranchCache support that enables customers to significantly reduce WAN utilization in branch office scenarios by leveraging new technology in Windows Server 2008 R2.
Greater 64-bit support that includes Remote Control, App-V, and the 2007 System Center Operations Manager agent

You can grab SP2 here.

Combine SCCM, with the free Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010, and you’ve got a very powerful platform for deployment within your infrastructure.

Microsoft System Center Service Manager

2009-10-26T02:21:00.001-07:00

Microsoft have made available as public beta 2 Microsoft System Center Service Manager ready for download. Firstly let’s expand on what Service Manager actually is. I’m going to take this directly from the Microsoft site:

Microsoft System Center Service Manager is an integrated platform for automating and adapting your organisation’s IT service management best practices, such as those found in Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It provides built-in processes for incident and problem resolution, change control, and asset lifecycle management. Through its configuration management database (CMDB) and process integration, Service Manager automatically connects knowledge and information from System Center Operations Manager, System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory. Service Manager delivers integration, efficiency, and business alignment of the datacenter IT services by:

Optimising processes and ensuring their use through templates that effectively guide IT analysts through best practices for change and incident management.
Reducing resolution times by cutting across organisational silos, ensuring that the right information from incident, problem, change, or asset records is accessible through a single pane.
Extending the value of the Microsoft platform through automated generation of incidents from alerts and the coordination of activities among System Center products.
Enabling informed and cost-effective decision making through its data warehouse, which integrates knowledge from disparate IT management systems, delivering out-of-the-box reporting and flexible data analysis through SQL reporting services.

Social Media is needed

2009-10-26T01:58:00.001-07:00

Gartner spoke about Social Networking last week and the need to utilise it within a business to embrace new technologies and forge stronger business relationships, so we thought we would also add some additional comments to it:

• Social media is a new and emerging communication channel. Enterprises will make the decision to utilise, resist or ignore it in the workplace. But opting to resist or ignore it is a decision – one that shuts your organisation off from valuable insight.

• Work is a collaborative activity and humans interact as social beings during work. Few, if any, jobs can be completed without the involvement of collaborators so providing the resources makes users more effective.

• An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem. Don’t blame it on social media. Productive employees are too busy with work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a means to get their work done.

Social media is an additional communication channel that augments others such as the phone and email. It offers a new source of information and, perhaps, insight. I’m talking about the opportunity to actively seek information in real-time, as well as to mine collected information for new ideas and perspectives. As a Unified Messaging (amongst other technologies) consultancy, Dataplex can continually monitor what’s being said in social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn about topics and issues relevant to our customers (both internal and external).

Work is a collaborative activity. Today people work on 8 – 15 projects at any point in time. They are constantly switching contexts and needing to create or re-establish work relationships. Social profiles give people the opportunity to find out about the expertise of colleagues and ‘get to know them’ even before they meet. They can shorten the bonding process that occurs as a new team forms and allow fellow workers to stay in touch with each other.

Need help on establishing your social media strategy and above all how to ensure it remains secure? Email us.

Software Assurance - Don't be a Cynic read on...

2009-10-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

For those of us out there who think that Microsoft Software Assurance is purely about software upgrades this blog entry could be right up your street.... Microsoft have made available a very useful tool indeed..... The interactive benefits tool helps you to understand which Software Assurance benefits you’re entitled to with each of Microsoft's licensing agreements – the easy way. A new, user-friendly comparison table shows at-a-glance which of the sizeable suite of benefits you can access. Easy!

I’m not sure there is any difference in these two versions, but I’ll provide them both nonetheless:

Software Assurance Benefits for Volume Licensing Agreements (less than 250 PCs)

Software Assurance Benefits for Volume Licensing Agreements (more than 250 PCs)

Simply tick your chosen agreement (or, multiple if you want to compare side-by-side)…

then see your results:

Use the icons scattered about to find out more information, and for those wondering what App, Sys and Ser mean:

APP = application, e.g. Microsoft Office SYS = system, e.g. Microsoft Windows operating system SER = server, e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Server Client Access Licences (CALs) Useful stuff!

