EMS Cortex Team Blog

EMS-Cortex and the DDC - The quickest go live ever.

2010-03-18T12:10:00.001+13:00

http://blogs.technet.com/hosting/archive/2010/03/12/new-time-to-revenue-record-10-days-provisioning-goes-from-48hours-to-10-minutes-partnership-pays.aspx

MHA A Cortex Partner goes from 0 to Cloud provider in 10 days!

Cortex Release 8.4 - now available

2010-02-03T15:47:00.004+13:00

Cortex 8.4 is now available for existing customer upgrades. Please refer to the Cortex Support Site to download the detailed release notes.

The release introduces some brand new features including trial customer accounts, OU management, Windows Mobile and the integration of Exchange 2010.

If you are interested in upgrading your existing Cortex instance, please contact Cortex Support to arrange a suitable time to install 8.4.

The Cortex Development Team are now working on our next release, which we plan to implement at the end of April.

Forget Password Feature

2009-12-17T10:23:00.002+13:00

Cortex 8.4 allows the end-user to select and save answers to specific questions on their user account. Once these answers have been saved, the end user will be able to reset their forgotten password by themselves rather than contacting their customer administrator. This feature provides greater empowerment to the end user, and has the potential to reduce the number of password resets that a Customer Administrator has to manage.

A new page has been added to the Change Password menu where the user can select predefined questions or create their own question.

This feature can be enabled or disabled on the Cortex Control Panel depending on the Service Provider's requirements.

Release 8.4 Development Update

2009-12-17T10:14:00.002+13:00

We are now in the final testing stages of Release 8.4 and are now planning the handover to the Cortex Support Team. Over the festive period, we will be updating the latest help guide, preparing the Release Notes and before releasing the code for implementations and upgrades from mid January 2010.

Release 8.4 contains the following features:

- Support for Exchange 2010 provisioning
- Support for BlackBerry 5 provisioning
- Support for HyperV provisioning and reporting
- Trial Customer Accounts
- Further enhancements to our new content management system
- Forget Password feature

If you are interested in scheduling an upgrade in 2010, please contact cortexsupport@ems-cortex.com

Cloud Computing Defined

2009-11-30T15:43:00.000+13:00

If you have 15 minutes spare, take a look at this presentation by Simon Wardley, aside from giving an interesting perspective on Cloud Computing, it's also really well presented:
Cloud Computing - Why IT matters

The New BPOS

2009-11-30T12:27:00.001+13:00

Microsoft have recently lowered the price of their BPOS offering, and are at a rapidly increasing rate adding new features and benefits.

Where does that leave the Exchange, and SharePoint hoster?

Microsoft are leaving out the middle of the market.

The middle market is hard: They have internal IT guys afraid for their jobs, some complex systems and are used to having account managers – someone to work with, and help them look like a hero to the business.

This is where there is opportunity. As a hoster you can take advantage of Microsoft’s massive advertising campaign. Every CEO, CTO and CIO will at least know about the hosting offering if not understand it. Due to your ability to customize to a customer’s specific requirements and host additional servers/software over and above Exchange and SharePoint you have a key point of differentiation.

You are supposed to be more expensive, you are offering local tailored services with a real understanding of the applications and requirements of your local market or vertical.
Hosting companies give excellent value for what they do:
Relieve the stress of maintaining hardware
Maintaining business critical applications in a cost effective manner
Offering a 99.999% uptime for often as little as $20 - $50 a month.
Offering expensive and complex applications traditionally only fully utilised by large enterprises to small and medium businesses as well as the enterprise market.
Providing a phone number and a face.

As a proven presence in the market – through either webhosting, being an ISP or perhaps a Managed Services Provider customers are likely to come to you first, over and above BPOS and Google.
Your willingness to engage the customer directly, rather than just a webpage will build the customers confidence and allow you to capture this market.
The market is clamouring for this sort of service. We have all heard customers ask about Virtual Desktops, Software as a Service and Hosted Exchange.

There is a huge market being marketed to by Microsoft – get on the gravy train.

Webinar for provisioning of Terminal Services/XenApp and XenDesktop

2009-11-23T15:01:00.004+13:00

Control Panel Webinar for provisioning of Terminal Services/XenApp and XenDesktop.

Offering Hosted Desktops is a hot topic these days, but delivery is complex, intensive and time consuming without adequate supporting systems.

