If you Collaborate you need to Groove

Microsoft has greatly enhanced their collaboration solutions with the acquisition of Groove. Now there is a tool for real-time long-distance ad-hoc collaboration. Its fast, its secure, and you can productively collaborate on almost any kind of project. Once you have finished Grooving and you have created a masterpiece, you can save it right into SharePoint for long term collarborative use.

You can try out Groove for free, so why not give it a whirl.

VMWare Enables Server Consolidation and Cost Containment

Many organizations today are finding that server virtualization is an important tool in reducing current hardware costs and containing future hardware costs.

The common practice of dedicating a single server to each x86 application and sizing it for peak loads has led to severe underutilization of server assets in most data centers. Servers typically run at 5-15% CPU utilization, but business process and technology limitations make it difficult to improve on those figures.

VMWare is the market leading software solution which enables companies to realize reduced hardware costs and efficiencies through server virtualization. VMWare is in use by 99 out of the top Fortune 100 companies. VMWare makes it possible to create a server as a virtual hardware-independent `machine` which can share a physical server with other virtual machines. This has several important benefits:

• Dramatic reduction in server costs. Customers report savings of anywhere between 30% and 70%
• Significantly improved managability. Fewer servers to manage mean less complexity
• Boost in Server Utilization. Instead of 5% to 15%, 80% utilization is now possible.
• Increased IT Efficiency. Common administrative tasks, such as hardware provisioning, are simplified.
• Greater responsiveness and Ability to Respond to Future Growth. Because servers are now virtual, it`s easier to respond to requests for new servers, to monitor growth and to plan capaicity increments more effectively.

Companies are discovering that they can achieve consolidation ratios ranging from a modest 4:1 all the way to 30:1 (e.g Qualcomm). In Canada, Société de Transport de Montréal achieved a consolidation ratio of 15:1, as documented in an August 2006 article in Computing Canada. This is just one of many companies which have realized success. Visit the VMWare site to browse Success Stories in Server Consolidation.

VMWare is not just for large enterprises. If you have as few as 5 to 10 servers, you can realize benefits.

Download VMWare`s Server Consolidation brief from their web site for more information.

For more information on VMWare, contact John Mason, VMWare Sales Professional, at 416-256-3096 ext 1002.

Symantec Backup Exec Version 11d Offers Major Enhancements

Version 11.d of Symantec Backup Exec offers Granular Recovery Technology for Exchange, Sharepoint and the Active Directory, thereby eliminating the need for lengthy duplicate backups.

For example, instead of taking a full Database Backup and a full Mailbox backup plus incremental backups on each with Exchange, you can simply take a Full Data Base Backup and Continuous Protecion backups of the transaction logs for email. When you want to recover, you go into a GUI window and point to what you want to recover. This appears to save a lot of computer time and email administrator time.