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Posts Tagged ‘software’

Windows #Intune – Toyota rolls out to more than 3000 clients

April 9, 2013 Leave a comment

Automotive Retailer Avoids $1.3 Million in IT Costs with Cloud-Based PC Management Tool

Toyota Motor Europe (TME) had no tools to manage 3,500 car-diagnostic PCs running outside the corporate domain at 3,000 dealerships. TME chose Windows Intune to manage the PCs remotely from a web-based console. It can standardize software deployments to ensure consistent customer service and enhance the security of managed computers to reduce downtime at dealerships. Remote assistance capabilities will also help reduce on-site support costs.

Business Needs
Toyota Motor Europe (TME) manages a network of 30 national marketing and sales companies (NMSC) across Europe. These organizations oversee more than 3,000 dealerships.

In early 2012, TME replaced its stand-alone car-diagnostic tool called IT2 with 3,500 new PCs running more up-to-date software, including Tech Stream and Picoscope. The PCs also store technical documentation. Mechanics attach the PCs to a Vehicle Information Module that connects to a vehicle’s engine to provide critical maintenance information, such as how to reprogram and update a vehicle’s computer chip. The PCs were installed by an external company. The computers are not joined to the domain and operate outside the corporate firewall.

TME did not have a management solution for these 3,500 computers. “We wanted everyone to use the new tools, but we had no visibility into how the dealerships were working with the PCs,” says Niels Svaerke, Manager, Business Process Office, After Sales at Toyota Motor Europe. 

NMSC staff downloaded diagnostic software to the PCs from a Toyota intranet site. However, there was no way for headquarters to verify that all dealerships received and installed the software updates concurrently. “It was difficult to ensure that everyone was providing the same level of service by using the same corporate systems and auto diagnostics,” says Dirk Christiaens, Manager of Enterprise Architecture at Toyota Motor Europe. “Also, the head office had no way of knowing if the dealerships deployed an antivirus solution for their PCs, a worrying scenario as they were connected directly to the Internet.”

NMSC employees performed on-site support for mechanics, which often entails travel time. Sometimes, NMSC staff called an external company to reinstall all the software on the PC. Either scenario incurred wasteful downtime at the dealerships.

Solution
To solve these issues, Toyota Motor Europe decided to evaluate Windows Intune, the cloud-based PC management service from Microsoft. Staff at the NMSC can use the web-based Administration console in Windows Intune to run PC management tasks remotely, including software distribution. All that is required is a standard Internet connection, a browser running Microsoft Silverlight, and the Windows Intune client software installed on the PCs at the dealerships. The client returns information on the PC, including software and hardware inventory, and endpoint protection and update status to the Administration console.“We wanted to move into cloud computing, so Windows Intune met our needs perfectly,” says Christiaens. “Windows Intune had a more flexible, pay-as-you-go model, with no additional bandwidth or server costs.”

Read the whole case study here!

//Richard

Categories: All, Intune, Microsoft Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) has reached General Availability!

April 9, 2013 1 comment

This is cool! And I think that it’s a great step in the right direction for many companies! 🙂

Windows Azure Active Directory

Windows Azure Active Directory (Windows Azure AD) is a modern, REST-based service that provides identity management and access control capabilities for your cloud applications. Now you have one identity service across Windows Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, Windows Intune and other 3rd party cloud services. Windows Azure Active Directory provides a cloud-based identity provider that easily integrates with your on-premises AD deployments and full support of third party identity providers.

Use Windows Azure AD to:

Integrate with your on-premises active directory

Quickly extend your existing on-premises Active Directory to apply policy and control and authenticate users with their existing corporate credentials to Windows Azure and other cloud services.

Offer access control for you applications

Easily manage access to your applications based on centralized policy and rules. Ensure consistent and appropriate access to your organizations applications is maintained to meet critical internal security and compliance needs. Windows Azure AD Access Control provides developers centralized authentication and authorization for applications in Windows Azure using either consumer identity providers or your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory

Build social connections across the enterprise

Windows Azure AD Graph is an innovative social enterprise graph providing an easy RESTful interface for accessing objects such as Users, Groups, and Roles with an explorer view for easily discovering information and relationships.