Let us show you how you can automate provisioning, reducing your overheads, time to market and increasing customer satisfaction:

- Allow customers to provision their own desktops and applications

- Delegate out password resets and day to day admin tasks down to the end user

- One Control panel manages Admin of TS/XenApp and services like Exchange, SharePoint and Online Back-up

- Automation leads to scalability – host more users with the same staff

- Create private applications for use by a single customer or shared applications to be used by many.

- Share a single farm among many customers safely and securely

Offering services based on Terminal Services/XenApp allow you to differentiate in this market. Choose applications your customer base knows and wants – create a niche for yourself.

Grow Quickly – most providers have limited or no automation – Grow your customer base by giving them control, a real low touch cloud offering with all their applications viewed and managed through a single pane of glass..

I look forward to seeing you on the 8th or 9th of December

US Webinar: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/435579713
Europe Webinar: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/483117560

Management of User Chevrons

2009-11-20T16:46:00.000+13:00

Currently only users who have been assigned with specific Cortex standard roles are displayed with chevrons on the Cortex UI. These chevrons are used to easily distinguish what type of administrator rights the user has been set up with and are great when faced with a user table consisting of 10+ users.

Feedback from our customers has requested that the management of the chevrons is extended to include individual customized security roles. We saw this as a real benefit to the overall end user experience and from 8.4, service providers will be able to assign the chevrons to their own customized roles.

Exam Success

2009-11-20T16:45:00.001+13:00

Congratulations to our senior developer, Jay Strydom, who achieved 100% in his recent exam this week.

Microsoft Certified Professional Developer – ASP.Net Developer 3.5
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist - .Net Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Applications

Hyper-V Dynamic DataCentre Demo with EMS-Cortex

2009-11-17T11:59:00.003+13:00

Hyper-V Dynamic DataCentre Demo with EMS-Cortex
We are excited to announce the public release of our Hyper-V provisioning module. The Cortex control panel now includes automated provisioning and delegated management of Hyper-V hosting.
Get the jump on your competitors – offer Virtual Servers and Virtual Datacentres today!
We are hosting a Webinar on the 2’nd of December to demo the platform. Please sign up using the links at the bottom of this post.
A Brief Overview of what’s included

Allocate resource pool to the customer

Disk
Memory
CPU Cores
Virtual Machines

Customer can utilise resource across VMs;

Create/upgrade/downgrade/delete VMs

Virtual Networks

Customer can have one or more secure VLANs

White Labelling and reseller functionality.

There will be a Webinar only install discount offered to those attending.
Look forward to seeing you all on the 2nd of December
Europe: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/133083001
America: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/259949457

Cortex UI translation made simple

2009-11-09T09:25:00.000+13:00

As we continue to increase our customer base globally, the Development Team has focused on improving the way that the Portal’s content management can be translated in to different languages. The 8.3 build saw a new content management user interface which easily distinguishes strings that are translated/un-translated and an export/import language tool allowing you to complete the translation off line and re-import by the touch of one single button.

More and more of Cortex’s content can be translated including reports, user error messages and Cortex’s download tools giving a overall better end user experience.

20 Character Username Limit

2009-11-04T10:46:00.000+13:00

Cortex ties closely into Windows Active Directory. As such when you create a user in Cortex there are a number properties you are required to enter (plus a bucket load of additional ones if you wish).

The required properties are.

UPN
Username
First Names
Last Name
Display Name
Password
Confirm Password

We often get asked why we have limited the username property to 20 characters?

Truth be told, we haven't. This limitation is imposed by Windows, mainly for legacy reasons from older NT versions of Windows. So the username has to be abbreviated to a maximum of 20 characters. The UPN however does not have the same restriction and in most cases can be used in place of the username.

Hyper-V vs. Anti-V

2009-11-03T08:47:00.014+13:00

As the uptake of Microsoft's Hyper-V increases, many organizations are now running business-critical services on virtual machines.
Now in R2, Hyper-V's popularity has been quickly established and the Cortex platform has kept pace with its development.

Hyper-V is an excellent product nevertheless like all software there are still a few areas that can catch out even experienced Administrators. Here is one that we have experienced and resolved recently. It has also featured in several Microsoft forums.

This only relates to those who intend to run a real-time A/V scanner on any of their Hyper-V hosts.

It applies to the following operating systems:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 (and R2)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Stnd/Ent/Datacenter (and R2)

with (in theory) any real-time virus scanner.

It has been seen in the wild with:
TrendMicro
Microsoft Forefront Client Security
AVG

Why exclude Hyper-V Processes and Files from a real-time scanner?

