Manage Alerts Within SharePoint
When brainstorming new ideas, our closest resources are usually our best. Just ask Jeff Cate, founder and president of SharePoint Solutions (http://www.sharepointsolutions.com). SharePoint Solutions provides training, consulting, and software for Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies. "We take students' feedback and use this information to create new SharePoint add-ons," Jeff told me.
According to Jeff, one of the most requested features for a SharePoint add-on is easy alert management in Windows SharePoint Services. SharePoint Solutions addressed this need in WSS Alert Manager, a SharePoint add-on that lets you subscribe other SharePoint users to alerts on any list, document library, or document. You can also add, change, or delete alerts for one or more users. Alert Manager's search functionality lets you locate users by preferred name or email address and supports partial words, wildcards, and pattern matching.
—Blake Eno
End-to-End Security: Bringing It All Together
Corporate networks face increasing threats from viruses, malware, intrusion attempts, phishing attacks, and the like. Enterprises have responded to these escalating threats by investing in a wide array of specialized security solutions, which often results in a patchwork of security-point solutions that make managing security across the network difficult and expensive. Check Point Software Technologies' (http://www.checkpoint.com) unified security-management solution, SmartCenter, now lets you manage Check Point's endpoint security solution, Integrity, along with your company's perimeter, internal, and Web security solutions, from a single console. This integrated management of all security layers lowers IT costs by eliminating the need for separate management consoles, servers, and reports. Such management also gives greater insight into an organization's overall security picture and ensures consistent security policies across the entire distributed network. This unification of endpoint and network security lets enterprises audit end-to-end security effectiveness.
—Gayle Rodcay
Replicate VMs Outside the Guest
Vizioncore (http://www.vizioncore.com), which produces backup, performance monitoring, and disaster recovery software applications for VMware ESX Server, recently introduced the first version of esxReplicator, virtual machine (VM) replication software. According to vizioncore's Azeem Mohamed, esxReplicator is a unique solution that can have positive implications for business continuity. esxReplicator replicates VMs that run on ESX Server and does so outside the guest OS. Because it works outside the guest, esxReplicator copies stored data, configuration settings, patches to the OS, and other OS-level changes—letting you create and replicate a full copy of a VM, rather than only the data it contains. You can replicate between dissimilar hardware or from multiple ESX Server machines and selectively replicate individual VMs, rather than an entire volume. Further enhancing the solution is that you don't need to maintain an open instance of the VM on the target ESX Server—the replicated VM launches as an original image, so it doesn't require additional licensing. vizioncore's solution is one among a growing body of products that provide better ways to safeguard mission-critical applications without the headaches and higher cost of hardware-level replication.
—Dianne Russell
Stratacache
Brings
Multicast
to SMS
At the Microsoft Management
Summit (MMS) in
San Diego in April, I had a
chance to see and hear about
several products that will
integrate with Microsoft Systems
Management Server
(SMS). Steve Bannister, vice
president of engineering for
Stratacache (http://www.stratacache.com), described
how his company’s OmniCast
for SMS improves on SMS’s
distribution capabilities for
WANs. Rather than using the
Background Intelligent Transfer
Service (BITS) or other
TCP protocol to establish a
session with each remote
node, OmniCast for SMS uses
Stratacache’s MFTP protocol
(which adds reliability and
manageability features to the
UDP Multicast protocol) to
simultaneously deliver files to
all remote nodes. OmniCast is
intended for very large companies
with hundreds or
thousands of remote sites.
For example, the world’s
largest retailer uses OmniCast
to distribute 1GB video ads
that run on its stores’ public
monitors. The SMS version of
OmniCast is integrated into
the SMS console and is easily
run from that interface. Steve
noted that enterprises looking
ahead to deploying Windows
Vista (a 3GB to 5GB package)
are expressing a lot of interest
in OmniCast for SMS for
that purpose.
—Renee Munshi
End of Article
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