Category Archives: Content Management

Cloud & IT Management, Content Management, Customer Relationship Management, Gartner, HCL Technologies, Information technology management, Internet Technology, Tools

4 Reasons to Improve Your Infrastructure Management On-The-Cloud

Infrastructure-as-a-service or IaaS is slowly yet steadily improving as the longest solutions towards successful integration of services and its management. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management systems are perhaps the quickest systems to adapt to legacy systems particularly on the cloud. Companies have not left any stone unturned when it came to adopting to the cloud, particularly towards adopting legacy systems. Not only have companies upgraded their spending potential for adapting to the cloud but it has also seen the adoption of cloud-based platforms as the leading trend with towards profit maximization and corporate sustainability.

Are companies inclined to spend more in IaaS?

According to a recent Gartner study, public cloud services are likely improve over the years which indirectly means that the global spending in infrastructure management is likely to grow. The growth rate or the CAGR will sustain at 17.7% over the years till the year 2016. Here’s what they predict about the investments in IaaS or infrastructure-as-a-service.

cloud-spending

At a sustained CAGR of 41.3% till 2016, the investments in IaaS is likely to be the fastest growing segments in the world. As companies want to reach to a wider audience, there is no doubt that companies want to achieve a competitive advantage before their competitors. 

Geographically too, companies across the world are increasing their IT spending towards cloud computing to enhance their company’s performance.

cloud-spending-2

Essentially, companies in Northern America, and Western Europe are the most eager or have already captured the benefits of cloud computing with an integrated infrastructure management. 

So, what is the direct advantage of having a cloud computing for integrated infrastructure management? Let’s take a look at the 4 critical advantages of having an integrated infrastructure management on the cloud:

  1. The lower your TCO, the better: When it comes to facilitating lower total cost of operations or achieving the best of cost savings, one of the critical ways of achieving either of these objectives is by going on the cloud. Not only have companies reduced their costs towards IT management services but they have avoided costs involved in severe challenges for managing various IT environments, while adapting to the cloud.
  2. Ability to concentrate on core businesses: Freeing up your time for core businesses is another critical way to facilitate enhanced business strategies. By implementing infrastructure management on the cloud, your strategic IT resources can concentrate on core IT strategies that facilitate business growth.
  3. Respond better to business needs: Enhance your flexibility and further your responsiveness to indulge into what your customers and niche clients want. Enhance your IT infrastructure with the availability of reliable and easily available services on the cloud.
  4. Improve the standards of service levels: Increase the level of security, stability, and IT infrastructure availability. With greater synergy between existing and newer technologies for infrastructure management, there are chances that one can make the entire IT infrastructure more accountable.

In other words, by implementing the best of IT integrated infrastructure strategies, one is virtually capable of indulging in cost savings, heightened competitive advantage, and greater accountability.

To know more about infrastructure management please visit HCL Technologies

Bitrix, Bitrix24, Collaboration, Content Management, Customer Relationship Management, Document Management, Messaging, Mobile, Social, Storage

Bitrix24 Collaboration for SMBs Update Supports Online Document Creation, Sharing

Bitrix has released a new version of Bitrix24, its free enterprise social network and collaboration suite for small businesses. The new release allows users to create, edit and collaborate on documents online, without having MS Office suite installed on their personal computers.

In addition to using Bitrix24 instant messenger for video and group chats, users now have access to video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. Email connectors to MS Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, iCloud and other popular e-mail services have been added to enable e-mail access from Bitrix24 accounts.

Activity Stream has been enhanced with real time updates, smart forwarding, notification options and company-wide announcements, while engagement analytics module (Company Pulse) has been added to provide real time indicators for enterprise social network adoption, identify roadblocks and slow adopters, and show which intranet tools are currently being (under)used by employees.

Bitrix24 has also released a fully functional mobile CRM, which allows creation or editing of CRM entries and invoices directly from the mobile device. The new mobile app also allows using multiple Bitrix24 accounts from a single smartphone or tablet.

