Posted on Tue, Sep 27, 2011 @ 07:25 AM
Office 365 is Microsoft’s new cloud-based offering of Office’s familiar productivity and collaboration tools. It enables employees to work from almost anywhere, on nearly any device. While there are several subscription options, users that purchase the entire suite get hosted versions of:
Office 365 can offer businesses several benefits, including greater accessibility and employee flexibility. However, it’s important to do some upfront preparation to ensure a successful move from the traditional Microsoft Office Suite. Following are some tips to help you get started.
Determine User Profiles
To determine what you need from Office 365, segment employees into user profiles based on work habits and activity. Example user profiles include:
- Road warriors: Extremely mobile workers who may be on the road more than in the office
- Power users: Those that need access from multiple devices and locations, typically executives and management level
- Office workers: More traditional “nine-to-fivers” who work standard office hours, most often from their own desks
Within each profile, identify the applications users regularly access, how and from where they typically access these tools, and which device(s) they use. This will help you determine what applications and services you need to deliver, to whom and how.
Estimate Return on Investment
The Microsoft Office Suite is licensed per device, meaning that a license is needed for each device on which the software is installed. With Office 365, however, subscriptions are licensed per user. This means that individuals can legally download the Office 365 client to as many devices they want and pay the same monthly fee ($24-$27/user, depending upon the plan purchased).
This is where the benefits of Office 365 can extend into cost savings. Evaluate the cost to deploy, upgrade and administer the installed Office suite versus purchasing Office 365 for each of your user profiles, and potentially individuals within them.
Microsoft offers a cool cost calculator on its site to help you evaluate your options.
Depending upon your user profiles and estimated return, you may find that a hybrid solution is the best option for your business. In this model, Office 365 is purchased for some employees, like road warriors and power users, and the traditional installed Office Suite continues to serve office workers and others.
Follow Your Gut
Sometimes, testing out a new solution simply looks right and feels right. In the case of Office 365 and other cloud solutions, ROI may not be as important a factor if you have specific objectives of increasing business agility, employee access and work/life balance, or hefty growth and expansion goals.
If this is the case for your business, you can try Office 365 with a one-year contract to see how it works. Microsoft has SLAs in place to assure your data ownership if you decide to switch back.
There are two Office 365 plan models. The P Plan is targeted at organizations with 50 employees or less, while the E Plan is built for environments with more than 50 employees. However, it's important to understand the specific features of each plan, as other factors can come into play besides company size. For example, if you have less than 50 employees but active directory services are important to your business, the E Plan — which offers this feature — may actually be the better solution.
Closing Thoughts
Preparation is an essential element of deciding whether cloud-based applications are right for your organization. While the above offers a good starting point, there are many moving pieces when it comes to determining the best solution for your business.
If you have questions about your strategy, work with a trusted partner that can help you evaluate your options and ensure a smooth transition.
Are you considering the switch to Office 365? Have you already made the move? Share your thoughts and experiences below.
Liann Moser, MCPc's Licensing Business Development Manager, is an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) in enterprise, and small and medium-sized business licensing solutions. She has worked with all sizes of organizations in a variety of markets, including Fortune 500 companies, to develop licensing strategies. Connect with Liann on LinkedIn.
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image credit: Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / freedigitalphotos.net
Posted on Wed, Sep 21, 2011 @ 10:22 AM
Collaboration is driving the next wave of business growth, innovation and productivity. By deploying secure, inter-company collaboration solutions—across video, voice, presence, instant messaging and email—employees can access information from any application or device, at any time and from any location.
Examples of specific applications that make up the collaboration suite include: conferencing, enterprise social networking, telepresence, messaging, mobile applications, video and IP communications.
At MCPc, we believe that collaboration needs to become intuitive—an engrained element of business technology and operations—for companies to compete and thrive in the modern business world.
The Driving Need for Change
A new collaboration experience is needed to address today’s business complexities. Consider the following trends:
- Globalization—No matter what size, almost all businesses work with outside suppliers, partners, clients or contractors across the country or globe. This has forced a shift in where, when and how people work.