Performance

Every I/O must be checked by the scanner and this causes extra lag on servers real or physical. It should be noted that Microsoft recommends the following in these cases:

To protect your virtual machines, we recommend that you install the antivirus software within the virtual machine.

Avoiding Major outages!

Let me explain: Real-time scanning of Hyper-V processes and files can cause some strange and serious problems due to how Hyper-V operates, opens segments of files and so forth. Lots of Anti-Virus products see this behaviour as being suspicious and may block or quarantine Hyper-V files (including VHDs). It can stop the successful creation of new virtual machines, affect those that are running and can cause some/all of your virtual machines to disappear from the Hyper-V management console. It can even cause your VMs to corrupt leaving them only recoverable via a backup.

What should I exclude from real-time scanning on my Hyper-V hosts to avoid these issues?

Directories

Default virtual machine configuration directory (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V)
Custom virtual machine configuration directories
Default virtual hard disk drive directory (C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks)
Custom virtual hard disk drive directories
Snapshot directories
If you use Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes on Windows Server 2008 R2, you must also exclude the Cluster Storage Volume path and all sub-folders (C:\Clusterstorage\....")

Processes

VMMS.EXE - Virtual Machine Management Service
VMWP.EXE - Virtual Machine Worker Process

For more information on the issues raised in this post please see:
Anti-Virus Scanning and Hyper-V : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961804
Sample Issue raised in an MS Forum : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/e81d0f59-18b5-4214-94ea-6cde883fdd4e

Cloudy Days at vForum

2009-10-30T18:46:00.001+13:00

This week I was at the vmware virtualisation forum in Sydney where there was much talk of "the cloud". vmware must have been pleased with the weather, because it was also cloudy (with added rain) when I arrived - which was disappointing.

Generally it was a good event - and it was also free to attend! Every presenter from every large organisation represented seemed intent on defining what the "cloud" really means, this got kind of boring after a while.

Virtualisation technology is now mainstream, and the key virtualisation technology provided by vendors such as vmware, Microsoft and Citrix has enabled service providers to effectively offer what is often now termed as Infrastructure as a service. At EMS we are working hard on our own virtual datacenter offering, this has now been deployed into several customers. The core benefits of the Cortex platform mean that our customers can very quickly offer Infrastructure as a service.

Watch this space, we will be releasing more information soon on this product.

First code drop of Cortex 8.4 has been delivered into our test environments

2009-10-23T11:03:00.000+13:00

We have now started our system integration testing on the new 8.4 Cortex release. The scope of this release is focused on extending the control panel’s support for BlackBerry 5 & Exchange 2010 and introducing the management and permission delegation of organizational structures in Cortex.

There are also some exciting changes to the end user experience. Users can now reset their passwords if they have forgotten their old one by answering some personal verification questions before the password is saved. This empowers the end user to take responsibility of their account.

Future enhancement requests raised by our customers include a trial customer feature where prospective customers can set up a trial customer account for a period of time to trial the services that a Service Provider may host. 8.4 will introduce such a system where Service Providers will be able to manage demo customers and users.

The Cortex Test Team will be testing the new code over the next month with the 8.4 release being tentatively available for customer implementations from the end of November 2009.

Watch this space for more details on the features that will be implemented as part of 8.4.

Cortex Hosted Exchange: Contacts Pagination

2009-10-22T14:33:00.002+13:00

With every new version of Cortex, the Development Team not only work on new features for Cortex, they strive to make improvements to existing functionality. In Cortex 8.3 they have made a number of performance improvements, some as a result of requests from our customer base. One of these improvements was to adjust the pagination rules for a users Hosted Exchange contacts limiting the number of contacts per page in Cortex to 20.

This is a change from the way Cortex previously worked as the View-All button used to display all the contacts on the one page. This was problematic for many customers because if they had hundreds of contacts (like lots of us do) it meant the page could take a long time to load. The change has caught a few users out who liked to load all their contacts up on one page and then use search functions to look for contacts – the search function only works with the displayed page.

If you wish to maintain the previous functionality you can do so by increasing (or even decreasing) the contacts per page limit. To make this change you need to access the file system on your Cortex Web Server and edit the following file:

C:\EMS\Cortex\CortexWebRoot\CortexDotNet\Web.config

If you search for the term ContactsRecordsPerPage you will come across the following entry:

add key="ContactsRecordsPerPage" value="20"

If you change the number against the value attribute and save the file, this will immediately update the number of contacts per page displayed in Cortex (no need to restart any services).