“2013 has been a year of significant growth for us, – said Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov, – we’ve signed up 90,000 companies, which is well over 500,000 users for the cloud and onsite versions of Bitrix24 intranet. Our workforce grew by 40% to over 130 employees and we opened three new sales and support offices. GooglePlay now lists Bitrix24 among the top 5 mobile intranet apps, along with or surpassing such established enterprise social brands as Jive Software, IBM Connection, VMWare SocialCast and TIBCO Tibbr. We hope to have a million users by the end of the year.”

Bitrix24 is 100% free to any company or organization with up to 12 employees. Bitrix24 paid cloud plans are priced at $99/mo (50 GB) and $199/mo (100 GB), and both come with unlimited users.

Bitcoin, CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, Electronic money, Payment

MaxCDN Now Accepting Bitcoin

NetDNA LLC, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, today announced that MaxCDN is the first CDN to accept payment via Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency, enables instant peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide payments with low or zero processing fees. The community-driven software operates with no central authority – managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.

“Developers are a core part of our customer base and have been requesting this payment model,” said Justin Dorfman of NetDNA. “We’re strong believers in open source and part of that commitment is being responsive to developer requests. Bitcoin as the emerging “coin of the realm” for this community and we’re excited at the opportunity to be accepting Bitcoins.”

AvePoint, Collaboration, Content Management, DocAve File Share Navigator, Guest Post, Microsoft, Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint

File Shares & Microsoft SharePoint: Collaboration Without Limitations

Guest Post by Eric Burniche of AvePoint.

File Shares can be a blessing and a curse when it comes to storing large quantities of data for business use. Yes, you enable a large number of users to access the data as if it were on their local machines, without actually having the data stored where disc space may be at a premium. But native management capabilities of file shares aren’t always ideal, so a third-party solution is necessary to fully optimize your file shares.

The primary benefit of file shares is simple, quick, and easy access to large volumes of data for large volumes of users at marginal infrastructure cost. With little or no training required, users can easily access file shares that consist of individual documents to large files and rich media like videos, audio and other formats than can range up to gigabytes (GB) in size.

The Simple Truth: Organizations are quickly realizing native file share limitations, including notoriously poor content management capabilities for search, permissions, metadata, and remote access. As a result, many have turned to Microsoft SharePoint to manage and collaborate on their most business-critical information and valued data.

The Problem: Organizations have various types of unstructured content on their file servers, which is data characterized as non-relational data– e.g. Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) — that when uploaded into SharePoint, are stored by default with the platform’s Microsoft SQL Server database. Once file share content is uploaded, the overall time taken to remove unstructured content from a structured database is inefficient, resulting in poor performance for SharePoint end-users and exponential storage cost increases for IT administrators.

Difficulty often arises when determining what content is business critical and should be integrated with SharePoint as compared to what content should be left alone in file shares, decommissioned, or archived according to business need. File types and sizes also create difficulty when integrating file share content with SharePoint because SharePoint itself blocks content types like Microsoft Access project files, .exe, .msi, .chm help files, and file sizes exceeding 2 GB violate SharePoint software boundaries and limitations.

The Main Questions: How can my organization utilize SharePoint to retire our legacy file share networks while avoiding migration projects and performance issues? How can my organization utilize SharePoint’s full content management functionality if my business-critical assets are blocked file types or larger than Microsoft’s 2 GB support contracts?

One Solution: Enter DocAve File Share Navigator 3.0 from AvePoint. DocAve File Share Navigator 3.0 enables organizations to increase file share activity and take full advantage of SharePoint’s content management capabilities, all while avoiding costs and disruptions associated with migration plans.
With DocAve File Share Navigator, organizations can:

  • Expose large files, rich media via list links, including blocked files more than 2 GB, into SharePoint without violating Microsoft support contracts to truly consolidate access to all enterprise-wide content
  • Decrease costs associated with migrating file share content into SharePoint’s SQL Server content databases by accessing file share content through SharePoint
  • Allow remote users to view, access, and manage network files through SharePoint without requiring a VPN connection
  • Direct access for local file-servers through SharePoint without burden on web front end servers
  • Increase file share content discoverability by utilizing SharePoint’s full metadata-based search across multiple, distributed file servers
  •  Allow read-only previews of documents for read-only file servers

The native capabilities of file shares are unlikely to improve, but fortunately there are third-party solutions such as DocAve File Share Navigator that can help turn your file share from a headache to an asset, allowing you to continue to collaborate with confidence.

