Don't E-mail that Document — Share It

Most companies share documents in one of three ways: attaching them to emails, storing them on a shared network drive, or burning copies to a CD. While seemingly convenient, these methods are inefficient when replicated throughout an organization and often result in a document management nightmare.

Attaching documents to email messages leads to a proliferation of the document on the network, eating up storage space and causing confusion among users. Changes to the document are not managed, so one person's changes may end up overriding someone else's. And finding a specific document or the most current version of a document can take hours. All this wasted time eats into productivity and employee morale.

SharePoint can be used to alleviate many of these issues. This Microsoft document management portal can help organizations boost productivity by improving storage efficiency, automating document versioning and allowing employees to find documents in no time. Using SharePoint, workers can collaborate from multiple points in the country or around the world. Multiple users can view a document simultaneously and communicate live. When changes are made, users are notified. No one is left out of the loop.

An organization that uses SharePoint realizes the "standard" benefits of a document management system, including:

• A central shared area for storing documents as opposed to all over the network, resulting in improved organization and improved storage efficiency.
• Automatic indexing, providing the ability to find documents in less time and thereby improving employee productivity.
• Document check-in/check-out ensures that updates are controlled and users don't overwrite someone else's work.
• Automatic versioning of documents, enabling history to be maintained and providing roll-back capabilities.

For a more detailed overview of SharePoint, check out what Microsoft has to say about its flagship collaboration software:

Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management helps ensure that proprietary and confidential information is better protected even if it is not connected to a server.

Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise. Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.

Simplify Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative site to a portal), or to cost-effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.

Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services–driven solutions make it possible to more securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.

Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.

Present business-critical information in one central location. Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business information from disparate sources by using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place to find the latest spreadsheets, reports, or KPIs.

Quickly connect people with information. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 incorporates people and business data along with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. The Search Center provides a single integrated location for employees to find content, processes, people, and business data relevant to their specific needs. This enables people and organizations to make decisions based on the latest information and facts more quickly.

Share business data broadly while helping to protect sensitive information. Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to data and analytics in real time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one centralized and up-to-date version while helping to protect any sensitive or proprietary information embedded in documents (such as financial models).

Take advantage of your unstructured business networks to drive better decisions. Employees can use new knowledge management tools to get the most from their powerful unstructured business networks, both inside and outside their organizations, thereby connecting with people more quickly and efficiently. By exploring these undocumented business relationships and finding subject-matter experts, individuals are able to make better decisions more quickly.

Unlock business data. The Business Data Catalog enables structured data from line-of-business applications, such as SAP and Siebel systems, to be integrated into Office SharePoint Server 2007 through Web Parts, lists, people profiles, search, or programmatically. Centrally managed connections to back-end systems can be defined once and then reused by end-users to access back-end data without writing any code — easily making business data part of portal content. The Business Data Catalog also provides the ability for Enterprise Search to integrate back-end business data into the search experience, without having to write any protocol handlers, iFilters, or custom code.

Enhance customer and partner relationships. With smart, standards-based, electronic forms–driven solutions, you can collect business information from customers and partners through a Web browser. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration and support for other pluggable authentication providers makes it easier to work with non–Active Directory directory service sources, thereby simplifying extranet setups and facilitating tighter connectivity with customers, partners, and suppliers.

Ubiquitous Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 has great relevance and incorporates enterprise content such as people and business data, along with documents and Web pages, to provide more comprehensive results. Enterprise Search is ubiquitous in Office SharePoint Server 2007, with tight integration into SharePoint sites, Web Parts, SharePoint lists, people profiles, and more. This enables people to look for the information they need wherever they navigate within the portal. Enterprise Search has the capability to search through business data, and the search results can be highly customized; for example, surfacing specific metadata elements of back-end records.

Work when and where you want. With offline access to SharePoint lists and document libraries, via Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you can free yourself from limitations of corporate network connectivity. Tight integration with Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 further enhances the offline experience for users.

Connect and share knowledge. New knowledge management tools empower employees to create and use people networks, both inside and outside their organizations, so they can connect and share knowledge more quickly and efficiently with other people.

Personalize operations. My Sites provides a totally personalized experience for users, with a dedicated site for each user. Each site can be used to store, present, view, and manage content, information, and applications in a controlled fashion. Each site can also be used to present information about the user, such as skills and roles, colleagues and managers, groups and distribution lists the user belongs to, and documents the user is working on. And each site contains stringent privacy control and enhanced security mechanisms, so that each user can choose how much information to present, and to whom. My Sites can also be fully customized to suit individual requirements.

