Don't let server sprawl steal capital you could be using for your company's next innovation
Capital guzzling server sprawl can eat into the funds Don't let server sprawl steal capital you could be using for your company's next innovation available for your company's next big project.
Certainly smart businesses are looking for ways to reduce expenses without adversely affecting network operations, security, or availability.
Underutilized equipment that still consumes significant energy contributes to hefty utility and cooling costs. This adds not only unnecessarily increases costs and complexity, but also creates many single points of failure.
Virtualization and hybrid cloud provide cost-effective alternatives to pricey server replacement and allow you take back control of your IT assets – improve server reliability and availability, reducing capital costs and operating expenses that will help position your business for its most successful tomorrow.
As Technology Partners that Empower Business, Managed Solution invests upfront in our customers, creating virtualized solutions and cloud-based services in a digestible, bottom-line friendly monthly, per-user payment at no upfront cost to you.
Contact us for a Free Network Assessment and Technology Road map.
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Word 2013 is packed with custom content possibilities, from brochures to newsletters to labels. One of these opportunities is a dynamic, fillable form, that designates fields for you or others to fill out. It’s easy to create one of these forms from Word’s online template gallery, and the video above shows you how.
To start, you’ll need to ensure the Developer tab is visible in your Ribbon:
1.From the File tab, click Options.
2.Select Customize Ribbon.
3.On the right-hand side, under Main Tabs, check the box next to Developer and the Developer tab will appear in the Ribbon.
Next, you need to download a form template.
1.From the File tab, click New.
2.In the Search online templates box, type the name of the form you want, or just type “form” to view your options.
3.Click the template that you want to use and select Create.
Now, you have a form that you can fill out or send. If you need to make edits to the form, select the Design Mode button from the Ribbon. Check out this support article for instructions on more advanced customizations you can add to your form.
Managed Solution’s In The TechKnow is a Web Tech Series featuring how-to video tutorials on technology.
This series is presented by Jennell Mott, Business Operations Manager, and provides a resource for quick technical tips and fixes. You don’t need to be a technical guru to brush up on tech tips!
Don’t see the technology that you would like to learn? Submit a suggestion to inthetechknow@managedsolution.com and we will be sure to cover it in our upcoming webcast series.
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See how to add contacts to your Skype for Business Contacts list so they’ll be a click away. Every contact you add is assigned membership in one or more of your contact groups. You define your own contact groups to add contacts to—like My Team, Lunch Bunch, or Data Analysis Project.
One of the easiest ways to learn how you can benefit from the AWS cloud is with hands-on practice. Self-paced labs provide this hands-on training in a live practice environment. AWS subject matter experts have developed more than 60 topics on AWS services, and labs are currently available online through APN Technology Partner Cloud vLAB’s qwikLABS.com platform. To help you navigate through topics and solve common use cases using related AWS services, they also offer several learning paths, or qwikLABS “quests.” Here are some of the paths available.
AWS Service Area or Use Case
You can learn how to work with related AWS services with quests by Service Area or Use Case. The following are available in beginner and advanced paths:
You will earn a badge each time you complete a quest.
AWS for Microsoft Windows
AWS offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database and systems management options that are optimized for Microsoft Windows-based workloads. Learn how to work with Microsoft technologies running in the AWS cloud, including:
Corporate Apps on AWS for Windows, such as Exchange and SharePoint.
Databases on AWS for Windows, like Microsoft SQL Server and Amazon RDS for SQL.
SysAdmin on AWS for Windows, including services to deploy and manage your Microsoft Windows-based environment in the AWS cloud.
Here are the badges that you can earn by completing these quests:
The market is saturated with a variety of software licensing models, each with different terms and conditions that the licensee must adhere to, as well as publishers providing their own spin on similar models. We all know what happens if you break those terms and conditions: auditors end up fining the organization large sums of money. Even free software has some form of license.
Top Ten Vendors and their Licensing Models
There are a number of different software licensing models currently offered by software vendors, including a number of emergent models that were not around in the licensing world ten years ago.
*Oracle “Developers License”
**Oracle’s “Update Subscription Service” Note: Whilst the Vendors may not provide subscription licensing, they do provide subscriptions to maintenance and other services. 1. User – License is assigned to a named user who must be identified to ensure the license agreement is validated and the license terms are adhered to.
2. Subscription (user or device) – License only available during time of subscription. No rights to use it pre or post agreement dates (unless agreement renewed).
3. Core/Processor – License is based on the capacity of the CPU/Hard Drive or other hardware configuration elements.
4. Device – Also known as ‘machine based.’ License is locked to an individual machine, allowing for an infinite number of users.
5. Networked (WAN & LAN) – A license that covers machines that is on the same network infrastructure. This is either in Wide Area Network or a Local Area Network format. Also known as “concurrent license.”
6. Cloud Credits – Cloud credits are the unit of measurement required to perform certain tasks or rights to run certain applications provided by the vendor. Hosted in the cloud and are usually a subscription model.
7. Freeware – License requires no purchase but the copyrights are still held by the developer. Developer can sell the software in the future and does not distribute the source code.
8. Font licenses – Font specific license. Related to the fonts used online or internally by an organization.
9. General Public License (GPL) – License and software available for free. Allows users to use, share, and copy and modify the software. Separate legal metrics to ‘freeware
10. Client Access License (CAL, includes both device and user metrics) – Allows users to connect to server software to use the software’s features/functions
The above list is based on the top ten vendors by revenue for the previous financial year. This gives us a good indication as to what the most popular license metrics are, and also helps us predict trends in the licensing market.
You can communicate in a text message-like format with anyone whose email address you have, and those communications will be synced with Outlook
Sometimes you just need to send a quick, short note to your co-worker. Of course, you can use Outlook for this, but today we’re launching a new app through the Microsoft Garage that is built specifically for those brief, snappy communications—Send, designed for in-and-out email.
