Microsoft has announced a Service Update for January 2011 which includes new features and enhancements to improve the service experience for both administrators and users.

Many of these changes have been requested by BPOS users, so it will be a pleasant surprise for those for sure…

This is from the bulletin released on January 5th, 2010:

All service upgrades in this Service Update will be performed on your behalf. These changes are a mandatory upgrade for all users, so it is important that you are aware of them and understand how they may impact you.
The following features and capabilities are included in this Service Update:

Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console Enhancements
Two enhancements have been introduced to the Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console (MOSBAC). These enhancements are relevant for customers who subscribe to the Microsoft Online Services multi-tenant Hosted Blackberry service.

User Search
Hosted Blackberry administrators can now search for users in the Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console. The new search function is similar to the user search function in the Microsoft Online Administration Center (MOAC).

Management of Users with Different UPN and SMTP Address
Customers can now use the Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console to manage users whose UPN is different from their STMP address.

Administration Console Localization
The Microsoft Online Services Blackberry Administration Console has been localized into the following 19 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish

PowerShell Self-Service Administration for Forwarding Rules and POP Access
New commandlets have been added to Microsoft Online Services PowerShell capabilities to allow administrators to modify email forwarding rules and grant or remove POP email connectivity for users. Additionally, a link to Microsoft Online PowerShell documentation has been added to the Microsoft Online Administration Center.

Updated Versions of Live Meeting Client and Outlook Add-In
The Office Live Meeting November Client and Add-in is now available. It includes several administrative and back-end updates including improvements to reading of uploaded PPT files, and German localization. Also includes option to encourage “Exit and End” session behavior. Please refer to this Live Meeting General Discussion forum post for details.

Messaging Records Management
To provide the best service experience for Exchange Online users, Microsoft utilizes Messaging Records Management (MRM) to manage mailbox item counts in critical path folders in Outlook.

Microsoft recommends the following maximum item counts for critical path folders:

• Inbox: 20,000 items
• Sent items: 20,000 items
• Deleted items: 20,000 items
• Calendar: 5,000 items
• Contacts: 5,000 items

MRM helps your users manage the number of items in critical path folders and improves the performance of their mailbox as well as the performance of Exchange for others in your organization. Read this FAQ for information about MRM, how it is applied to users’ mailboxes. The FAQ also includes Powershell commands for determining item counts in your users’ mailboxes. You can also contact Microsoft Online Services Technical Support for a list of high item count mailboxes in your organization.

Service Update Timeline
Deployment of this Service Update into production data centers has started, with deployment to all regions anticipated to be complete by the middle of January, 2011.

The deployment schedule is subject to change. Updates to the deployment schedule will be announced via the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog.

Additional Information
If you have additional questions, there are several resources at your disposal. The Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal provides information about how to contact Microsoft Online Services Support. You can also read the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog for the latest news about the Service Update, participate in technical discussions on the Microsoft Online Services TechNet Forums, or follow the Microsoft Online Services Twitter account.

Sincerely,
Microsoft Online Services

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If you would like more information about BPOS or other SaaS / Cloud Computing Solutions, we are partners with Microsoft and Google and would love to assist you! Please call 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com. You can also try Microsoft BPOS out today by clicking the Free Trial link above…

Yes, I keep beating this horse, but not a week goes by that we are not reminded how important backups are for businesses and individuals!

Happy New Year 2011

This week, a gentleman sent us his Lexar 16 GB memory stick, which had been purchased in order to backup his data to it. Normally I would be cheering for this, but, apparently this memory stick actually became his main storage location and there was no backup of the data on his hard drive or other media.

As you have probably guessed, this story does not have a happy ending. The memory stick has malfunctioned and no data can be read off of it. It is a hardware issue, and the memory stick is damaged and overheating.

So, what could this gentleman have done to protect himself? He could have had more than one copy of his data. Storing it on one memory stick is the equivalent to putting all your eggs in one basket. (Or all your investments in one company).

A simple solution would have been to have kept the data on his computer, then copied it regularly to the flash drive, or multiple flash drives, external USB hard drives, or even DVD media.

A more elegant solution would be to use an online backup service like our Servosity offering. Servosity is a fully automated application that runs during a particular time window to upload files from your desktop or notebook computer, and/or your company server. The storage is in-the-cloud (located on remote servers), completely encrypted, so you have no need to worry about the security of the data.

You get a daily email that explains that your data was indeed backed up and you don’t have to give it another thought. In the event you delete a file, or lose a folder, or something becomes corrupted on your end, you can log into a web based interface and download the data, or you can even restore an entire drive.