Provide single sign-on across your cloud applications

Provide your users with a seamless, single sign-on experience across Microsoft Online Services, third party cloud services and applications built on Windows Azure with popular web identity providers like Microsoft Account, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook.

Read more about the service here!

Pricing

Access Control

Access Control is available at no charge. Historically, we have charged for Access Control based on the number of transactions. We are now making it a free benefit of using Windows Azure.

Directory

The base directory, Tenant, User & Group Management, Single Sign On, Graph API, Cloud application provisioning, Directory Synchronization and Directory Federation, is available at no charge. Certain additional capabilities such as Azure AD Rights Management will be available as a separately priced option.

Read more about pricing here!

//Richard

Categories: Active Directory (AD), All, Azure, Microsoft Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

#HP Improves Enterprise #Mobility with Cloud-based Management Solution

April 4, 2013 Leave a comment

Interesting…

PALO ALTO, Calif. — HP Enterprise Services today announced a cloud-based management solution that delivers secure anytime, anywhere access to applications and data from any mobile device.

HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility meets the demands of balancing the responsibilities and requirements of IT with the challenges and expectations of users. This new cloud solution is part of the HP Converged Cloud portfolio, which provides enterprises with the essential foundation of technologies and services to confidently build, operate and consume IT services.  

The new solution provides fast and flexible deployment of tools and services for secure application access, file storage and sharing via multiple mobile platforms and all types of devices, including tablets and mobile phones. IT organizations are provided the tools to set appropriate security policies and the access controls to protect valuable corporate assets, applications and data.

The solution also allows users to download approved enterprise applications from a secure storefront, upload files to support collaboration and synchronize files between the HP cloud infrastructure and any mobile device. Mobile data is encrypted in transit and at rest, covering the device as well as the cloud infrastructure.

HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility also provides the ability to configure cloud file storage that can scale up and down, and offers local storage options that address data sovereignty and compliance requirements.

“Mobility in the workplace continues to be a key focus and concern for IT executives,” said Pete Karolczak, senior vice president, HP Enterprise Services. “HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility leverages HP’s strong cloud portfolio by providing clients with a mobility service that provides the highest level of user experience and productivity while minimizing risk for IT.”

HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility integrates leading industry technologies, including solutions from Citrix and SAP, which are fully managed and maintained by HP to simplify deployment and ongoing operations.

Pricing and availability

HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Mobility is available globally with a set of service features and options priced and packaged to deliver…

Continue reading here!

//Richard

Categories: All, Mobility Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

#Sanbolic Brings Public Cloud Economics to the Enterprise – #Melio

March 18, 2013 1 comment

Ok, I must say that this product is great!!! If you haven’t looked at it before then please do! And contact us at EnvokeIT if you want more details!

Sanbolic Enables Distributed Flash, SSD and HDD to Achieve Enterprise Systems Capability and Scale-Out In Server-Side and Commodity Storage Deployments

Waltham, MA – (March 18, 2013) – Sanbolic® today announced the general availability of its Melio version 5 (Melio5™) software – delivering distributed scale-out, high-availability and enterprise data services through software. Server-side flash has seen rapid adoption for applications such as hyperscale web serving, but limited adoption in general purpose enterprise applications. With the launch of Melio5, Sanbolic enables enterprise customers to dramatically improve their storage infrastructure economics by enabling server-side flash, SSD and HDD as primary persistent storage. Melio5 aggregates across nodes for scale-out and availability while providing RAID, remote replication, quality of Service (QoS), snapshots and systems functionality through a software layer on commodity hardware. This provides customers with the ability to deploy commodity and server-based storage architecture with similar economics and flexibility as public cloud data centers such as Google and Facebook.

With validation by hundreds of enterprise and government organizations running in production, Melio volume management and file system technology addresses the needs of high performing cost effective storage infrastructure on-premise. Melio5’s architecture is designed to scale up to 2,048 nodes and up to 65,000 storage devices enabling linear performance scalability in a cluster.