- Influx of data—Information comes from multiple sources, devices and applications, often in real time. Employees increasingly need help sifting through this information to find what’s relevant to them.
- Worker mobility—With technology advances, distributed workforces and flex schedules, not all workers come into the office any longer, demanding more robust collaboration functionality.
- Consumerization—Employees continue to bring new devices and applications, such as smartphones and Facebook, into the workplace.
As these trends continue to impact organizations, they will make the workplace more:
- Visual—Inherently video based.
- Virtual—Converged with VDI/virtualized endpoints.
- Mobile—Requiring a consistent user experience across devices and locations.
- Social—Leveraging social networking principles in enterprise settings.
The result is that organizations will need to deploy solutions that bridge communications-centric systems, web 2.0 capabilities and today’s text and document-centric systems to make the user experience consistent and transparent across platforms.
Developing a Collaboration Strategy
The key to creating any collaboration strategy is to focus on the user experience. In doing so, some factors to keep in mind include:
- Open architecture—By creating an open, interoperable infrastructure, all devices and applications can utilize the same collaborative services.
- Inter-company collaboration—Organizations need to be able to work with partners, suppliers, customers and others outside the firewall. Collaboration tools should enable this, securely.
- Video communications—Video is becoming a transformative element that will permeate the entire business world.
- Enterprise social networking—Fluid, ad-hoc communities will evolve the way people work and interact within organizations, as they offer ease of use, speed and ubiquity.
- Flexible deployment models—Both the enterprise network and the cloud will play key roles in enabling a comprehensive collaboration platform. Companies should blend the best of both worlds.
Collaboration Business Benefits
With a collaboration strategy, businesses can experience a range of benefits, including:
- Reduced travel, saving time and money.
- Increased speed to market, as partners, suppliers, customers and others can work together in real time to finalize products, business direction, plans and more.
- Reduced energy consumption, supporting green initiatives.
- Improved customer service through faster response times and greater accessibility, using the customers’ preferred communication methods.
- Better productivity and efficiency as people will have access to the information they need when they need it.
- Improved knowledge sharing and training.
Your Thoughts?
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
- Are you using intuitive collaboration solutions within your organization? Why or why not?
- What business benefits have you experienced?
- What challenges have you faced?
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Darin Haines is Group President of MCPc's Advanced Technology Group, focusing on solution delivery, and has over 16 years of experience in leading the technology function in mid-sized and enterprise-level organizations. Connect with Darin on LinkedIn.
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Posted on Fri, Sep 16, 2011 @ 09:16 AM
We’re finally coming down from the VMworld 2011 high, as the show themed “Your Cloud. Own It.” hit records of more than 19,000 attendees and 175 breakout sessions.
It’s an invigorating feeling to be among providers like VMware, our customers and other IT leaders, as together we learn to leverage virtualization and the cloud to make information technology a total business solution. In this post, we examine some of the underlining themes and takeaways from VMworld 2011.
The Cloud Era Is Here
In his keynote, Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware, said that the new way of computing is “not just about technology,” but that it will require changes in people, processes and business operations to reach the highest potential.
Imagine upgrading your vehicle from a Honda to a Ferrari. If you change the car, but not your driving style, you’ll see less improvement than you would if you learn to take advantage of the features a Ferrari has to offer. Similarly, upgrading to virtual and cloud technology can drive considerable business results, but only if strategically engineered and managed.
Post-show survey results revealed that while nearly 75 percent of VMworld attendees are currently building or operating in the cloud, with 58 percent of the remainder planning to do so in the best year, more than half of all respondents’ organizations do not have cloud management strategies.
As discussed in a recent MCPc roundtable session, overcoming the challenges along the path to the cloud is complex and takes input from an entire organization. To transition to the cloud successfully, we recommend customers strategically “walk their way to the cloud,” a concept VMworld confirmed.
Next-Gen Applications & Automations
Application development was highlighted as a component critical to cloud adoption, as organizations await a “new generation of applications.” While many of today’s apps are coded to compute serially or linearly, end users have called for more rapid responses. Business needs include access to cloud-based infrastructures, up-to-date data and real-time computing.
