It is coming this weekend… are you ready? IT consultants have been scrambling for the past two weeks to complete the necessary transitions in this “mini-Y2K” and no doubt will be burning the midnight oil this weekend, thanks to the usual last-minute customer calls. Here is a quick list of valuable links to educate yourself on how this will affect your organization (whether or not you’ve already made the necessary updates). Please let us know if you need assistance on these, but scheduling is tighter than ever across the country right now. Yesterday a customer had an emergency for an onsite router configuration and it took quite some time to track down a partner with the available time to do this quick job.

What will this upgrade cost? http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4609

Microsoft charging for “older” patches? http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=288

List of affected Microsoft products: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist

General info on the upgrade: http://blogs.zdnet.com/topic/Daylight+Saving+Time.html

More useful information: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2096765,00.asp

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Microsoft announced today its list of 800 “Vista Approved” third-party applications. Some items not listed on this list may still work, however good luck getting any support from Microsoft on their compatibility. You can view the full list and announcement here.

However, please note some of the more important omissions from this list. According to computerworld.com, “Popular Windows software that is conspicuously missing from Microsoft’s list includes Adobe Systems Inc.’s entire line of graphics and multimedia software, Symantec Corp.’s security products, as well as the Mozilla Foundation’s open-source Firefox Web browser, Skype Ltd.’s free voice-over-IP software and the OpenOffice.org alternative to Microsoft Office.”

Some of the more common applications listed to work as “bug-free” with Windows Vista “include CorelDraw and WordPerfect from Corel Corp., PowerDVD from Cyberlink, Nero 7 Premium, Trend Micro AntiVirus and PC-Cillin, AutoCad 2008, QuickBooks 2007 from Intuit Inc., Microsoft Office 2007 and many other Microsoft applications.”

The computerworld.com article is a great resource for specifics, but again my advice is to wait, wait and wait to migrate to Vista. Again, the question remains: What reasons are there to upgrade and do these reasons tell a compelling enough story to make you restock your collection of Tums?!?

Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group and contributing writer for CNET’s News.com, wrote a great article this morning on the prevailing lack of proper asset management and tracking strategies in corporations. He even sites the Department of Homeland Security’s inability to properly document its technology infrastructure:

“If you think that I’m exaggerating, check out the past few Federal Information Security Management Act report cards. Massive federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) get low marks for asset management. If DHS can’t identify its assets, how secure can it be?”

I won’t discuss how pitiful and scary this is (although not entirely unexpected), however I WOULD like to encourage you and your organization to take another look at your resources and make sure you have a proper handle on your environment. With such rapid technology growth, infrastructure additions and innovation over the past five to 10 years, do you really know what you have in your arsenal? Not just all of your servers, but what software (including versions) they are running and how they fit into your short and long-term business strategy? This may be too much to ask, however just taking the smallest steps to document your assets will pay off in the long run. I encourage you to read the entire article, as Oltsik makes some very insightful points.

March 11^th (that’s the second Sunday in March) marks daylight savings time this year. This event, normally on the first Sunday in April, is rather important if you use any software coded before 2005. Why? Well, Congress thought it would help us save energy by increasing the process by a month.

Therefore, according to Microsoft, any and all meetings scheduled in Outlook 2003 for March and April should be double-checked and confirmed with the organizer. This is just one example, but be sure to check your software programs and any and all automatically changing clocks for similar glitches. In addition, if you work with anyone located in any other country other than the US and Canada (they had to follow suit), the time differences between zones will be an hour off during this 3-4 week period… i.e. France will be 7 hours and the UK 6 hours ahead of the US East Coast. You can view more specifics behind the legislation and Microsoft’s suggestions here and here, respectively.

While recently working on a project involving the “soft” costs associated with backing up a company’s data, an IV partner provided me with an excellent collection of statistics pertaining to this subject. I’ve listed it below for your reference and welcome any questions you may have. Of course these numbers fluctuate by a couple of percentage points depending on who you ask, but the point is still made crystal clear… back up your data (preferably not on a PC in your CEO’s basement)!

« 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures.

« 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster.

« As much as 60% of corporate data resides unprotected on PC desktops and laptops.

« Key causes of data loss:
78% Hardware or System Malfunction
11% Human Error
7% Software Corruption or Program Malfunction
2% Computer Viruses
1% Natural Disasters
1% Other

« 25 percent of users frequently back up digital files, while 85 percent of computer users say they are very concerned about losing important digital data.

