In nearly every major purchasing scenario today, consumers have the option to try before they buy. And yet this concept is often conspicuously absent in the technology world. Organizations are frequently required to invest considerable sums in software and hardware without ever being given the chance to test them in a real-world environment.

That’s why SHI has teamed up with Microsoft to offer hands-on introductions to the Microsoft Productivity Suite. In a Microsoft Experience Center (MEC) session, we bring technology decision-makers into our labs to test drive Microsoft software in a number of true-to-life, work-related scenarios, such as working remotely, social networking to locate expertise and share information, and connecting in real time with coworkers and customers via video and voice conferencing, instant messaging, simultaneous SharePoint and document editing, help-desk and IT ticketing.

Trained SHI MEC facilitators walk attendees through hands-on demos of Windows 8

An MEC session also provides a first-hand look at Windows 8 and the features of Lync, Exchange, SharePoint, Office, CRM, and other Microsoft desktop offerings across a variety of devices, including tablets, PCs, and smartphones. Organizations have time to interact with these software and devices in order to make an informed decision on whether or not they fit their current IT landscapes.

We’ve already hosted a number of MEC sessions and have gotten great feedback. It seems that most organizations value the opportunity to get their hands on the software they’re buying before signing the dotted line. To that end, we’re working to pin down our schedule of MEC tour dates for the remainder of the year. Email us or sign up here to find the next MEC session near you.

Creative Cloud, introduced last year, delivers all the applications from Creative Suite, eliminating the shrink wrap and box, and replacing perpetual licenses with a subscription-based model. Here’s everything you need to know about Creative Cloud, what the change means for you, and what you can do about it.

What the shift to Creative Cloud means for customers

• CS6 products will remain available via perpetual licensing (i.e. a Cumulative Licensing Program and Transactional Licensing Program), but perpetual licensing customers will see no future release of the Creative Suite. Subscribing to Creative Cloud will be the only way to get the new version and receive updates going forward.
• A major release of Adobe’s Creative applications arrives on June 17 and includes updates to 15 of the applications: Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, InCopy CC, Flash Pro CC, Dreamweaver CC, Premiere Pro, CC, After Effects CC, Audition CC, SpeedGrade CC, Prelude CC, Adobe Muse CC, Adobe Edge Animate CC, Adobe Bridge CC, and Adobe Media Encoder CC. This release will be exclusive to customers who have a Creative Cloud subscription.
• Customers using CS3 or higher can purchase a one-year subscription to Creative Cloud for Teams at a promotional retail price of $39.99 per month good through August 30. (This can be used in place of the current promo price of $49.99 per month, which will still be good through December).
• In the second half of 2013, Adobe will also offer a subscription to Creative Cloud Single App for $29.99 per month (retail) for customers that only want to use Photoshop, for example.
• The above changes only apply to the Creative Cloud applications. Acrobat will continue to be available via perpetual licensing.
• For Education customers, Student & Teacher Licensing will be discontinued on June 6, and a new Education Enterprise Agreement (EEA) program will become available to offer one- to two-year term-based licensing for the Creative Cloud apps and other Adobe software.
• Term-based licensing will also become available for government customers in July. More details will follow.

What Creative Cloud means for IT

The shift toward a subscription licensing model is good news for customers. Adobe can now instantly update the software, adding and updating features on the fly instead of waiting to release them as part of yearly updates or every 18 to 24 months with a new release of the Creative Suite. By subscribing to Adobe’s applications through the cloud, customers can deploy the applications immediately and always have instant access to the latest version of the software.

Subscription-based licensing makes for a more predictable budget than perpetual licensing, as the steady-stream model of subscription eliminates the spikes in spending around the latest Creative Suite release. The subscription model, using Adobe’s Value Incentive Plan (VIP), also makes it easier to administer seats, monitor storage, and track who’s using which seats and when they were purchased.

What IT can do about Creative Cloud

Reach out to an SHI sales rep to identify the appropriate pricing and enroll in Adobe’s VIP, the licensing program needed to subscribe to Creative Cloud. We can provide the promotional pricing that lasts through August, and by enrolling with SHI as your reseller, you can simplify Adobe license and subscription management. We can notify you when new seats are added before an order has been placed for them, as well as when subscriptions are coming up for renewal to ensure continuous coverage.

In the long run, the rates and benefits of Creative Cloud should keep it a good value, as companies gain instant access to the latest versions of so many programs. So unless you’re going to miss the box, Adobe’s leap into the cloud should be a welcome milestone.

