Category Archives: Miscellaneous IT

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 7/14/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of tech news and stories you may have missed from the week of 7/14/2014.

 

Are you interested in learning more about VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service? We’re holding a webinar on July 23rd about how vCloud provides IT administrators and architects with a common platform for seamlessly extending existing data centers to the cloud by leveraging the same tools and processes they use today.

 

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 7/7/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of tech news and stories you may have missed from the week of 7/7/2014.

 

Are you interested in learning more about VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service? We’re holding a webinar on July 23rd about how vCloud provides IT administrators and architects with a common platform for seamlessly extending existing data centers to the cloud by leveraging the same tools and processes they use today.

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/30/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Take some vacation time for the 4th of July? Here’s a quick recap of tech news and stories you may have missed!

 

Interested in learning more about the rise of unauthorized AWS use? Download this webinar on-demand to learn how to address risks created by shadow IT!

 

 

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/16/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of tech news and stories you may have missed from the week of 6/16/2014!

 

If you’re interested in learning more about modern day cloud management methodology, download this whitepaper!

 

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Project management

Effective Communication Strategies for Successful IT Project Management

 

By Kristi Samber, PMP, Project Manager

 

Effective communication throughout the life of a project is not always as easy as it sounds.  It does not mean sending more emails to more people, capturing every detail and delivering it to all project stakeholders, and it especially does not have to mean meetings. 

In a Project Management role, you must facilitate accurate exchanges of information to your project sponsors and all project stakeholders. Communication is the glue that keeps the project together throughout the entire project life-cycle. Effective communication is required right from the planning stage of the project where communication is key in gathering requirements and negotiating budgets. In the initiation phase of the project, you are building your team and establishing expectations. This is the most critical during project execution, where you are communicating status and issues and collaborating on issue resolution.  Finally, during project closure, it is imperative that you communicate the lessons learned so that others can benefit from the knowledge gained during your project, as well as the overall success of the project to your project sponsors.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that about 80% of your time managing projects should be focused on communication.

Know Your Audience!

Your methods of communication vary by who your audience is, as well as the content of the information you’re delivering. There are both passive and active means of communication. Emails, webcasts, websites, even this blog are all examples of passive means of communication. Those who you are communicating with can review the information on their own time. Examples of active means of communication include face to face meetings, conference calls and telephone calls – where you have an active audience. Throughout a project life-cycle, both active and passive means of communication should be utilized. Be sure to consider your audience.  A formal presentation in a conference room may be the right medium for communicating the achievement of major project milestones to the executives within your organization. Whereas a conference call may be the correct medium to collaborate on issue resolution or to bring new resources up to speed. There is no one method that is right for all audiences or all information that is to be delivered. 

I believe that communication style is a key element to successful communication and extremely undervalued.  We all have our own communication style that to some extent is part of our personality.  For those of you who have done a DISC Assessment, this may sound familiar.  My communication style has served me well in my career. With my innate communication style, for instance, I am more likely to communicate the big picture than focus on detail.  But this does not mean that it’s ALWAYS effective.  When I am going to communicate information with someone, I think about their motivations, their goals, and their personality.  If I am delivering a message to a highly analytical person, who only wants the facts and understands the impact of what is being delivered, then I am going to flex to their style to facilitate the most effective communication. 

Helpful Tips

  • Meetings should be short with a clear agenda and objectives
  • Be timely in your communication – don’t wait on delivering an important message or in distributing action items.  Confront issues HEAD ON.  Don’t delay delivering a hard message – it just makes it worse.
  • Don’t information overload – nobody is going to read an overly verbose email.  Target your message and tailor to the key information that you are trying to relay.
  • Elicit feedback and follow up if you are not getting the confirmation or answers that you need–don’t assume that just because you sent it they will read it.
  • LISTEN and be present.  It is your job to make sure that you are capturing the stakeholder’s needs, that you are understanding their motivators and concerns, and that you are distributing the information accordingly.

What strategies do you use to manage projects?

 

Are you looking to learn more about effectively managing IT projects? Fill out this form and one of our PMP Certified Project Managers will be in touch!

 

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 6/9/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of tech news and stories you may have missed!