Automating virtualization and cloud management was another key topic discussed by VMware representatives — expect to hear more on this in the coming months. While current environments have historically been created and administered manually, the expectation is improvements in vSphere and the management toolsets such as vCenter Operations and vCloud Director means these technologies will be far more “public utility” in form and function. Finally, elastic cloud infrastructure has arrived with the “plumbing” able to be turned on like a light bulb; as long as your organization is ready to make the people and process changes needed to embrace this tectonic shift in compute power
Virtualization and cloud automation would enable IT managers to spend less time on administrative tasks, and focus more on taking advantage of agility enabled by the cloud, to help their organizations improve business processes, innovations and information access.
IT: Delivering Solutions
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It’s no longer about delivering technology. It’s about delivering solutions.
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It’s no longer about STRICT CONTROL and LOCK DOWN of mobile device management. It’s about managing the users so they can connect to the enterprise from any device, easily and securely.
These two trends were evident throughout VMworld 2011, and they reflect a business practice we believe in at MCPc: With the proper infrastructure and tools in place, leveraging technologies like virtualization and cloud can put IT in a position to truly advance the business as a whole. As the roles of CIOs evolve, IT’s strategy must also advance to address holistic, modern business needs.
Keynotes & Comments
Check out the recorded keynote sessions on VMware.com. Maritz in particular provided an inside look at how cloud computing is shaping the next generation of IT. Tuesday’s address from VMware chief technology office and senior vice president of research and development, Steve Herrod (@herrod), showcased a comprehensive cloud infrastructure for the enterprise.
What did you think of VMworld, and what takeaways do you plan on incorporating into your business’ IT strategy?
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Andy Jones is Senior Vice President of Sales. He has more than 15 years of IT industry experience, and is an expert on cloud, virtualization and managed services solutions. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.
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Image credit: dellphotos
Posted on Tue, Sep 13, 2011 @ 03:27 PM
Last month, in the second of MCPc’s Modern Technology Lessons roundtable series, Cleveland business leaders came together to talk with panelists and one another about corporate mobile device strategies. Attendees discussed the challenges and realities they face in dealing with multiple devices on the network, employee-owned devices, increased data accessibility and more.
This post recaps five hot topics covered during the roundtable—important considerations for any mobile device management strategy.
1. Security & Compliance
Maintaining security is at the top of IT managers’ lists when dealing with mobile devices accessing corporate networks. On a high level, we’re looking at data security and confidentiality of corporate systems. In regulated industries like healthcare, education, retail and manufacturing, CIOs and CEOs are most concerned with maintaining compliance despite increased paths to data access.
On a granular level, several attendees brought up specific security concerns and desired functionality, based on their industry and usage. Following are a few examples:
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Disable cameras on mobile devices when users enter R&D labs.
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Limit screen-capturing capabilities in specific apps, so that sensitive information can’t be taken outside the network.
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Deactivate search functionality while students take exams.
2. Mobile Device Policies
Corporate mobile device policies must be established, with details and processes in place to cover concerns such as network and data exposure, non-secure access points, malware and viruses, and lost or stolen devices. These should be paired with management programs to monitor device activity, encrypt sensitive data, and lock out or wipe compromised devices.
Before allowing their mobile devices to connect to any corporate systems, employees must understand and agree to mobile device management policies and practices.
3. Personal vs. Professional Data
With employee-owned devices come personal files and data. Help your employees segment their personal and professional files, programs and access by creating sandboxes on mobile devices for work-related email, PDFs, video, corporate programs or other sensitive data.
A key benefit of this approach is that when an employee leaves the company, you can wipe all business-related materials from his or her device without removing personal data. The mechanics of this functionality will vary based on platform used, but some are able to selectively wipe devices in a matter of seconds.
4. Application Management
Another hot topic was the new trend, bring-your-own-application, or BYOA—employees bringing business-focused apps into their organizations via mobile devices. While it has been called the new path for savvy enterprise start-ups, BYOA also has implications for the security of your network.