The press release we issued this afternoon has all of the details. Click below to read the announcement in its entirety.

As the amount of data grows, and organizations also deal with accelerated virtualization, regulatory compliance, strict SLAs, and shrinking backup windows, IT departments will be forced to rethink their data backup and recovery strategies.

To better help our customers navigate this environment, SHI has partnered with EMC to create a Backup as a Service (BaaS) solution. SHI Backup as a Service is an end-to-end software and hardware backup and recovery solution that’s delivered as a self or managed service.

It combines SHI’s Management and Support Services with EMC Avamar and Data Domain to provide high-speed data deduplication, predictable performance, and simple scalability. With BaaS, organizations can cut down network bandwidth issues, reduce backup time, and keep data safe at minimal cost, without upfront expenditure.

SHI BaaS provides fast, daily full backups of physical and virtual servers, desktops, laptops, enterprise applications, and network-attached storage (NAS) servers. It easily integrates with many existing environments — Oracle, NetBackup, Microsoft, and VMware, to name a few — so organizations don’t have to worry about a major process or infrastructure change.

SHI BaaS is available in several deployment models to meet the needs of every IT department:

Multi-Tenant. For organizations interested in an off-premises solution, Avamar software agents are deployed onto customer servers, desktops, and laptops with no additional remote hardware required. Organizations can back up data over an existing WAN connection to SHI’s Multi-Tenant environment, eliminating the need for local tape backups and the risks associated with them. If your business has an existing Avamar or Data Domain appliance on premises, you can also replicate data over your network to SHI’s multi-tenant environment for disaster recovery purposes.

On-Premises. Host an Avamar or Data Domain appliance in your data center. This enables you to back up your environment on site and immediately begin replicating to the SHI Multi-Tenant environment within SHI’s Data Center.

Dedicated. If your company has strict security or compliance requirements, you can gain a dedicated appliance for exclusive use within the SHI Data Center for replication.

Our Backup as a Service video gives a good overview of the capabilities and options available with this new solution.

Which of the BaaS deployment models is most appropriate for your IT environment? Need more info? Contact us at BaaS@SHI.com or download our SHI Backup as a Service One Pager.

SHI posted $1 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2013, a 15.5 percent increase year over year and our highest first quarter revenue total ever. Not only that, but this is the third consecutive year in which we set a revenue record for the first quarter.

There are a lot of factors that contributed to this growth, and the press release we put out today has them all. Most importantly, though, thanks to our loyal customers and partners for contributing to this success.

Outlook uses PST files to store email outside of an Exchange system. The program prompts users to auto-archive old email to PST files by default, but users can also manually create them. While this sounds like a simple fix, most IT support will tell you that PST files are a pain in the neck to manage and in some cases create more problems than they solve.

To make matters worse, desktops and laptops are not always protected by a backup process. For this reason, users are taught to put documents and files they want backed up in their “home” folder on a network file server, which, in theory, is backed up regularly. As a result, users often put their PST files in their home folder and open them in Outlook to use.

Server administrators (or backup administrators) are responsible for backing up these file servers. There are two types of backups: full backups, during which all files are backed up, and incremental backups for files that have changed since the last full backup.

SCREENSHOT: The archive attribute of a file is denoted by the letter A.

Most backup programs use what is called the “archive” attribute to determine if a file has been backed up before. When a file is created or modified, the file system turns on this attribute. When a full backup is run, the archive attribute is cleared. When an incremental backup is run, only files that have this archive attribute turned on are backed up. This makes incremental backups smaller and therefore faster than full backups, and enables them to be conducted during the week. Full backups, meanwhile, usually happen on the weekends when more time is available.

How is this a problem?

1. Here’s a fun experiment to show file server administrators:
2. Put a PST file in a folder on a file share (such as a home directory). Clear the archive attribute on the file. You can do this by opening the file properties, choosing advanced, and unchecking the “ready for archiving” box.
3. Open the file in Outlook. Don’t expand the PST folder. Don’t add or remove anything to the PST file. Then close Outlook.
4. Go back to the file server and check the PST file’s archive attribute. It will be turned on again.
5. Repeat this process (you can just open Outlook now that the PST file is linked in Outlook) and you will see that each time the PST file will be marked for backup.

In this scenario, even though the PST file was not modified at all, it will be backed up each night with an incremental backup. Multiply this by hundreds or even thousands of users with multiple PST files each and you get thousands of files totaling several gigabytes or even terabytes of space.

