At a large HMO I used to work for, they used to have a tough re-image policy. I believe that if a problem took more than two hours to solve, they would just have the desktop support person re-image the machine. This approach did lead to plenty of problems, lost user data, etc. But, if [...]
I had a lively exchange with another consultant today that included a discussion of imaging client machines. This other fellow subscribed to what I think is an old school philosophy that there should be a separate volume for the system and the data on client machines. I still subscribe to this view in regard to [...]
For corporate Video Conferencing, we usually have a dedicated “codec” from Tandberg or Polycom. However, we recently ran across this offering from Sony which works well, has nice modular add-ons, supports the latest protocols, and is more economical: Sony iPela PCS-G50
(CDW is a good corporate vendor if you want to simplify purchasing - not [...]
I have been thinking about how to provide health monitoring to our clients, host servers for our consulting business, and have a flexible lab environment for testing and training. We don’t have a data center of our own, so I started looking at dedicated servers, virtual dedicated servers, etc. I was able to cave in [...]
Some IT shops don’t even bother with client backups. I’ve had one IT Admin tell me that he sets a policy for all users to save their data on the network. If they neglect to do that, it’s not his fault. This CYA approach only makes sense if you are almost deliberately [...]
I wasn’t hip to Google video until recently, but it’s a cheap and simple way to embed video in web pages.
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35093
Some clients insist on having mobile broadband cards in their laptops which is pretty cool. But why pay for the extra data plan when so many of these same users already have a smartphone with data. Just configure the device and laptop and you can access the internet wherever there is a cell phone signal. [...]
After much abuse from my associates, I have finally caved in. I’m all for using http://Postini.com to filter out spam. It’s cheap and it works well. It keeps the spam off the network, and I like how it just sends a quarantine report to the end-users each day.
Of course, now we have to turn off [...]
Why am I so turned off by online backups? Well I’m not entirely turned off, I use http://filesanywhere.com to backup my personal workstation. Here are some things that bother me:
special files - The performance of online backups relies on being able to perform incremental backups (and compress these?). But some special files are problematic to [...]
Many times our clients run into the problem of sharing files with people outside the company. Sometimes it’s just a simple matter of needing to send large files that cannot be attached to e-mail due to attachment size restrictions. One simple (not highly secure) way to handle this is http://www.yousendit.com/. I like this service because [...]