The cover artwork of this book continues the freedom theme of the first edition of “The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide.” We may look back upon the past to question the motives of those who have gone before us. Seldom do we realise that the past owes us no answer, and despite what we may think of the actions of those who have travelled lifes’ road before us, we must feel a sen…
A quality outsourced call center can save costs, enhance your company's image and help your business grow. Outsourcing your call center operations can increase productivity among your employees; relieved of the responsibility of handling calls, they will be free to focus on their regular duties. Time is one of your company's most precious resources, especially when it comes to management…
There may have been a time when a collection of stand-alone endpoint management and security products and solutions made sense. But as IT environments grow more complex and diverse, IT service requirements rise, and users become more mobile and demanding, businesses are embracing more unified and complete solutions that can help them take back control of their unmanageable environments.
Many organizatons fail to see IT's impact on the bosom line, but imagine if: Your e-‐commerce applicaton lags or worse, becomes unavailable. • Corporate email goes offline and severely hampers productvity across the board. • Business critcal applicatons like Salesforce.com or SAP become unresponsive. The financial loss could be millions of…
The phone service and system is a necessity for any successful organization. Having the right hardware and software is strikingly imperative. Although embedded with many fine details that must be focused closely on, transitioning from a traditional analog phone system to one with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capabilities does not have to be an intimidating process. With reliable resource…
Configuration management is a critical cornerstone of IT automation, providing tools that allow you to centrally manage the packages, configuration files, process state, firewall rules and other settings that equip servers to do their assigned jobs. Without automated configuration management, you do all these tasks manually, or with handwritten scripts. It's time-consuming, and prone to human e…
There are many ways to take advantage of the rich set of collaboration tools provided with Microsoft Lync. IT leaders should consider a cap-and-grow strategy where investment dollars in legacy systems are capped and the financial and IT resources are reallocated to grow Lync. Once the company has a cap-and-grow Lync strategy, IT leaders should consider retirement of legacy infrastructure and h…
Employees use mobile devices and cloud apps in their personal lives because they are easy-to- use, anytime, anywhere. So naturally, they want to use these technologies in the workplace. In fact, enabling mobility offers huge productivity gains for businesses. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Internet & American Life Survey, smartphone adoption in the US crossed 50% of the ad…
Owning and operating a small business is a continuous uphill battle. You’re fighting the big guys to keep your business alive, tackling new obstacles each day, and staying busy trying to make your business successful. Knowing this, many people tend to focus on the percentage of small businesses that close shop each year, but it’s actually more valuable as a business owner to look at the oth…
Regulatory compliance has become an important corporate initiative as the complexity and scope of the regulatory environment continues to increase. Coupled with the rise in cyber attacks and insider threats, organizations are now searching for a more effective, sustainable, and scalable approach that will achieve their compliance objectives while improving the overall security posture of the or…
Forget about Farmville. Social media is becoming essential for IT organizations looking to improve support and boost productivity. Social media has made the world a smaller and more enlightened place, allowing friends, family members, business colleagues and often strangers to share information, play collaboratively, and lend each other support across counties, countries and time zones. As soc…
We are pleased to present the findings of the 2012 Payment Security Practices Survey: United States, sponsored by CyberSource and Trustwave. The study also was conducted in the United Kingdom and the findings from that research are available in a separate report. A secure payment process is essential to maintaining customer confidence and trust when making online purchases and sharing financ…
Many eDiscovery companies announced integration with Microsoft SharePoint last year. Frankly, our usual response was a resounding yawn. These announcements usually meant that the eDiscovery tool contained a data connector for SharePoint document libraries, which acted as repositories for stored files. Most companies were using SharePoint in this way, so this very basic eDiscovery capability see…
This paper provides an overview of the problems and risks associated with increasing amounts of data and the inability to quickly and efficiently identify sensitive data for business and legal reasons and the impact of data privacy requirements. It also provides an overview of challenges associated with Intellectual Property and how an organization can utilize eDiscovery solutions to address t…
No performance management strategy can be completely effective without support from underlying technology. When a company pursues performance management, it must find a single, unified solution that can meet all its requirements and deliver a holistic view of performance across the enterprise by easily accessing any metric from any source – without compromise. The solution should remain compl…