  • Google Pays $500 Million to Buy Satellite Maker Skybox Imaging
  • Brown University goes personal with 100 percent virtualized cloud
  • How Hackers Set Up Illegal Mines for Virtual Currencies
  • Increased Productivity & Design Flexibility: The Case for Migrating to SharePoint 2013
  • Georgia Tech Engineering Students Use Virtual Desktops to Access Specialized Tools Anywhere, Anytime
  • Google Offers Cloud Database to Aid Autism Research
  • Some clouds may bypass IT, but someone still needs to keep the lights on
  • Food Chain, PF Chang’s, Investigates Possible Card Breach
  • LEAKED: LG’s First Android Wear Smartwatch Will Supposedly Offer 36-Hour Battery Life
  • Clean Cloud Is the Future
  • Top Ten Competencies of the Modern CIO
  • Target Names Its First CISO
  • How Big Data is Redefining the Role of a CIO
  • Data Never Sleeps {Infographic}
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison Gets from 97 Data Centers Down to 8
  • 14 year olds finds manual online, hack an ATM during their school lunch hour

Are you interested in learning more about 5 common mistakes in consolidating & virtualizing the datacenter?

 

 

Featured, Microsoft, Miscellaneous IT, SharePoint 2013

Increased Productivity & Design Flexibility: The Case for Migrating to SharePoint 2013

By Kevin Hall, Managing Director

 

Deciding when and how to migrate to SharePoint 2013 is not a small decision. If you’re on an earlier version than SharePoint 2010, Microsoft doesn’t offer an officially supported method for upgrading directly to 2013. Even if you are operating on 2010, upgrading the platform that so much of your business depends on creates risks and costs that must be offset by measurable business benefits.

 

There are already a significant amount of resources available around the benefits of migrating to 2013. At GreenPages, we have helped many organizations with SharePoint projects. This post will cover some real world examples of organizations migrating that we’ve experienced that highlight some of the key benefits.

Design flexibility to extend your public brand to the intranet

One client, a high-tech medical device supplier, has built its reputation on ease of use and modern mobile technology. With earlier versions of SharePoint, the client struggled to reinforce its brand promise and promote its high-tech, mobile culture among its employees on the corporate intranet. After they migrated to SharePoint 2013, the organization was able to take advantage of the improved design flexibility and standards compliance of the platform to create an intranet that truly reflected their brand and values. The site not only looks great on 2013, but it also uses responsive web design to allow access on any device.

Increased productivity with secure document sharing and predictive search

In the financial services industry, protecting sensitive client information is mission critical. Due to information security and compliance goals, a large financial services and analytics client decided to replace internal file shares with SharePoint. While SharePoint immediately helped better protect information, it was not until the migration to 2013 that this client started to see day-to-day business value from SharePoint. With the combination of cross-site publishing and the integration of FAST search, 2013 allowed for a single repository of documents to be indexed and securely shared with multiple intranet and extranet sites, all still governed by SharePoint security. Additionally, the built in predictive search capabilities available in 2013 greatly reduced the amount of time employees and partners spent searching for documents and information.

Out with the new and in with the old

We talk with a lot of clients about Microsoft and whether or not the industry has surpassed it from an innovation standpoint. Often times, a platform switch is under consideration as an alternative to migration. One of our clients, a hip technology firm, had some specific goals which seemed out of reach with Microsoft in general, and SharePoint specifically. In some respects, they had bought into the hype about the industry surpassing Microsoft and went with a competitive solution. GreenPages is now helping this client migrate back to Microsoft and SharePoint 2013 because our client found the product they went with couldn’t scale like SharePoint, required arcane technical skills to manage, and was difficult to brand and build a great user experience on. With 2013’s improvements to design and search, as well as the stability of SharePoint as a platform, the client is excited to get back to the “old way” of doing things.

Collaboration at scale with the technology and platform you already know

As I mentioned, sometimes the complexity of a potential migration opens up a bigger conversation about Microsoft and potentially shifting to a competing technology. Depending on your specific needs, leaving SharePoint may make sense. However, make sure you do not act too hastily. Microsoft as a company is doing quite well, and SharePoint 2013, along with Office 365, lies at the core of where Microsoft is heading and is enjoying tremendous success.

There is real business value to be gained from taking on a SharePoint 2013 migration. By migrating, you will ensure that your business is taking advantage of the improvements that Microsoft has made to the platform, and you will be well positioned to make a smooth transition once Microsoft makes the next version available.

Click here if you’re interested in learning more about the unique business benefits SharePoint 2013 can provide your organization.

Do you have any experience with SharePoint? What’s your opinion? Leave a comment below!

 

 

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT

Tech News Recap for the Week of 5/26/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of news and stories you may have missed!

 

Are you interested in learning more about cloud management? Download this whitepaper to learn more!

 

Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Tech News

Tech News Recap for the Week of 5/12/2014

 

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of tech news and stories you may have missed!

 

Register for our 5/22 webinar, “The Rise of Unauthorized AWS Use. How to Address Risks Created by Shadow IT.