« More than 22 percent said backing up information is on their to-do list, but they seldom do it.

« 30 percent of companies report that they still do not have a disaster recovery program in place and two in three companies feel their data backup and disaster recovery plans have significant vulnerabilities.

« 1 in 20-25 notebooks are stolen, broken or destroyed each year.

« Today’s hard drives store 500 times the data stored on the drives of a decade ago. Increasing storage capacities amplify the impact of data loss, making mechanical precision more critical.

« The average failure rate of disk and tape drives is 100% - All drives eventually fail.

« 30% chance that you will have a corrupted file within a one-year time frame.

« More than 50 percent of customers surveyed said their current backup solution does not meet their needs.

The following was taken from an article on StartupNation.com, of which IV is a contributing member. Written by Marcia Layton Turner, it has some decent things to say which I feel are worth passing along. The full article can be read here.

1) Identify the problem

When EndSight saw its customer satisfaction, efficiency and employee satisfaction levels plummeting, management knew it was time to make a change.

But even if your company isn’t experiencing problems or bottlenecks, there may still be opportunities to improve overall efficiency and productivity.

Eric Hobbs, president of Cary, N.C.-based Technology Associates, Inc., suggests companies start by looking at “whatever they do repeatedly for customers.” Then seek out technology that can help the business do that work faster or better. “Inefficiency is expensive,” Carroll agrees.

2) Determine What You Need

Once you’ve zeroed in on processes needing improvement, the next step is finding the technology best-suited for the situation. In most cases, small business owners shouldn’t be making such choices themselves, although many still try to “cobble it together,” Hobbs says, maybe by asking for help from a colleague or neighbor.

Like Carroll, Hobbs strongly advocates hiring an information technology consultant to recommend equipment and a plan for the future.

Even EndSight, a company of IT specialists, hired a consultant for help in choosing the most appropriate equipment. Recognizing its lack of familiarity with phone systems, the firm decided to leave its integration to the experts.

One place to start looking for qualified IT vendors and consultants, Hobbs suggests, is Microsoft’s Small Business Center. He also advises sticking with name-brand hardware and software to avoid most major problems. “Ninety percent of a small business’s needs can be handled by off-the-shelf products, many of which are already seamlessly integrated,” he says – meaning, as Florin Pal of Business Communications Solutions puts it – that they’ll “play nice with other equipment.”

3) Develop a plan

After choosing your IT vendor or consultant, the next step is creating a plan for getting from where you are to where you want to be tech-wise. A timeline, equipment list and critical steps should be part of that plan, including how employees will be brought into the loop.

“One of the key things people overlook is their personnel,” says Pal, customer service manager at Business Communications Solutions of Irvine, Calif. While you may be ahead of the curve in your familiarity with different technologies, don’t assume your employees are right there with you. Some may actually be tech-averse. “Don’t jump too far ahead with the technology,” Pal says. “Take incremental steps and everyone can use the new features and benefit from them, rather than being frustrated.”

4) Install the Equipment

Likewise, “the fewer systems the better,” says David Koretz, CEO of BlueTie, of Rochester, N.Y. “Sixty percent of enterprise software sits on a shelf unused,” he says, reinforcing the importance of investing in software that will improve your company’s performance. “Don’t implement technology for technology’s sake – do it to make more money,” Carroll adds.

Training should also be a part of your roll-out plan, as well as access to consultants for post support.

5) Keep It Maintained

“People forget about the maintenance,” says Pal, but keeping software and hardware up-to-date will assure that your technology and your business run smoothly – and continue to grow together.

I’ve been working a couple of different projects recently which have kept me quite busy. Both involve data storage, but each is handled differently. The primary question at the bottom of both projects is should the client store its data on site or outsource that task? There are going to be positive and negative factors no matter what scenario you pick, so the question you have to ask is: How do we optimize the design for your business model and strategy? Is this model in line with your security policy (please tell me you have one by now)…Also, keep in mind that Congress may finally take a stand on how businesses secure customer data and of course, Symantec’s John Thompson constantly reminds us of its importance.

The old-school method of data storage is to process (with local servers) and back it up to tape on site, then store those tapes off site in a secure location (preferably not the back of your car or CEO’s timeshare, as we’ve stressed before). This is still very effective, but may not satisfy your data availability needs. If you need to find a tape and have it shipped to you, then retrieve that five year old email you needed yesterday, it may not work so well.