Therefore, it’s important to alert employees of your company’s application blacklist —programs not allowed on devices that access company data. It’s also a good idea to develop an application whitelist that includes recommended applications for all employees, or for employees in specific departments.
Incorporate the lists into your mobile device policy, update them regularly, and make them easily available to staff to prevent copycat or non-secure applications from entering your network.
In the past two months, both Gartner and Forrester evaluated mobile collaboration vendors. Each found 13 vendors that passed evaluation criteria and rose to the top of the pack. Analysis like this, along with interoperability testing, can help determine what technologies make your whitelist.
We were also excited to hear that several organizations represented at the event have been creating custom applications for a variety of uses.
5. Mobile Integration with Traditional IT Systems
Lastly, company IT leaders are starting to think about how mobile devices affect existing IT systems and processes.
When upgrading corporate systems, IT managers must now think about all available end-user devices—including tablets and smartphones— and what mix makes the most sense for the company employees. CIOs, CTOs and other company leaders need to consider how form factors can be used create a competitive advantage, or drive improvements in business processes.
Also, with a mobile workforce comes a demand for mobile printing. Options like HP ePrint allow employees to print from their mobile devices to any network printer, or to public printers on HP’s network.
Your Thoughts?
What mobile-device management topics are top of mind for you? Join the conversation by commenting below.
To learn more about mobile-device management, see the following MCPc blog posts:
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Ira Grossman, VP, Personal Systems Group, has more than 15 years of technology project management experience and is an expert in lifecycle management and mobile device management for the enterprise, including the iPad. Connect with Ira on LinkedIn.
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Posted on Fri, Sep 09, 2011 @ 08:36 AM
In many organizations, both public and private, there has been a greater focus on leveraging IT as a competitive differentiator. With cloud computing, virtualization and other disruptive technologies, IT holds the power to attract customers and employees, and help organizations gain market share. As a result, IT has shifted from a reactive and supporting role to a proactive driver of business decisions.
Technology as a Competitive Differentiator
When all other things are equal between two organizations, technology can be the distinguishing factor and act as a competitive differentiator. Read on for some examples:
Recruitment and Retention
Today’s workers are digital natives, meaning they have grown up using computers and technology in a virtually (no pun intended) unlimited and unrestricted manner, and have come to expect the same experience in the workplace. The younger workforce in particular spends as much time or more computing from their phones and tablets as they do from their more traditional platforms of desktops and netbooks.
Virtualization and cloud computing can provide these individuals with the mobility and flexibility they expect and demand, while giving IT the security and management requirements it needs for compliancy. These seemingly incongruous worlds are suddenly bridged for the benefit of both parties.
This versatility helps businesses attract — and keep — the biggest, best and brightest talent. Especially in IT, medicine and healthcare, where quality job candidates are in high demand, professionals often make career decisions based on the technology and work/life balance opportunities their employers will provide.
If you had hired a developer 10 years ago out of college, handed him the Fortran Bible and said, "go forth and learn," he or she most likely would have said "no, thank you; I prefer to work somewhere else." IT “benefits” are fast becoming a standard conversation and negotiation point when attempting to attract top-shelf talent. In many cases the work/life balance, and the ability to work in a more mobile capacity, are given equal footing to compensation and other traditional benefits.
See Enterprise Mobility and Collaboration: A Better Work/Life Balance by Andrew Borg of TechNewsWorld for details and statistics on how modern technologies can help attract and retain top employees.
Expansions and Acquisitions
Say your CEO wants to open a new office or acquire a competing company. Historically, it would have taken months and a hefty budget to put the IT structure in place to support these types of initiatives. In the cloud model, however, this time and upfront monetary commitment is significantly reduced, making projects like this much easier to execute.
John Shaw’s SYS-CON article, Cloud Computing: David and Goliath Rival Companies, gives more details about companies like Netflix and Amazon that used the scalability of the cloud to grow their businesses.
Customer Service and Sales
Disruptive technologies can help your team improve sales processes, and better serve existing customers. For example, instead of time- and budget-intensive onsite customer meetings, your organization can use telepresence to virtually connect. And, your sales team can respond quicker to prospects through the use of tablets and other mobile devices, as they always have the most updated information, no matter their location.