Upgrading to Cortex from an HMC Control Panel

2009-10-19T22:09:00.000+13:00

Since Microsoft announced HMC was being retired, we have had an increasing number of questions around migration, the most common one being, I use HMC, How can we move from our HMC Control Panel to Cortex?

Migration is never straightforward, however the good news about HMC is that it automated provisioning - which makes migration somewhat easier. At Cortex we've been migrating users onto the platform for some time, and in a number of cases we've had to deal with a beast uglier and more complex than HMC.... yes, the "Manomatic" provisioning system - a home made system that has typically been through several unpleasant and painful levels of evolution. Often, by the time we're involved we're fighting to tame a three headed monster.

The problem with manual provisioning is:
(a) Humans aren't very good at repetitive tasks, they forget things and don't follow instructions well.
(b) After the first couple of times, manual provisioning gets kind of boring, so corners get cut.
(c) Smart engineers delegate the task to a trainee - who gets lost and makes more mistakes.

So in conclusion - automagic provisioning is the way to go, and if you've already been using HMC the migration process once proven, can be easily repeated across all of your hosted customers. (we've also done lots of them, which makes it easier)

HMC Control Panel Migration Process
HMC stores it's user and service information in Active Directory and in a small SQL database. In order to ensure best accuracy of data, Cortex tries to base the core migration from the Active Directory.
1. Extract user data from AD
We use LDIFDE to make a quick extract of the directory into a text file. This separation means that we can use the same process for moving users from one directory to another.
2. Import data into the Cortex migration tool
The file is loaded into the migration tool - this can then be used to identify resellers, customers and users.
3. Determine services provisioned to users
As the file is parsed, much information about the user and their HMC services can be gathered from the AD data. This is used to determine the appropriate Cortex plan for each user.
4. Determine services provisioned to customers
By determining which services a user has consumed, we can determine which services and plans a customer should have... and similar for the reseller.
5. Provision
Provisioning sends requests to the Cortex API, the customers, users and services are provisioned into Cortex, the end result is users that can be managed with Cortex.

Minimising impact on the end-user
Provided migration tools are configured correctly and good sample tests are completed, the migration should not affect the end-users consumed service in any way. The biggest impact is in the change of control panel and in communicating this well to your end users.

EMS-Cortex partners with implement.com to deliver next-generation Cloud services

2009-10-13T16:07:00.000+13:00

Auckland. 9 October 2009. EMS-Cortex today announced a strategic partnership agreement with Seattle-based implement.com Corporation. The agreement will see implement.com provide implementation and consulting services to Cortex customers worldwide.

implement.com is the leading worldwide systems integrator of Microsoft-based provisioning systems and infrastructure to hosted service providers and telecommunications companies. implement.com has a close working relationship with Microsoft, offering consultancy, training and services to both Microsoft and its customers.

implement.com President Steve Schwartz says the partnership is logical in that it combines complementary skill sets and software: “Cortex provides a comprehensive control panel capability that enables hosted services to be set up and managed through a single interface. implement.com specializes in the infrastructure itself, so it’s a perfect match,” he says.

“Cortex has a number of unique strengths. The software delivers a highly self-reliant provisioning engine, with architecture flexible enough to allow us to expand capabilities for clients – without modifying the platform itself,” says Schwartz.

“We are delighted to be partnering with EMS-Cortex, especially as we start to enter into the 2010 release cycle from Microsoft where our respective assets will be critical to the success of our mutual customers.”

EMS-Cortex General Manager Colin Williams says the partnership agreement formalizes an existing relationship with implement.com. The two companies have worked together in the past on Cloud implementations for tier-1 companies, including global telecommunications companies and systems integrators.

“implement.com will help us bring our cloud solutions to market by expanding our implementation capability, especially for larger projects and high market demand areas such as Exchange 2010, server virtualization, Office Communications Server and hosted voice systems,” he says.

“The partnership with implement.com is highly strategic for us. It means we can support the explosive growth in demand for our software with the highest quality implementation and consulting services.”

Williams says global demand for the Cortex platform has been accelerated by Microsoft’s discontinuing development of its own provisioning services engine. EMS-Cortex has increased customer numbers by more than 40 percent over the past 12 months, with sales in Australia, Europe, the UK and the US.

The implement.com partnership announcement closely follows a global purchase of EMS-Cortex’s provisioning and management software by Unisys Corporation. Unisys made the purchase to support and bring clear differentiation to its Unified Communication as a Service offering. The Unisys strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed private clouds to Unisys-managed cloud services as well as hybrid solutions.