Securely Extend Your Office With Cisco ASA 5505

With more employees working from home or while on business trips, your workforce is often anywhere but down the hall. Staying in touch with mobile employees is the easy part. Maintaining the security of your network and the information it carries is the real business challenge. How can you keep your hardware and data protected while opening your network to share information with an increasingly mobile workforce?

The Cisco ASA 5505 solution addresses this sticking point by stopping outside threats before they enter the network. Additionally, the appliance can boost employee productivity by controlling file sharing, instant messaging, spam, phishing, and other emerging threats at the network gateway.

From Cisco: Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances are easy-to-deploy solutions that integrate world-class firewall, Unified Communications (voice/video) security, SSL and IPsec VPN, intrusion prevention (IPS), and content security services in a flexible, modular product family. Designed as a key component of the Cisco Self-Defending Network, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series provides intelligent threat defense and secure communications services that stop attacks before they impact business continuity. Designed to protect networks of all sizes, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables organizations to lower their overall deployment and operations costs while delivering comprehensive multilayer security.

Protect Your Network With Market-Leading Security Services

Firewall

Secure your network and information from unauthorized access, while maximizing network resiliency and maintaining business continuity. Cisco ASA 5500 provides advanced application-aware firewall services with identity-based access control, denial of service (DoS) attack protection, and much more - all built upon market-proven Cisco PIX Security Appliance technology.

Unified Communications Security

Protect your Unified Communications infrastructure, call control, endpoints, and applications from attack. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series delivers market-leading Unified Communications security services with the widest portfolio of application inspection and threat prevention services for voice/video - protecting against attacks such as protocol fuzzing, denial of service (DoS), rogue phone callers, and much more.

SSL/IPsec VPN

Extend your network with secure, flexible, seamless remote access. Cisco ASA 5500 Series, Cisco's premier VPN solution, offers unmatched clientless portal capability and cross-platform full-tunnel client for up to 10,000 simultaneous SSL or true IPsec connections in one device - all protected by world-class firewall services and much more.

Intrusion Prevention

Defend your critical network assets from attack with advanced, full-featured intrusion prevention (IPS) services. Cisco ASA 5500 Series incorporates powerful, high-performance zero-day protection against threats including application and operating system vulnerabilities, directed attacks, worms, and other forms of malware.

Content Security

Improve employee productivity and eliminate unwanted content threats in your network. Cisco ASA 5500 Series delivers powerful content security services including URL filtering, anti-phishing, anti-spam, antivirus, anti-spyware, and content filtering - which can help lower operations costs, reduce liability, and improve employee productivity.

Crabby's Favorite Outlook '07 Features

With anything, be it software, cheese, or sports, when you like something, it's usually a specific aspect that calls out to you (ease-of-use, stinkiness, or the fact you can throw people to the floor all in the name of fun). With Outlook, it might be the RSS integration. For me, it's a combination of things. And if I know anything about my readers, these might just well become your favorite features too.

View your upcoming appointments, mail, and tasks...all in one window 

This has been a very popular request among Outlook users. You were getting very tired of having to either switch from Mail to Calendar to Tasks. Now we have the new To-Do bar, which gives you a consolidated view of your daily priorities by integrating tasks, e-mails flagged for follow-up, upcoming appointments, and calendar information. And the coolest thing is that the To-Do bar can take up the right side of your Outlook window (when your mail is showing) or you can minimize it so that it's a horizontal list that you open with just one click. Now you can see your Mail Folders list, your Inbox, your Reading Pane, and your To-Do bar...all at the same time.

A tisket, a tasket, a task inside my basket  (Or, rather, a task inside my calendar.)

Sometimes I have a list of tasks so long that I don't know where to start. And sometimes I have an e-mail that I just want to add to that growing list (because I'm a glutton for punishment). Luckily for me, tasks in Outlook have gotten a bit of a face-lift. One of my favorite things about them now is that I've often wished that Outlook tasks could be handled like meetings and appointments are, that a certain block of time is not only carved out, but it stays there — it doesn't just disappear after the meeting is over. With previous version of Outlook, sure, you could drag a task to the calendar and set some time to complete it. But after you did, the task would just *poof* disappear from your calendar, leaving no trace of the time you spent working on it. With Outlook 2007, after you've completed that task, the time "sticks" to that day, meaning you now have a visual record of the work you performed and how long it took.