Melio5 also eliminates the need to deploy a redundant flash caching layer in front of legacy storage area network (SAN) hardware by directly incorporating flash into hybrid volumes and intelligently placing data based on file system access profiles. A hybrid volume will place random access data such as file system metadata on flash sectors while placing sequential data on low cost hard disk drives to greatly reduce the cost of capacity. The result is a highly scalable, high performance storage system, with a much lower cost than legacy storage arrays.

“Typically, server and disk drive vendors operate on gross margins in the 20-30% range. Storage array vendors, on the other hand, are often twice that or more,” said Eric Slack, Senior Analyst,Storage Switzerland. “Sanbolic’s approach leverages the architecture that the big social media and public cloud companies use, to fix this problem. By replacing storage arrays (and storage array margins) with commodity server and disk drive hardware and enabling it with intelligence through software, companies can significantly reduce storage infrastructure costs.”

Terri McClure, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), stated, “Sanbolic’s Melio5 software enables corporate users to take advantage of flash and SSD in conjunction with commodity hardware to create an intelligent, cost effective, and high performance storage architecture like the huge public cloud companies run, while still ensuring enterprise workload scalability and high availability.”

“Melio5 lets us solve one of the biggest challenges for our customers today – the upfront and management cost for storage – without sacrificing systems capability or performance. The Lego-like modular capability of Melio allows our customers to scale-out their storage and servers based on off-the-self commodity components, without downtime,” said Mattias Tornblom, CEO, EnvokeIT.

“LSI and Sanbolic’s shared vision and complementary products help customers to dramatically improve the performance, flexibility and economics of their on-premise storage infrastructure,” said Brent Blanchard, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Sales and Marketing, LSI Corporation. “LSI’s Nytro™ family of server-side flash acceleration cards and leading SAS-based server storage connectivity solutions…

Continue reading here or here!

//Richard

Categories: All, Storage Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

#Citrix #StoreFront Slowness, Join and Replication issue – check list!

March 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Ok, I guess that you may have seen issue with StoreFront before… and it you have not then good for U!

But in the case that you have experience it here are a couple of things that you can do and hopefully it solves your issue with slow StoreFront console startup, server join issues or replication issues. Sometimes I’ve seen that the join, replication and slowness is ok and the process goes through. But then all of a sudden you get an error and the propagation fails… and this can be because of a timeout in the StoreFront process that you’ve initiated.

I already assume that you’ve checked the basic stuff.. that the servers can reach each other (ping server name and FQDN etc. and that there are no FW issues)….

You may have an issue because you/your server cannot reach the Internet, and some of the components of the product is signed with SSL certificates and StoreFront will try to perform a check whether the publishers certificate is ok or not. So if your servers are behind a proxy serevr that you usually configure in your browser to be able to connect from your companies internal network to the Internet then you should do the following.

1. Log on to your first StoreFront server and create a copy of the original aspnet.config file under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 (verify which framework version that your app is using in IIS and modify that appropriate aspnet.config file, more info about this change can also be found here and is for Web Interface but is also applicable to StoreFront)

2. Open Notepad as an Admin (if you have UAC of course enabled) and open the asp net.config file

Citrix_StoreFront_aspnet_config_file

It will have the content as described by the picture above,  add this line to it:  <generatePublisherEvidence enabled=”false”/>

Read more…

Categories: All, Citrix, CloudGateway, StoreFront Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Top 5 #Citrix #XenServer Questions from the Citrix Master Class

February 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Below are the top 5 XenServer questions raised from the Citrix Master Class posted by Amanda Saunders!

Let’s face it, XenServer has been around for quite a while. Citrix purchased the hypervisor back in 2007 and released it entirely free to the market in 2009. Since then, we’ve seen over 1 million downloads of the product and mass adoption in all sorts of businesses from SMBs to the largest service providers. Despite all this, we had almost 700 first time attendees on our XenServer Master Class last week taking a look at what this product has to offer. The newbies were joined by 300 additional Master Class veterans who continue to return to see what we’ll be showing off this time on our British radio show inspired, tech webinar. All of the attendees joined in to keep us busy, asking hundreds of questions for our XenServer experts to answer live on the webinar. If you missed it, watch the recording and read a summary of the top questions asked by the audience.