Citrix Listened and Citrix Delivered - XenDesktop 4.0 License Changes

2009-10-20T00:16:00.000-07:00

Citrix recently announced XenDesktop 4.0, which in our opinion is set to be a game changer and drive virtual desktop projects into businesses who to date have been sceptical about the performance, price point and flexibility to deliver relevant content on demand to authenticated in users in the way THEY want to receive it.

Amidst all the positive conversations we have had with customers there has been one area which was not as well received - the new Citrix licensing framework which was set to per user, well Citrix have been gauging the general feeling about this and understand that they need to be more flexible in their approach to virtual desktops, and have delivered three new options for XenDesktop adopters:

NEW device-based licensing option.
NEW VDI Edition available in both user/device and CCU licensing
NEW Campus-wide Licensing Program for customers in the education industry

Flexible licensing based on user or device

Customers in some industries have scenarios where multiple users share the same device. To help with these situations, Citrix decided to enhance XenDesktop 4 licensing to offer more flexibility by adding a new device license option - available at the exact same price as the user-based license.

This means that users can access their XenDesktop from an unlimited number of devices with the user-based license option, and devices powered by XenDesktop can be used by an unlimited number of users with the device-based license option. As a result, your XenDesktop 4 product license can now be assigned to either a user or a device.

VDI-only solution for people getting started with virtual desktops available in user, device or CCU licensing

This option is based upon customers who only want to deliver VDI desktops without the ability to use Flexcast technology and be flexible in the approach to content delivery and a cost effective way to trial in a wide variety of VDI use-cases.

In response, Citrix are creating the new XenDesktop 4, VDI Edition available for $95 per user/device, or $195 per concurrent user (CCU). XenDesktop 4, VDI Edition gives customers the ability to deliver VDI-based desktops with a true HDX experience, and scale them up with built-in provisioning services, profile management, and StorageLink™ technology.

As with all the XenDesktop editions, the new VDI edition lets customers use any hypervisor, including XenServer or Hyper-V (both of which ship with all XenDesktop editions) as well as VMware ESX or vSphere.

Desktop Virtualisation in Education is ready to go Campus-Wide

University users have highlighted they need the ability to deliver desktops and applications to a wide range of users and faculties. They also want the flexibility to deliver either the full Windows desktop, or just some applications to a wide variety of use cases, including enabling access from smart phones, etc.

To address this customer requirement, Citrix are adding the Citrix Campus-wide Licensing Program. This program, available starting November 16th, will offer extremely compelling prices to accredited educational institutions in K-12 and university campuses who adopt XenDesktop 4 for campus-wide use.

Putting it all together

Citrix XenDesktop™ 4, VDI Edition - VDI-only solution available at $95 per user or device, or $195 per CCU
Citrix XenDesktop™ 4, Enterprise Edition - Enterprise-class desktop virtualisation solution available at $225 per user or device
Citrix XenDesktop™ 4, Platinum Edition - Best-value comprehensive desktop virtualisation solution available at $350 per user or device

Microsoft SCDPM 2010 - Hyper-V R2 Support

2009-10-19T02:53:00.001-07:00

At the end of September Microsoft launched the public beta program for Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 (codename Zinger).

DPM 2010 beta introduces support for Hyper-V R2 (both the Windows edition and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server edition).

More importantly, the product finally introduces the capability to backup virtual machines running on the Windows Server 2008 Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs), a technology that is used to perform the VMs live migration with Hyper-V R2.

Without DPM 2010, and similar 3rd party solutions, the only way to backup Hyper-V virtual machines in CSVs is by running the backup agent inside the guest operating systems.

On top of that DPM 2010 introduces other virtualisation-friendly features, like the capability to restore virtual machines to an alternative host, or the capability to restore single items from within the VHDs.

