In a conversation today, I heard how much someone had just paid for 18 full retail versions of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional which they purchased online because they were not aware of other ways in which you can obtain the product.

If you are in Greenville / Upstate, SC and need to buy Microsoft Office 2010, please consider giving us a call! We may be able to save you or your business some money on Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office Home & Student,  Home & Business, Standard Professional, Professional Plus and Office for Office for Mac in addition to making administration of larger quantities much easier.

Different ways Microsoft Office 2010 can be purchased include:

• Microsoft FPP (Full Product Package) – This is the full retail package, includes media and product license and ability to load on a desktop AND  a notebook (restrictions apply). Versions available are Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student, Home & Business and Professional.
• Microsoft PKC (Product Key Card) – If you buy a new PC with the Office Trial loaded on it you can purchase the PKC for Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student, Home & Business and Professional (cheaper than buying the Full Product Package)
• Microsoft Volume Licensing – If you have a business or organization and need to purchase 5 or more copies at a time, this is the way to go! Open licensing is a downloadable product which saves on packaging and thus is better for our environment, and in turn, saves you money! You have only one product key to keep up with and can place the same installation package on a file server to install across machines on your domain. Microsoft Office 2010 Standard and Professional Plus are available via this method. We can help determine which is best for you!

In addition to those methods, non-profit organizations which we work with can obtain almost unreal pricing through some programs we have available!

If you would like more information on which version may be right for you or your business, click the more info banner to the left, or feel free to call 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com

We are a Microsoft Partner & Small Business Specialist and would love the opportunity to help you with any Microsoft purchase or support, whether it is Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Small Business Server 2011, Microsoft Exchange 2010, Microsoft Link Server, Microsoft BPOS / Business Productivity Online Suite, Office 365, and more…  One seat or one thousand!

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…

Everyone else has been making their predictions for the coming year, so I thought I might do the same…

These predictions are based upon industry news, social media and blog rambling as well as some personal wishes.

Will any of it come to fruition? I guess at the end of 2011 you can remind me how wrong I was.

A few IT Predictions for 2011:

• Google Android based devices will continue to dominate the market in smartphones, pads, and everything else from alarm clocks and personal weather stations to set top boxes.

• Wireless carriers will discover that loading their own “value added” bundled software on top of the phones they sell is really a turn off and that keeping the smartphone just as the manufacturer and OS provider intended it to be will enable a faster rollout of updates and make for happier customers.

• Dish, DirecTV & cable TV providers have a fight on their hands… Services like Netflix and a whole slew of streaming providers will fight to bring first run movies, and streaming of networks via the internet. We will see many new set top boxes, TVs with built-in streaming capability. The most exciting thing will be an the legal battles around this, not really the technology itself.

• Tablet and pad wars will continue. Apple’s iPad II will provide some stiff competition for the Android pads, but be prepared for Android based pads to spring up everywhere as more are cleared for import to the USA.

• Internet Tax? Yep, 2011 is the year. So much revenue is being lost that I predict we will see taxes placed on our online purchases. I believe it will be both good and bad. Some online retailers may no longer be able to beat out the local brick and mortar prices, so that could be good for us smaller guys, but it may slow down the injection of money into the economy. Either way, it’s coming.

• Cloud Computing: Over half of all businesses will look into using cloud based services, whether it is online storage, online backup, online applications like Microsoft BPOS or Google Apps, hosted anti-virus, hosted anti-spam or even hosted VoIP solutions. Of these, 10% will actually make the switch, and half who do make the switch will be totally happy, with the other dissatisfied due to bandwidth or network reliabilty. The number of fully satisfied people will go up as the technology matures.

• Malicious software will affect more Macs and Linux based machines in 2011. We’ve already seen a sharp increase in the number of exploited machines, expect this trend to continue. Add to this smartphones as a target.

• Network Connectivity: Charter Business has just come out with a 75×5 meg Pro75 package. This is great, but I expect this to reach 100×10 by the end of 2011, possibly as a free upgrade like they upgraded the 20meg to 30meg…

What do you think the very near future has in store for us? More solid state storage devices? Hard Drives reaching 5TB?

Either way, we hope you have a very Happy New Year!

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….

Microsoft BPOS

Are you tired of dealing with POP3 or IMAP mail from your ISP? Tired of SLOW email? Do you want to share calendars between coworkers? Do you want to see the same contacts, calendar entries and emails on your phone as you do in your Outlook on your desktop and also via a web interface? Do you want your mobile workforce to have access to the same resources you do, including public / shared calendars & contacts? Want support for your Mac, Apple iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry?

Then Microsoft Exchange is the way to go, however, there are costs associated with hosting your own Exchange server that are unattractive to many smaller businesses.

Fortunately there are Hosted / In-The-Cloud alternatives, such as Microsoft’s Own BPOS, the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite which features a Hosted Exchange server, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online. Using BPOS can eliminate the need to purchase, deploy, maintain, backup and eventually upgrade a Microsoft Windows Server with Microsoft Exchange Server. The services are hosted “in the cloud”, in a data center, where all maintenance and upgrades are maintained FOR you. No need to worry with backups either.

This solution isn’t right for everybody, but it could be the answer to your problems if you have a smaller office, a large mobile workforce, a small budget or possibly no central location to place a server at. Would you like more information? Please call us at 864-990-4748 ext 201 or email info@homelandsecureit.com to arrange for a free, no obligation consultation.

Free 30 Day BPOS Trial

Optionally, you can sign up for a FREE 30 day trial of BPOS - Business Productivity Online Standard Suite - This trial includes 20 user licenses for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.

Homeland Secure IT offers Hosted Microsoft Online Services including the full BPOS / Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting & Office Communications Online) as well as the Business Productivity Online Deskless Worker Suite (Exchange Online & SharePoint Online), and each service individually.

If you are in the Upstate / Greenville SC area, we can assist you with configuring your Outlook to work with the Hosted Exchange Online service at your location or ours.

We also offer full remote support and phone support to clients anywhere in the United States.

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.