Cyberstream Blog

Web Conferencing has been a split market for a while now:

– Cisco’s WebEx is a great platform, yet quite expensive for a smaller business to implement across a limited staffing base.

– There are numerous free-to-use applications like join.me that are widely adopted as costless alternatives.

– And while there are mid-priced competitors they sincerely fail to offer features that even remotely compete with WebEx.

It is for these reasons that we’ve stayed agnostic towards the web conferencing space and formed no major partnerships with vendors. Yet right now we are more than excited about the process of a much needed “middle path”.

As Microsoft’s Lync Online has matured, partners have now began offering very strong feature sets that at time trump WebEx, all while presenting more flexible and reasonable pricing structures.

Check out a feature to feature comparison here:

– Lync Online Web Conferencing Comparison to WebEx

Perhaps even more interesting though, is the promise made around the corner. Microsoft partner InterCall is months away from releasing a full PBX replacement option that fully integrates to Lync Online and Office 365. While there is no 100% substitute for the quality of an on-prem business phone system, many business models don’t require such a level of performance, but still need a rich unified communications experience. Now it seems that will be possible in the coming months. We will be sure to update you as details are released.

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CyberStreams now enters the second decade of SonicWall being its leading security recommendation to clients. This may seem a minor point, but few vendors stay on top and remain a good value for such a long stretch of time.

We’d like to take a moment to formally thank SonicWall for staying so dang reliable over the past decade. (This goes back to when we sold the SonicWall SOHO2 as our first unit with them. If you remember what this is, +10 points for you).

The IT Consulting business has changed tremendously since then. For one thing, the money is no longer in hardware sales (Amazon and Google changed that many years back). What this means for us as a firm, is that hardware recommendations have turned from being an asset to a potential liability. If we recommend the wrong unit, we may lose the long term support relationship with a client (which is where we actually start to pay the bills around here).

This change has made us think a great deal harder about who we refer, and in most cases we’ve made changes in vendors (often 2-3 times over the past decade). So perhaps now you can understand what makes the relationship with SonicWall so profound.

10+ years and they’ve never left us hanging.

Thank you! Lets do 10 more.

– CyberStreams Inc.

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At CyberStreams, our primary goal is always to effectively leverage technology to improve the business models of our customers. Believe it or not, this isn’t always a game of selling better equipment. Often it is as simple as optimizing resources we already own (or even abandoning those that are overkill).

In the spirit of efficiency, we thought we would take a moment to talk about ways to reduce business consumption. Leading this charge is the growing trend of cloud computing. The cloud asks a simple question of small business owners: Why run a server 24/7/365 for your minimal staff presence?

Below you will find some simple tips to improve Green IT use and make some Green Office Improvements.

SAVE TREES

• Implement user access codes to restrict use of printers and digital copiers
• Set volume limits by user or department
• Route document filing and record keeping to cloud based databases
• Maximize electronic tools & documents instead of print
• Use recycled paper
• Route inbound faxes to an email address

SAVE ENERGY

• Reduce dedicated assets with multifunction devices
• Make office improvements to lighting fixtures and optimize the use of natural light
• Pull reports on average equipment workloads and discover ways to optimize use
• Move unnecessary servers and devices to the cloud
• Set devices to enter sleep mode during off hours

REDUCE WASTE

• Return printer cartridges for recycling
• Trade in older equipment for re-manufacturing
• Purchase office supplies and furniture made from recycled materials
• Empower employees to web-commute when it fits the business needs
• Develop strategies for sales people to present using web conferencing (also will expand your geographic reach)

CyberStreams is a IT Consulting firm which serves over 300 small and medium sized businesses in the Greater Pacific Northwest.

