Improving Infrastructure Management for Mid-Size Companies
System Center Essentials 2007 is a single, unified management system that proactively monitors, updates and troubleshoots IT infrastructures with up to 500 PCs and 30 servers. As the name indicates, most of the features in System Center Essentials 2007 come from members of Microsoft's enterprise class System Center family of management products
February 1, 2008
Managing the IT infrastructure of a mid-sized business presents problems that are quite different from those faced by staff at larger organisations. Although many of the challenges that staff deal with on a day to day basis are the same – diagnosing and fixing IT problems, helping end users and managing multiple systems and applications – IT staff numbers in mid-sized companies tend to be far lower, and skill sets are necessarily more broad with few, if any, specialist technicians to call on.
System management software has the potential to make the efficient management of IT infrastructure much easier for mid-sized companies, but there's a catch. Many of the tools available today are either point solutions for specific applications aimed at enterprise IT departments, and are thus too complex and specialised to be used fully without time-consuming specialist training, or they are simpler tools that lack the scope and features required to be truly effective.
It's precisely to address this that Microsoft has introduced System Center Essentials 2007, a single, unified management system that proactively monitors, updates and troubleshoots IT infrastructures with up to 500 PCs and 30 servers. As the name indicates, most of the features in System Center Essentials 2007 have been taken from members of Microsoft's enterprise class System Center family of management products, and integrated into a single unified management application. Using Essentials 2007, system administrators can manage an entire medium-sized company infrastructure including:
Manage servers, clients, hardware, software and IT services from a single unified management console
Monitor and troubleshoot systems and end-user problems
Deploy software and install security and application updates from a single, centralised location.Companies with very limited IT staff will be able to benefit from Essentials 2007 without tying up human resources unnecessarily. That's because with Essentials 2007 monitoring the corporate infrastructure from a server, a service partner running Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager will be able to connect to Essentials to manage the infrastructure remotely. This is particularly useful for companies who want to hand off day-to-day infrastructure management so their IT staff can involve themselves in projects that add value to the business, or those with IT staff numbers too limited to provide 24-hour management coverage. Existing staff may thus manage the network during the day, with monitoring and troubleshooting responsibilities passed to a partner after hours.
One of the central tenets underpinning Essentials 2007 is simplicity: not in its functionality, but in the way that information is presented and can be acted upon. Essentials 2007 does this through a single management console that presents a complete view of all of the organisation's servers, clients, hardware, software and IT services. This enables a single administrator, at a glance, to get an instant overview of the state of the entire IT infrastructure, to view and act on alerts, and to carry out common management tasks. This makes management far simpler and more effective than the alternative: attempting to work with a variety of different tools, with different interfaces, from an assortment of vendors, some of which have been designed for much larger enterprise IT environments.
Reporting functionality is also included in Essentials 2007, using SQL Server 2005 Express, which is installed at installation time (unless an existing SQL Server 2005 database is specified). More than 30 pre-configured reports are included with Essentials 2007, including update compliance, capacity planning and software deployment. Quick and Easy DeploymentThe good news for staff in smaller IT departments is that Essentials 2007 is quick and easy to deploy: in fact it is usually possible to get it up and running in less than an hour. That's because the software uses simple wizards for installation, automatic device discovery, security configuration and group policy and update settings. Certificates are also configured and deployed automatically. If Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition or Windows Server Update Services 2.0 or 3.0 are in use already, these can be upgraded to Essentials 2007 while preserving information like upgrading metadata and groups and approvals, or Essentials 2007 can be run along side.
Once it's up and running, another key tenet of Essentials 2007 is proactivity. This means checking for updates to keeping systems and applications up to date with the latest security patches, and spotting problems as soon as they occur so they can be diagnosed and corrected before they turn into major incidents that threaten business operations.
Because Essentials 2007 is aimed at companies with smaller IT departments, it is not assumed that system administrators have specialist technical knowledge of every application under management. To help ensure efficient administration, management packs for Windows server and client operating systems, and key applications including Office, Exchange, Active Directory and SQL are shipped and installed with the product, providing expert knowledge to help prevent and solve problems, and in-line links to click and "fix it now."