Dataplex Move Offices

2009-10-19T01:21:00.000-07:00

Dataplex Makes Room for the Future with New Oxfordshire Offices

UK Leading ICT Consultancy switches location to Deer Park House, Witney.

Oxfordshire » 19/10/2009 » Dataplex Systems, the UK’s leading provider of ICT Solutions and Consultancy services across physical and virtual technologies has opened a new office in Deer Park House, Witney to house its growing team, and provide a base for enhanced services across the country.

The company has moved its Oxfordshire team from their previous location in the Long Hanborough, to new, larger, more modern premise. The new offices will allow more space for the continued expansion of the team, and are better suited to the needs of the business. The company will be able to provide seminar, training and demonstration facilities from the state of the art premise, adding exceptional further value to our new and existing clients.

“We’re very excited about the move and see it as a great opportunity for the business,” said Richard Sparrow, Managing Director, Dataplex Systems Ltd. “It was really important to us that we remained within Oxfordshire, so that we can continue to benefit from our long relationship with surrounding businesses and close commutable links to our business partners. Being able to tap into the highly skilled local workforce is also a big advantage for us.”

Dataplex Business Development Manager, Charles Barratt comments “The office move marks a momentous occasion for Dataplex Systems to elevate our capabilities and services as one of the UK’s leading ICT consultancies. And as we continue to integrate our business practices further we will be making additional announcements about our enhanced services and capabilities, so please watch this space.”

Dataplex Managing Director, Richard Sparrow will officially open the new offices in due course. If you would like further information about attending the opening ceremony, please contact: Sarah Morris (sarah.morris@dataplex-systems.com).

About Dataplex

Dataplex Systems was founded in 1996 as a company of excellence in the delivery of ICT solutions and support to assist our clients in achieving their business goals; Dataplex has grown through organic and inorganic means year-on-year, and has developed an industry recognised brand for delivering solutions on time, on budget and exceeding expectations.

Our capabilities are recognised by our vendor partners with accreditations and specialisations that acknowledge the depth of our expertise and the priority that we place on ensuring our Architects, Consultants and Engineers have the highest technical capabilities available.

Our services range across the following disciplines, Design, Implementation and Support.

Our new contact details are:

Dataplex Systems Limited

Deer Park House,

Windrush Park,

Network Point,

Witney,

Oxfordshire,

OX29 0YN.

Telephone: 0845 260 4747

Fax: 0845 260 4748

The Planning Season!

2009-10-16T03:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Q4 2009; what we at Dataplex call planning season for most IT departments. In a typical year, this is the time that infrastructure and operations professionals spend lots of cycles burning through what remains of the 2009 budget and building plans for investment in 2010 with the hope of gathering a bit more budget than last year. Of course this is no ordinary year. Economists are predicting a long recovery from the recession, with many turning to IT to help pull through the recession. However, this can also mean another year of your infrastructure getting older. There’s two ways of looking at this problem and thus your budget proposals for 2010:

You can either predict when you will get the rights to refresh the systems and return to the infrastructure spending patterns of old, or

You can realise that a long recovery means a new way for IT spend is in order.

We think the latter is far more fruitful even if it isn’t entirely accurate. It’s both prudent and different because your go-forward infrastructure strategy likely isn’t the same anymore either. We still see many customers doing the following

Continue to consolidate infrastructure

Are repackaging workloads into VMs

Are standardising everything from hardware, golden master server images to change management processes as consistent and repeatable as possible.

Are racing to shorten deployment times from weeks or months

Are learning to love automation.

In other words, you aren’t buying, running or managing infrastructure the way you used to. So why plan your budget the old way.

In other words you’re evolving into an Infrastructure as a Service cloud. But despite vendor claims for products such as the VMware vCloud, Citrix C3, Microsoft Azure offerings, most businesses can’t just drop in an IaaS platform and they have a cloud. You have to prepare your organisation and your operations staff for this. But that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve this aim in a short time horizon or that you can’t embrace public or hosted cloud infrastructures in the near term.