Color code all your Outlook items

I've often been asked if you can color code your e-mail messages so that you can see, at a glance, which e-mail pertains to which category (such as who it's from, if it relates to a certain project, and so on). So far, that hasn't been possible. But now, color categories can be assigned to messages, contacts, appointments, tasks, and so on. I love this because I may have a message, a task, and a calendar item all relating to the same project and when I see that they've all been flagged with the same color, I know that they're all part of one big happy family.
     
For an existing message in your Inbox, you just right-click it, point to Categorize, and then click a color category. If it's an open message, on the Message tab, in the Options group, click Categorize and then click a color category. You can change the color associated with a category at any time and you can create a new color category. And, to make things even easier, a Categorized Mail search folder has been added to Search Folders in the Navigation Pane and provides a view of all your categorized mail items.

And there you have it — my top three favorite new things in Outlook. However, I don't want to give short shrift to the other new features, so let me list some of the bigger ones here and provide some additional links so that you can dig a bit deeper:

• Attachment previewer. Preview attachments in the reading pane, before you open them. Learn more about how to Preview messages.
• Instant Search. Search through your tangle of e-mail messages and attachments, calendars, contacts, and tasks....all at the same time. Learn more about Instant Search.
• Calendar publishing, snapshots, and overlay mode. Now you can post and share your calendar (publishing), provide a visual way to share your calendar with folks outside your organization (snapshots), and view and navigate multiple calendars at once (overlay mode). So now you have no excuse to be late...ever (and neither do your coworkers.) Learn more about what's new with Calendar and scheduling.
• Security. Although the word "security" might not move you sufficiently to jump out of your chair and pound your fist in the air, shouting a resounding "YES!" this topic is of the utmost concern to us and to you. With new features such as the Outlook E-mail Postmark (which ensures that e-mail reaching your Inbox is legitimate and that all mail sent by Outlook 2007 will be trusted by your recipient's computer), as well as improved anti-phishing and junk e-mail technologies, you can rest assured that you will have less spam and other nasty stuff to deal with. Learn more about the Junk e-mail filter.

Of course, this isn't everything that's new; I just grabbed a few of the more dramatic changes to highlight for you.

Crabby's old favorites with a new twist

While there are some brand new features in Outlook 2007, there are also improvements to some of the existing ones. The improved features I want to highlight today are ones that work in tandem with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

• Scheduling capabilities. Scheduling meetings for large groups of people is a lot easier now that Outlook, in connection with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, can suggest ideal meeting locations and times for everyone involved.
• Out of Office capabilities. Using Outlook 2007 with Exchange Server 2007, you can schedule your auto-response messages for a specified date and time and send different messages to internal and external contacts.
• Free/busy information management. Outlook 2007, when used with Exchange Server 2007 gives you the ability to determine and set a variety of levels as to who can view your free/busy information. Now that three-hour lunch need not show up on your shared calendar. (Don't think I don't know who you are, Mr. Martini.) In other words, you're in control of your personal information.

As you can tell, a lot has happened with this new release of Outlook: RSS integration, that cool To-Do bar, and the new Ribbon, a component of the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, just to name a few cool new enhancements. I suggest you hop in there and start playing around. You never know what changes and improvements you will find to make you feel better about your job, your organizational skills, and even your work life in general.

MOM Knows Best: Automate & Report Network Diagnostics with Microsoft Products

Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM)

From Microsoft: Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 helps provide you with the knowledge to avoid the avoidable–reducing the complexity associated with managing today's IT infrastructure environment and lowering the cost of operations.

MOM 2005—a key component of the Dynamic Systems Initiative—provides manageability as part of the design and implementation of Windows Server System technologies. By delivering operational knowledge and subject expertise directly from the application developers, MOM 2005 helps simplify identification of issues, streamlines the process for determining the root cause of the problem, and facilitates quick resolution to restore services and to prevent potential IT problems.

