How to Install Windows on Mac with an .Exe Image File in Parallels Desktop

Guest blog by Dhruba Jyoti Das, Parallels Support Team I’m sure many users have encountered the following scenario after successfully installing Parallels Desktop for the first time—they buy a digital copy of Windows from Microsoft and…find out they can only use an .iso image or a CD to install Windows on Parallels Desktop. Sound familiar? If so, read on […]

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F5 Networks to Present at @DevOpsSummit NY | @F5Networks [#DevOps #IoT]

DevOps tends to focus on the relationship between Dev and Ops, putting an emphasis on the ops and application infrastructure. But that’s changing with microservices architectures.
In her session at DevOps Summit, Lori MacVittie, Evangelist for F5 Networks, will focus on how microservices are changing the underlying architectures needed to scale, secure and deliver applications based on highly distributed (micro) services and why that means an expansion into “the network” for DevOps.

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Rackspace Moving To Managed Cloud Services

Rackspace has been one of the most successful companies that have moved from a traditional web-hosting model to being a cloud vendor. However, despite this they have not reached their expected level of success. Rackspace’s growth has increased, but has not been what it should be based on the amount of money in the cloud industry.

 

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Previously, they have been considered number two (next to Amazon) for cloud services, but other larger companies have swooped in and taken this title away.

 

Last year, Rackspace took itself out of the cloud service provider race to focus on being a managed cloud vendor. This move was based on the need for help when transitioning to using a cloud service, and Rackspace wanted to provide that help.

 

Their CEO Taylor Rhodes has hinted that supporting many companies’ clouds are in their future. They already work with Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint. This move is similar to the one Dell made when they stopped offering their own cloud and focused on servicing other clouds. There is a significant amount of money to be made by supporting other cloud services.

The post Rackspace Moving To Managed Cloud Services appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

UK cloud adoption continues to rise – and WS2003 shutdown will accelerate it further

(c)iStock.com/portishead1

Newly released figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) show that cloud computing adoption rate in the UK currently stands at 84%, with that number expecting to sizeably increase due to the shutdown of Windows Server (WS) 2003.

WS2003 will have its support stopped on July 14 and, as this publication has previously examined, many companies are leaving it to the last minute to finalise data migration plans. The CIF results confirm it; 58% of companies polled are still supporting the server, down only 2% from the year before. One solution is to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy, migrating easier data to the cloud but keeping others on-premise until the time is right. The CIF believes this uptake will significantly boost the overall numbers of UK cloud adoption.

78% of respondents are using two or more cloud-based services, according to the research of 250 senior IT and business decision makers from the public and private sectors. By early 2016, CIF predicts that 86% of UK-based firms will formally use at least one cloud service.

Seven in 10 (70%) of those polled who are already using cloud expect that number to go up in the next 12 months, while eight in 10 (79%) say they include consideration of cloud services within their wider IT strategy.

CRM is the most likely application to become cloud-based over the next 12 months, according to respondents; followed by disaster recovery, data storage, email, and collaboration services. Earlier this week disaster recovery specialists Databarracks issued a bullish prediction that disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) would become the most adopted cloud service of 2015.

“Cloud computing has come a long way in just a few short years,” said Alex Hilton, Cloud Industry Forum CEO. “Cloud has moved from the edge of the IT estate to the centre, and it is now largely regarded as just another way that we do IT.”

He added: “Importantly, it is, by and large, delivering the benefits the industry promised it would deliver.”

SPM REST API | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps #API]

By popular demand…we’ve just added some new goodness to SPM with the SPM REST API. This new API lets you: create SPM Apps for monitoring (e.g. generate a new SPM App + its token during deployment; list all available metrics and charts for a specific App; list all alerts defined for some app (threshold, anomaly or heartbeat); create new alerts (of any type: heartbeat, threshold, anomaly); and enable/disable or delete individual alerts.

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SmartBear Simplifies Continuous Delivery | @SmartBear @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

SmartBear Software has released a TestComplete plugin for Jenkins, a popular open source continuous integration tool. The new TestComplete Jenkins plugin helps simplify and streamline continuous delivery process by making it easy for anyone to automatically execute and report on TestComplete tests through Jenkins. Customers deploying the new TestComplete Jenkins plugin are able to balance speed of application delivery with quality.
While implementing continuous delivery, organizations often simplify the release process by prioritizing product backlog and releasing requirements in small increments frequently. This helps minimize cycle time between teams and accelerate application delivery schedules. Testing, many times, however can act as a bottleneck to such faster application delivery processes.

