WIT Holiday Technology Toy Drive & Lunch

WIT Holiday Technology Toy Drive & Lunch

Give back this holiday season with the San Diego IAMCP Women in Technology community! Come enjoy lunch and networking at Vintana Wine + Dine in Escondido on Thursday, December 15th from 1pm-4pm. The Technology Toy Drive will be providing toys for San Diego's Adoptive and Foster Care Boys & Girls, with toys being delivered to Straight From the Heart in San Marcos.
Please bring a new, unwrapped Techie-Toy for a donation.

For more information and to purchase tickets click here

Microsoft Releases 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility Report

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Microsoft Releases 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility Report

By Susan Hauser as written on blogs.microsoft.com
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
We care deeply about how we achieve that mission and our lasting impact on the world. Across the company, we are working to apply the power of technology to ensure corporate responsibility, safeguard human rights and protect our planet. This commitment is central to why many of our employees come to work every day, and it impacts the type of products and services we develop.
In our 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report, which we published today, you will find information about our policies and business practices which reflect our commitment to making the planet a better place.
During fiscal year 2016, Microsoft made progress on a number of fronts:
·       Expanding our commitment to sustainability by establishing new energy goals, including having our data centers rely on a larger percentage of wind, solar and hydro power electricity over time.
·       Prioritizing inclusive design and accessibility in the development of our products and services to empower everyone, while deepening our inclusive culture at Microsoft.
·       Enhancing our companywide privacy principles and the Microsoft Privacy Statement to protect our customers’ personal data and their right to privacy.
·       Holding our suppliers accountable to human rights, labor, health and safety, environmental, and business ethics practices prescribed in our Supplier Code of Conduct.
·       Expanding economic opportunity to every corner of the planet through Microsoft Philanthropies’ three-year commitment to donate $1 billion in public cloud computing for nonprofits around the world.
·       Contributing to public policy discussions with a new book, “A Cloud for Global Good,” which lays out a roadmap of 78 specific policy recommendations to help ensure cloud computing is trusted, responsible and inclusive.
 As part of our commitment to transparency, this report builds on Microsoft’s prior annual citizenship reporting, but is now designed to be a living reporting website where we can offer both the year-over-year data we traditionally provide as well as ongoing updates throughout the year on important developments on our efforts.
We take seriously our responsibilities to help the world achieve more and are committed to meeting our responsibility to address economic, social and environmental issues. We also recognize the importance of partnerships and value the opportunity to work with nonprofits, advocates, governments, academics, customers and employees to advance progress. Together, we can strengthen communities and ensure greater outcomes for all.
We will continue to dedicate ourselves to the challenges humankind faces, the role technology can play and the unique contributions Microsoft can make in cooperation with others around the world.

Managed Solution Supports Boy Scouts of America Event

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Managed Solution Supports Boy Scouts of America's Wood Badge Event

San Diego, CA. Wood Badge is a leadership training program available for Adult Scout Leaders who are involved in the programs of the Boy Scouts of America. The course is designed to train leaders using the latest skills and techniques of Leadership. Wood Badge designed for use in Scouting as well as in the workplace and other volunteer organizations with both experience-based learning and classroom learning.
Managed Solution's SCCM Engineer, Michael Shapiro, was invited to be a staff troop guide for the September 2016 Wood Badge course led by Boy Scouts of America. Shapiro took the course himself last February, and his wife took the course this September.  He was inspired by his father, who took the course 25 years ago, when Shapiro was a youth in the Boy Scout program.
Here are some photos from the event:
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At the event, Managed Solution provided orange cups for all of the attendees.  Managed Solution was honored to contribute to such an amazing event.  Managed Solution demonstrates its commitment to people through contributions, charitable sponsorships and employee volunteer programs in the communities where we work and live. “Committed Redefined” is integral to every company initiative. Managed Solution Cares! We’re involved with some of the most respected charities and community organizations out there, including The ALS Association, C2SDK, Feeding America, Just in Time for Foster Youth, Homeless Connect Project, and Youth and Leaders Living Actively (YALLA). For more information, check out our community page.

Help JIT Meet its $200k Goal to Support Foster Youths

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Help JIT Meet its $200k Goal to Support Foster Youths

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Each year, approximately 300 youth reach the age of 18 and transition out of the foster care. But with little or no support the odds and the statistics are stacked against them. Managed Solution invites supporters to once again invest to support the JIT programs that build self-sufficiency for over 500 youth each year.
Just In Time for Foster Youth is running a program called "Pathways to Financial Power", where JIT participants can learn important business skills, such as overcoming self-limiting beliefs, cultivating effective resumes, and interview skills. Discovering a Pathway to Financial Power breaks the cycle of foster care and gives the next generation an opportunity to make a contribution of their own.

