All posts by GreenPages Blog

Microsoft, Office 365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 1: Mailbox Size, Spam Filtering, & Address Change

There are several pitfalls that organizations experience when doing Microsoft O365 migrations. This is the first part of a three part video series where I outline some of the most common pitfalls I’ve seen organizations run into. A lot of people don’t fully understand how much your IT deficit has impact on your ability to migrate data. In this first video, I discuss Mailbox Size, Spam Filtering, & Address Changes. If you’re looking for more information around O365 migrations, I recently held a webinar with a couple of my colleagues that takes a deep dive into the topic.

 

Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 1

 

Interested in learning more about Microsoft O365 Migrations? Download David’s recent webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 12/14/2015

Were you busy this week? Here’s a quick Tech News Recap of articles you may have missed!

Tech News Recap

Cloud adoption is increasing in regulated industries, the DoD is eyeing commercial cloud options to house sensitive data, and Twitter has issued a warning against state-sponsored hacking attacks. Several large banks are spending $1.5 billion to battle cyber crime, Morgan Stanley analyst predicts that iPhone sales with tumble in 2016, and more top news from this week!

  • DoD eyeing commercial cloud options for secret data
  • Cloud adoption soars in regulated industries
  • Twitter warns users targeted by state-sponsored hackers
  • J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank And Wells Fargo Spending $1.5 Billion To Battle Cyber Crime
  • Congress Set to Enact Cyberthreat Information-sharing law
  • iPhone sales will tumble in 2016, claims Morgan Stanley analyst
  • Singapore students create wearable devices to tackle Parkinson’s disease
  • Why Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman are Funding Smart Machines
  • Treasury looks to Nutanix’s VDI environment for workplace mobility
  • 14 Tech Gift Recommendations from GreenPages’ Architects
  • How Notre Dame is going all in with Amazon’s cloud
  • Should You Try Calculating ROI on Digital Transformation
  • Managing your workloads in the cloud the right way
  • Apple CEO defends privacy, encryption amidst terrorist concerns
  • The year in fraud: 2015 by the numbers
  • Prediction: Apple Will Soon Become the World’s First $800 Billion Company
  • It’s time for IT teams to digitize like the startups do
  • The 5 trends that rocked business tech in 2015
  • Google’s top trending topics of 2015 include the hottest gadgets in tech
  • Cybercriminals will target Apple in 2016, say experts
  • Banks told to get get tough on cybersecurity in 2016

The NSX vs. ACI debate is going strong. Listen to our on-demand webinar to learn when it makes sense to use each

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Miscellaneous IT, tech gadgets

14 Tech Gift Recommendations from GreenPages’ Architects

With the holiday season upon us, I reached out to some of our experts here at GreenPages to pull together 14 tech gift recommendations. Check out answers from David Barter, Chris Ward, Randy Weis, Dan Allen, and David Jones!

 

David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

  • Microsoft Band 2 – The Microsoft Band 2 can be used for tracking for running, biking, golf and more. It has 11 sensors, including GPS, UV monitor, and barometer. It also gives you access to email, text, calendar, and call alerts on the go!
  • Surface Book – Microsoft describes the Surface Book as the ultimate laptop because it’s ultra-thin, meticulously crafted, and has incredible screen resolution.
  • Arlo Smart Home Security System

Chris Ward, CTO

  • Apple Watch – “The watch reimagined”… stainless steel or space black stainless steel cases. Sapphire crystal. Comes in a range of stylish brands
  • Some sort of drone!!!

Randy Weis, Principal Architect

Dan Allen, Architect

Editor’s Note: Dan admitted that this is, in fact, everything that is on his holiday wish list. Hint hint.

David Jones, Senior Consultant

  • Amazon Echo – The Amazon Echo plays all your music, fills the room with immersive, 360 degree omni-directional audio, and allows hands-free convenience with voice-control. It also answers questions, reads audiobooks, reports traffic and weather, provides sports updates, controls lights and switches and more!

 

Interested in learning about Docker? Here are 10 things you need to know

 

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

photo credit: www.techtimes.com

Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 12/7/2015

Were you busy this week? Here’s a quick Tech News Recap of articles you may have missed!

Tech News Recap

Google says that its quantum computer is over 100 million times faster than a regular computer chip. Learn how Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are using cloud and containers successfully. Get a list of the top gifts and gadgets for under $100 as we head into the holidays. Microsoft now wants to train people to use Linux…and more articles from this week!

 

[Download Whitepaper: 10 Things to Know About Docker]

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

 

Help Desk, IT Management, Managed services

Webinar Reminder: IT Help Desk for the Holidays

As a reminder, we’ll be hosting a webinar tomorrow morning at 11:00am ET! Jay Keating and Geoff Smith will be hosting a discussion on modern IT Help Desk approaches and how cloud platforms and a tech-savvy workforce have fundamentally changed the support game. Learn why your IT Help Desk can’t be an afterthought, and why it needs to be scientific and handled by professionals. Finally, discover how easy it is to leverage IT Help Desk services and why it’s the best present you can give this holiday season to your organization…and yourself.

Topics will include:

  • Market trends in Help Desk: Modern vs. Old School
  • Considerations for building your own IT Help Desk
  • How to significantly reduce ticket resolution time down to minutes.
  • Tailoring Help Desk to unique business needs and IT environments
  • How to support complex devices that require different authentication methods
  • Handling distributed appliances in private data centers needing VDI connections

 

Register now!

 

About Jay Keating, VP of Managed Services – Jay has 21 years of IT experience, with the past 16 years focused on Managed Services, and is currently responsible for GreenPages’ Managed Services organization. He has a strong data center and infrastructure operations background with substantial experience managing and optimizing 24×7 delivery organizations to execute with quality.