I find that personalizing the technology I use everyday helps me to maintain focus and productivity. In Managing Information Technology in a Global Environment, Mehdi Khosrowpour writes that “personalization,” or “making an access to information more responsive to the unique and individual needs of each user,” is a “mean to cope with information overflow.” If you’re someone who uses Microsoft Office 365 to maintain a list of tasks, organize your calendar, or any other daily function, adding a personalized header to your SharePoint site can bring some color and uniqueness to an otherwise stale virtual environment.
Some like to add their company’s logo to the top of the site, but if the specific SharePoint site is for your own personal use rather than a company project, consider tailoring an image or incorporating colors that are significant to you.
Once you have created an image, follow these directions to upload it to your SharePoint site:

1. Under “Site Actions,” click “More Options…”

2. Select “Picture Library” to create a place to store photos. Name it and click “Create”.

3. Go to your new picture library, which should be visible in your left menu. Click “Upload,” then select your personalized image. Once your photo appears in your picture library, click it twice until it shows up in its own window. Copy the URL and then click back.

4. Under “Site Actions,” click “Site Settings”.

5. Under “Look and Feel,” click “Title, description and icon”.

6. Across from “Logo URL and description,” paste in image URL into the blank box and click “OK” at the bottom to save your changes.

7. You should now see your new image displayed in the top left corner of your site.

Whether you are buying for a small business owner, a tech enthusiast, or even yourself, choosing the right tech gift in a huge market can prove a challenge. While websites galore review and rate electronics, their opinions differ across the board. So, to help guide those who are drowning in a sea of brushed aluminum and plastic, I asked our team of engineers to recommend their favorite current gadget.

Mark Jagger.:
“I’ve been using the 13-inch MacBook Air running dual-booted Windows 7 Ultimate with Apple Boot Camp for over a year now. The hardware is light, portable, fast, and durable. I’ve dropped it couple times with only aesthetic damage, so the forgiving but strong aluminum unibody has proven to be an excellent choice by Apple…it’s easy on the eyes as well. The Intel Core Dual 2 processor, sufficient 4GB memory, and Intel HD Graphics 3000 provides more than enough performance for all my business requirements. The 256G solid state hard drive and LED lit widescreen allows for a lightning quick boot-up and shutdown experience. I’ve had a few infrequent bugs with the Apple Boot Camp software, but outside of that it has comprehensively fit my business needs extremely well. This probably won’t ideally meet the performance requirements of an engineer or developer, but I would highly recommend this laptop for executive business use ONLY if you were going to run Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate operating system for primary business purposes.”

Eric M.:
“The ‘Voyager’ series of Bluetooth hands-free headsets, currently the ‘Voyager PRO HD’ or the ‘Voyager PRO+’ [boast] fantastic sound quality, [and] work extremely well. Very important accessory for anyone with a cell phone!”

Brian G.:
“My favorite awesome gift for Christmas is the IOGEAR USB 2.0 External DVI Video Card (Part# GUC2020DWG). It’s under $60, and allows you to add another monitor to any workstation or laptop with so much ease.”

Chris M.:
“If you’re considering purchasing a new CPU, steer clear from the new Bulldozer lineup from AMD and opt for the tried and true AMD Phenom II X6 1090 at $169.99, or go faster with the Intel i5-2500K at $219.99. You just can’t debate with the evidence from the benchmarks published on the web, and it appears Windows 8 changes aren’t going to save the current Bulldozer models.”

Miles E.:

“Kindle Touch with Special Offers is awesome beyond words. It has re-ignited my love of reading, no pun intended, and being able to check out both public library books and Kindle Owners Lending Library books for free is awesome. I can even log into Safari Books Online to access technical reference materials “on the go” with the experimental web browser feature. Best $99 gift EVER.”

As you may have heard, Lync for Mac just came out. Office 365 has released an update for Enterprises covering such features as support for SharePoint Business Connectivity Services and Windows Phone 7.5 support. However, this update is of particular interest to Mac users, because it finally offers a complete list of features that were once reserved for their PC counterparts.

According to the Office 365 website, Lync for Mac now allows users to:
• See their colleagues’ online presence while working in Outlook or collaborating on Office documents
• Utilize instant messages
• Start video chats
• Schedule an online meeting through Outlook

So how do you get your update? Download “Lync for Mac 2011” here and follow the prompts as shown below:
1. Click the Microsoft Lync icon on your desktop

2. Double click the “link installer” when the window opens up
3. Press “continue” to “be guided through the steps necessary to install this software”
4. Continue, and agree to the terms if you find them acceptable.