$53K more to go to meet $200K goal

Companies are investing in the JIT Pathways to Financial Power program to assist foster youths in learning how to take control of their finances. Our VP of Cloud and Vendor Operations, Jennell Mott, is the Board Secretary for JIT.  Support Managed Solution's  own employee while helping a great cause for amazing kids.  JIT only needs $53K more to meet its $200K goal before the 2016 Pathway to Financial Power event on September 24, 2016.
The event will provide knowledge and networking to:
* Develop a customized resume & cover letter
* Uncover the Top 10 “credit building myths”
* Create a LinkedIn page & maximize social media
* Learn their Strengthsfinder profile & how to use it
* Connect to training & employers with open jobs
* Shop for professional clothing to make a great impression
* Practice an “elevator speech” to tell their story
* Meet volunteers in their potential career field
* Match savings up to $4,500
* Overcome persistent employment roadblocks

For more information on the event and details on how to invest, visit jitfosteryouth.org

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Managed Solution demonstrates its commitment to people through contributions, charitable sponsorships and employee volunteer programs in the communities where we work and live. “Committed Redefined” is integral to every company initiative. Managed Solution Cares!

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Case Study: Plum

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Case Study: Plum

As written on news.microsoft.com
Based in Austin, Texas, Plum makes a Wi-Fi-enabled light switch and dimmer that “completely reinvented the light switch,” says CEO Utz Baldwin of the company’s Lightpad product. Users can control and customize their home lighting from their phone and Lightpad’s touch-based switch plate. They can also see their energy use in real time.
A graduate of Techstars and Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Seattle, Plum has raised nearly $5 million in three years. Customers have pre-ordered more than 10,000 Lightpads, which Plum began shipping in November.
Baldwin says Microsoft Ventures Accelerator helped him meet investors, test hardware and give brand legitimacy to Plum. That helped Plum raise money on crowdfunding platforms like Fundable and CircleUp, positioning the startup for a Series A round.
“When investors see that Microsoft supported you, and still supports you through BizSpark, it provides them with another checkbox that has been satisfied,” Baldwin says. He encourages other entrepreneurs to explore Microsoft for support.
“Programs like what Microsoft has built through BizSpark and Microsoft Ventures Accelerators around the globe are a surefire way to get the help you need,” he says.

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Case Study: FUNDEMEX Small Nonprofit Makes Big Strides Through Tech

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FUNDEMEX: Small nonprofit makes big strides through tech

As written on microsoft.com
FUNDEMEX (Mexican Foundations for Entrepreneurs) supports entrepreneurs in the rural corners of Mexico, enabling the disadvantaged to climb out of poverty. A dated IT system often slowed operations to a crawl, though, and made working on the road a technological headache. The Office 365 Nonprofit program changed all that.
The universality of the cloud-based suite, available to qualifying nonprofits for free or at a huge discount, allows FUNDEMEX to
Thanks to the donation, FUNDEMEX is empowering more entrepreneurs than ever—and watching the benefits fan out to change even more lives.

 

"Reliable software in the cloud makes us more efficient so we can better achieve our goals and save money."

Regina de Angoitia Guerrero, Director of Partnerships and Development

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A ripple effect in the cloud

Crossing the digital divide

FUNDEMEX works with other nonprofits and entrepreneurial groups operating in underdeveloped parts of Mexico, thereby reaching more clients than they could alone. “With Microsoft Office 365, FUNDEMEX is able to reduce the digital divide as rural communities lack access to information technologies,” Marisa Monroy, director of programming, says. These organizations are often hundreds of miles away and have the most rudimentary tech, but cloud-based tools enable employees on both sides to collaborate with ease.
“Without this partnership with Microsoft we couldn’t have reached the organizations that we have,” she adds. “The technology generates a triple result: economic, social and environmental development.”

Expanding capacity in the field

FUNDEMEX employees travel to partner sites throughout Mexico, from a small-scale organic coffee farm to a women’s weaving cooperative. Staff upload reports and photos to OneDrive, updating the home team about progress via their mobile phones. Instant communication prevents the need for expensive follow-up visits since they can address issues while employees are on-site. And because they share documents in the cloud, they avoid the confusion of image-heavy emails bouncing.
What’s more, using Skype for Business allows them to join meetings taking place at their office in Mexico City. With a staff of just seven, every member is invaluable, and the organization couldn’t function if employees went offline every time they hit the road.

Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

We specialize in providing full managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.

