Archivo de la etiqueta: cloud

Microsoft, O365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 3: Mobile Devices & Help Desk

Here is the 3rd and final part of my video series around common pitfalls of Microsoft O365 migrations (you can watch part 1 here and part 2 here). In this final installment, I dive into the mobile side of Microsoft O365 as well as how your help desk factors in.

 

Pitfalls of Microsoft Office 365 Migrations Part 3

 

Or watch the video here.

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

Microsoft, Office 365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 2: 3rd Party Utilities, DNS, & Management Tools

Here is the second part of my video series around issues & operational considerations of Microsoft O365 migrations (you can watch part one here). In this video, I  cover 3rd party utilities, DNS, and other management tools. Keep your eyes peeled for part 3 coming soon!

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. If you have any questions or comments, be sure to leave them in the comment section below.

Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 2

 

Or click here to watch the video.

 

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

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

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.

 

Microsoft, Office 365

Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality

There are many benefits to implementing Microsoft Office 365 including reducing capital expenditures, the ability to scale your business quickly, and simplified licensing. There have also been increased features and functionality such as Yammer, Delve and Skype for Business. Keep in mind, however, there can be some challenges associated with Office 365 implementations. Organizations need to take the proper measures to prepare for quality migration  and management of this critical suite of end user productivity services.

I’ll be hosting a webinar on 11/18, with my colleagues Jay Keating and Geoff Smith, to cover strategies for migrating and supporting mobile workforces. If you’re considering implementation, I highly recommend you register. Below are some of the topics Jay, Geoff and I will be covering:

  • Office 365 capabilities and use cases
  • Microsoft Cloud IaaS (Azure) considerations
  • Hidden challenges of migrating to Office 365
  • Licensing, version control, & AD Premium & Office 365 E3 issues
  • The ugly side of post-migration user support
  • SLAs, Quality of Service, and accountability challenges
  • Security, confidentiality, and compliance pit falls
  • Having the CFO talk – risks, benefits, costs

Register now for David’s upcoming webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality.” Bring your questions, as there will be a Q&A session at the end of the webinar!

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

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

Customer experience, Miscellaneous IT, Project management, transformation services

GreenPages is Helping Dead River Become a Transformational Services Provider

David Widener is the Director of IT & Project Management at Dead River Company and is one of the most cutting edge people we work with. Dead River Company is New England’s largest energy marketer which means they provide wholesale commercial and residential energy services in the form of oil, propane, and, in some cases, natural gas. David is the senior most leader for both IT and Project Management with 20 years of IT experience.

From an IT perspective, Dead River is just rounding that curve from being infrastructure blockers and tacklers to becoming the transformational services provider they know they need to be. David understands that even as a traditional energy marketer, he needs to change the way he does business in order to gain a competitive advantage including integrating new tools, new services, and new processes. This directly falls in line with GreenPages’ launch of our Transformation Services Group.

Watch the video to hear David discuss the projects he has worked on with GreenPages, including Managed Services, Cloud Services, and Project Management initiatives, his experiences in doing so, and his recommendations to his peers that want to transform their IT departments in a similar fashion!

Watch the video on GreenPages’ YouTube Channel

 

 

We’ll be holding a webinar on 11/18 entitled, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality.” Register now!

DRaaS, Featured

Is the Cloud Right for You?

I recently presented a session entitled, “Is the Cloud Right for You?” with Randy Weis and wanted to provide a recap of the things I covered in the presentation. In this video, I discuss some of the advantages of cloud including the access to enterprise class hardware that you might not normally be able to afford, load balancers, multiple data centers, redundancy, automation and more. I also cover some of the risks associated with the cloud. Enjoy, and as always, reach out with any questions!

 

Download eBook: The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department

 

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

DRaaS

Is the Cloud Right for You?

I recently presented a session entitled, “Is the Cloud Right for You?” with Randy Weis and wanted to provide a recap of the things I covered in the presentation. In this video, I discuss some of the advantages of cloud including the access to enterprise class hardware that you might not normally be able to afford, load balancers, multiple data centers, redundancy, automation and more. I also cover some of the risks associated with the cloud. Enjoy, and as always, reach out with any questions!

