Cloud computing moves IT off your balance sheet

With cloud services your IT costs become operating expenses. You no longer have occasional large capital investments in depreciating servers for your email service. You no longer need to upgrade or buy additional servers when your business grows or your requirements change. Predictable monthly subscriptions allow you to run your business more effectively than large irregular costs.

What are the hidden costs of your existing systems?

What are your current costs in order to provide an email service to each of your employees? There are many hidden costs that you may not have considered:

Outages

No SMB can cost effectively run an in-house email server  and guarantee 99.9% uptime. At a minimum you need IT staff on call 24/7 and large investments in redundant hardware. A certain percentage of outages are inevitable, but do you know what your current percentage downtime is? Do you know the associated costs due to lost productivity or lost business? With Office 365 the responsibly for 99.9% uptime is shifted from your IT department to Microsoft.

Lost productivity

Spam, viruses and full mailboxes all carry a cost. Important emails are bounced back to your customers, employees spend time managing the size of their mailbox potentially deleting important emails, viruses can bring your business to a standstill. Office 365 includes 25 GB mailboxes along with enterprise level protection from viruses and spam.

Data loss

A significant loss of data can be catastrophic to a business. It can be triggered by a simple hard drive failure, fire, flood, theft or the loss of a laptop. If you manage your own servers you need a robust and regularly tested backup and recovery strategy. The costs of doing this properly are significant so many businesses cut corners and are not as safe from data loss as they think they are. Cloud services put the responsibility for protecting your data with providers who are experts at this and whose reputation depends on it.

Summary

We’ve only focused on Office 365 as a replacement for your email server. Hopefully you can see how this feature alone will significantly reduce your IT costs. There is a lot more to Office 365 than just email, find out more about the other features here.
]]> http://www.cloudmaster.com/blog/how-cloud-services-reduce-your-it-costs/feed 0 http://www.cloudmaster.com/blog/office-365-released?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=office-365-released http://www.cloudmaster.com/blog/office-365-released#comments Sat, 02 Jul 2011 18:13:13 +0000 Cormac O'Brien http://www.cloudmaster.com/blog/?p=60 The latest version of Microsoft’s flagship cloud computing solution Office 365 was released this week. For a good introduction to it’s capabilities and some demos have a look at the launch video and our website

Read more about Office 365 here

Round 1 in Bantry, Cork unfortunately did not have enough wind for official racing. But Round 2 was a different story. Held last weekend at Jamie Knox watersports in Castlegregory, Kerry, a total of 16 races were run in winds of between 20 and 35 knots.

Replays of all of the gold fleet
races are now uploaded to the cloud and can be seen here:
http://www.tacktracker.com/web/races?rgid=784390139

70-595: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions by Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010

I’ve worked with BizTalk server since the 2000 version was released, but this is the first time I took one of the certification exams. I thought it was a good exam and covered a reasonable amount of what is a very broad topic. I’m glad to say that as well as an MCSD for .NET I am now also a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010.

We’ve chosen this name to emphasize our focus on cloud computing which we believe will revolutionise IT in the coming years. CLOUDMASTER was also the nickname given to the Douglas DC-6, a classic piston-powered airliner that first flew in 1947 and is still in flight today. As you can see we’ve featured the DC-6 in our new logo:

1. From the Home screen select Menu –> Settings –> Accounts & sync

2. Select Add account –> Exchange ActiveSync

3. Choose to enter the settings manually and enter them as following:

Email Address – your full mail address e.g. dave@example.com

Server Name – Enter the following depending on which region you are in:

Domain – leave this blank

Username – the same as the email address

Password – the password for your account

This server requires an encrypted SSL connection – this option must be selected

4. Press Next and once the connection is established choose to synchronize Contacts, Calendar and Mail.

5. Modify the Account Sync settings as required. From the Home screen select Menu –> Settings –> Accounts & sync and choose the ActiveSync account just added. We recommend enabling Auto-sync and changing the sync schedule if you wish.

This is all you need to do in order to receive push email on your Android phone. In addition the rest of your email, contacts and calendar appointments will be synchronized between everything that uses your Exchange account (typically this will be Outlook, Outlook Web Access and your phone). Any changes in one will be reflected in the others. For example:

• Send an email from your phone it will show up in the Sent items folder on Outlook
• Add an appointment to your calendar in Outlook it will appear on your phone’s calendar and you will get a reminder on your phone
• Receive a phone call and create a new contact on your phone from their number. You can then edit the same contact later in Outlook to add further information like postal address and notes.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,BPOS,Android,HTC

Connecting your Windows Phone 7 to BPOS is relatively straightforward. When first setting up the device (or later through the Settings menu) add an Outlook account. It will first prompt you for just your email address and password, but unfortunately it is not smart enough to figure out the settings just based on this. After telling you that it cannot find the settings it will next ask you for a username and domain. The username should also be your email address and the domain should be left blank. Try to sign in again and it will tell you once more that the settings cannot be found. This time you can click the Advanced button and you will now have a place to enter the server name. The server to use depends on which region you are in and will be one of the following (note that you must use https:// before the address):

Once you get over this initial setup all your email, contacts and calendar entries will be imported and you are ready to go. The one other thing you will want to set up is SharePoint. The Office hub in Windows Phone 7 has a lot of SharePoint integration, however it is targeted at SharePoint 2010. BPOS will be upgraded to SharePoint 2010 shortly but for now the only way I found to access the BPOS SharePoint site was through Internet Explorer. You can add a favourite to Internet Explorer to access your SharePoint site, it will prompt you again for your username and password which will then be saved. SharePoint works satisfactorily through the browser (as it does on my iPhone) but hopefully it can be accessed through the Office hub shortly.

I think Microsoft need to improve the process for adding a BPOS account so that you only need to enter your email address and password once and it will configure everything for you including SharePoint in a similar way to the Single Sign On tool for the desktop.

There’s a lot more to Windows Phone 7 that I’m only getting started with. One of my favourite features is the new mobile version of  OneNote which will synchronize a notebook between the phone and your Windows Live account or a SharePoint site.

The new UI of the Windows Phone 7 is something completely new and will divide peoples opinion. Personally I think it is the best mobile UI I have used. There are some features missing at the moment, most notably copy and paste, but it is promised that Microsoft will update the OS regularly to add these. If your company uses BPOS or its own Exchange servers I believe that Windows Phone 7 is the best mobile OS for accessing this information from your phone.