Eric_Burniche

Eric Burniche is a Product Marketing Manager at AvePoint.

Collaboration, Content Management, Microsoft SharePoint, National Association of Broadcasters, Video, Windows Workflow Foundation, Workflow

ZOOcore Moves Media Production Workflow to the Cloud

ZOO Digital, a provider of workflow management software and services for creative media production, has launched its new Cloud-based platform, ZOOcore.

ZOOcore is a workflow and collaboration platform for creative and production businesses designed exclusively for the Cloud, enabling tailor-made workflow management systems to be configured and deployed very quickly at a fraction of the cost of bespoke software development. It is a centralized system to organize and control production information and brings significant efficiencies to project tracking, online review and approval which enable a reduction in email traffic and spreadsheet management.

ZOO has already deployed ZOOcore systems for a number of clients in diverse business areas including a major film studio for review and approval of artwork, a global TV network for co-ordination of advertising campaigns, a major US book publisher for preparation of eBooks, a post production facility for management of DVD, Blu-ray and digital product creation, a marketing agency for campaign management, and an international printer for job processing.

Such existing clients report that the use of the product eliminates many administrative overheads and enables robust and reliable collaboration, giving shorter time to market and lower operating costs.  It is fully configurable and deployments of the ZOOcore Enterprise Edition can be tailor-made to support each client’s unique workflows.  For smaller workgroups, ZOOcore is available in simplified pre-configured versions.

ZOO will be showcasing ZOOcore at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas between 8 – 11 April 2013at booth N-CP2.

Gordon Doran , President of ZOO, commented: “We have been delighted with the feedback from early adopters of ZOOcore, who are already reporting significantly reduced administrative overheads in creative and production workflows.  We believe that this new platform will enable us to license and deploy workflow systems more quickly and widely than before, delivering highly cost-effective solutions to our clients.”

Content Management, GP Strategies Corporation, Imaging, Medical, Picture archiving and communication system

GP Strategies Moves infoMaestro to the Cloud

Global performance improvement solutions provider GP Strategies Corporation launched a cloud version of infoMaestro, a medical information solution that reduces compliance risk and enables companies to respond to complex medical inquiries anywhere in the world with a timely, accurate and consistent answer. GP Strategies will be showcasing this new solution at the DIA Medical & Scientific Communications Annual Forum March 18-20, 2013 in Phoenix, AZ.

With today’s information-driven, global economy, new challenges are presented for medical information authors and specialists. The number of medical information inquiries continues to rise, and unique questions require more collaboration than ever. With content stored in diverse internal and external systems and collaborators in different locations, the process for assembling response packages in a timely manner is becoming increasingly complex. For the past 12 years, GP Strategies’ infoMaestro on-premise product has supported the need for quick response package creation and delivery. The cloud version of infoMaestro addresses the need in the market to accommodate small to medium-sized pharmaceutical companies that require a solution with less overhead costs and complexity, while still improving response times and streamlining content.

Scott Metker , GP Strategies Chief Software Architect, stated, “Cloud-based medical information software is a logical next step for our customers who are looking for solutions that can be deployed flexibly, either for a single region or as a global solution. The infoMaestro cloud offering for medical information is a true, end-to-end solution that provides both inquiry tracking tools as well as a full, global medical library supporting translation and local adoption workflow.”

Learn more about infoMaestro.

Amazon Web Services, Archiving & Regulatory Retention, Content Management, Data, DropBox, Google, Google Drive, Intellectual Property, Social, Storage

The Fracturing of the Enterprise Brain

Never mind BYOD (bring your own device), employee use of non-corporate online storage solutions could lead to the weakening of enterprise ability to access company data and intellectual property. In the worst case scenario, companies could lose information forever.