 

 

Citrix, Citrix Synergy, Featured, Miscellaneous IT

Key Announcements from Citrix Synergy 2014 – Part 2

By Randy Becker, Enterprise Architect, Solutions

Here is the second part of my blog series providing a recap of Citrix Synergy 2014. If you missed part one, you can find it here. Enjoy!

Intel Iris Pro Graphics

On day 2 Intel disclosed its new “Crystal Well” Xeon process, including the Intel Iris Pro Graphics.  The Iris Pro Graphics is Intel’s most powerful graphics technology and the first time Intel has included it in the Xeon Processor Family.  What does this mean?  Well, this will now enable incredibly high density graphics capable infrastructure supporting workloads like CAD, 3D Rendering, video editing and other high end graphics requirements.  HP joined the stage to announce Moonshot with the Xeon E3 processor support.  If you are unfamiliar with HP Moonshot you should take a look at this technology.  HP had it out on their booth at the conference.  The Moonshot chassis will support 45 cartridges, each with four System on a Chip (SoC) having up to four x86 cores each.  That is 180 systems in a 3U chassis.  Moonshot doesn’t require a hypervisor and leverages Citrix Provisioning Server and XenDesktop to provide maximum user performance with dedicated hardware, maximum security with isolation and maximum compatibility with access to bare metal with no hypervisor tax!  I am expecting to see more adoption of this in the future.  The prototype for the Intel Iris support looks like a single system per cartridge, so 45 per chassis.  We will have to wait and see how this shapes up.  We have a Moonshot system in our lab now and will be anxiously awaiting a new Iris supported cartridge for testing. 

XenServer with 64-Bit

This caught me off guard because I already thought XenServer was 64-Bit.  There is an important distinction here because today Dom0 is still run on 32-Bit architecture.  While we may think that VMware won the hypervisor battle, we continue to see development with XenServer and NVIDIA and this will allow for significant increases in the number of GPUs per host using pass-through. This is really for customers requiring increased density in graphically-intensive XenDesktop workloads. 

XenDesktop 7.5 Update

One of the most notable new features in XenDesktop and XenApp 7.5 is the ability to directly provision to Amazons Web Services, (AWS).  It allows for an on-premises deployment and burst or deployment in AWS for certain use cases.  This is true hybrid cloud, and I have several customers getting ready to deploy this architecture now.  AWS is supported today and IBM Softlayer and Microsoft Azure will both be supported in the future. 

XenApp 7.5 is back

XenApp is back as a dedicated platform now in 7.5.  What does that mean?  Not much if you are already familiar with the new architecture. With XenDesktop 7.0, XenApp came bundled and the architecture received a full refresh using the XenDesktop Flexible Management Architecture (FMA) vs. the old Independent Management Architecture (IMA). With 7.5, there is now a dedicated XenApp product available separately or integrated with XenDesktop.  As more features have been added back into 7.5, I think we will see more customers start to migrate from 6.5 to 7.5.  I hate to admit it but I know there are a lot of customers still running on XenApp 4.5! Now is a good time to start looking at an upgrade to the new supported versions. This shouldn’t scare most small to medium sized customers, as this is a good time to look at the design and treat it as an opportunity to truly look at how you deliver applications to users. You may be surprised at some of the benefits in a new design. To assist customers that have a large number of applications, Citrix is working on a migration tool. During Synergy, Citrix announced a new Migration Tool for customers upgrading from previous versions of XenApp.  You can register for the Tech Preview here.

NetScaler 10.5

A new update to 10.5 for the NetScaler platform was announced.  This latest update will include deep visibility into mobile network traffic streams and cloud-first architecture. Today, we have this visibility with NetScaler HDX Insight for XenDesktop and XenApp traffic.  If you haven’t looked at HDX Insight yet, you should see the level of detail that is available at the protocol level.  This makes troubleshooting slow connections significantly easier.

Synergy Instructor Led Training

If you have not had the opportunity to take advantage of the Synergy training, you should consider this the next time. While I was at Synergy, I took advantage of two, five hour instructor lead training sessions.  The first was SYN617 – Take the mobility and networking journey with us.  This deployment included a full XenMobile deployment with the App Controller, WorxMail, WorxWeb, NetScaler and XenApp.  You even get to enroll your own personal smartphone and tablet to control deployment. 

The second one was SYN619 – Build enterprise or private cloud workloads in a few hours using Citrix CloudPlatform. I have seen other platforms so I was curious to see how easy it would be with Citrix. The lab was built perfectly and allowed for the ability to test some pretty advanced scenarios.  CloudPlatform can leverage most of the major hypervisor out there, (XenServer, KVM, vSphere, Hyper-V) and can also burst to AWS. 

All in all, another great event put on by Citrix. If you have any questions about specifics from the event, leave a comment or fill out this form and I will be sure to get back to you.