Send is available for iPhone in the U.S. and Canada, and is coming soon to Windows Phone and Android phones. The app works for people with Office 365 business and school email accounts, and we expect to make the app more broadly available in the coming months.
While tools like text messaging and IM are great for short messages, you often don’t have your co-worker’s cell phone number or an IM app on your work phone. And we’ve heard loud and clear from people at work, they want all their communications available in Outlook—even if they send them from other apps. This is where Send comes in! Send gives you the simple, quick text message-like experience while allowing you to reach all co-workers and have all of your communications in Outlook for reference later.
Send lets you quickly and easily send any co-worker a message without a subject line or formal email constructs. Some examples of Send messages include:
Straight to the point: “Let’s chat in 10”
Super urgent: “Don’t send the presentation yet”
Simple back-and-forth conversations: “Are you in the Office today?” “No”
These are the sort of quick emails you send to the people you care about at work—your boss, your teammates, and sometimes partners or customers outside your organization. You’re usually busy or on the go when you send them, and Send is specifically designed for this get-in get-out scenario.
Imagine you’re walking into a big presentation and someone asks you to find out if your colleague will be attending. Chances are, you don’t have your colleague’s phone number, but you will probably have their email address—especially if you’ve been emailing with them recently. You don’t have time to search your inbox, start a new thread, or even type out a subject line. You just want to ask that person, “Will you be at the presentation?”
Inside Windows Cortana: The Most Human AI Ever Built by Dan Tynan Tech Columnist
Tony Stark had Jarvis. Luke Skywalker had C3PO. And, if Microsoft has its way, very soon you’ll have Cortana.
Like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, Cortana lets you talk to your devices as if they were people. And, like those two voice-driven interfaces, she can understand what you’re saying and respond in a way that feels almost human.
But unlike those other virtual entities, Cortana will work across PCs as well as phones. And it will do far more than just retrieve information; Microsoft wants Cortana to be the Alfred to your Batman — handling your communications, managing your calendar, and attending to your needs.
On July 29, when Microsoft begins releasing the latest version of its operating system, the world’s 1.5 billion Windows users will have access to one of the most human-like artificial intelligence interfaces ever made.
But Cortana presented a unique challenge to Microsoft’s developers: How do you imbue a series of bloodless algorithms with a human personality? What form should that personality take? How clever should it be? How nice? And can you persuade people to fall in love with it?
To find out, we spent time with the team behind Microsoft’s daring experiment and with Cortana herself. This is her story.
Jarvis 1.0
A few years ago, when Microsoft was struggling to give consumers a reason to buy its phones, it did what Microsoft always does: It held focus groups. From those groups it learned something essential about what users wanted, according to Marcus Ash, group program manager for Microsoft’s Cortana and search teams.
While having constant access to information is good, the focus folks said, having a device that actually does things for you is better. Instead of something that could display all the flights from San Francisco to New York on a particular day, for example, customers wanted one that would book the flight, pick an aisle seat in business class, and order them a kosher meal — all on its own.
That became the design goal: a digital personal assistant that would set Microsoft’s devices apart from everyone else’s. The early name for this concept was Jarvis, named for Tony Stark’s virtual valet.
The first question the Microsoft team had to answer: How should the ideal personal assistant act? To find out, Microsoft interviewed a half-dozen high-powered assistants to Hollywood executives and technology CEOs. All of them had one thing in common: extremely detailed knowledge about the boss, usually contained in a notebook that rarely left the assistant’s hands. Not merely their bosses’ schedules or the list of people whose calls they were trying to avoid, but also things like whether they preferred veggie burgers to sirloin steak, dinner jazz to R&B, or town cars to taxis.
To do the job well, the assistant had to be able to use that knowledge to anticipate the boss’s desires and make decisions on his or her behalf, says Ash. To work as intended, Cortana will need to read your email and manage your schedule. She’ll need to know which sports teams you follow, the stocks you track, where you went on vacation, and dozens of other personal details. It’s an intimate relationship requiring enormous amounts of trust.
“Cortana can’t be very helpful if she doesn’t know anything about you,” explains Ash. But Microsoft believes the key to trust lies in transparency. Users will to be able to see what data Cortana collects, what she does with it, and then have the opportunity to say “no thanks,” he adds.
The chit chat
Convincing users to extend that level of trust to a faceless digital entity was the second challenge facing the Cortana team. For Cortana to have any chance of success, she needed a personality. So Microsoft hired a team of writers to create one.
Every morning at 10 a.m., Jonathan Foster assembles his team in Building 50 at Microsoft’s North Campus. The team includes a screenwriter, a playwright, a novelist, and an essayist. On the wall, a screen displays a query Cortana has received that can’t be answered via simple search results.
The team’s job, for the next hour or two: come up with human-like dialogue that makes Cortana seem like more than just a series of clever algorithms. Microsoft calls this brand of quasi-human responsiveness “chit chat.”
Most of these questions aren’t seeking information; instead, they’re testing the limits of Cortana’s intelligence and/or patience — in other words, they’re pure entertainment. Users want to know what she thinks; they want to see whether she’ll respond with shock or outrage or confusion.
Like writers for a TV sitcom, members of the chit-chat team go around the table trying to out-do each other with witty responses. It is, Foster admits, a great job. But it’s not an easy one.
“Our No. 1 priority is for people to walk away from their experience feeling good,” he says.
But even a seemingly innocuous question like, “Do you like dogs?” can generate a nearly infinite range of responses, most of which will likely offend someone. If Cortana says dogs are her favorite animals, you risk drawing the ire of the Internet’s legions of cat lovers. If she says she prefers Schnauzers, you alienate fans of Labradoodles.