A post by Brian Proffitt at ReadWrite Enterprise explains:

Employees are the keepers of knowledge within a company. Want to run the monthly payroll? The 20-year-veteran in accounting knows how to manage that. Building the new company logo? The superstar designer down in the art department is your gal. When such employees leave the company, it can be a bumpy transition, but usually not impossible, because the data they’ve been using lies on the corporate file server and can be used to piece together the work that’s been done.

Of course, that’s based on the premise that, for the past couple of decades or so, data has essentially been stored in one of two places: on the file servers or the employee’s local computer.

Today, though, people store data in a variety of places, not all of it under the direct control of IT. Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive or a company’s cloud on Amazon Web Services…

Read the article.

Amazon AWS, CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, NetDNA EdgeCaching, Site Management

NetDNA EdgeRules Gives Websites Control over CDN Content

NetDNA today announced EdgeRules, an instantaneous HTTP caching rules service, giving site managers rapid and granular control over their web content for a better user experience, improved security, lower bandwidth costs and the ability to better monetize content by preventing hotlinking.

EdgeRules is an add-on service to NetDNA’s EdgeCaching and EdgeCaching for Platforms.  Both of these HTTP caching services place site content in NetDNA’s worldwide network of edge servers and peering partners for superior web performance optimization.

Using the EdgeRules control panel, site managers can make changes to their content rules and see them enacted in less than one minute – with no review needed from the NetDNA engineering team. This makes it possible for the first time to test, tweak and deploy very granular controls over how and when content is served.

“EdgeRules truly gives website manages the ability to manage their CDN services their way and to finely tune their pull zone content in a way that they never could before,” said David Henzel, NetDNA vice president of marketing.  “NetDNA is well known for giving site managers unprecedented control over their CDN service through our Control Panel.  With EdgeRules, we are at the forefront of CDN self provisioning again.”

A site manager can use EdgeRules to keep certain files from being proxied and thus protecting them from exposure on the Internet. For example, EdgeRules can prevent the exposure of directory indices due to misconfiguration, which is a common problem on cloud services such as Amazon’s S3 service.

The service allows different rules to be set for different files or classes of data so that frequently updated files can be classed differently from more static data.  This reduces calls to the origin server, which lowers bandwidth charges.

Site managers can also use the service to blacklist certain IP addresses, for example blocking web robots that are scraping data from the site.

The EdgeRules service can also read the operating system of a device and serve up optimized content for that device.  For example a smartphone-optimized image can be served up instead of a large image when the service detects a request from an Android or iOS device.

EdgeRules is now available for all NetDNA EdgeCaching customers.  For more information email sales@netdna.com or go to: http://www.netdna.com/products/add-ons/edgerules/.

CDN, Cloud & IT Management, Content delivery network, Content Management, EMEA, hybrid cloud, Le Nouvel Observateur, Multimedia & Internet, Networking, Nouvel Observateur, Openmix, User Story

Le Nouvel Observateur Digital Uses Openmix Hybrid CDN Strategy for News Cycle Load Balancing

Sudden traffic load bursts following the news is business as usual for an online news provider. When the news is hot, interruptions and heavy slow-downs are common things on various websites; which can mean loss of audience and consequently loss of revenues, forcing technical teams to constantly anticipate any possible incident.

The third most read news & politics media in France, as per a September 2012 Nielsen study, with almost 8 million unique visitors every month, Le Nouvel Observateur recently chose the Cedexis “Openmix” load balancing solution to roll out and manage its own hybrid CDN — a mix of their infrastructure at origin and their own cache servers spread among various webhosting providers with third parties CDNs.

Rolled out during the second quarter of 2012, Le Nouvel Observateur’s hybrid CDN strategy now includes two content origins, backed by Varnish cache servers, located at two French hosting providers whose performance had been previously measured with Cedexis Radar as being optimum for serving their French audience. A global CDN is also used, mostly to deliver content to their international audience.

Details can be found in a case study published by Cedexis.