Colin Williams says the Unisys deal helps illustrate the rapid evolution of ‘next generation’ Cloud services. “Inside the Cloud we’re seeing trends towards virtualization, customer self management, virtual private clouds, and an ever wider choice of applications,” he says. “There is huge demand for customer-specific integration of hosted applications, specialized implementations of virtual private clouds, and support of business and billing systems.

“The Cloud revolution is just beginning. We’re excited to be at the forefront of that revolution - supported by partners of the caliber of implement.com.”

Unisys selects EMS-Cortex for Cloud Computing Service

2009-10-13T16:06:00.000+13:00

Auckland. 12 October 2009. EMS-Cortex today announced that global IT services company Unisys Corporation has selected the New Zealand-developed EMS-Cortex provisioning and management software to support and bring clear differentiation to the Unisys Unified Communication as a Service offering.

This Unisys offering enables secure communication and collaboration in Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and Office Communication Services environments. It is a software as a service (SaaS) offering provided through the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, which enables enterprise clients to securely move conventional business applications – including those with secure or sensitive data – into a managed, shared cloud service without costly, time-consuming rewrites or other alterations.

Unisys New Zealand managing director, Brett Hodgson, said Cortex had been selected following a competitive evaluation between the Cortex software and software from other vendors worldwide.

“Unisys selected EMS-Cortex for its combination of functionality and value. Its feature set matched our requirements to be the provisioning and management portal for the Unisys Secure Unified Communication as a Service offering in data centres that support the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution. The first implementation will be in North America.

“Unisys has supported businesses and government organisations in New Zealand for more than 40 years, and we are delighted to play a role in the international growth of EMS-Cortex as an innovative New Zealand software developer,” Hodgson said.

Cortex software provides a comprehensive control panel capability which enables hosted services to be set up and managed through a single interface. A key differentiator for Cortex is its ability to allow end customers to perform day-to-day administration themselves, as well as the breadth of applications it supported – including key Microsoft applications, Blackberry and Citrix.

EMS Cortex CEO Mark Loveys said the selection of Cortex by Unisys to support one of its global cloud services offerings was a major sales milestone for the Cortex product.

“We’re delighted that Unisys has selected Cortex to support its unique cloud offering. Our success in winning this business is evidence of our leadership in provisioning and managing large enterprise level customers, as well as smaller companies. That speaks to our technical strengths around customer self management, multi-tenanting, and the breadth and depth of applications we support,” Loveys said.

Loveys also said the Unisys sale was part of a strong increase in market demand from large international providers of hosted services as the Cloud computing model gains momentum. This demand has seen EMS Cortex increase its customer numbers by more than 40 percent over the past 12 months, with sales in Australia, Europe, the UK and the US. Flagship customers include Telecom New Zealand and Australia’s largest web and application hosting company, WebCentral.
Unisys unveiled its cloud computing strategy – with the Secure Cloud Solution as a core component – on 30 June 2009 . The Unisys strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed private clouds to Unisys-managed cloud services as well as hybrid solutions.

SaaS: 10 Ways to Fail – Part 1

2009-10-13T15:22:00.000+13:00

There's some good food for thought in this article for anyone working on SaaS software (read the part 2 as well)
SaaS: 10 Ways to Fail – Part 1

Unisys/Cortex Press Release from Computerworld

2009-10-13T07:13:00.002+13:00

Control Panel for HMC

2009-10-07T08:32:00.002+13:00

The term "HMC" refers to the Microsoft solution for "Hosted Messaging and Collaboration" - essentially, HMC includes a hosting solution for Exchange, SharePoint and OCS. Release 4.5 was the last release of HMC and there will be no more.

The HMC solution only included a sample control panel, HMC did provide a code level abstraction layer to each of the hosted applications, this was called MPS - the Microsoft Provisioning Server. The sample control panel demonstrated how a control panel could be connected to MPS in order to automate provisioning and administration.

MPS along with HMC has reached end of life. Cortex is not built around MPS but still adds value to any HMC based environment. As an HMC control panel, Cortex can be brought in to manage an existing HMC infrastructure. Cortex has a proprietary provisioning engine that gives transparency to what it's doing, the ability to build custom provisioning processes, an easier route to adding more hosted services and much more flexibility around how you sell and manage your hosted services. It's flexibility and simplicity mean that if you choose Cortex now, you will be well placed for the changes coming with the new range of hosted Microsoft products.