One of the most time-consuming activities for system administrators is the deployment of new software onto client machines. This is especially the case in organisations with branch offices without resident IT staff. The only practical way to handle organisation-wide rollouts of applications like Office 2007 is to perform the installations remotely from a central location, and Essentials 2007 makes this easy to do using a software deployment wizard. This helps create packages to deploy Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) applications and patches and device drivers to defined groups of computers.
The need for effective systems management software is evidenced by the strong demand over the last few years. In 2006, global systems management software sales were about $11 billion according to research house Gartner, and this is forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual rate of 8.7 percent to reach over $17 billion in 2011.
The problem for companies using this type software has historically been the number of products from different vendors needed to work side by side to create a complete management solution. The exception to this has been Microsoft's System Center family, which has emerged as a formidable product and perhaps the only completely integrated solution for the Windows enterprise. With Essentials 2007, Microsoft has taken this a stage further, providing everything necessary for the efficient management and administration in the sub-enterprise level market, in a single unified product. It's likely that Essentials 2007 will become the de-facto standard for the management of Microsoft-based IT infrastructure in mid-sized organizations.
Monday, March 17, 2008
adding features to your asp site
During the last few years the number of Web sites has grown dramatically, as well as the level of quality demanded from these sites. To succeed today, it's not enough to place some content on a static site. You need to have more and more features to attract new visitors and make them return again and again. Some of these features are not directly related to increasing the interest of your visitors and the level of traffic. Sometimes they are even not visible to the user, but are nonetheless crucial to getting your site's quality to the top.
In this article, I will try to show you how to implement some of today's most popular site features in ASP. Let's start with working examples of three commonly used features: a feedback form, a "recommend to a friend" feature and a 404 error reporter. The main function in the implementation of these three features is sending email from the ASP script. There are no built-in capabilities to send email from ASP, but there are lots of free and commercial components enabling you to do this. In this article, I'll use the JMail component available for free from www.dimac.net. You may use any other component available on your host; it shouldn't be difficult to adapt these examples to work on your site.
Feedback form
One of the most important elements of a great site is the ability to satisfy user needs, and the easiest way to know what your users need and want is by getting their feedback. From my own experience, I know that simply displaying your contact information doesn't guarantee much feedback. There are a variety of reasons why people might not send you email even if they want to tell you something: they're not browsing your site from their own computer; they don't have their email software properly configured; an email message tends to require some formal things like greetings and more; they don't want to give you their email but still have something important to say... Having a feedback form solves most of these problems, enabling you to get more information from your users and build a better site.
Implementation of feedback form in ASP is quite easy:1) create HTML form2) get fields3) send email.
So let's start by creating basic HTML form (formatting skipped):
And now we will get the fields from that form and send them to our email:
<%
Set jmail=Server.CreateObject("jmail.smtpmail")
jmail.ServerAddress="mail.company.com"
jmail.AddRecipient "webmaster@company.com"
jmail.Sender=Request.Form("fromaddr")
jmail.SenderName=Request.Form("fromname")
jmail.Subject=Request.Form("subject")
jmail.Body=Request.Form("body")
jmail.Execute
%>
This is the simplest implementation of a feedback form. You may use it on your site as is. However, I would recommend customizing it to be more universal. You can make the form accept not only the name and email of the sender, subject and body, but also allow a choice of email address of the recipient (you) so you may use it from various parts of your site or on various sites. In this manner, you will be able to add a select box (dropdown) to your HTML form, so your visitor may choose the theme of the message and send the message to a specific responsible person. To be even more universal, you may want the script to redirect to a specific "thank you" page after processing.
Now our HTML form will look something like this:
And the processing script:
<%
Set jmail=Server.CreateObject("jmail.smtpmail")
jmail.ServerAddress="mail.company.com"
jmail.AddRecipient Request.Form("toaddr")
jmail.Sender=Request.Form("fromaddr")
jmail.SenderName=Request.Form("fromname")
jmail.Subject=Request.Form("subject")
jmail.Body=Request.Form("body")
jmail.Execute
Response.Redirect Request.Form("redir")
%>
Note: Response.Redirect should be used before any content has been passed to the client.
In this article, I will try to show you how to implement some of today's most popular site features in ASP. Let's start with working examples of three commonly used features: a feedback form, a "recommend to a friend" feature and a 404 error reporter. The main function in the implementation of these three features is sending email from the ASP script. There are no built-in capabilities to send email from ASP, but there are lots of free and commercial components enabling you to do this. In this article, I'll use the JMail component available for free from www.dimac.net. You may use any other component available on your host; it shouldn't be difficult to adapt these examples to work on your site.