Download eBook: The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

Featured, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld 2015: Day Two Recap

In this post, I’ll recap Day 2 of VMworld 2015 (you can find a recap of day 1 here).

Over the past several years, Tuesday’s general session has been focused on the End User Computing space, and this year was no exception. Sanjay Poonen, the head of VMware’s EUC business unit, kicked things off by talking about how the overall VMware SDDC strategy is making the desktop/application virtualization story stronger than ever. He highlighted tighter integration between AirWatch, Horizon, and NSX as being keys to the future success of the EUC business unit. There was a lot of focus on VMware’s recently released Identity Management solution.  This solution comes in two flavors, one being embedded in specific editions of the AirWatch mobile management platform and the second being a standalone product which does utilize some of the Airwatch back end functionality. Both are primarily SaaS base offerings. In my mind, this is a shot across the bow of Microsoft as more and more customers continue to migrate data into O365. VMware sees this as a huge threat, not because of the email migration, but because many customers are also deploying O365/Azure based Active Directory services and they see Microsoft “owning” or becoming the authoritative source for all authentication to all apps.  VMware wants to be in the game of being that hub at the center of the authentication chain. 

Sanjay then brought up Jim Alkove from Microsoft to the stage.  So, you’re probably thinking, based on the last paragraph, “why would VMware and Microsoft be holding hands on stage at VMworld?” Well, Microsoft is a big company and while there is a lot of competition between the two in some areas (Azure, Hyper-V, etc), there is a good amount of cooperation in others (Windows 10 in this case). Jim and Sanjay talked about how VMware has made use of some of the new Windows 10 embedded management features to greatly expand the AirWatch platform capabilities around Windows 10 management. While this won’t have an immediate impact, as organizations make the move to Windows 10, AirWatch can provide a very solid management platform that spans just about any type of device a user could have (iOS to Android to a Windows based desktop/laptop/tablet). Along with this was the announcement of Project A2.  This is a combination of AppVolumes application virtualization capabilities being managed by AirWatch to enable virtual apps to be pushed to physical Windows 10 based machines.  Again, a big expansion of mobile management into a more traditional desktop/laptop platform.

Next up, finally, was Pat Gelsinger (CEO of VMware).  His presentation was much different this year as he focused very high level and in general (non-VMware specific) terms about 5 imperatives for businesses across any vertical to succeed in the mobile/cloud world.  Below is a synopsis of those 5 imperatives.

1. Innovate like a start-up, deliver like an enterprise: Nimble startups are thriving in the mobile-cloud era, while large, stagnant corporations are being threatened for failing to innovate. As Eric Pearson, CIO of IHG, said earlier this week, “It’s no longer the big companies beating the small companies, it’s now the fast beating the slow.”

2. Embrace Unified Hybrid Cloud: The journey to the cloud is maturing as the industry shifts from experimentation to professional delivery. Unified hybrid cloud is bridging the gap between personal and private cloud so that organizations can take advantage of the best of both worlds.

3. Architect with security in mind: Instead of adding security in as a last minute feature, organizations need to choose solutions that have robust security capabilities built in from the start. Virtualization helps provide the foundational level of security to protect the people, apps, and data that keep organizations running.

4. Automate everything to predict (almost) anything: The next major wave of innovative technology is automated smart technology that knows what to do before you tell it to. Apps, big data, and analytics are the building blocks behind these emerging forms of proactive technology, and the businesses that know how to use them will come out on top.

5. Take risks to stand out: Businesses that don’t take risks and focus on innovation will not survive the next decade. And, as IT professionals, we must constantly lead the charge for change.

In the next post, I’ll summarize all the major announcements around the VMware solutions set that came out of the event.

 

GreenPages is hosting a webinar on 9/16, “How to Increase Your IT Equity: Deploying a Build-Operate-Transform Model for IT Operations” . Learn how to create long-term value for your organization and meet the increasing demand for services. Register Now!

 

 

By Chris Ward, CTO