After much ado, Microsoft's newest operating system release in almost five years, Vista became available to business users in November 2006. Vista offers no shortage of visually stunning effects and new features, but these benefits come at a price — namely the need for more powerful and faster PCs. If you are among the many that are considering adopting this new operating system for your small or mid-sized business, there are some important factors you need to consider before you make your decision.

Vista's key benefits

Microsoft developers have built Vista to succeed where previous versions have fallen short. Here are just some of the improvements and features that are part of Vista:

Easier search functionality:

Windows Desktop Search enables easier searching, and thumbnail previews of documents allow you to view the contents without opening.

Mobile made easier:

If you or your employees routinely make wireless or remote connections, or use handheld devices such as PDAs, then Vista's easy setup and synching functions will save time and enable quick access.

Better compatibility:

Historically, Microsoft operating systems haven't worked very well in conjunction with third party applications. Vista was built with compatibility in mind — giving users more control over what they can access.

Problem resolution:

Vista prides itself on being a very smart and intuitive user friendly system. The OS can solve many common problems on its own, lessening the potential for costly downtime and time spent dealing with the help desk.

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--Mark Twain
 

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Optimum Networking’s Tech Brief! Tech Brief is Optimum’s bi-monthly newsletter that we have designed and delivered to help you, our valued clients, gain a better understanding of how technology can be used to improve your business as well as personal life.

As you read through the articles, we hope that you will find Tech Brief both informational and educational. To keep things a little lighter, we also include a quote of the month and a cartoon of the month.

This Month’s newsletter is full of great articles including the hottest topic of all right now -- “virtualization”. If you would like to see a specific topic in a future newsletter, please feel free to let us know. Also, don’t hesitate to forward our newsletter on to friends and colleagues if they will benefit from it.

We hope that you enjoy and look forward to receiving Tech Brief every other month. However, if at any time you wish to stop receiving our newsletter (and we hope you don’t) please feel free to click on the unsubscribe line at the end of this email. It is a legitimate link and we will not SPAM you.

I would personally like to say thank you for continuing to put faith in us and being your trusted IT advisor/partner! We greatly appreciate your business!

Best regards,

Joe Turnbough
CEO

Virtualization Overview 
by Jane Cage, COO, HTS

We live in a world that constantly forces us to “do more with less”. Employees are expected to be more efficient. Multi-function devices are becoming the standard on many desktops. We multi-task by answering email, talking on the phone and reviewing a spreadsheet – all at the same time.

We shouldn’t be surprised then that IT departments are asking the same of their fileservers. When server utilization gets measured, we find that many servers have much more capacity than they actually use for the majority of the time. With so much excess capacity – why not run more than one server on a single machine? That’s what virtualization is all about -- one physical machine running more than one server operating system.

Virtualization is a “hot” technology right now and here are some of the reasons why.

How Big is Your Mailbox?

We have spent a lot of time recently (which translates to a lot of extra expense for our customers) troubleshooting, managing, and working with VERY large mailboxes.

From a purely technical standpoint, once a mailbox gets over a GB in size, it starts to become a minor challenge in terms of supporting it, speed of access and search, and management in general. Once a mailbox gets to be over 2 GB in size, we start to run into some very serious limitations that will manifest in support, management, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Believe us when we say we are VERY heavy Outlook users, but using a few simple techniques, it is not much of a challenge at all to keep our own mailboxes under the 1 GB limit we need to keep us ‘light on our feet’ with our own mailboxes.

First: archive! Outlook has a built in archive feature that will remove things from your mailbox and put them into a long term storage file. Our technique is to add to that archive file daily until it gets to be between 1 and 2 GB in size, then burn that to a DVD (so that it isn’t taking up space on the server). This can easily be set up to happen automatically in Outlook, and you can get very granular in your control of what gets archived, how old it has to be before archive, etc. Just ask us for help to get this set up.

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Exchange 2007 — What you need to know

Many of today's small to mid-sized businesses operate in a Microsoft Exchange environment. Most of these businesses have invested in Exchange and Exchange-compatible systems over the years, and now they are both loyal to and dependent upon Exchange for email. Now that Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 has finally been released, you might be wondering if it's worth the time, effort, and cost to migrate to 2007 from your current platform. Find out what's new with Exchange 2007, and what security issues to consider before you migrate.

Long time coming

Prior to 2007, the last release of Exchange was in 2003. Exchange Server 2007 includes many new enhancements and features that improve upon the 2003 platform. Here are some of the improvements that come with Exchange 2007: