Application Virtualisation
For one of my first projects this year I’ll be looking at Application Virtualisation – streamlining application deployment by creating single executable files which can then run on any workstation, there are some obvious advantages to this such as centralised deployment and maintainance, as well as the speed at which new applications can be provisioned using such methods.
Mobile Phone Refresh: new iPhones and a move to Everything Everywhere
In 2011 the existing mobile phone contract with Vodafone came up for renewal and so, being diligent we decided to evaluate the top three/four mobile phone companies in the UK, Vodafone (again); o2; and Orange (which quickly became Everything Everywhere due to the merger between T-Mobile and Orange).
Our Vodafone contract had been a three-year deal, and our technology fund had expired. We were currently in a situation where a third of our user base had iPhones (some 3GS, some 4) and the rest were still on classic Nokia handsets which were starting to fall apart, consequently we were looking for a deal that satisfied a number of requirements. The issues that we wanted to solve were:
- Technology fund empty – we couldn’t get any more iPhones
- Data Usage – some users are utilising data despite not having an iPhone causing extra cost (no bundle)
- Signal Strength – some rare locations such as basement offices didn’t get signal.
- Cumbersome procedures – the method of setting up roaming and adding extra packages to mobile handsets is time consuming and awkward to complete.
- Disparate handsets
- Online billing system is not ideal
New office success!
A fairly unique opportunity arose for me towards the end of 2010: I was able to design, purchase components for, and then oversee the implementation of a new office infrastructure. This was due to a new physical build, and based on the success of the previous SAN and Infrastrucure project, I was essentially given full control over all aspects of the IT infrastructure.
It was an extensive piece of work and covered about six months of my life before finally going live at the end of November 2010, it involved visits to the site before building works were completed; setup of an entire dedicated test lab; and various correspondances thrasing out the business requirements for the new build.
The actual move-and-go-live happened over a weekend, the staff downed tools on Friday, had their PCs moved over the weekend and were able to log on and start work again Monday morning, a huge achievement bearing in mind that the entire system had changed: everything from the cables to the printers to the back end storage was now completely different. Continue Reading →
Google apps for domains for small businesses
It’s been no secret that for quite a while now google have been offering their applications for domains, yet it’s surprising how many people I speak to haven’t implemented it in their business because they don’t quite see the point, or the relevance, or how easy it is…
The Standard Edition (read: free) allows for up to 50 e-mail accounts to be registered against your top-level domain (.com / .co.uk etc) – which is pretty much in keeping with my idea of a small business – if you want more, you have to pay more (at time of writing £33.00 per user/year). The Standard Edition allows for all the usual things that you’d expect: e-mail (in the much-loved “gmail” interface); docs (for online storage and sharing of letters, spreadsheets etc); calendars (shared and individual); sites (to allow for small websites to be created) and even chat (although as of yet I’ve not found much use for this).
What’s even better is that you can do almost all of it using any hosting company / domain name provider – as long as you have access to your DNS records (which 99% of them allow these days), even a cut-back service like 123-reg (which is actually my favourite supplier) allows you to directly manipulate your DNS records with them).
It has to be said though, one of my favourite features is part of the “google mail for your domain” application: Exchange-like behaviour! You can add your google mail accounts to smartphones and the like and it will act just like an exchange server, allowing you to get push e-mail, contacts and calendar entries straight to your phone – this is something that larger businesses usually have to pay quite a lot for by investing in a package as overwhelming as Blackberry Enterprise Server.
If you have a smaller business and you’ve got some nice new iPhones or some other sort of smartphone, let your users push their work e-mail, contacts and calendar – it’s a bit of fun and ultimately it’s likely to increase their productivity anyway because it’ll allow them to answer quick e-mails while out of the office. Best of all you don’t have to worry about buying expensive Exchange installations or even having to worry about your e-mail server being in-house (no-one wants to come into the office at 5am on a Sunday to reboot the broken e-mail server).
In the last week I’ve done three translations from pop3-based implementations to google apps for domains and all have been successful (more impressively I’ve got my transfer time down to about an hour now!)
Google apps standard edition: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
Update, October 2011: The “free” google apps edition now only supports up to 10 users, but still works just fine!
Remote Working
- See all posts relating to this project
One of the biggest projects that I undertook at the end of last year was the Remote Working project. The brief was simple in essence: “we’ve got a team of about 12 business users who all have an interest in remote working in various guises (working from home; working when out and about; working from other offices etc) – get involved”.
Interestingly the team of business users already had some firm ideas about what they thought might be ideal technical solutions for their problems, using off-the-shelf-solutions like GoToMyPC.com to achieve connectivity to their office machines while out and about.
What’s often difficult in these situations is being able to trace your way back to the initial requirements – the question, “what do you want to be able to do?” can have many answers, and often these start with technical solutions rather than actual requirements, driving down to the original requirements is essential to make sure nothing’s missed, but at the same time you have to be careful not to make users feel like they’re jumping through hoops or covering ground they feel they’ve already covered.
WAN Optimisation and Review
Many companies utilise some way of connecting their offices together, these Wide Area Networks can be national or international and they can be dedicated fibre optics between buildings or they can be home-user-broadband connections utilising some sort of VPN. Regardless of which system your company uses it’s worth revisiting it every now and then and making sure you’re getting the best out of it.
Businesses have cropped up over the last few years offering optimisation of these sorts of networks, people like Riverbed, GlobalScape WAFS and DBAM have been selling products for a few years now which allow you to get more out of your existing bandwidth, and many of them suggest that their products are more efficient and more economic than simply upgrading your existing link speeds. The latest version of Windows Server 2008 (R2) even has a facility built in which does something similar called BranchCache.
During the course of this project I will evaluate a few of these hardware and software solutions and establish whether or not they actually deliver and whether or not they really are better than just buying bandwidth.
SAN, Virtualisation and Infrastructure Refresh
This project was one of the largest undertaken so far, and for the sake of completeness when publishing I shall include the work that was undertaken on the network infrastructure (switches and so on). The current infrastructure was a small room full of hand-built (literally), tower servers. Many of the servers failed frequently due to niggling hardware issues such as problems with removable hard drive caddies and so on. These failures added up to about thirty (30) instances per month.
This project was a tremendous opportunity to build an infrastructure in its entirety and deliver a solution that fulfilled the initial high-level business requirements, namely delivering highly available systems which would allow the staff to work during core business hours without suffering any “computer downtime”. Continue Reading →