Servosity Online Backup is the primary cloud computing backup solution that we use here and highly recommend to all of our customers. It works on Microsoft Windows desktop & notebook operating systems, Apple Mac OS X desktops and laptops, Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange Mail Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Linux/Unix/*nix, Solaris and more!

With offerings like Servosity there is really no excuse for not backing up, so we are offering a free 30 day trial to give you a chance to check it out!

If you would like more information about Servosity or physical backup solutions like LTO & DAT tape, RDX (Removable Disk Storage), tape autoloaders, NAS or SAN solutions, Symantec Backup Exec, or continuous backup systems, please call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com. We offer complete sales, service & consultation in Greenville and Upstate SC!

Click here to check out our free Servosity Online Backup trial!

Today you can hardly have a conversation with IT professionals without the buzz words, “cloud computing”, “in the cloud”, “cloud solutions”, etc popping up.

What do these terms mean? To over-simplify the definition, it means that something is not stored at your location. It is stored “in the cloud”, or on a remote server, and accessed via the internet. The “it” could be data, as in your databases, email, files, or it could be programs / applications, such as web based suites of software like Microsoft Office suite, including Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word or custom applications.

All this talk about moving to “the cloud”, a term which is generically used for the internet, has people thinking about how it can be used for their business. Let’s take our own small business and use it as an example.

Currently, we use a large server which has Microsoft Server 2008 loaded on it and functions as our domain controller, DNS, DHCP, and other standard server tasks… It also serves as our file server, and it hosts Microsoft Exchange for our in-house email. Other tasks this one piece of hardware is responsible for are: TFTPd for management of our VoIP phone system’s configuration files, backup of data (Using multiple backup systems such as Servosity Online Backup Solution, an “in the cloud” product, and MozyPro) and Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security Advanced for anti-virus and anti-spam.

We have a second server which hosts additional files, Blackberry Enterprise Server (not currently in use due to the switch to Android phones), and is a test bed for us. Then we have two other servers, a Voice over IP server based on Linux OS which is in control of our phone system & voice mail, and a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for storage of video from our CCTV cameras.

In order to reduce some overhead, we could potentially maintain a smaller main server with only Windows 2008 R2 running on it as a domain controller, then utilize Microsoft Aurora, or even Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), allowing mail storage and transport to take place outside our building.

We could then switch from Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security Advanced to the Trend Hosted solution, relieving our server from those duties.

Since we are already using a remote backup solution, we would not have to worry about that, and our backup requirements would actually drop since we would no longer need to backup the Microsoft Exchange Store (Microsoft would handle that for us with the BPOS solution).

As you can see, eliminating the main server entirely from the equation here is not going to be possible, however a considerable amount of storage, backup, and resources could be moved elsewhere.

One thing to take into consideration before moving to these hosted solutions is, what if our internet is down? That is a good question which still has many people concerned about these technologies. In the case of online file storage, if you do not have cached storage at your location, you simply have no access to it. In the case of mail, if you are caching the information locally, you CAN see your old/existing email, but you cannot send or receive new mail until the connection is reestablished. It is important to note that cloud based email will still RECEIVE email when your business is without an internet connection and you will get it as soon as the connection is reestablished, something that doesn’t happen now if you use an onsite Exchange Server, unless you are using a mail hold & forward (spool) system at your ISP or other provider.

Should you desire to discuss your needs and how products like Microsoft Aurora, BPOS, Google Apps, Servosity and other cloud services can fit into your infrastructure, please call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com for a free consultation!  We are partners with Microsoft, Google, Servosity, MozyPro and other cloud providers. We also offer a full line of computer, server & network service, support, sales and consultation here in Greenville & Upstate SC!

Microsoft is offering a free 30 day trial of their Business Productivity Online Suite if you would like to see it in action.

Word travels fast on Twitter!  And word was that there were outages affecting some Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite customers over the past few weeks…  In light of that, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate with their Online Services Health Dashboard and made it available to all customers and partners in all regions.

This is direct from their newsletter:

Introducing the Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard
Microsoft Online Services is pleased to make the new Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard available to all customers and partners in all regions.

The Health Dashboard is a step forward in our efforts to continuously improve our ability to provide customers and partners with up-to-date, accurate, and complete information about our dynamic services. It provides a greater level of transparency into the status of all Microsoft Online services and tools with detailed current and historical information for our three regions: Americas, serving customers in North America and Latin America (NOAM); Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific (APAC).

For more information on the Health Dashboard, please refer to the Public Announcement on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog.

If you would like to see what all the hubbub is about regarding Software As A Service (SaaS), In-The-Cloud, or Cloud Computing, you can try Microsoft BPOS for free with a no obligation trial.