MOM 2005 helps businesses avoid common IT service woes, for example:

• "My application doesn't work!"
  With MOM 2005 and the SQL Server 2000 Management Pack, potential database issues can be discovered quickly, allowing administrators to fix the issue before the user encounters a problem.
• "My e–mail takes forever!"
  With MOM 2005 and the Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack, you can use synthetic transactions to monitor the latency experienced by Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, and Exchange ActiveSync technology. You can generate warning alerts when the latency is over a predetermined threshold, allowing administrators to address potential issues before they become reality.
• "I can't log on!"
  With MOM 2005 and the Active Directory Management Pack, each Active Directory Domain Controller can be monitored to help ensure that tasks are configured correctly, site replication is occurring within reasonable thresholds, and end-to-end replication is occurring within service level agreements, reducing the number of logon failures.

In short, MOM 2005 delivers enterprise-class operations management to improve the efficiency of IT operations. Now you can spend less time managing crises and more time delivering new services to your business.

Hardwyre's implementation and managed support of MOM 2005 result in improved employee operational efficiency decreased operational cost. Through these capabilities our customers will enjoy:

• Enterprise-class operations management
• Improved efficiency of IT operations and therefore bigger ROI on IT investments
• Spending less time managing crises and more time delivering new services

To spend less time managing crises and more time delivering new services to your business through MOM 2005, call Hardwyre today at 501.851.2880.

Microsoft System Center Overview

From Microsoft: Overcome the challenges of day-to-day IT management with the new Microsoft System Center solutions, now joining the family that includes System Center Operations Manager 2007. Start now and see how fast you can achieve integrated IT life-cycle management, knowledge-driven efficiency, and rapid time to value.

Microsoft System Center plays a central role in the Microsoft vision to help IT organizations benefit from self-managing, dynamic systems. System Center solutions capture and aggregate knowledge about your infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so your IT staff can build manageable systems and automate operations in order to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.

System Center solutions are tuned to simplify management of the systems and applications your company already has implemented, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, the Microsoft Office system, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition, System Center solutions interoperate with third-party management tools so you can make the most of your existing investments and build on the System Center foundation with confidence. Already used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies, System Center solutions provide the reliability, scalability, and security required to manage the most mission-critical IT systems, applications, and services.

With an aim to enable self-managing dynamic systems, System Center solutions close the gap between development, operations, and IT by evaluating dependencies and optimizing business process performance from deep inside the operating system, applications, and composite services and workflows. These solutions also provide comprehensive management of physical and virtual environments, resulting in improved efficiencies and better control.

Benefits of System Center

Independent research shows that a well-managed IT environment improves an enterprise's bottom line and productivity.* Using the System Center family of solutions, you can connect your organization's people, processes, and tools across your development and operating environments. As a result, you can optimize your IT infrastructure and more effectively and easily manage all of its components, thus allowing you to focus more on delivering new business value for your organization.

Fuel Productivity
With System Center solutions, IT professionals can quickly and easily perform complex tasks. For example, the solutions enable knowledge-driven IT management and rapid problem resolution by providing comprehensive support and diagnostic information for Windows Server and client operating systems, Active Directory directory services, and the Microsoft Office system. In addition, IT professionals can access products and tools that simplify customization tasks and help them to effortlessly find information about your IT infrastructure—making it easy to identify, catalog, and report on software assets throughout your organization.

Best Choice for Windows
The System Center family integrates with the systems you already have in place, including Windows Vista and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Get comprehensive, built-in information for managing your Windows systems and workloads—expertise that comes directly from the Microsoft development team—and extend the value of the System Center family with add-ons from a vibrant partner community. Finally, implement a familiar, scalable solution that enables you to manage the smallest hardware component; the most complex service-oriented, architecture-based IT services; and anything in-between.

Enterprise-Strength Management
Achieve the enterprise-class reliability, scalability, and security necessary to manage the largest, most complex infrastructure—all with a solution that most Fortune 500 companies use. Implement management servers that can scale to accommodate any size organization and automate tasks to help simplify the discovery of system vulnerabilities and the distribution of security updates. In addition, deliver consistent, reliable, accessible services, and use modeling and application virtualization capabilities to minimize the risk of new application deployments.

Foundation for Growth
Keep pace as your infrastructure grows and changes by taking advantage of the extensible architecture of the System Center family. Centrally and virtually manage your entire IT environment to help achieve operational agility, optimize resource usage, and make the most of your IT economics. Access best practices based on industry standards to help deliver high-quality service each and every time, in addition to a flexible and scalable data model that allows you to consistently define, deploy, monitor, and manage your IT resources.