Forrester feels that cloud computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so you can gain the experience necessary to take advantage of it in its many forms to transform your organisation into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business.

Interesting ways that Collaboration and Search Save you Money!

2009-10-15T02:31:00.000-07:00

Commonly we find that users and our clients users get a better experience finding information on the Internet than it is on the corporate network.

According to IDC, workers waste 3.8 hours per week looking and not finding information.

That’s over £2,500 per employee per year.

Do you have multiple copies of the same document in file shares, intranet sites and in boxes?

The same IDC report found that users spent 3.7 hours unravelling version control issues and recreating content.

That’s over £2,500 per employee per year.

That doesn't include the cost of storage.

Google Search Appliance allows you to search file shares, SharePoint sites, Exchange Public Folders and Lotus Notes databases. It’s quick and easy to set up, and pays for itself in a short time frame.

Now you can give your employees the same powerful search capabilities internally as they get from Google Internet Search. And reduce the time they waste looking for information.

Windows SharePoint Services or Google Apps (Google Sites) and indeed Wave provide workspaces for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions—within the organisation and over the extranet. Reducing the amount of time they spend managing multiple versions of the same document.

So, whether you want an on premise solution or a hosted solution for collaboration or search there are effective solutions that Dataplex can provide for you. Interested in seeing where Google can take your business and see where you can save money then please contact Charles Barratt

Citrix XenDeskop 4 - A Game Changer

2009-10-06T00:43:00.001-07:00

Last night (5th October), Citrix announced the next release of XenDesktop, with a stack of technology and very attractive pricing for XenApp users. Excuse the blatant cut and paste of the press release but I thought you would find this useful.

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), today announced a new 2-for-1 trade-up offer that makes it easy for Citrix® XenApp™ customers to realize all the benefits of desktop virtualization by stepping up to the new XenDesktop 4. The “Trade-up to XenDesktop 4” program allows XenApp customers to trade up their existing XenApp concurrent user licenses for twice the number of XenDesktop 4 user licenses – a savings of up to 80 percent off list price. With its new FlexCast™ delivery technology, XenDesktop 4 is the first product in the industry to deliver every major type of virtual desktop in a single, integrated solution (see separate announcement today). XenDesktop 4 further extends the value of desktop virtualization by including all the functionality of XenApp as a core integrated feature, making it easy for customers to deliver on-demand applications as a seamless part of their overall desktop management strategy. By taking advantage of this limited-time trade-up offer, XenApp customers can make virtual desktops a reality for all of their employees at a fraction of the cost.

XenApp Customers are Ready for Desktop Virtualization

XenApp customers have already taken an important first step towards centralized desktop management, delivering an estimated 25 million applications to more than 100 million users every day1. Many of these same customers are now looking to extend the benefits of centralization to all desktops in the enterprise. The new Trade-up to XenDesktop 4 program gives these customers the best of both worlds, allowing them to leverage all the functionality they already own, while adding a simple, low-risk path to full desktop virtualization when they are ready. For many enterprise customers, the upcoming Windows 7 desktop refresh provides the perfect opportunity to choose from a variety of virtual desktop models to simplify desktop management enterprise wide.

“Customers clearly want the flexibility to purchase one simple license that can address any combination of desktop and app virtualization requirements. With XenDesktop 4, that’s exactly what we’re delivering,” said Al Monserrat, senior vice president, sales and services, at Citrix. “With the new Trade-up to XenDesktop 4 program, we’re taking that flexibility one step further for existing XenApp customers. In addition to the attractive 2-for-1 trade up offer, this program allows them to continue using all the capabilities of XenApp as they always have, with the full flexibility to add virtual desktop functionality at their own pace.”

The Best Solution for Every Customer

For more than 100 million users worldwide, XenApp has consistently proven that it delivers superior performance, security and TCO across a wide variety of use cases, cutting application management costs in half for most customers. With XenApp now included as a core integrated feature of XenDesktop, most customers going forward will find XenDesktop 4 to be the best solution to meet their combined desktop and app virtualization needs.