You will have the same exact PST files on hundreds of backup tapes, resulting in unnecessary costs of the tapes, the rising cost to shuttle them back and forth for storage, and the time wasted backing up files that don’t need backing up.

Here are some other problems with PST files:

• They aren’t accessible through Outlook Web App (OWA), Outlook’s web portal.
• By default, they’re created on the local laptop or desktop and usually not backed up.
• Their default location is: C:\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook, which makes them easy to miss when you’re transferring your data from an old computer to a new one.
• They corrupt easily.
• Email scattered and stored on multiple computers in thousands of files makes eDiscovery efforts much more complicated, time consuming, and expensive.

Though PST files can be difficult to manage, there are solutions available to ease the process. An archiving application — Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, for example — can locate PST files throughout the network — on desktops, laptops, or on file servers. It can pull those PST files to the archiving server and archive that email into the individual user’s email archive. Often, shortcuts to the PST file can be created in the user’s Exchange mailbox in a separate folder with the PST file’s folder structure intact.

SCREENSHOT: Imported PST file in Outlook with folder structure intact

When the PST file is imported into a user’s archive, the user can then access that email from any company computer or through OWA. The user also doesn’t have to worry about losing the email in that PST file due to corruption or hard drive failure.

SHI’s archiving experts have tools that can show an organization the number of PST files scattered throughout their network, and can explain why a company would benefit from getting rid of PST files and putting that email into an arching application. Email me for more information.

SHI receives highest honors for customer satisfaction from Cisco

We’re proud to share that SHI has achieved Cisco’s Gold Star for Customer Satisfaction Excellence, the IT partner’s highest distinction for customer service.

Cisco measures the customer satisfaction levels achieved by its certified partners (SHI was just recertified as a Cisco Gold partner) based on regional target goals and the results of an online customer survey. The Overall Satisfaction Score is a weighted average of a partner’s pre and post-sales support over a rolling 12-month period.

As a Cisco Gold partner, SHI demonstrates specialization in mobility, collaboration, and physical, virtual, and cloud architectures. In addition, we consistently meet a number of certification, support, customer satisfaction, and service requirements.

Thanks to our customers who communicated their confidence in our customer support to Cisco! We hold this recognition in high regard and will remain diligent in our dedication to delivering the best Cisco solutions and customer experience possible.

You want the simplest, most cost-effective way to acquire the latest Microsoft technology. Don’t we all?

Do you work for a corporate, academic, charitable, or government organization that prefers to pay for software as you go? Or are you with a small-to-midsize business that wants more control over your investment and access to training, deployment planning, software upgrades, and product support?

Either way, the next webinar in our Microsoft Spring 2013 Webinar Series, “Open Value and Open Business,” is for you. We’ll cover the Microsoft Open Value and Open Business programs from head to toe so you can decide which is the best fit for your organization. Check out this feature comparison chart to get started.

It starts today at 2 p.m. EDT. Simply use these log in credentials to join:

Join online: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/shi2/join
Meeting ID: G673PH
Entry Code: 2{@kTW9
Call in US/Canada: 877.866.2469
Conference ID: 88386838

Then, come back later this month on April 25 for a webinar on the Microsoft Enrollment for Application Platform (EAP) and Enrollment for Core Infrastructure (ECI). In this session you’ll learn about licensing SQL Server, BizTalk Server (Microsoft recently changed the BizTalk Server licensing model), SharePoint Server, Visual Studio, Windows Server, and System Center, and discover how you can realize additional savings. Sign up by scrolling down to #11.

Want to join these webinars but aren’t available on those dates? Don’t worry. We’ll record the sessions and post the files online for you to watch at your convenience. Or feel free to ask us any questions by leaving a comment below.

Did I mention we’re also raffling off an Xbox 360 after each webinar?

Consider this real-world scenario. In my past life as an Exchange administrator, I found that my organization’s Exchange server was running low on disk space. After running some reports, I made a surprising discovery: 65 percent of all the email in our system was in the deleted items folders of user mailboxes! In addition, most of that email was more than a year old.

Excited that I was able to solve a problem without needing funding to purchase new storage for our Exchange server, I shared the good news with my boss. I told him we didn’t need to spend the $6,000 on new storage. I could simply create a policy to purge the email in the deleted items folder that was more than a year old. With that, I sat back in anticipation of the kudos that was certainly on the way.

Much to my surprise, he answered, “What if people need that email later on? I go back and get stuff out of the deleted items folder all the time.” So the decision was made to keep the old email and add new storage to the Exchange server.