You get a virtual Microsoft Exchange server which you can use with Outlook Web Access, or your own Outlook, shared calendars, Microsoft SharePoint, and more!

Homeland Secure IT offers both Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS and can help you decide which is best for your application. Please email info@homelandsecureit.com, call 864.990.4748 or visit HERE for more information….

I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but a dear friend called this morning as I was on my way in to the office, telling how his notebook computer had experienced a totally depleted battery over the weekend and that when he tried to bring it back up, he got the dreaded blue screen of death… This was followed by lots of time attempting to get the machine to run, and then a restless / sleepless night worrying about lost productivity, unrecoverable data, and expense involved.

I told him not to worry because somehow, some way, we will recover his data and get him back online. Of course, he didn’t mention that no backup existed until near the end of the conversation… Hopefully this story will have a happy ending…

What are you doing for a disaster recovery plan? Sure you are backing up your desktops and servers, but what about those notebooks? We offer a free trial of Servosity Online Backup…

Free Servosity Online Backup Trial! Click Here...

With Servosity Online Backup you will be able to sleep at night knowing your data is protected, even on mobile computers which may never see the main office. Your data is encrypted and uploaded to the Servosity secure remote storage server. In the event of a disaster, individual files, folders, or an entire system drive can be restored.

Have important files that change throughout the day? Servosity also offers CONTINUOUS backup protection – important files are backed up as they are changed on your system. All of this takes place automatically.

Servosity works with Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OSX, Linux and other *nix based operating systems. Don’t take a chance, try out Servosity TODAY! For FREE!

Homeland Secure IT offers many backup solutions and one is just right for your application! Tape, Backup-2-Disk, NAS/SANs, Autoloaders and Jukeboxes… Email info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748 for more information.

Just saw where another computer user in Greenville could have avoided a nightmare. They posted their computer was toast. Bad hard drive according to some geeky type people that looked at it. The computer is back to running, but their data is GONE.

Homeland Secure IT offers many backup solutions that can protect you from this scenario, but our favorite is Servosity Online Backup, which runs on your computer, regardless of the operating system of that computer (Server, Workstation, Notebook, etc) and quietly backs up your data to a secure server located “in the cloud”.

It is affordable, it is reliable, and the president of Servosity is an Upstate SC native. What more could you ask for?

If you would like to try this awesome online backup service, we offer a FREE trial, just call 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com for additional details or get setup for a trial.

Please do it before it is too late. Losing your pictures, music, documents, etc is a painful experience, and potentially devastating. The cost of recovering hard drives can be in the thousands!

Servosity - Now with continuous data protection goodness!

I’ve heard every excuse in the book for not backing up data. Too much trouble, too expensive, too time consuming, slows the computer down while the backup is running, etc.  Until today.

I actually had a discussion in which the individual told me that backups were useless because they were not real-time, and that using a backup program like Symantec’s Backup Exec or even an online backup solution like Servosity was a scheduled backup and data had potential to be lost between the time you saved it, and the time it was backed up to the media or remote server.

Then, I dropped the bombshell…  There is such a thing as “Continuous Backup Protection”. Symantec offers it of course, but this person was totally against a hardware solution that was on premise, so I told him about Servosity’s offering. Where you can have a regular backup taking place after hours, but for critical data, you could have that backup immediately when you save it! And, if you wanted, you could set it up to backup the entire system in near real-time! Kind of a mirror of your data, on a remote, secure server where each file that is saved or modified is synced with the remote system.

This is where cloud computing, or Software as a Service (SaaS) really shines! If you backup instantly, to a remote location, and a horrific incident occurs, say a tornado, fire, flood, or even theft of your equipment, you have access to it over the internet! A perfect solution for business continuity plans.

Servosity can protect a single workstation or a thousand, a fleet of mobile computers, your Mac OS X, Windows Servers, Exchange, SQL, Linux, and so much more!

If you would like more information about Servosity or other Continuous Backup solutions, please call us at 864-990-4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com

ASK ABOUT OUR FREE TRIAL OF SERVOSITY!

Trend Micro is offering 3 years for the price of two on Worry Free Business Security products!

The headline says it all! There really never has been a better time to switch your business to Trend Micro’s world class Worry Free Business Security anti-virus / anti-malware  / anti-spam products!

For a limited time, we can provide you with THREE years of anti-virus protection for the price of two years. This is a no-brainer for small to large businesses because you license one product for the number of computers you need to protect, and don’t have to worry with a renewal for 3 years! At the time of renewal, you renew one product license for the number of seats you have in use, and not the individual license for each computer.

Whether you need to protect two computers or two hundreds, there is a perfect Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security (WFBS) product for you.