See our previous blog post for more on the business drivers and benefits of telepresence.
Monitoring and Management
Enhanced management tools let you identify issues before they escalate, allowing you to focus on strategy instead of troubleshooting. In addition, monitoring tools give you insight into who is accessing your technology, and when and how they are using it. This enables IT to continually optimize systems and processes to meet core business objectives, and even make cost-saving operational suggestions based on user data.
The Computing article by Stephen Prentice, Big Opportunity, Big Dilemma, discusses the evolving role of the CIO, largely based on the implications big data can have on an organization.
The Evolving Role of IT
These examples and others driven by disruptive advancements in technology, provide a different type of relationship between IT and business.
Traditionally, IT was the laggard, the one potentially holding back or slowing strategic business plans. This is because it was much easier to dream up an idea then to actually get the technology in place to execute it. Now, IT can often deploy a solution faster than the business can act on it through a variety of private, public and hybrid cloud offerings. As a result, businesses can be more dynamic and agile than ever before.
Because of this, CIOs are assuming a more strategic, innovative position within executive teams, and are often asked for input on mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing, remote workforces and more.
Closing Thoughts
With IT taking a larger role in business strategy, this is an exciting time to be in the industry. What trends are you seeing? How are you taking advantage of this shift?
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Andy Jones is Senior Vice President of Sales. He has more than 15 years of IT industry experience, and is an expert on cloud, virtualization and managed services solutions. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.
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Posted on Tue, Sep 06, 2011 @ 08:39 AM
Each month, we share a collection of articles that provide insight into the ever-evolving world of IT. August’s roundup looks at: unified communications, data management, the IT job landscape, and recent news from Hewlett-Packard and Apple.
Unified Communications
Unified communications provides the tools to make collaboration simpler than ever before and much more engrained in an organization’s processes. At MCPc, we refer to this as intuitive collaboration.
When implementing unified communications, Bob Hockman suggests developing a UC Assurance Plan to ensure a seamless experience for users. In his article, “Unified Communications: Speeding Time to Acceptance,” he outlines the key components of this plan, including pre-deployment testing, and the ongoing monitoring of user experience and network traffic.
For more on unified communications solutions, see Marty Parker’s thoughts on Gartner’s 2011 UC Magic Quadrant, over at Unified Communications Strategies.
Data Management
According to Dell’s Brandon Canaday (@wbcanaday) in his “Data Management Manifesto,” many organizations struggle to keep up with rising storage costs, as the amount of data grows exponentially in the virtual era.
To solve the problem, Canaday advocates for organizations to employ an active archiving solution that reduces static data, limits the amount of data that needs to be backed up and cuts storage spending.
For more on data management, read “Modularity Does Not Necessarily Mean Uniformity” by IBM’s Steve Sams, in which he explains that modular data centers do not have to take a one-size-fits-all approach.
IT Job Landscape
IT hiring remains strong despite economic fears. In fact, IT jobs in Cleveland grew 107 percent in the past year. So, what does it take to secure your dream job? CIO’s Meredith Levinson (@meridith) offers tips for improving your resume, including:
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Portray your personal brand.
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Provide an executive summary that highlights expertise and experience.
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Communicate your functional niche, such as healthcare, Fortune 500 or startup.
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Display concrete accomplishments, or business goals you achieved.
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Make your resume easy to read and scan.
For additional resume suggestions from MCPc, read “Your Resume Has Five Seconds to Make a Good Impression.”
August IT News
Hewlett-Packard
In conjunction with the release of its third-quarter earnings, HP announced plans for significant changes within the organization, including exploring strategic alternatives for its PC business, ending its webOS TouchPad and webOS phone business, and acquiring information management software vendor Autonomy.
For more on HP, read GigaOm’s “Without PCs, HP Must Capitalize on the Cloud” and MSPMentor’s “HP’s New Direction: Five Critical Lessons for Your Business.”
Apple
Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO. Learn more about how Apple unintentionally revolutionized corporate IT during his tenure, as well as how CIOs can emulate Jobs’ leadership success.