As another option, you can outsource your processing, storing and backing up of all of your data off site (i.e. hosted by a trusted, third party and accessible to you at all times). While losing some control, this may be very convenient, but depending on the amount of data we’re talking about, remember that often you will pay monthly, per gig.

As I mentioned, there are obvious pluses and minuses to each scenario. There is also a third option, growing in popularity, which combines these two designs and will leave you with a better solution overall. That is, house your servers on site (managed locally or remotely, doesn’t matter) and host your data internally as well. Then, by partnering with that trusted third party, have them image and store a backup of all data (also called vaulting, but could also be dynamic and real-time) so that in the event of an emergency, hardware/software failure or other “mix-up”, your data is secure and accessible at all times.

This last option has become more and more popular with the reduced cost of disk space and more efficient methods of backing up over the WAN. It enables you to control and manipulate your data locally, but have it housed offsite as well for security and availability. And as EMC’s chief, Joe Tucci, said this week: “You will see EMC playing there.” This speaks directly to the subject, considering EMC is the world’s largest hardware/software storage vendor and it is considering making storage a service.

How to really “Get Your Communications Off Life Support”

It seems that in the past couple of years, there has been a noticeable slowdown in innovative thinking within companies as it relates to IT. I realize that this is a strong statement and perhaps not everyone will agree with me. I’m OK with that, because I’m not the only one and I can see this becoming a growing concern in the near future.

Google’s General Manager and Vice President of Enterprise, Dave Girouard knows enterprise software architecture and he knows data management. Girouard heads up Google’s efforts to bring the simplicity and management of consumer software to the enterprise and is so far succeeding (at least in my eyes). His group has so far released the Google Apps “suite” of products and I’m sure there is more innovation on the way. Our team here at IV uses Google for email (at ivforbusiness.com), for shared spreadsheets, calendar and Google Talk for Instant Messaging. Because I don’t have to worry about managing an email server, Office applications and backing up and storing all of this information, I have the ability to concentrate my efforts instead on innovation for IV and more importantly for our clients.

Speaking at yesterday’s keynote address for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s annual meeting, Girouard voiced his increasing concern with the limited innovation happening within corporations’ technology departments. He stated that “75% to 80% of IT budgets (are spent) simply maintaining the systems they have already,” according to Jon Brodkin at Network World. With such a heavy concentration of time and energy spent on maintaining existing infrastructure and the status quo, what percentage of a CIO’s time, energy and budget are left to create innovative processes and procedures for his or her organization? Has a CIO’s job description become “head fixer-upper” or is there anything left relating to “Information Management?”

Girouard went on to state that IT organizations and companies should, at a strategic level, take another look at the way they manage technology and consider outsourcing its day to day management, even if your internal departments are fully capable of handling the workload. The idea here is that hardware and software break-fix work, installs and the associated ongoing management is a commodity service in itself. Why use the majority of your internal resources to manage a commodity? Why spend all of that time and money on training your staff and keeping them up to date on the latest and greatest, if you can do so more cost-effectively by outsourcing these tasks?

‘“A lot of things that people think of as core IT functions need to disappear into the ether so that the IT organization can properly focus on the value-added [activities],” he said. “Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff. Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security?”’ (Jon Brodkin of Network World)

Instead they could be creating new and improved processes and strategically aligning your technology to your business. So, does innovation still exist within a corporate IT department? I hope so, but let’s help give it a jumpstart by creating the right conditions for this to happen. I guarantee it will pay off. For more on Dave Girouard and Google Apps, here is a pretty good CIO Insight interview with him.

Last May I discussed the importance of proper, thorough planning when considering your corporate software standards and the associated upgrades. Now that Windows Vista is fully available to corporations (with the consumer release only a week away), please keep in mind the importance of planning this out and review the total cost of upgrades and what actual ROI you will see… Please, keep in mind the reasons why you WOULD upgrade… At this point I don’t see a single valid point to upgrading, at least until Microsoft has released service pack 1 a bit later this year.

I have included below two fairly comprehensive lists: 10 reasons to upgrade to Vista and 10 reasons not to. These two lists are available with associated annotations and explanations at apcmag.com and were written by Dan Warne and Ashton Mills, respectively. Please note that some given reasons are not entirely true, in particular Mills’ statement in #10 about ownership rights and license transfers. I’ve discussed this in greater detail here. However, overall I think the cons outweigh the pros by a healthy margin; for now. There will be a time where your organization should implement Vista, but there is always time for testing and planning this upgrade, so let’s not to add to Microsoft’s margins just yet.