For a small organization, like a church or non-profit that does not have a server, you can use the hosted / in-the-cloud solution to protect as few as two computers, or dozens and still get the full protection. You get a web based console and can check up on the status of all your computers, even if they are notebooks roaming in the field.

For a business who has a server, you probably will want to look at the WFBS Standard anti-virus package. It is loaded on a Windows based server, then each computer in the organization is associated with that Trend Server and from the central console, you can check up on the computers in the network! This makes life for the admin of a business because they are not running to individual computers to maintain anti-virus!

Worry Free Business Security Advanced is for those businesses lucky enough to have a Microsoft Exchange mail server. WFBS Advanced provides all the advantages of the Standard offering, but adds mail server protection to keep viruses, spyware, phishing and other forms of mal-ware out of your email. It stops it cold at the gate! It also features an amazing spam filter that will reduce your spam to a trickle across the entire organization.

There are so many features of these products that you do not get from the competitors that it makes no sense to even consider anything but Trend Micro! You can block down websites based on types of content, you can lock down computers to prevent people from installing software and modifying registry entries, and you can even see attempts by your users at reaching malicious websites, so you can tell who the real power-browsers are at a glance. This is in addition to the “normal” stuff, like firewalls, wi-fi protection, removable media protection, etc.

It doesn’t matter if you are in Greenville or the Upstate of South Carolina, or any of the great 50 states of America, Homeland Secure IT can offer these products to your business at a great price currently. We can sell you the licensing and also provide the installation and support if you happen to be in the Upstate of SC.

Involved with a non-profit, academic or governmental organization? We can offer even steeper discounts! Call or email us to find out what Trend Micro can do for you!

Google Apps offers in-the-cloud alternative to Microsoft Office products and BPOS

A major buzz word for 2009/2010 has been “cloud computing”, where your applications and servers are not actually hosted locally, but instead “in the cloud”, on a remote server or servers. Thus eliminating the need for you to purchase an expensive Microsoft Server and Microsoft Exchange Server, all the licensing, then the Microsoft Office applications for each of your users, not to mention the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading all this. Instead, you sort of rent the usage of this technology from an in-the-cloud vendor.

Let me go ahead and get the buzz words out of the way so the uninitiated will stop hating me.

In-The-Cloud, or “The Cloud” – Just think of the cloud as the internet. Something that is out there, elsewhere. Not local.  It would be “in the cloud”.

Cloud Computing, Hosted Solution, Software As A Service, SaaS – These are all the exact same thing, or variations on a theme. It means, the hardware and software is not all hosted locally at your site. Some or all of it is hosted at remote sites and accessible via the internet. Sometimes with a simple browser, and sometimes with a download of an applet or software package to access it. The largest part of the computing power and storage requirements takes place outside your facility.

Google Apps – A suite of software and services that is hosted in the cloud. These applications could potentially replace a Microsoft Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office, and the need to maintain and upgrade all that. What you get: Gmail, a mostly web based mail application similar to Microsoft Outlook. Google Calendar, a calendaring system similar to what Outlook offers. Google Docs, which is similar to everything the rest of the Microsoft Office suite offers, including document editing via a word processor, spreadsheets similar to Excel,  drawings and presentations similar to Microsoft Powerpoint.  You also get Google Groups, which is a group sharing system with mailing lists, and Google Sites, a web hosting/authoring package, and last but not least, Google Video, a place to host your video.

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite – This is the direct competitor of Google Apps, and offers the familiar Microsoft look and feel. With this you get a familiar Microsoft Office and Outlook interface.

These are both great solutions for some businesses. And as the headline reads, The City of Los Angeles ditched GroupWise, a very expensive system to go with Google Apps. Could this be the right solution for your business? A free consultation with us might just answer that question. Please call us today at 864-990-4748. We will closely analyze your needs and tell you if either of these options will work for your application.

Homeland Secure IT, LLC is a reseller of both Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS, as well as other hosted solutions, such as Servosity online backup to backup your computers and servers automatically!  We offer service to Greenville, the Upstate of SC, and national sales.

Homeland Secure IT, LLC can assist you with a move to (or from) Google Apps. We are a reseller of Google Apps and can help determine if using an “in the cloud” solution is right for you.

Some interesting news is that Google has made it (somewhat) easy to migrate from your current Microsoft Exchange system to their hosted solution. You can read more about that at InformationWeek http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223900148

Some issues we are seeing are total mail blackouts due to internet connectivity interruptions, if this is a concern for you, then a hosted email solution is probably not going to work out for you, but give us a call and we will examine your needs and go over the pros and cons with you.

On the other hand, if you want to use a Microsoft Exchange server to host your own mail, we can assist with that too.