What Do You Think?
What articles, blog posts, videos or podcasts did you find interesting last month? Post a comment, and we’ll be sure to keep an eye on those sources and topics for future articles like this one.
This post is an MCPc blogging team collaboration.
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Posted on Thu, Sep 01, 2011 @ 10:48 AM
With IT innovations dramatically impacting everything from servers to mobility to the traditional PC environment, it sometimes seems like the printer has been left behind.
Do you realize that none among the current generation of non-Windows tablets come with built-in print drivers? What happened to this essential, daily business function? Did the printer get lost in the virtualization shuffle, or was it simply not considered a significant concern?
As users access printers from multiple networks and endpoints, it can be difficult for printer administrators to keep control of the printing environment. However, there are several tools that make printing more manageable in a virtual environment. First, let’s take a look why virtualization can be so tough on printers.
Virtual Printing: Why Replacing Your Physical Print Server Isn’t Enough
From an end user point of view, printing is simple: You click “print,” walk to the printer and pick up your document. From a technical standpoint, however, the process is much more complex.
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The computer transmits the print job to a print queue on a server.
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The server queue then submits it to the printer.
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The printer then produces the hard copy.
The main issue with printing in virtualized environments is that a printer is not a piece of software or an app that connects to the cloud. It’s a big piece of hardware that sits on a desk. A printer itself cannot be virtualized; what can be virtualized is the print server.
As you can see from the image above, simply replacing a physical print server with a virtual one doesn’t change the print queue setup and management process. But because print queues and drivers are installed on print servers, setting up virtual print servers requires IT administrators to set up brand new queues and drivers, essentially recreating something that already works well.
Following are four tools that can reduce or eliminate the need for these additional administrative tasks.
Virtual Print Management Tools
Universal Print Drivers (UPD) – The main benefit of UPD technology is the simplification of driver management. It allows network administrators to set up multiple server-based print queues on a single driver.
Though in the past its functionality was lackluster, UPD has reached a level of maturity that makes it a viable option for many businesses. Today, many universal drivers support multiple manufacturers and full-color printing. For example, the HP 5.2 postscript driver supports both HP and postscript-enabled Canon imageRunner Advance, including Canon proprietary finishers.
An added bonus: Most UPDs are provided for free download from major printer manufacturers to organizations that have the printer hardware.
Citrix Universal Print Driver – Citrix provides its own built-in UPD that simplifies the setup of server-based print queues in Citrix environments. It provides all the benefits of UPD, and also removes the need to install print drivers from multiple manufacturers in Citrix-based workplaces.
HP ePrint Enterprise – This virtual and driverless software solution extends the functionality of iOS, Android, WebOS and BlackBerry devices, allowing users to send documents from their mobile devices to printers and multi-function printers (MFPs) within an organization’s firewall, or to designated offsite ePrint enabled business such as FedEx Office and major hotel chains. This technology fully supports nearly all printer command language (PCL), postscript (PS) compatible printers and MFPs, including non-HP devices.
From a management perspective, the ePrint software stores all printing history by device, providing print administrators with the data they need to keep control of the organization’s printing habits.
ePrint includes a tie-in with HP’s universal print driver, extending its functionality to the cloud and enabling users to print documents on supported printers at copy shops, airports and other off-site locations.
QR Code Release – QR code release works almost exactly the same way as secure job release, only you don’t need to install employee ID badge readers on each printer. Instead, a QR code is applied to the front panel of each printer or MFP, and employees’ camera-enabled smartphones do the rest of the work. No new print queue or drivers setup is required, and users send jobs to print queues, rather than specific printers.
After users click “print” on their PC and walk over to the printer, they take a picture of the printer’s QR code with their smartphone, and then simply select their job from the application on their phone. The software tells the network which job to release and where to send it.
Your Thoughts?
If printing has been lost in your virtualized environment, these technologies can help you regain control. Which do you think would work best for your organization? Please share your comments.
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Jeffrey Goldstein is Senior Consultant at MCPc and is responsible for the delivery of hardcopy and value-added services within the Lifecycle Management Group. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.
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