5. Enter your computer’s password to activate installation
6. Allow it to finish installing
7. Now is the time to sign in. Use your Office 365 email and password, and for the user ID, either your email address or your full name (with a space in between) should work. Click “sign in.”

You should be connected! If you are confident that you have entered your information in correctly but are still unable to sign in, here are a couple things we found that helped the problem:

1. Fill in your login information, but before selecting “Sign In,” click “Advanced” at the bottom of the window. When a new window pops up, select “Manual Configuration” and enter your Internal and External Server names (these may work). If you are unsure of what your server names are, contact Microsoft Support (1-800-865-9408), or if you are a client with Cyberstreams, we also have willing staff ready to assist you. Once you have entered this information, select “OK” and attempt to sign in again.
2. If you still can’t log in, and are receiving an error message regarding your “Logon Credentials,” the issue could be with Microsoft itself. As plan maintenance is still not quite complete, there are a few intermittent issues expected to arise. After receiving this error message, I closed Lync and attempted twice more to log in; though the submitted information was the same, it worked the last time. If it comes down to it, attempt to send the information a couple more times to account for this margin of error.

Though PC and Mac users tend to remain passionately loyal to their company of choice, the equal opportunity availability of tools such as Lync will only make collaborating in the workplace more convenient for everyone.

To say that SharePoint is popular would be an understatement; at 7.3 million new users a year, Microsoft claims it is the fastest growing product in their company’s history.

So, perhaps you are like many users and have just opened your new Office 365 account. Once you’ve tackled the task of provisioning a SharePoint site, you suddenly have a new batch of resources—including a new calendar. As most business owners will already be using an active calendar via Outlook, the next step is to add a syncing SharePoint Calendar to Outlook. This way, all appointments, projects and work events can be viewed on a personal Outlook Calendar.

Note: These instructions are meant to direct users with an Enterprise Licensing plan, which differs in setup from a P1, or small business licensing plan.

If you do not already have a calendar in your Home toolbar on the left, simply add one by clicking “Site Actions” in the top left corner of your SharePoint site and select “More Options.”

After choosing “Calendar” from the options, name it and click “Create.”

Open your calendar, which should now be visible in your left Home toolbar under “Lists.” Click any calendar day to reveal an array of tools at the top. One of the buttons that should appear is “Connect to Outlook”—click it.

A “Launch Application” window should pop up, with Microsoft Outlook automatically highlighted. Select “OK,” and the hardest part is over!

At this point, Outlook will start up, and ask “Connect this SharePoint Calendar to Outlook?” Select “Yes,” and watch as your SharePoint Calendar is positioned right next to your Outlook Calendar.

Though the two calendars remain separate, you can overlay them to neatly appear into one easy-to-read calendar.

If you got lost along the way, or have additional questions, Microsoft has a step-by-step tutorial illustrating all this in even more detail here.

Apple users will be unable to pull the “Connect to Outlook” button up on a MacBook. This is no fault of your browser. Look at the Microsoft Office for Mac website and you’ll notice that this is a characteristic of Office for Mac 2011. So, if you are working from a Mac, I’m afraid this feature is unavailable.

However, rumor has it that an update allowing SharePoint/Outlook Calendar syncs for Mac Office 2011 will be available at some unknown but upcoming date.

Hopefully syncing calendars will make your job a bit easier. To answer advanced questions on SharePoint Calendar syncing with other products, feel free to talk to our SharePoint Designers or call. We look forward to answering your questions.

I recently attended Adtran’s big annual product tour and got an earful about what is up and coming from the company. The most persistent topic is their new vWLAN technology they recently aquired from BlueSocket. The company is calling it “A Next Generation Wireless Solution”, so how can they make this claim?

If a company has more than one wireless access point, they then need a controller to “guide” these points on how to interact. This has numerous implications, a few major ones are listed below:

- Unwanted traffic actually enters the LAN through the thin, unintelligent access point.

~ Only after that traffic reaches the controller is it discarded.

- Scalability is restricted to a single purpose device (the hardware controller).

- Any failure in the control plane interrupts the data plane.

- Control traffic and data traffic both flow up to the controller chewing up bandwidth.