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Why Developer Experience Matters By @Cloudant | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Why does developer experience matters, what makes for a great developer experience and what is the relationship between developer experience and the broader field of user experience?
Software developers are gaining more influence over the purchase decisions of technologies with which they must build on and with which they must integrate. For example, the success of Amazon Web Services, Heroku and MongoDB has been driven primarily by individual software developers choosing to use these tools, rather than the by the decisions of managers or business executives.

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WordPress whiz Pantheon buys NodeSquirrel in cloud backup play

Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist

Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist

Pantheon, a large website managemet platform for Drupal and WordPress-based sites has acquired NodeSquirrel, a hosting provider specialising in open source cloud-based data backup technology.

NodeSquirrel provides hosting and data backup and recovery services to over 300,000 websites, and the acquisition will see Pantheon offer NodeSquirrel to its own customers for free. Some of the core NodeSquirrel team will also join Pantheon following the acquisition.

“We have always had a big vision for what could be possible with NodeSquirrel. With Pantheon’s support, those dreams are going to become reality. Our shared vision of great, easy-to-use tools for developers and agencies makes this an incredible opportunity. We are excited to join the Pantheon team,” said Drew Gorton co-founder of NodeSquirrel.

The move will give NodeSquirrel scale and Pantheon a new value-adding service to offer to existing customers. The company also said it plans larger investments into data backup and restore technology designed to handle larger file footprints and incremental backup.

Zack Rosen, Pantheon co-founder and chief executive officer said: “It’s 2015 and people are still storing backups of their website locally. If anything happens, whether that is a security attack or a natural disaster, those websites are not protected. Secure, reliable offsite backups are a fundamental best practice.”

“Acquiring NodeSquirrel gives Pantheon the ability to make secure offsite backups freely available to every Drupal website on the planet,” Rosen added.

Cloud-based data backup and recovery services are being deployed more and more in a bid to complement both online and on-premise systems. Click here to learn more about how to use the cloud for backup.

Real Time Connection By @AGouaillard | @WebRTCSummit [#IoT #WebRTC]

It’s time to put the «Thing» back in IoT. Whether it’s drones, robots, self-driving cars, …
There are multiple incredible examples of the power of IoT nowadays that are shadowed by announcements of yet another twist on statistics, databases, …. Sorry, I meant, Big Data(TM), tiered storage(TM), complex systems(TM), smart nations(TM), ….
In his session at WebRTC Summit, Dr Alex Gouaillard, CTO and Co-Founder of Temasys, will discuss the concrete, cool, examples of IoT already happening today, and how mixing all those different sources of visual and audio input can make your life happier and simpler.

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Microsoft Ignite 2015: Top News & Announcements

This week I was fortunate to be able to attend my first-ever Microsoft Ignite 2015 Conference in Chicago at the McCormick Center. Me and 23,000 of my closest friends. We all gathered in one of the most cavernous buildings I have ever been in to see what Microsoft would unveil. We were not disappointed. Satya Nadella, Joe Belfiori and Gurdeep Singh Pall brought us insight into what was to come and began to showcase the innovation being delivered in the latest Microsoft miracles—miracles to empower IT Pros in companies all over the globe.

Microsoft IgniteIt quickly became apparent that Microsoft has made significant strides reinventing productivity for people and organizations. All of the new and upcoming Office 2016 features will enable successful companies to create effective communication flows between folks on premise and tele-workers. From my perspective, how can individual productivity not provide collective value from the co-creation feature available in Office 2016. Quite literally, you see folks type letter by letter, word by word from anywhere in the world. Gone are the days of email for this effort, painstakingly waiting for Jim to respond and then email it to Jennifer. In today’s new IT Integrator world, this means we can share documents with perspective customers via Skype for Business and mark them up live, with the customer adding to the flow real-time, in the actual Word document, not just on a whiteboard. Enable Track Changes and you can see what each contributor is doing and then merge the changes at the end.

This leads to faster turnaround on important Statements of Work, BAAs or other sales documents, speeding the rate of close on a particular opportunity.