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Greener datacenters for a brighter future: Microsoft’s commitment to renewable energy

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Greener datacenters for a brighter future: Microsoft’s commitment to renewable energy

By Brad Smith on blogs.microsoft.com

 

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As the world increasingly races to a future based on cloud computing, a host of new and important public issues are emerging. One of these issues involves the energy and sustainability practices of the datacenters that power the cloud. Over the past year we’ve spent considerable time focusing on our work in this area at Microsoft, and I wanted to share today where we’re heading.
When it comes to sustainability, we’ve made important progress as a company since the start of this decade, but even more important work lies ahead. Across the tech sector we need to recognize that datacenters will rank by the middle of the next decade among the large users of electrical power on the planet. We need to keep working on a sustained basis to build and operate greener datacenters that will serve the world well.
For Microsoft, this means moving beyond datacenters that are already 100 percent carbon neutral to also having those datacenters rely on a larger percentage of wind, solar and hydropower electricity over time. Today roughly 44 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters comes from these sources. Our goal is to pass the 50 percent milestone by the end of 2018, top 60 percent early in the next decade, and then to keep improving from there.
Especially given the magnitude of datacenter expansion that will continue throughout this time period, this is not a small goal. It requires that we understand where we’ve come from over the past few years and take a principled approach to our work in the future. We need to translate these principles into clear and concrete goals that we can use to hold ourselves accountable in a responsible way. And it will require work with many other important stakeholders and institutions, from environmental groups to utilities to governments themselves.
Important work to date
Our focus on sustainability is not new. We’ve been tracking and reducing emissions since 2007, and we’ve been operating our datacenters and the rest of the company at 100 percent carbon neutrality since 2012. We’ve achieved this progress by driving efficiencies, charging our business units a fee on carbon, and investing in sustainable energy projects and technologies. When we’re not able to eliminate our energy use or directly power our operations with green energy, we purchase renewable energy certificates to reduce carbon emissions. When we include the use of these certificates, 100 percent of our consumption has been powered by renewable energy since 2014.
Microsoft was in fact one of the first large enterprises to implement a global internal carbon fee model, charging each business unit a fee based on the carbon emissions of its business operations. This provides a powerful incentive to find carbon-saving alternatives and invest in carbon-reducing innovations. Thanks in part to this program, Microsoft was ranked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the second largest user of green power in the United States. Earlier this year we were honored to receive an EPA Climate Leadership Award and to be recognized by the United Nations and World Economic Forum for our carbon fee model.
As part of our commitment to carbon neutrality, we also offset the carbon impact of our air travel. We do this by investing in community projects that focus on issues such as clean cookstoves, habitat protection and restoration, and solar power and lighting – impacting more than 7 million people worldwide.
As a result of this work, we’ve reduced carbon emissions by 9.5 million metric tons, purchased 14 billion kilowatt hours of green energy, and cut energy consumption by 10 percent at our 125-building main campus in Redmond, Washington. All of this represents important progress and creates a strong foundation on which to build.
A principled approach to the future
While we’re proud of our progress, we readily recognize that even bigger steps will be needed in the future. In part this is because of the unique and increasingly important role that datacenters will play in the decades ahead.
Over the past 250 years a few select inventions have served as the fundamental catalysts for human progress. In the First Industrial Revolution that began in the latter 1700’s, steam and the steam engine played this role. A century later, the Second Industrial Revolution was based on electricity and electrical power plants, and then gasoline and the combustion engine. The Third Industrial Revolution relied on the microprocessor. The Fourth Industrial Revolution we’re now entering will feature major technology advances in physical materials, biological processes and digital technologies. But the fundamental cornerstones for all of these advances will be data – the electricity of our age – and the datacenters that will make this massive use of data possible.
Datacenters have become the engine of transformation. The good news is that public cloud datacenters operated by companies like Microsoft are more energy efficient than the private server facilities run by individual companies or governments. This is natural, given the degree to which this has become a core competency, and it reflects our focus on both world-leading R&D and large capital investments to drive datacenter energy efficiency.
But there is no room for complacency. The largest tech companies today may each consume as much electrical power as a small American state. There may come a point in just a few decades when we each may consume as much power as a mid-sized nation. This creates an obvious responsibility that we need to take seriously.
To help us live up to this responsibility, we have established three principles to guide our environmental sustainability work:
Transparency. We’re committed to the type of transparency that will hold ourselves accountable and share our track record with the public. We’ll report annually our total energy consumption and consumption across regions, the mix of sources for the power that we use, the impact of our internal carbon fee model and the investments we make. We also will be transparent about where we are investing in renewable energy certificates or international equivalents, and our investments in carbon offset projects around the world.