Feedback form
One of the most important elements of a great site is the ability to satisfy user needs, and the easiest way to know what your users need and want is by getting their feedback. From my own experience, I know that simply displaying your contact information doesn't guarantee much feedback. There are a variety of reasons why people might not send you email even if they want to tell you something: they're not browsing your site from their own computer; they don't have their email software properly configured; an email message tends to require some formal things like greetings and more; they don't want to give you their email but still have something important to say... Having a feedback form solves most of these problems, enabling you to get more information from your users and build a better site.
Implementation of feedback form in ASP is quite easy:1) create HTML form2) get fields3) send email.
So let's start by creating basic HTML form (formatting skipped):
And now we will get the fields from that form and send them to our email:
<%
Set jmail=Server.CreateObject("jmail.smtpmail")
jmail.ServerAddress="mail.company.com"
jmail.AddRecipient "webmaster@company.com"
jmail.Sender=Request.Form("fromaddr")
jmail.SenderName=Request.Form("fromname")
jmail.Subject=Request.Form("subject")
jmail.Body=Request.Form("body")
jmail.Execute
%>
This is the simplest implementation of a feedback form. You may use it on your site as is. However, I would recommend customizing it to be more universal. You can make the form accept not only the name and email of the sender, subject and body, but also allow a choice of email address of the recipient (you) so you may use it from various parts of your site or on various sites. In this manner, you will be able to add a select box (dropdown) to your HTML form, so your visitor may choose the theme of the message and send the message to a specific responsible person. To be even more universal, you may want the script to redirect to a specific "thank you" page after processing.
Now our HTML form will look something like this:
And the processing script:
<%
Set jmail=Server.CreateObject("jmail.smtpmail")
jmail.ServerAddress="mail.company.com"
jmail.AddRecipient Request.Form("toaddr")
jmail.Sender=Request.Form("fromaddr")
jmail.SenderName=Request.Form("fromname")
jmail.Subject=Request.Form("subject")
jmail.Body=Request.Form("body")
jmail.Execute
Response.Redirect Request.Form("redir")
%>
Note: Response.Redirect should be used before any content has been passed to the client.
10 reasons to develop with .net
Active Server Pages are a server-side scripting technology primary developed to work under IIS (Internet Information Server) on Windows NT Server (3rd party products exist enabling the use of ASP on other server platforms). ASP enables the server to deliver dynamic, database driven content to the client with minimal effort.
The goal of this article is not to move developers from other wonderful technologies to ASP, but to explain the advantages of Active Server Pages to Web designers, programmers and anyone interested in Web development. ASP is not my first server-side scripting technology. I was developing with Netscape Server-Side JavaScript, Borland IntraBuilder and Oracle Web Application Server before I moved to ASP. Now I'm an ASP developer, and I will try to explain why I think ASP is currently the best choice for general Web developer.
Ease of Use
Active Server Pages are plain HTML pages with ASP code embedded into them enclosed in <% and %> tags. You just place ASP files into a directory on the server with scripting or execute permissions and your ASPs are ready to run. Whenever you need to change something you just edit the .asp files and that's it, your changes are applied.
Language Independence
ASP is a scripting engine enabling you to develop in virtually any language of your choice. The two languages available by default are VBScript and JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript); however, modules for Perl, Python and other languages already exist and there are virtually no limits for support for other languages to be implemented. This enables the novice ASP developer to utilize his or her previous programming experience. If you have ever programmed in Visual Basic or VBA (the version of Visual Basic used in the MSOffice suite), you will have no problems starting with VBScript. If you're familiar with JavaScript, then JScript is your choice. Unix gurus will find that Perl can be used readily.
Short Learning Curve
As you have seen, you may use your current expertise in some programming language or technology to jump into ASP in short time. Even if you know only HTML, it will not be difficult for you to learn how to insert ASP commands into your HTML files. Why, you ask? Just keep reading....
Tons of Information
There are currently more than 150 sites listed in Open Directory's ASP category. This is more than for any other server-side development engine or language. Lots of online magazines will deliver new articles on ASP to your mailbox on a weekly or even daily basis. There's a lot of resources out there for ASP, folks.