For GreenPages, and our fellow IT Pros in their respective customer organizations, this is our collective opportunity to create better and more adaptable infrastructures. No longer are we burdened by hardware lead times and costs that blow up our budgets, just to add capacity for DevOps. The Microsoft Cloud makes it possible to create virtual datacenters on the fly, edit documents live, store them in the Microsoft Cloud and recall them from anywhere on a moment’s notice, and at a lower cost than ever before. I want to also highlight that this week at Ignite was not just about Azure, Office365, and Office2016. We also saw the walkthroughs on Skype for Business, Server 2015, Exchange 2016 and SharePoint 2016 in-depth for the first time. One word… Impressive.

 

Now, let’s talk about what Microsoft sees as the new online work experience.

Teams

Where work used to be a cube based, do your own thing and don’t lift your head (unless you smell food), it’s now a communal one. People still work individually on their own devices, in their own space, often on their own time, but now teams deliver projects more effectively to customers. With the foundation of new Office 365 Groups, they can work in communal, virtual teams, again anytime, anywhere. The ability to quickly bring people together to solve a complex business problem must be simple, lightweight, and allow team members to work the way they want to (much like the new millennial worker will or does want).  It is the ubiquitous team element that allows organizations such as GreenPages to listen to customers, take notes, create content, video, IM, tweet—and ensure our practices and our customers are part of the OneTeam approach driving collaborative context. As a Microsoft VTSP, I have access to their Office365 portal as my communication and knowledge base toolset. I have often lamented to customers during presentations that I wished Microsoft would release Office Delve to the consumer. Oh, what a great real time presentation of data; pertinent to what you are working on and a single pane of glass experience. Well, viola, we saw the preview of the Office 365 Group’s “hub” in Office Delve – not to mention that Delve has been released into production in Office365.  Also, I saw the ability to have group conversations in email, via Outlook 2016.

Human Mobility

Today, work is what we do, not where we go. My mission at GreenPages is to have helped develop a next generation VAR that ensures people can be productive wherever they are, using whatever device they have, therefore resulting in exemplary customer services to all of our customers. This includes both GreenPages’ employees and GreenPages’ customers. There are many, many reports that say 80% of time spent on phones and tablets is within native applications, so Microsoft presents us with the step-future approach and releases Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Skype, OneDrive, Yammer and more—across all devices and platforms. These newly deemed Office universal applications for Windows 10 are another great step on this journey. So, I immediately updated my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10 and Office 2016. So far so cool.

I am now a mobility monster. Maybe I should change my Microsoft Surface touch type keyboard to green. No… the whole thing should be green. I’ll show you a picture in my next blog.

Meetings

At GreenPages today, our meetings are as often ad-hoc as they are pre-scheduled, and there are very few meetings where everyone is in the room. Most meetings, even those with customers, include one or more remote attendees. But I live for body language; I need to see how the person is reacting to the information that I’m offering so that I can adapt to make sure they are comfortable with it. The physical queue is imperative for me. Virtual attendees don’t offer body language. They don’t offer queues and most of the time you hit it out of the park, but sometimes you miss that shift in the chair and don’t find out you were off base until a follow up from the customer crushing your record of successful delivery. I believe, as does Microsoft, that moving forward, every meeting scheduled in Office 365 will automatically be a Skype for Business meeting, so customers and fellow employees don’t have to do anything additional to make video meetings.  With Microsoft’s roll-out of the new Skype for Business experience, it’s easy to get a meeting up and running in a few clicks, and video just works. There’s no need for plugins or special software; it is part of the default experience. Now, add in great hardware integration across the Surface Hub, Skype Room Systems, and with vendors like Cisco, Logitech and Polycom and you can have smart meeting rooms on the fly.

Content co-creation

One of the more exciting things we saw in the Office 2016 Public Preview release was Content co-creation. In theory and practice, I tried this once my upgrade was complete. All Office content is by design and default saved to, and shared from, OneDrive or OD4B. This content can be created and edited with real-time co-authoring in Word 2016. Also, email attachments are a thing of the past with Outlook’s new attachments that are simply shared from the cloud, much like you would share a link from Microsoft SharePoint.

I think this is an unprecedented period in Microsoft history. A full on charge at the Cloud, better yet the Microsoft Cloud and finally a rich Office package that makes the cloud seem like it is the hard drive on your desktop, laptop, tablet, Ipad, Surface or Mac. It was a very exciting week, and this just begins the build up to WPC in Orlando this year. I am sure more is to come from this next evolution.

Have you been dragging your feet leading up to the Windows Server 2003 End of Life date? Read David’s whitepaper to get a better idea of migration options available to organizations.

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager – Microsoft Technologies