Microsoft Lync is the latest edition (brand name) of MS Office Communications server products. As most of you may already know, Lync can be deployed locally within an organization (on-premise) or it can be purchased as a service from either Microsoft themselves or a third-party managed service provider (MSP). Briefly, to deploy Lync in your organization you need a license for each Lync Server 2010 instance and a Client Access License (CAL) for each user and device. Standalone and enterprise licensing models exist and this is similar to the other major products delivered by Microsoft. Conversely, if you go for a hosted solution then you would face a subscription licensing model which in my opinion is much simpler to handle! The Server/CAL licensing model for on-premise implementations incorporates servers, clients and external connector components. Therefore, you need a license for each: Server instance you will be running, whether Standard or Enterprise Servers User accessing the servers, known as CALs and we find three types Standard CAL – enables standard features for a user such as, IM and video & audio conferencing between internal computers Enterprise CAL – enables enterprise features such as, extended conferencing features – External & Web Plus CAL – enables plus features such as, VoIP features To enable all features, a user must be licensed with all three CALs External Connector, which is an external entity (travelling employee, business partner, etc.) connecting to your servers. There are three External Connectors which are Standard, Enterprise and Plus. External users' licenses can be purchased as CALs or ECs: CAL – a license for each external user EC – a license for each server (can have multiple instances) that will be accessed by an unlimited number of external users Users' CALs (as explained in point 2
Another update by Google of its search ranking algorithm has caused anger amongst several businesses which according to CNNMoney had a negative impact on their websites traffic! Many businesses rely on search engines to drive traffic to their sites mainly on Google search engine as it is by far the most used engine. According to Google the goal of the new algorithm or changes is to move high-quality sites at the top of the search rankings. They (Google) were being criticized by many users that low quality sites were ranking high. It is quite normal that minor changes to the algorithm are performed on regular basis but this change was big and had immediate drastic effects,hopefully for improved search results! The IP address 64.233.179.104 would allow you to compare the old algorithm against the new one, where results from the 64.233.179.104 search would appear as they would have appeared before the latest changes. Check your website or blog, mine has lost some places but to more relevant content. It’s kind of a dirty game – some gain some lose. You find some businesses that focus entirely on SEO techniques to get their sites ranked higher and tend to forget about unique content, about the services or products they provide and about ethical issues! While Google tries to crack down on sites that try to fool the system, so often the new countermeasures manage to penalize legitimate websites as well.For more details read Google’s blog post - Finding more high-quality sites in search
Free App Brings Spicework Users Mobile Access to Help Desk, Network Management Capabilities, and the Largest Social Business Network for ITAUSTIN, Texas – February 24, 2011 – Spiceworks™ Inc., today announced the release of Spiceworks for the iPhone – a new mobile application that allows the 1.3 million users of Spiceworks to connect with peers, access the help desk, and manage their IT networks from the iPhone. The new Spiceworks app, which has already ranked among the top 30 free business apps in iTunes, can be downloaded at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spiceworks/id420457...2?mt=8. "IT professionals spend much of the day away from their desks fixing and deploying network equipment or helping employees troubleshoot problems," said Francis Sullivan, co-founder and CTO of Spiceworks. "That's why facilitating mobile management of IT products and services is so important. Our new iPhone app helps by allowing users to tap into the power of Spiceworks whenever and wherever they need it." Key mobile IT management features available in the Spiceworks iPhone app include: Help Desk – allows IT pros to open, access, edit and manage Spiceworks help desk tickets from the iPhone. Inventory & Monitoring – enables users to view the status of their servers, software applications and cloud services. As a result, IT professionals on the go can stay informed about the health of important network services and devices. People View – allows IT pros to access employee contact information from Spiceworks. In addition, they can easily upload employee photos taken with the iPhone to their Spiceworks user profiles. Community Access – gives users a way to view posts, answer questions, ask for help, and comment on topics that spark their interests from the Spiceworks community of IT pros – all from their iPhone. Low Bandwidth Requirements – because this is a native application, the amount of data sent between the iPhone and Spiceworks is very lean, which means it performs well ov
As we have seen in the previous post creating a customized Data Collector Set is pretty straight forward. Go here to read the post! In addition we have seen that the data sources defined were derived from a set template. In this post we are going to see how you can add your own data sources to a previously created set: To customize an existing Data Collector Set follow these steps: From Data Collector Sets\User Defined of Performance Monitor select your custom set, right click and select New, then Data Collector. From the What type of data collector would you like to create? page, type a name for your new data source, select the type and click Next. Performance Counter Data Collector – you can add as many performance counters as you like while you can assign a sample interval Event Trace Data Collector – you can add a number of Event Trace Providers while you can modify their properties Configuration Data Collector – you can add registry keys that you want to monitor. Performance Counter Alert – you can add alerts for specific thresholds bound with performance counters Click the remaining Ok and Finish buttons to complete the procedure. Each Data Source can be later modified from the details pane (right hand side pane of performance monitor) by right-clicking it and selecting Properties. For instance the Configuration (Data Collector) source allows you to add configuration data other than registry keys set during the creation of the data source. You can add WMI management paths, file and state capture. Data sources that are no longer needed can be deleted from the list of sources in the user defined set.
Most Systems Administrators have used Performance Monitor to view real-time performance data on Windows servers and identify bottlenecks. Some may have also recorded sessions and later analyzed log files for performance issues. In fact, this is what I will be talking about in the couple of posts to come, mainly about Data Collector Sets. Data Collector sets gather system information, including configuration settings and performance data and store it in a data file. Before going to a brief explanation of how to create a Data Collector set, let's see some built-in features and basics: AD Diagnostics set: this inbuilt Data Collector Set is only found in domain controllers and runs for 5 minutes. It logs data about the Kernel, Active Directory, AD registry configuration and performance counters. LAN Diagnostics: this inbuilt Data Collector Set starts and stops manually and hence it runs until you stop it! It logs network performance counters, network configuration data and diagnostics tracing. System Performance: this inbuilt Data Collector Set logs processor, disk memory, and network performance counters and kernel tracing. The System Performance counter stops automatically after one minute. System Diagnostics: this inbuilt Data Collector Set logs detailed system information plus all the information included in the System Performance Data Collector Set. The System Diagnostics counter stops automatically after one minute. Wireless Diagnostics: this inbuilt Data Collector Set is present only in computers with wireless capabilities and includes all the same information as the LAN Diagnostics set plus information relevant to troubleshooting wireless network connections. This set does not stop automatically and hence, you need to stop it. To start a set, right click and then choose Start. If you are troubleshooting a problem, I suggest that you should try to replicate the problem if this is possible! You can view the results in the Reports node; however, right-clicki