For customers focused on delivering Windows applications with no plans to step up to desktop virtualization in the near future, the standalone XenApp product line will continue to be the best solution to meet their needs. Because XenApp is sold on a concurrent user basis, it also remains the most cost-effective solution for use cases with high application concurrency ratios. Cloud providers delivering Windows apps as an on-demand service will also find XenApp to be the best solution, as will independent software vendors offering XenApp as a part of their enterprise application platforms.

Program Pricing

To take advantage of the full 2-for-1 trade-up offer, customers active on Subscription Advantage must trade up all their existing XenApp licenses. Suggested list pricing for the trade-up begins at $45 per user, plus the normal cost of subscription renewal – a savings of up to 80 percent off the list price of XenDesktop 4. Additional trade-up offers are available for customers who only wish to exchange a portion of their existing XenApp licenses. All trade-up offers are available through June 30, 2010, and are also valid for customers with previous generations of Citrix application virtualization solutions such as Presentation Server or MetaFrame. For complete information and program details, please visit http://www.citrix.com/xendesktop4/tradeup

Google Search Enhancements

2009-10-03T00:44:00.000-07:00

Google, are constantly refining their flagship product - search, but do you know or even care what new features they are constantly adding to your search experience. Hopefully if you are reading this blog you do care about the quality of the results that are presented back to you, well I thought I would share some of the recent enhancements they have added to Search.

Hot Trends highlighted on results page
Have you ever wondered how many people query [tsunami] or [samoa] right after they read about it in the news, or are you the only one looking? For years, Google Trends has let you search an aggregation of what other people are searching for. Now Google are taking that concept to the results page and showcasing fast-rising terms with a graph at the bottom of the page.

New tools in Search Options
Google have just added a host of new tools in their Search Options panel. To view the Search Options, do a search, find "Web" in the top blue bar, and click on the "+ Search Options" link to the right of it. A navigation bar on the left side of the screen will appear. They launched Search Options back in May, but this week they added a set of new and exciting features.

Learning from history
If you use personalised search and web history, it's now easier for you to see which of the search results you have visited already and which you haven't.

Keeping up with time
The Search Options panel has always helped users search over time, but now there are two new features that help you do this even more flexibly: "Past hour" and "Specific date range."

Personalised Suggest now on Mobile
Finally, here's a fun tidbit that bridges web search on the desktop to web search on mobile. New this week, Google Suggest (the suggested queries that appear below the search box as you type) on your mobile phone is personalised, based on searches from your desktop. This feature only applies when you are signed in to your Google account, and only for searches done while you are signed in. We think this small feature is significant because it enables you to easily migrate your search tasks from the desktop to your phone. It's also one of the first instances in which your desktop search usage can improve your mobile search experience, and vice versa.

Google Chrome OS on the horizon?

2009-10-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

Google first announced its entry into the the operating system space back in July. At that time, Google stated that Chrome OS would not be available to consumers until sometime in 2010. However, various Chinese sources have this week claimed that devices running the upcoming open-source OS could be seen as early as next month.

According to Shanzi.com, Chinese hardware manufacturer Lemote may ship its line of budget netbooks with preview builds of Google's Chrome OS. These Chome OS-based netbooks could hit the market in late October. Chinese manufacturers, as Liliputing speculates, may be more willing to try new, untested technology, whereas western manufacturers may be more hesitant to take new tech on board without performing rigorous testing first.

Rumors regarding the early release of the Chrome OS are, of course, nothing new, and Google has not responded to any of the supposed claims, including those of various 'leaked' screenshots. So with Google being tight-lipped and providing no solid hint as to when we can expect to see the final OS on shelves, reports such as these can only be taken with a pinch of salt, but hopefully not.

As blogged before I will be very interested in seeing where this takes VDI.....