Why are cloud providers choosing XenServer to power their clouds?

This question could have an entire blog post dedicated to it, but I will try to address it as simply as possible. Currently 80% of Citrix CloudPlatform and Apache CloudStack environments are built on top of Xen or XenServer. Why? The high level reasons are scalability and cost*.

Scalability comes from XenServer’s fully replicated architecture across all hosts in an environment. This means there is no management server required to manage a given number of hosts. Should the master host in a pool go down, any other host can be promoted to replace it with no loss of functionality or configuration. In practice, this means cloud providers can freely choose to cluster hosts as required without incurring any additional configuration or management complexity based on cluster size.

While cost is an important factor for every company to consider, it is particularly important when you’re looking at licensing hundreds or even thousands of hosts. Both the open source version of XenServer and the premium version of XenServer that is included as part of your CloudPlatform entitlement, mean cloud providers can get the virtualization layer of their cloud at no cost. These savings can then be turned into additional differentiated service offerings or added savings to their end user.

 *other reasons include open source base, flexibility, VM density and tenant isolation.

XenMotion, what is it and is it free?

We have a competitor in the space who likes to use “v” in a lot of their feature names. A good rule of thumb to find the corresponding feature in XenServer is to replace “v” with “Xen”. XenMotion is our live migration feature that allows you to move VMs from one host in a pool to another provided that the pool has shared storage attached. This has been available in our free version since 2009.

Storage XenMotion is a brand new feature that we released with XenServer 6.1. This feature enables you to move VMs between hosts without the requirement of shared storage which lessens the hardware requirement/expense for both cloud providers using commodity hardware and SMBs with smaller environments. Storage XenMotion is available in our advanced version of XenServer.

Is there an easy way to get support for my environment, even if I’m running on free?

For those of you running a premium edition of XenServer (Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum) we recently changed our support model to offer unlimited, 24×7 support for paid editions of XenServer at about 7% of license cost. What does this mean to the free users out there? Well, it means you can no longer purchase support from Citrix for your XenServer environment. That being said, in addition to the incredible support you can get on the forums, we’ve also introduced a new Citrix Auto Support tool that can do a sanity check of your environment. Simply upload a log file and we’ll check for any issues that we recognize including missing patches, known bugs or configuration errors. This tool can be used for both free or paid editions, so try it out for yourself at http://taas.citrix.com.

What is MonitorIT?

A big thank you to our friends at Goliath Technologies who demoed their brand new version of MonitorIT on our XenServer Master Class. This solution delivers proactive monitoring of your entire environment right out of XenCenter or directly from a browser. What do we mean by “entire environment”? Virtual servers, physical servers, VDI, applications, databases, log management, network, storage, data center components, workstations – EVERYTHING! Do you have multiple hypervisors in your environment? Monitor your vSphere clusters straight from your XenCenter console using this product. You can go one step further and have MonitorIT proactively make changes to alleviate bottlenecks in your environment so the business can keep doing business without interruption. Don’t take my word for it, check out their free trial for yourself. They’ve even opened up their early access program so you can access all the great new features that…

 

Continue reading here!

//Richard

Categories: All, Citrix, Cloud, XenServer Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Do you really need a #BYOD policy? – via @GeneMarks

February 27, 2013 Leave a comment

This is a really good article by Gene Marks!

Social media.  Cloud computing.  Gamification.  SaaS.  Social CRM. Virtualization.  Mobile.  Every year we hear of the latest technology issues facing small business owners like me.   And now it’s BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).  Everywhere I read in the tech world it’s BYOD.  That’s because with the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and mini-laptops it’s become the hot tech security issue.  Whitepapers are written.  Seminars are conducted. Roundtables are moderated.  It’s a BYOD year.