However, this eventually led to another problem: The size of our email data had grown so large that it was taking too long to finish our daily backups. We couldn’t get them done in the off-hours. But the problems didn’t end there; our Exchange admins were facing a number of issues:

• Constantly monitoring and resolving disk storage problems
• Backups that took too long (and restores that took even longer)
• Exchange database maintenance tasks took too long

The good news is that there are a few steps that can be taken to address these types of problems: adding more Exchange servers (and expanding your backup systems), or implementing quotas and requiring your users to move mail out of Exchange and into PST files. However, adding new Exchange and backup hardware is costly, and the use of PST files opens up a wide range of administrative headaches (I’ll tackle this in another post).

The best way to manage Exchange growth is with an email archiving solution. There are several in the market, and most allow the creation of policies to remove the oldest, least-accessed emails for long-term storage. Several give the option of shortcuts in user mailboxes, so the older email is removed from Exchange, but not out of the end user’s reach. The result is much smaller Exchange databases that make for quicker backups, restores, and maintenance. Most email archiving solutions also result in massive cost savings, as they don’t require expensive storage.

Many archiving products also reduce the amount of storage required to save all this email, either by Single-Instance Storage (SIS) technology, or with SIS capable hardware. Many data archiving solutions, like Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, have an advanced “Single-Instance Storage” model that results in each email (and attachment) being stored just once. Simply put, that email blast to 5,000 users is stored just one time, that’s it. (By the way, Exchange 2010 took out Single-Instance Storage, which makes for larger mail databases and a greater need for an archiving solution.)

Aside from helping manage the size of the Exchange environment, and keeping all those users who want to save every last email in check, email archiving solutions are also helpful in simplifying and shortening the email backup process.

If you’re wondering where you stand, SHI has tools that will show how much of an organization’s email is old or duplicated (including attachments) and forecast how much storage overall can be reclaimed from an Exchange system. Plus, we’re always available to demo, architect, and deliver email archive solutions. Just shoot me an email to learn more.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Enterprise, Standard, and Branch Server licenses will be sold in 2-Core Licensing Packs. So, pricing for a single-processor license under the old model is equivalent to four core licenses under the new model. Customers deploying BizTalk Server 2013 on machines with more than four cores in each processor will end up paying more.
• To license a physical server, you must license all the cores on that server. There is a minimum of four core licenses required for each physical processor in the server. Servers fully licensed with Enterprise Edition core licenses with software assurance (SA) allow for an unlimited deployment of virtual machines (VMs) running BizTalk on the server (or server farm). This is especially beneficial in heavily consolidated virtual environments.
• As an alternative to licensing all the physical cores on a server, organizations are able to license individual VMs. To license a VM with core-based licenses, count the number of virtual cores allocated within the VM (minimum of four core licenses per VM). Each VM licensed w/SA can be moved frequently within your server farm.

What does this mean for you?

Two things to keep in mind as you move forward are: 1) how you are currently procuring BizTalk Server licenses, and 2) what impact this licensing change has to any current software assurance investments you have made.

Let’s first tackle the impact based on how you are procuring licenses today.

For Enterprise Enrollment and Enrollment for Application Platform Customers

If you already have purchased BizTalk Server editions under either the Enterprise Enrollment or Enrollment for Application Platform programs, you can continue to leverage the previous per-processor licensing model and true-up pricing through the end of your current enrollment term. For step-up orders — that is, situations in which you are migrating from a standard (BizTalk Standard) to a premium edition (BizTalk Enterprise) — you can also leverage the pricing under the previous per-processor licensing model. The caveat is that to take advantage of a step-up order, you must have software assurance coverage in place.

However, any new product orders made after April 1 are subject to the core-based licensing and pricing model. Similarly, at time of renewal all customers will be transitioned to the new model.

For Select/Select Plus/Open Customers

All purchases made after April 1 are subject to the new core licensing model and pricing terms. We need to consider the impact if you have invested in software assurance.

If you have active software assurance on BizTalk Server Branch, Standard, or Enterprise Edition Processor Licenses, upon first software assurance renewal on or after April 1, you will have the following options.

You can renew the greater of four core licenses for each processor license assigned to the server. Or, where the actual number of physical processors exceeds four, you can renew the total number of core licenses based on the physical hardware supporting instances of BizTalk Server software. 

In order to accurately gather this inventory data, Microsoft suggests the MAP Tool or any other equivalent software. And of course, we’re here to help. Contact your SHI Account Executive or leave a comment below with any questions.