I’ve been focused on Business Intelligence for nearly a quarter of a century and I’ve never been more excited about the industry than today. However, opportunities come with new challenges and this research is designed to help navigate those challenges. Back in 1993, I first used the term information Democracy to envision a time when every user would have access to timely, relevant and ac…
Given its ubiquity, it’s hard to believe that the Apple iPad has only been on the market for 18 months. Consumers love these devices, but they are also sprouting like weeds in the commercial sector as they enable new types of business processes and applications. As tablet computers become more and more pervasive, will their presence increase IT risk? In other words, where does tablet secu…
Technology moves at breakneck speed. Technology upgrades typically do not. While there’s no doubt that having the latest technology increases productivity, remaining competitive requires a significant capital outlay to purchase new hardware and deploy it. For small and medium sized companies that have limited budgets and IT staff, keeping up with technology can be challenging, if not impossib…
The rise of the social consumer creates tremendous opportunities for organizations to develop deeper relationships with their customers in support of their business objectives. Whether your goals are to acquire new users, increase on-site engagement, or collect and leverage customer insights (or all of • What are your business objectives? • What are you trying to achieve on your site? • …
This is the first part in a series designed to help organizations develop their “BYOD” (bring-your-own-device) strategies for personally-owned smartphones and tablets. This chapter provides an overview of eight components that our customers have found to be the foundation of a secure and scalable BYOD program. Many organizations are considering personally-owned mobile devices for busin…
When you think about protecting virtual machines, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For many IT professionals, that first thought probably centers around high-availability, or HA, technologies. Each of the major virtual platform vendors has its own representation of HA, and although each vendor’s tactics in accomplishing the task might be very different, the result is effectively t…
The major IT initiatives of today – data center consolidation, cloud computing, unified communications, virtualization, and disaster recovery – share a common theme: they all presume a well performing Wide Area Network (WAN). The reality though is that most WANs are unable to compensate for the increased packet loss, latency, and bandwidth problems endemic to publicly shared infrastr…
Discovery is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing, analyzing and producing information during civil legal actions. The goal of discovery is to obtain information that will be useful in developing relevant information for pre-trial motions and for the trial itself. Information sought during discovery can include documents, testimony and other information deemed necessa…
Business documents are vital strategic, financial, operational and intellectual assets that are essential to daily business processes. They constitute the lifeblood of an organization. Yet half of organizations rate their document management practices as less than effective. This is why document process management is becoming an outsourcing strategy that enables organizations to reduce cost…
The expression “better, faster, cheaper” is commonly associated with supply chain initiatives, where companies have developed an edge by getting products to market faster and more efficiently than their competitors. However, in the new world of cloud computing, more companies are looking at their IT department as a competitive differentiator by enabling them to quickly deploy hosted appli…
What if you could save money while developing high- quality training, technical documentation and even online help, all at the same time? You can! It’s called single sourcing and it’s all about eliminating duplication of work and ensuring consistency across your entire product suite. Simply by writing all the documentation for your product in one file, you can deliver a user manual and a…
Recent financial upheavals have resulted in a wave of increased regulations, and organizations are facing increasingly stringent government scrutiny and audit requirements. As a result, companies across the spectrum must implement an effective IT governance, risk and compliance (GRC) framework. Organizations, from small and mid-sized companies to global enterprises, are affected by changing and…
Small and midsized businesses experience business issues and challenges that are inherently different from those of larger enterprises. They generally have smaller workforces, lower budgets, and less complex IT environments than enterprise organizations. And yet, small and midsized businesses must meet the same types of demands as enterprise organizations, and optimize service levels to sup…
IT organizations are under increasing pressure to meet the business goals of their companies. This challenge can be particularly daunting because it involves complying with regulations, such as the Sarbanes- Oxley Act (Sarbox) and Basel II. Compliance requires strong corporate governance capabilities that are demonstrable to outside auditors. Because IT plays such a major role in business proce…
In today’s competitive business environment, small and midsized businesses that want to grow and sustain an edge in the market must continually streamline and improve core business practices. In many instances, technology-based solutions are integral to achieving operational efficiencies and to furthering key business objectives. As businesses progress from small to midsize organizations,…