Unified Comms for Small Business with Office Communication Server

Office Communication Server isn’t for every small business and it isn’t always straightforward to implement, but when it’s a good fit the rich features offer obvious benefits you can sell.

Staying up while you recover: Double-Take Cloud provides easy server protection

Building a backup and disaster recovery service can be time consuming and costly. You need access to a data centre where you can site racks, servers, storage and have sufficient bandwidth to support the service. Alternatively, you could just take advantage of the cloud and leave your cloud supplier to take care of all that.

Replicating Active Directory

This is one of the easiest systems to add redundancy to. Active Directory contains all the information about your customer’s users and machines. If this fails, and you have no backup, they have a problem.

Hardware Recycling: Making money from green

Dealing with end-of-life hardware can be a burden for it consultants, but managing recycling and trade-ins for clients provides a business opportunity, as well as a chance to help the environment.

Set up event subscriptions in Windows Server 2008

Set up an event subscription between two Windows Server 2008 systems

Open the Reliability and Performance Monitor console, right-click on Data Collector Sets > User Defined, and create a New > Data Collector Set. Name the Data Collector and choose to Create manually (Advanced).

Managing networks with System Center Essentials 2007

Microsoft’s System Center tools manage everything from updates to virtualisation. Now there’s a version that will help you manage an entire SME from one screen.

Dealing with a Data Breach

Turn DPM and Windows Storage Server into an appliance

Combine windows storage server and add windows system center data protection manager and you can get a backup and dr appliance you can build – or a service you can sell.

SQL Server Alternatives

We’ve talked mostly about SQL Server mainly because Microsoft has focused not just on enterprise level BI, but also on the needs of smaller companies. David Hobbs-Mallyon, SQL Server product manager, claims: ‘Right from the start, Microsoft has

Controlling anti-social networking – a guide to blocking employees access to Facebook, MySpace and more.

Right now, your customers’ employees are looking at Facebook and surfing MySpace. If that doesn’t worry their employers, it should.

Social networking has only gained popularity in the last three or four years, but it is generating the same concerns that instant messaging did at the start of the decade.