Windows 2008 Server R2 - Whats New Apart from Hyper-V

2009-09-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

By now you know that the Windows Server 2008 R2, latest version of Windows Server, will be available to all in just a few weeks. Some of the big features like Microsoft Hyper-V have received a lot of attention, but there are several other new features surfacing with this release, here are just a few of them:

Out of the box, Windows Server 2008 R2 uses less power on the same hardware than Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 – with no additional configuration. This isn't a gimmick, but a proven 10% to 15% reduction on identical boxes, just with a different operating system.

Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5, included with Windows Server 2008 R2, supports .NET on Server Core installations. The big shortcoming in the original Server 2008 edition was the lack of support for running managed code on Server Core-based Web servers.

Microsoft's new BranchCache feature can speed up access to files for users at branch offices while allowing you to save on data line and bandwidth costs. Caching in their branch will help increase productivity and remove user frustrations without bailing out a telco.

The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has been enhanced in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, allowing for far smoother media playback, multi-monitor support and more.

The Agile VPN feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 allows a virtual private network connection to generate multiple paths between discrete points in the VPN tunnel. If a problem occurs, the Agile VPN feature uses other network paths to maintain the tunnel without interruption.

You can use BitLocker on removable drives to eliminate easy information leakage. This isn't just a Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 feature either. If you protect a removable drive with BitLocker, the BitLocker to Go reader is also copied to the drive. This provides backward compatibility so that machines running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and higher can read the encrypted contents if the user enters the correct password.

Offline Files, a feature that helps mobile users maintain access to their network share files when disconnected, is now enabled on slow network connections. This reduces network traffic while not degrading the user experience too much.

IIS 7.5 now has a Best Practices Analyser (BPA). Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows Small Business Server, and other server products have had these BPAs for a while now. The BPA itself scans your environment and compares a number of different elements against known best-practice states, delivering the results in a very consumable format—an instant quick-check for your configuration.

Windows Server 2008 R2 also contains enhancements to PowerShell. Windows PowerShell 2.0, includes more than 240 new pre-built cmdlets along with a new graphical user interface with coloured syntaxing, new production script debugging capabilities, and testing tools.

Where did the Google Chrome Logo come from?

2009-09-29T02:22:00.000-07:00

Just a bit of fun....

We have been blogging about Google Chrome OS for some time now, and have been using Google Chrome Browser for some time also - we like it.

Have you ever wondered where Google Chrome OS got its logo concept from?

The Italian cartoonist, Federico Fieni, cleverly portrays how Google first pondered how to challenge Windows, put its heads together, and ultimately devised Chrome....

Will you ride the Google Wave?

2009-09-29T01:49:00.000-07:00

There has been a tremendous amount of buzz surrounding one of Google’s newest products,Google Wave. Essentially, it is a real-time communication platform that combines aspects of email, wiki, chat, app platform, and more into one tool.

With a potentially game-changing product set to make its debut tomorrow, will you be riding this Wave and what impact to a small business will it have?

Q: What is the purpose of Google Wave?

A: According to Google, it is “is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web.” Perhaps the best explanation might be Google Wave is what email would be if it were invented today. Conversations (aka “waves”) occur faster, they are easier to organize and parse, and they are not limited to the individual.

Q: What are Google Wave’s biggest features?

A: While Google’s real-time communication platform has a lot of features, there are a few big ones that you don’t see in most communication platforms.

Wave employs wiki-style editing, meaning that anyone can edit anyone else’s message. The goal is to have a malleable conversation.
There is a playback feature, which lets you view an entire wave conversation as it developed if you missed it.
It employs drag-and-drop file sharing.
You can use apps within a wave – this is called a Wave Extension. You can embed maps, games, and more into wave conversations.
It’s open source, so you can create your own private version of Google Wave and install it on your own server like an Exchange Server.

Q: Will it kill email?

A: That’s a question nobody can answer. In many respects it’s more advanced than email, but ultimately it depends on whether the regular person adopts Wave over email.

Q: Is it useful for a small business to use it?