Rather than keep building bigger & better controllers, BlueSocket took a completely different path and virtualized the controller entirely. This allows the control plane to effectively run at the access point, eliminating the issues listed above.

So where is the big news?

For anyone familiar with Adtran, this is not really news. What is new is the spin Adtran is attempting to put on BlueSocket’s product. The logic goes: If the controllers can be run in a VMWare environment by the customer, why can’t we have MSPs and Outsourced IT firms hosting these instances in a “cloud-style” way. If done correctly, Managed Service Providers would be able to walk into a business, lay down a few access points, remote in a few commands back home, and the location is up and running. This was when CyberStreams got interested.

We are currently testing this concept in our own VMWare environment and are excited about the results. We’d also love to have feedback from readers. Does eliminating controllers and going to a PaaS style model seem attractive to you? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Thanks!

As CyberStreams migrates more of our customers to Office 365, it becomes increasingly vital that we help provide guidance on patching and maintaining these systems.

The purpose of this blog entry is to provide a one stop shop for questions relating to patching and changes in Office 365 as of this fall season. This includes patching software on the customer side and what Microsoft is doing on their back-end services.

Read below for a list of topics:

Topics:

– Patching Desktop Applications for Office 365

– Recent Updates for Office 365

– Set up your desktop for Office 365

Patching Desktop Applications for Office 365

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Recent Updates for Office 365

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Set up your desktop for Office 365

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New data from Harris Interactive suggests that 15 percent of Americans now own a tablet device (keep in mind that this is up from roughly 8 percent one year ago). As tablets continue to surge in popularity, many businesses are looking to the market as a means to equip mobile workers with the same functionality of a typical laptop, yet at a reduced cost.

Unfortunately, as the market grows, so have options. Business owners now find themselves overwhelmed with with tablet statistics that are closer to Greek than English for many. To demonstrate this, you can find a chart at the bottom of this page (full chart) which compares features of over 45 major tablets. While this may be useful for some IT professionals, we figured it made more sense to pull out a few select picks that business owners should look closely at.

In the graph immediately below, I’ve pulled two tablets aside that would be worth considering for your business environment. Below this you will find a brief review of each phone as well.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

First off: The Galaxy Operating System (Honeycomb) is arguably the best option on the market for business users:

- Robust notifications system designed for ease of management and navigation

- Effective support for Exchange integration and email management

- Support for Video Calls and meetings

- Ability to apply encryption of the entire tablet (don’t forget your password if you do this)

- Wide range of connectivity options: USB tethering, hotspot, Bluetooth tethering, etc.

- Unlike iPad’s screen doubling, Android apps run full-screen natively in Honeycomb.

I could continue listing features, but the core message is that the overall OS experience leaves you with a device that runs extremely smoothly. For business owners who might be running several email accounts while flipping between data intensive applications and their conference call, smooth is very important.

While part of this is a function of the OS, the hardware of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is also a major component of its performance. A review test done by Engadget clocked the “in-use” battery life at 10 hours, making it a great fit all-day for trade shows and conventions. Additionally the tablet sports the same specs as the more expensive limited edition release 4G LTE version from Verizon(1GHz Tegra 2, 1280 x 800 resolution display, front- and rear-facing cameras).

Lastly, Google’s app store for Honeycomb is the only option to rival Apple’s volume of options available. Providing end business users a wide array of custom developed business productivity apps.

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet

The Lenovo ThinkPad is a tablet aimed squarely at business users. It looks a bit clunky and won’t win you points with Apple groupies, but it supplies unique business targeted software along with the business friendly Honeycomb OS.

The design itself is targeted towards professions. Sporting larger buttons which are easier to press and a pen to write with for users over the age of 20 (the non-finger-tap-typing-at-inhuman-speeds generation).

The ThinkPad carries the same great Operating System as previous example, while also coming preloaded with business focused software of its own.

All and all its a bit cheaper, heavier, and less lightning fast that the Samsung Galaxy mentioned above, but for some businesses it makes for a great affordable option for their on-the-move sales staff.

Full Tablet Comparison Chart

Source of original chart data