I have 10 people in my company.  And a half dozen other contractors.  These people are using smartphones, tablets and laptops to access our data.  We do not have a BYOD policy.  Do I really need one?  Do all businesses, big or small, need to really worry about this?  Or is just another scare tactic from a bunch of IT guys looking to put fear into their clients’ minds and generate additional billable hours.

Hmmm.

The fact that everyone in my company has a different smartphone is of no concern to me.  Why should I care if Sam prefers his iPhone but Josh likes his Droid?  They are using their phones to call clients on Verizon or AT&T or whatever so I’m not exposed to any risk there.  The same with texting.  But uh oh…then there’s email.  Am I exposed to security issues when they send and retrieve email from our server?  No.  That’s because we have a hosted mail server and each employee has their own login to their email account.  They set up their email on their own with instructions we gave them.  Viruses, spam and all the other evil things that could happen via email are (hopefully) controlled by the security software running at the server level.

Read more…

Categories: All, BYOD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

#Citrix #AppController 2.6 released as part of #MobileSolutions #Bundle #BYOD

February 25, 2013 Leave a comment

As a part of the Mobile Solutions Bundle that now is available on MyCitrix you can find a new version of AppController.

AppController 2.6 supports the following new features:

  • Certificate support. When you configure AppController for the first time in the web-based management console, you can add or create certificates on the Active Directory settings page.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V support. You can install the AppController 2.6 virtual machine on Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V enabled or on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012.
  • Migration support to AppController 2.6. You can upgrade to AppController 2.6 from AppController 2.0 or from AppController 2.5.
  • Mobile store support. You can upload mobile apps from the Apple App Store or Google Play to AppController. You can use the Citrix App Preparation Tool to wrap iOS and Android apps from the Apple App Store or Google Play. When you wrap the app, you can secure access and enforce policies. When you upload the app to AppController, you can configure the policies. You can also upload an app from the App Store or Google Play to AppController without using the App Preparation Tool.
  • Secure connections to Active Directory. You can configure secure connections to Active Directory when you configure AppController 2.6 for the first time.
  • ShareFile updates. In previous AppController versions, when you configured ShareFile, the domain sharefile.com was automatically appended to the domain name. In this release, the domain sharefile.com does not automatically append to the ShareFile domain name. You must enter the entire ShareFile domain name.
  • Support for mobile links. You can configure mobile links to retrieve the name and description of apps automatically from the Apple App Store. For apps available through the Google Play Store, you enter the name, description and URL of the app. When you configure mobile links, links appear in Receiver with the Play Store or App Store name.
  •  Web proxy user name format. When you configure the web proxy, you can use either the SAMAccount format or the User Principal Name (UPN) as the user name.

Read more about it here!

//Richard

Categories: All, BYOD, Citrix, CloudGateway, MobileSolutions, XenMobile Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

#Microsoft #Office 2013 lockdown aims to boost cloud services

February 19, 2013 Leave a comment

Microsoft Office 2013 lockdown aims to boost cloud services

If a computer dies, so does the Office license, unless you have enterprise deals

Microsoft has confirmed that a retail copy of Office 2013 is permanently tied to the first PC on which it’s installed, preventing customers from deleting the suite from one machine they own and installing it on another.

The move is a change from past Office end-user licensing agreements (EULAs), experts said, and is another way Microsoft is pushing customers, especially consumers, to opt for new “rent-not-own” subscription plans.

“That’s a substantial shift in Microsoft licensing,” said Daryl Ullman, co-founder and managing director of the Emerset Consulting Group, which specializes in helping companies negotiate software licensing deals. “Let’s be frank. This is not in the consumer’s best interest. They’re paying more than before, because they’re not getting the same benefits as before.”

Prior to Office 2013, which debuted last month, Microsoft’s EULA for retail copies of Office plainly stated that customers could reassign a license when, for example, they replaced an aged PC with a newer model, or the original machine gave out.

“You may reassign the license to a different device any number of times, but not more…

Continue reading here! 

//Richard

Categories: All, Microsoft, Office 365 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,