A: It has a lot of useful features, like drag-and-drop file sharing and apps that make it a useful project management and collaboration platform for business. It’s very efficient for communication, once you learn how to use it.

Q: Will it get widespread adoption?

A: That’s the million dollar question. It has hundreds of thousands of people signed up for the beta testing occurring later this month.

Should be an interesting time, and the output of technology from Google in recent months and proposed projects seems to be increasing exponentially. There has been a lot of development effort put into Wave so I am sure its going to be exciting.

Are we going full circle? Lets Make PC's thin again..

2009-09-29T00:58:00.000-07:00

It seems that the onset of VDI is bringing with it a number of requests again, one of which I am getting time and time again from clients is can I dumb down (thin) my existing desktop estate? This has been a request I have been familiar with since starting with Citrix technologies back in 1999, and it slowly started to become less frequent with many organisations wanting pure Thin Client environments or to provide a mixture of local processing power and applications with the benefits of remote applications. However, the more I engage with clients for VDI architectures the more I am getting questions raised again about thinning down the endpoint once again.

There seems to be two ways this is being achieved:

1. Windows-based Conversion Products

These products live in Windows, locking down the interface so that users can only do certain, pre-configured tasks. The software can be installed or deployed using your existing application deployment technologies.

2. Thin Client OS.

The products, while running on PC hardware, are running some version of a thin client or slimmed down operating system.

These solutions aren't as vulnerable to security problems, and can even be provisioned on boot so that the client is refreshed each time it's started. That way, if something should happen, the machine can just be powered off and restarted without any repercussions.

Management typically involves some sort of additional management infrastructure beyond that of simply managing Windows environments.

Google Search Results Now Show Hot Trends

2009-09-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

With millions of Google searches performed every day, it makes sense that what people are searching for can be a good indicator of what has captured the interest of the U.S. and the world.

That's exactly what Google Trends does: it tells you what's currently popular on the search engine via its Hot Trends feature, which displays how popular the search is and graphs out the volume of searches over time.

But sadly Google Trends is not widely known about as it is a destination site, but Google are about to change this and have announced that it has integrated Google Trends in actual Google Search results.

The integration is rather simple. Now when you search a hot trend, you will find the trend and its graph at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP), you will find its hotness, how it ranks in the top 100 most popular searches, and the search volume graph

Google's been busy lately with new additions. Search snippets and Place Pages are just two of the small additions/tweaks that add a new layer of functionality to Google Search to keep at bay Bing, there are plenty more features still to come.

Bing is the fastest growing Search Engine.....

2009-09-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

According to a Nielsen report this week, Microsoft's new Bing search engine is growing faster than any of its search competitors in the top 10.

Earlier this year, Bing was sitting at around 9.4% of the search market in July, but Nielsen's new numbers confirm the search engine's continued growth through the month of August, up to 10.7% of the total market.

The rankings for the top 11 engines reveal Bing's impressive growth rate at about 22% month-over-month. Compare this to the rest of the pack, none of whom breaks more than a 3% increase (Yahoo and Comcast are both losing share).

The growth is thanks in part to an enormous marketing campaign, but also surely to some of the innovations Microsoft is bringing to the table with Bing. The recently launched visual search feature is arguably flat out better for browsing certain types of information, and social sharing of search results will soon be coming to Bing as well for an interesting new twist.

So what does XenApp 5 FP2 really mean?