“10 reasons you should get Vista”

1. UI built for the era of video and digital photography
2. Image-based install
3. Up-to-date driver base and better driver handling on installation
4. Desktop search and search folders built in
5. Sleep mode that actually works
6. Rock-solid laptop encryption
7. Better file navigation
8. Inbuilt undelete
9. DirectX10
10. Face it, you have no choice

“10 reasons not to get Vista”

1. You don’t actually need it
2. Cost $$
3. On that note, it’s outrageously overpriced
4. Upgrading hardware
5. Driver support
6. Applications that don’t
7. It’s a big fat target
8. UAC
9. DRM
10. The draconian license

Throughout my years of experience in channel building, management and development I have come across the good, the bad and the really, really ugly in vendors of all shapes and sizes. Some of them sell routers designed to work with cable/DSL modems, when you actually have full T1’s coming into your offices. Others develop Microsoft licensing schemes bordering on the insane, not to mention illegal (a legal liability). But there are plenty of vendors out there who are really, really good at what they do; from analysis and design to procurement or delivery and installation, to the ongoing management. There are gems in the haystack. But how do we determine who’s who and more importantly, how do we decrease the impact on your bottom line profitability and efficiency, resulting from a potentially bad decision?

Do you get new vendors on a referral basis? Perhaps your rolodex goes back through 20 years of industry experience and that is enough to fulfill your needs… Well, however you accomplish this task today, this world is changing at a new rate of speed.

First, let’s look at the different type of vendors that exist today. There exist the hardware and software “value-added” resellers or VAR’s, also known as box-pushers (such as CDW, Insight, PC Connection, etc.). Then there exist the IT management shops who will help the SMB customer manage its Exchange network or remote connectivity environments (such as All Covered on a national scale or the thousand other shops built like it around the country). Additionally, there are CLEC’s spread across the country (not often known by name, they will resell blocks of phone minutes at a discounted price). Then we get into the “managed service” providers, or MSP’s. This is where the water gets muddied and the quality of service you will receive can take your business to new, previously unimaginable levels, or embarrass and throw your company’s technology (and consequently business environment) into a brick wall. Let’s try to avoid this scenario, shall we?

Michael Vizard, from eWeek’s Channel Insider, helps to navigate the unknown of the MSP world for channel partners (i.e. the VAR’s, IT shops, CLEC’s and of course MSP’s) in his recent column entitled, “A Managed Services Means to an End.” While making some rather good points about what is most important, this article is of course written for the traditional VAR or “solution provider” and their desires to move into the managed services space; primarily because without additional channels of revenue they will die by their own hand of horribly low hardware and software margins.

Let me stop here for a bit and explain a couple of things about how the VAR channel works (and additionally what most every other channel is modeled after). First tier is the manufacturer. Second is the distributor (Ingram, Tech Data, Synnex, D&D, etc.). Third are the VAR’s (and at times the IT management shops). By the time you get to the third level (from whom most companies will purchase their hardware and software, telecommunications services, etc.) there is little difference in service or price. It essentially comes down to your sales rep’s ability to manipulate the process as best he can. There is a constant fight to keep declining margins from toppling their strung-out sales’ forces and therefore they need to diversify into other offerings whenever possible. Buyer beware…

This is where, as Vizard points out, VAR’s can use a platform (such as Silverback, N-Able or Level Platforms) to create packaged, managed services for remote management, design, backup and recovery, etc. However, due to the nature of their business structure, VAR’s cannot accomplish this task or actually sell ANY of these services without SKU’s. So, the feared “C-word” or “commodity” comes into play here as it always has in this environment. In other words, if you have sku’s, than anyone can sell it, thereby reducing the increased competition and reducing any possible margins which once existed for them. While trying to diversify their portfolio of services, these “channel companies” are creating another commodity channel which will self-destruct, just like the rest of them.

As you can imagine, this is becoming a growing problem for companies needing to determine who to use in order to complement or replace their existing capabilities. How will these VAR’s (and other “MSP’s”) complement your business? Do they know your environment? Your competition? Your short and long-term business strategy? These are very valid questions which must be asked every time we venture out for additional help. Why do you think IV is in business?!? The potential savings or chance of disaster makes the stakes very high for all involved. Perhaps we can be considered a Channel Broker, as I mentioned yesterday, but as long as that definition is defined without concrete walls; because, to quote a fairly famous musician from the last 60 years, “The times they are a-changin’”.