Huge Community
There are plenty of professional ASP developers ready to answer your questions in numerous ASP newsgroups and forums. For instance, on the day I write this article, there are more than 50 new threads in the microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general newsgroup alone.
The goal of this article is not to move developers from other wonderful technologies to ASP, but to explain the advantages of Active Server Pages to Web designers, programmers and anyone interested in Web development. ASP is not my first server-side scripting technology. I was developing with Netscape Server-Side JavaScript, Borland IntraBuilder and Oracle Web Application Server before I moved to ASP. Now I'm an ASP developer, and I will try to explain why I think ASP is currently the best choice for general Web developer.
Ease of Use
Active Server Pages are plain HTML pages with ASP code embedded into them enclosed in <% and %> tags. You just place ASP files into a directory on the server with scripting or execute permissions and your ASPs are ready to run. Whenever you need to change something you just edit the .asp files and that's it, your changes are applied.
Language Independence
ASP is a scripting engine enabling you to develop in virtually any language of your choice. The two languages available by default are VBScript and JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript); however, modules for Perl, Python and other languages already exist and there are virtually no limits for support for other languages to be implemented. This enables the novice ASP developer to utilize his or her previous programming experience. If you have ever programmed in Visual Basic or VBA (the version of Visual Basic used in the MSOffice suite), you will have no problems starting with VBScript. If you're familiar with JavaScript, then JScript is your choice. Unix gurus will find that Perl can be used readily.
Short Learning Curve
As you have seen, you may use your current expertise in some programming language or technology to jump into ASP in short time. Even if you know only HTML, it will not be difficult for you to learn how to insert ASP commands into your HTML files. Why, you ask? Just keep reading....
Tons of Information
There are currently more than 150 sites listed in Open Directory's ASP category. This is more than for any other server-side development engine or language. Lots of online magazines will deliver new articles on ASP to your mailbox on a weekly or even daily basis. There's a lot of resources out there for ASP, folks.
Huge Community
There are plenty of professional ASP developers ready to answer your questions in numerous ASP newsgroups and forums. For instance, on the day I write this article, there are more than 50 new threads in the microsoft.public.inetserver.asp.general newsgroup alone.
search engine marketing and aspx
Search engine marketing campaigns with PPC systems like Google AdSense and PPA affiliate programs like ClickBank that generate maximum revenue require web design software that can enable users to create, develop and manage large websites with many pages of relevant content and keyword optimization. Affiliate link handling and tracking can get quite complicated, and the process is greatly enhanced if you have effective software tools that keep your structures properly organized.
by Adrian BiffenGM, Aerohost
I've been doing this with FrontPage for nearly 10 years, ever since FrontPage 97, for those of you that remember that struggle. Up until now, I haven't seen anything worthy enough to replace FrontPage - I needed something extra special to inspire me to go through yet another learning curve.
So I've put up with the frustrating experience of using FrontPage 2000 for the last five years, finding 'work arounds' to deal with its idiosyncrasies. Granted, it does do some things well, but it seems that for every good feature, it has a bad one, and I especially don't like the way it alters my html code without any indication that it is doing so - even when I have the code assist turned off. I was very wary of installing the bloated FrontPage 2003, so I've stayed with version 2000, hoping to find an alternative. We have been working with PPC advertising and affiliate programs, and I was looking in earnest for a solution that would allow me to create more relevant web content efficiently.
by Adrian BiffenGM, Aerohost
I've been doing this with FrontPage for nearly 10 years, ever since FrontPage 97, for those of you that remember that struggle. Up until now, I haven't seen anything worthy enough to replace FrontPage - I needed something extra special to inspire me to go through yet another learning curve.
So I've put up with the frustrating experience of using FrontPage 2000 for the last five years, finding 'work arounds' to deal with its idiosyncrasies. Granted, it does do some things well, but it seems that for every good feature, it has a bad one, and I especially don't like the way it alters my html code without any indication that it is doing so - even when I have the code assist turned off. I was very wary of installing the bloated FrontPage 2003, so I've stayed with version 2000, hoping to find an alternative. We have been working with PPC advertising and affiliate programs, and I was looking in earnest for a solution that would allow me to create more relevant web content efficiently.
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