About Geoff Smith, Director, New Business Development, Managed Services – Geoff has more than 25 years of experience working in all verticals and markets, from the SMB to the enterprise, focusing on the application of IT solutions that enable businesses to achieve their goals. As a Director of New Business Development, Geoff is focused on the development of co-sourced and federated infrastructure operations, help desk, and cloud service frameworks designed to optimize IT operations and drive economic value to the business

 

 

Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 11/30/2015

Were you busy this week? Here’s a quick Tech News Recap of articles you may have missed!

Tech News Recap

Microsoft and HP offer up more info about their recent partnership. Microsoft beefs up security products. Chinese hackers use Dropbox to attack Hong Kong media outlets. There were also good articles around digital transformation, the Internet of Things, the auto manufacturing industry utilizing cloud technologies, and more!

Interested in maximizing productivity and providing the support your line-of-business users need? Register for GreenPages’ upcoming webinar, “IT Help Desk for the Holidays: The Strategic Gift That Keeps on Giving.”

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

application development, Azure, Microsoft

Microsoft Blog: The cloud for any app and every developer

The below is an excerpt from a recent post on the Microsoft Azure blog by Nicole Herskowitz.

At Microsoft, our vision for Azure is to enable every developer to be able to create, deploy and manage any application in the cloud, regardless of the tools, technology, architecture or platform they prefer. We continue to innovate in delivering services on Microsoft Azure, often in close partnership with leading innovators across many technologies, to ensure open source and third party offerings have first-class support on Azure. Today we’re announcing new technologies and capabilities that advance our mission to make Azure the preferred cloud for any app and every developer — from back-end cloud services to higher level platform services, to the development process itself.

For building highly scalable back-end services in the cloud many developers are turning to microservice architectures. The independent nature of these microservices offers superior application lifecycle management, performance at scale, 24×7 availability and cost efficiency compared with traditional monolithic architectures for service based apps. Today, we’re announcing the public preview of Azure Service Fabric, Microsoft’s platform for developing and operating microservice-based applications. Service Fabric also brings new innovations to microservice development with support for reliable, stateful services for low-latency partitioned data access at scale, and the Actor programming model which drastically simplifies building high-scale microservice applications.

We’ve already seen strong interest in Service Fabric with over 300 customers and partners already building on the platform during the private preview. With the availability of public preview in Azure, you can now explore the scale-out potential of Service Fabric combined with dedicated Visual Studio tooling. Today, Service Fabric is available on Azure and will extend to Windows Server, Linux and other cloud providers next year providing application portability and hybrid scenarios. To get started, download the SDK, check out our getting started videos and documentation and deploy your application to a cluster live in Azure.

For developers who want to build powerful, enterprise grade web and mobile apps that connect to data in the cloud or on-premises, Azure App Service is a highly productive platform for building scalable apps in .NET, NodeJS, PHP, Python or Java as well as engaging mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows. Azure App Service is one of our most popular Azure services used by more than 60% of customers to host over 700,000 apps. Building on this success, today we announced new capabilities in Azure App Service including:

  • Single sign-on using EasyAuth across all app types making authentication easy, everywhere
  • Code-free interface and data design for rapid development of data-driven Node.js apps
  • API app innovations extended to all app types, eliminating the need for an API gateway

 

To read the entire post, click here.

 

Interested in learning about common migration problems with Microsoft Office 365? Download our latest on-demand webinar.

 

Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 11/16/2015

Were you busy this week? Here’s a quick Tech News Recap of articles you may have missed!

Tech News Recap

Hackers could take advantage of inaudible sounds that link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC. Anonymous hackers have declared war. By next year, there will be six billion connected devices. Apple has a new magnetic charging dock for the Apple Watch. Cisco says worldwide cloud traffic will reach 8.6 zettabytes by 2019.

Register for our upcoming webinar – IT Help Desk for the Holidays: The Strategic Gift That Keeps on Giving.

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Miscellaneous IT, Tech News Recap

Tech News Recap for the Week of 11/9/2015

Were you busy this week? Here’s a quick Tech News Recap of articles you may have missed!

Tech News Recap

Tech News RecapMicrosoft will be keeping German customer cloud data in Germany. Hackers who targeted the CIA Director also breached a police arrest database. Walmart’s raising privacy questions after starting to use technology to spot shoplifters. Microsoft continues to grow its cloud footprint in Europe.

 

 

 

Are you considering adopting Microsoft Office 365? Register for next week’s webinar to learn more & get any questions you have answered!

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

Azure, Microsoft, Office 365

Bringing the Cloud to Life with the Microsoft Experience Center

It’s oftentimes difficult to get a legitimate user experience when viewing a canned demo. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Microsoft Experience Center. It’s a mobile kit that operates out of the cloud through an Office 365 instance. This allows users to get that legitimate experience of interacting with Microsoft productivity solutions (while having access to experts to answer questions and provide guidance)  because it’s not a prepared environment or running over faster internet. It’s running over whatever the building you’re in is providing so that you can get a real understanding of what the experience will be like accessing these applications from the cloud. Watch the video below where I discuss the Microsoft Experience Center in more detail, including the process, benefits, and key takeaways you’ll leave with.

If you’re interested in learning more about Microsoft Office 365, I’ll hosting a webinar on November 18th entitled, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality. Strategies for Migrating & Supporting Mobile Workforces. Register here!

This video is also available on GreenPages’ YouTube Channel

 

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager Microsoft Technologies