Note that as a solution, much of HMC was about ensuring that an environment was suitably engineered to cope with scalable hosting - i.e. high volumes of users operating in a shared hosting environment. This was good work, it was well designed and tested and is still applicable. If an environment has been built following the HMC guidelines this will provide a sound platform for hosting.

Cortex is well proven in this field, we are a Microsoft Gold partner and have been working in the area of provisioning for 10+ years, Cortex has been selectd after in-depth technical comparisons by an increasing number of the worlds largest hosting providers over MPS based solutions.

In conclusion, if you are considering deploying an HMC solution, you will still need a control panel, but take a look at Cortex before investing in an MPS based solution that could need replacement in the next 12 months and will not have any more investment.

Exchange 2010 - The Plan

2009-09-17T15:30:00.003+12:00

We understand that Microsoft Exchange 2010 is expected to be released in late 2009 or first quarter 2010. This release is targeted at Enterprises, for various technical reasons it will only be supported by Microsoft in a single tenant model. For hosters, this means it will only be supported for dedicated hosting.

Microsoft also intends to launch a new hosting version of Exchange 2010. This version will have a completely new model of Multi-tenanting with numerous advantages over the permissions based model currently used in Exchange 2007. This will be released at a later date to be announced.

The EMS-Cortex approach to Exchange 2010 is as follows:
- Dedicated Exchange 2010 hosting will be supported within 2 months of Exchange 2010 RTM.

- EMS-Cortex is currently working on an interim Exchange 2010 multi-tenant solution. The solution will be based on current Exchange 2007 multi-tenanting design. If it is technically possible to achieve this using the Exchange 2010 RTM, we will offer this to our customers. We expect to know if this is possible on or shortly after release.

- There are several things to consider when looking to offer this in a production hosted environment:
o It is expected that the solution will be unsupported by Microsoft.
o All Support from EMS-Cortex will be without SLA and will be best efforts only. Patches and bug fixes will be provided at EMS-Cortex discretion
o EMS-Cortex will not offer support for your Exchange 2010 hosting environment – only the control panel. We will publish any and all knowledge we gain from customers doing this in our knowledge base.
o The Cortex functionality for Exchange 2010 is expected to replicate Exchange 2007 functionality – it will not expand or expose any new functionality in 2010. In fact it may remove some new functions in exchange 2010.
o There will be no migration or upgrade path from EMS-Cortex to move users or customers from unsupported multitenant exchange 2010 to hosting version Exchange 2010.

EMS-Cortex will offer full support for the multi-tenant version of Exchange 2010, we expect this to be available within 1 month of this product being generally available.

Please get in touch with us to find out more or to give us any feedback.

Active Directory User Synchronisation Utility

2009-09-15T23:01:00.003+12:00

Cortex v8.3 has recently been released. One of the key new features is the new integrated Cortex "User Synch" feature. This is designed to ease the move from on-premises to hosted services by offering simple and effective identity provisioning and password synchronisation.

The User Synch utility comprises a small Windows Service that is deployed to each of the customers on-premises domain controllers. Selected users in the customers local AD are automatically provisioned to Cortex, any password change, or change in the users properties, will result in an update being made to the user in Cortex.

Cortex offers added benefits by
- Allowing service providers and resellers to control who can use the User Synch Service.
- providing each customer with a customised User Synch installer - preconfigured to connect to Cortex. This makes deployment a snap - the deployment can be achieved in a matter of minutes.
- Users that have been synchronised cannot have their details changed in Cortex or have their passwords reset. This is because they are controlled by the customers AD.

User Synch is expected to be used by customers with 50+ users, up to 1000s of users. The solution has been tested on Windows 2003 and 2008 (both 32 and 64 bit versions), it has not been tested on Windows 2000.

The solution provides a simple and robust alternative to high-end identity management solutions. It is tuned for the hosting environment and gives Cortex powered service providers another point of differentiation in an increasingly competitive market.

For more information on User Synch, please contact us sales@ems-cortex.com - we have a white paper on the solution that we are happy to send out on request.

Microsoft WPC

2009-06-09T14:16:00.000+12:00

EMS-Cortex will be at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July. This year it's in New Orleans and runs from 13th to 16th July. Lookout for Cortex delegates dressed in "shocking blue" Cortex polo shirts.

There's also a possibility that the Giant Cortex Provisioning Pig may be making an appearance at the conference.