Help to accelerate the transition to a clean energy infrastructure. We’re committed to using more clean energy every year. We will be mindful about siting datacenters and other facilities where renewable energy sources are readily available or can be made available during ramp-up or operational phases. Wherever we operate, we will work to bring new renewable energy sources online either through investments in new projects, by engaging on enabling policy changes that will help accelerate availability of more clean energy, and by working with utilities to increase the availability of renewable energy on the grid.
Investments in research. Finally, we’re committed to cutting-edge research and development investments to advance our energy responsibilities. We will continue, in particular, to focus on R&D that will lead to further improvements in the efficiency of computing infrastructure, datacenters, servers and software performance. We will also work to advance sustainability through the products, platforms, and capabilities we use to run our business and offer our customers and partners, and we will invest in new technologies that have the capability to create more clean energy at scale.
Practical energy commitments
We recognize the importance of translating these principles into action. We’ve concluded that this requires that we make to ourselves and to the public five clear and concrete commitments:
1. Improving our energy mix. First, we need to focus on our datacenters’ sourcing of electricity. Today, although 100 percent of the electricity used by our datacenters is renewable based on a mixture of direct projects and renewable energy certificates (or the equivalent), only about 44 percent of that power is generated by wind, solar and hydropower sources. Some of that electricity comes from projects where Microsoft directly procures renewable energy, such as the Keechi wind farm in Texas and the Pilot Hill wind farm in Illinois, while the rest is supplied by wind, solar and hydropower sources on the grid. But this means that we have a large opportunity to address the remaining 56 percent either with our own direct purchases or by encouraging the addition of new wind, solar, or hydropower additions to the grid.
We recognize that both the volume and percent of energy from these renewable sources needs to be higher. As we move forward, we will continue to purchase renewable energy certificates to ensure we reduce our carbon emissions to zero. But more important, we are setting goals to grow the percent of wind, solar, and hydropower energy we purchase directly and through the grid to 50 percent by 2018, 60 percent early in the next decade, and to an ongoing and higher percentage in future years beyond that. As we make progress, we’ll report on it and share how we’re thinking about our next milestone on this path.
2. Maintaining carbon neutrality. Through investments in energy efficiency, direct purchases of renewable energy, renewable energy certificates or the equivalent, and carbon offsets, we will continue to be 100 percent carbon neutral in our operations and business air travel.
3. Retiring all green attributes from projects in which we invest. Any time we purchase green energy, we will not sell the renewable energy certificates or any other green “attributes” for others to claim.
4. Investing in new energy technologies. We will continue to invest in new energy technology, such as our biogas and fuel cell work, that have the potential to accelerate the availability of new types of energy and drive new efficiencies.
5. Supporting public policies that help enable new renewable energy sources. Finally, we will support public policies that accelerate the availability of additional renewable energy in markets where we operate. We believe this is an imperative not only for our ability to meet our own commitments, but for the energy improvements that are needed by the tech sector more broadly.
Toward a broader conversation about a sustainable future
The more we’ve focused on these issues, the more apparent it has become that the world needs an ever-broadening conversation to make sustained progress. Much has been accomplished in this regard in recent years, including a new global commitment to address these issues. But we’ll all need to work together to translate this into the types of practical steps that are needed.
We definitely learned a lot earlier this year about the types of practical steps that can make a difference. Microsoft joined an innovative public-private partnership with Dominion Power and the State of Virginia to do just that. Dominion will build a 20-megawatt solar energy plant to bring new, additional clean energy to the grid in Virginia, and Microsoft helped fund it and will claim and retire the green attributes. Partnering with utilities and governments in these types of ways can impact the grid beyond our own operational needs and can help accelerate the transition to a cleaner energy economy.
The progress that’s needed will not come easily. The issues are complex and the steps that are needed are varied. Real progress will require that groups across the non-governmental, business and governmental communities find new ways to work together.
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In a world of more than 7 billion people, this plainly comes with a responsibility to advance sustainability in our operations, including datacenters, to deliver innovative solutions that will help address the environmental challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

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New Employee Announcement: Shawn Weebe, Project Manager

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Shawn joined the Managed Solution team as a Project Manager on May 31, 2016. He joins us with 20 years of technology experience, including managing projects and people in the IT arena. Shawn earned his MCSE over three versions and also had the opportunity to write questions on the A+ certification exam. He also has his PMP.
An Orange County native, Shawn has now been living in San Diego for the past 15 years. He is married with three daughters, Savannah, Isabella and Ava, along with their dog named Kaiser, two turtles and two guinea pigs. In his free time, Shawn has loved to play soccer for over 30 years. He is also the commissioner of a 15 year old fantasy football league and also has success playing on FanDuel.
We’re excited to have Shawn on board, please join us in welcoming him to the Managed Solution team!
At Managed Solution, we strive to be the best technology based company by investing in our top assets; our people – CAREERS