2009-09-16T08:55:00.001-07:00

So cutting through all the marketing mist what does Citrix XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 really boil down to, well we thought we would share with you what it initially looks like:

VM hosted apps - Lets you deliver Windows applications from centrally hosted virtual machines running Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. This feature is great for regulated applications and those which have performance bottlenecks, peripheral compatibility and general compatibility issues on Terminal Services. It's also great for applications where your ISV won't support them on Terminal Services. One thing is, for VM hosted apps, you'll need Microsoft VECD licenses, not Terminal Services CALS. Most environments will have a mix though so just keep this in mind as you consider it.
Windows 7 and Windows Mobile support - In this release, Citrix now support access from Windows 7 devices to server and VM hosted apps, as well as streamed applications running on the users desktop. Citrix also released an updated profiler which includes Windows 7 as an option.
Power and Capacity Management - You install an agent on your XenApp servers (whether virtual or physical) and Power and Capacity Management turns them on and off when capacity is needed based on rules you create. You tell it how much capacity you always want available on standby and it just keeps turning on servers as users log into your farm to maintain that buffer capacity. Plus, you can manage multiple farms from a single implementation. But Power management is only half of this feature. The other half is capacity management. This feature will help to keep sessions consolidated on fewer servers while maintaining adequate user performance. . You can even tell capacity management to drain sessions on servers for you so you can come back later and perform your maintenance. Available to Enterprise and Platinum customers running XenApp on Windows Server 2003.
Provisioning Services - some key enhancements which you might already be aware of but certainly worth mentioning are multi-partition and dual NIC support for provisioning images. Plus there are some wonderful new fault tolerance improvements that have been made such as server maintenance mode which let's you transfer image management between multiple provisioning servers in the event you need to bring one down for maintenance. And of course, Provisioning services can be used to manage VM hosted applications. Enterprise edition customers can use Provisioning services to manage VM hosted apps only. Platinum customers can use Provisioning services to manage VM hosted or server hosted apps. 
Service Monitoring - Service monitoring now measures the performance of XenApp servers running on XenServer by giving you visibility into the performance of the hypervisor. This will help you better determine the right mix of physical and virtual servers in your environment. In addition, you can now measure application start up time for streamed applications - a nifty feature for testing those new performance improvements we've made with your own apps. Service monitoring is available to Platinum customers. 
HDX MediaStream for Flash - . Basically, it leverages the processing power on the users Windows device to render Flash content and applications. This offloads the server and also improves performance and fluidity for the user. What's more, if the users device isn't capable of rendering the content, it will automatically fall back to server-side rendering. Citrix call that Adaptive orchestration. It's available in Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum Edition and for XenApp running on Windows Server 2003.
HDX Plug and Play for USB storage devices - Citrix have supported USB drive mapping before. This is just a bit different in that users can plug in their USB drive even if they are already in a session and it will be mapped automatically without their having to restart their session. It's a great usability feature and is available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum customers and for XenApp running on Windows Server 2003.
Profile management - Profile management has seen some bug fixes and platform support enhancements. Plus Citrix have added a number of counters to Service monitoring that expose the performance of user profiles within your environment to give you a better idea of how performance bottlenecks in user profiles can be affecting the performance of your applications.
EasyCall voice services - In the previous XenApp release, Citrix introduced this as a Xen-based virtual appliance available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum edition customers. Basically, EasyCall let's users hover their mouse over any phone number on their screen and then click to call that number. This is accomplished using a plugin on the users device. The plugin communicates call requests to the EasyCall virtual appliance and then the appliance tells the VoIP system to call the user at their current location and then to call their destination number. In this release, Citrix added a feature called Find Me which lets users configure phone numbers that EasyCall will use to redirect their calls to if they are not available, trying each one in order. EasyCall is available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum edition customers.

Citrix to release XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2

2009-09-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

Citrix are about to release XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 on the 29th September and features a plethora of long awaited features to simplify application delivery, enhance VDI architectures, ensure application compatibility and consume power.The key features include:

VM hosted apps – the fastest way to roll out an application and ensure instant user productivity
Power and capacity management – instantly optimise server farm performance and reduce power consumption
Load testing – fully optimise server capacity and usage with intelligent testing scenarios
Provisioning services – maximise server availability and ensure zero user disruption
HDX MediaStream for Flash – for a high definition user experience with Flash applications and video
HDX Plug-n-Play – now supports instantaneous, real-time mapping of USB drives anytime during a user session

You To see more you can connect here and see a short video.