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Looking for a ColdFusion resource for immediate, short-term project.

Upcoming Support Life-Cycle Transition Dates for Windows Client and Server. Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), and Windows Vista Release to Manufacturing (RTM) will reach the end of support in upcoming months. Customers should migrate their systems to a supported version of Windows Client or Windows Server, including any applicable service packs because Microsoft will not issue new updates—including security updates—for these operating systems.

Microsoft has announced that May 12, 2010 is the global launch date for SharePoint 2010 and that the new SharePoint in its market-ready form will be available for download (RTM) sometime in April.

Windows 7 Presentation: Friday, March 12th at Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce

"After Windows Vista, is Windows 7 the Right Choice for your Business?"

• Windows 7 Upgrade Considerations:
• • In-place upgrade vs. clean install
  • How to check compatibility before you upgrade
  • What version is right for your business
  • XP ModeWIndows 7
• Productivity Enhancements
• • Faster Search and better-organized Libraries
  • Taskbar that's much easier to work with
  • Easier Networking and remote connections
  • Troubleshooting tools
• Protect your data
• • Backup tools
  • File encryption
  • Restore previous file versions
• Your Questions Answered!    

Ian Smith will be presenting, as part of the Business Technology Forum.  Topics will include:Please visit our Windows 7 Resource Page for more info and event details.

SyncraTec is a fully-qualified provider of Dynamics SL Consulting Services:

Microsoft Dynamics SL is a business-management solution specialized to help project-driven midsize organizations obtain reports and business analysis while helping to increase efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction. With powerful solutions for professional services, operations, field services, and construction management, you can be confident that projects are estimated correctly, completed on time, and meet your customers' requirements.

Dynamics CRM / Twitter Integration

There is now a Social Networking "Accelerator" for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that allows business professionals to monitor and analyze customers’ conversations on social networking sites, and as a result, provides real-time status updates about their products and services. This first release of the accelerator delivers integration with Twitter; other networks will be introduced in future releases.

Microsoft Dynamics has released several interesting accelerators over the last several months.  I'll be installing, testing, blogging, and presenting on the integrations as we go along.

Look for more on the CRM / Twitter integration test results soon.  We also plan on holding "Twitter and Grits" Lunch and Learn sessions in the next month or two.

Are You At Risk of Losing All of Your E-mail and Contacts?

In recent days, two people have relayed to me how they lost years and years worth of e-mails and contact information.  Are you at risk of this happening to you?  If you're certain that your data is not at risk, are you certain about your employees' data as well?  Some companies have not yet consolidated their employees' contact data into a shared, centralized database; and so that valuable information could be here today and gone tomorrow.

Here's a couple scenarios that could result in complete loss of your e-mail history and contact data:

1. Let's say you have some sort of webmail e-mail account, like comcast.net, verizon.net, yahoo, gmail, hotmail, AOL, etc.  When you have a webmail account, you have a couple of options to consider in how you manage your e-mail and contacts.  You can leave all of your e-mail on the web server and work exclusively online within the webmail program that your host provides, or you could download the e-mail into an e-mail client software like the full version of Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Entourage, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.  When you download e-mail from a webmail host to an e-mail client, the process by which this is done is referred to as POP3 e-mail.  (An important factor to consider when down-loading POP3 e-mail is whether to leave a copy of the e-mails on your host webmail server.)  Let's say you opt not to keep a copy of your e-mail on the host webmail server.  Now then, let's say you've done it this way for years and years.  If you've been working on the same laptop or desktop for any extended period of time, you've accumulated a lot of historical e-mails, that you may want to keep for reference.  Also, most e-mail clients give you a convenient place to store your contacts.  Now here's the thing, if your laptop or desktop crashes, and you're not backing up your e-mail and contact data, then you're at risk of losing a lot of valuable information at any given moment.
2. Another way you can lose all your e-mail and contact data is if you're working exclusively on the webmail client, and counting on the reliability of a comcast or verizon to safeguard your data.  Do you think comcast and verizon offers the typical consumer, or even the business consumer, any kind of data protection guarantee?  If so, I'd be interested to hear about it.  And some people may be shocked to learn that the big boys do indeed, make their fair share of mistakes when it comes to shutting down accounts or the like.  It's happend to me with Verizon Business FiOS where I had a business internet service account, and a separate residential FiOS television account.  I cancelled my FiOS TV service, and even though I had separate accounts, and was paying for business class service on the internet service, they shut that service down as well, and my business-critical network addresses were flushed away with the flick of a button.  Moral of the story is: don't rely on your internet service provider, or webmail host to permanently secure your e-mail and contact information, unless you have a 100% data protection guarantee from them.

So, how then, do you make sure you don't lose this kind of data?  Well, you need to do a couple things: first I would recommend downloading the information to your local laptop or desktop; secondly, you simply need to make sure this critical data -- like any other critical data stored locally on your laptop or desktop -- is backed up. 

Another way that small-and medium-sized businesses are using to make sure their e-mail and contacts information is protected, is to synchronize the data with an e-mail server, like Microsoft Exchange.  When you sync up your e-mail client with Exchange, you have a local copy, and you also have everything stored centrally on the server (which should, of course, be backed up as well).  An added advantage of the Exchange server is that it allows you to pull all of your e-mail, contacts, and calendar information into the full Outlook client from any of your laptops or desktop computers.  You would also be able to access all of the same information via webmail if you didn't have access to your personal computer.

The good news is that connecting to an Exchange server isn't just for corporations with large I.T. departments any more.  You can connect to a hosted Exchange server account, with a 100% data protection guarantee, and a 99.999% data reliability guarantee, for as little as $11.95 per user per month.  It's such a good deal that even companies that can afford to install, configure, and maintain their own e-mail servers are choosing to outsource this service. 

Please contact us with any questions you may have about your current e-mail situation.  We can help you assess your current backup strategy, get set up with domain name e-mail, deploy a server network with or without an on-premise Exchange server, or discuss the pros and cons of connecting to a hosted Exchange server.

SharePoint Deployment Planning Services

We’re excited to tell you about SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, an offering designed to help you effectively plan your Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment to transform and manage your current collaborative strategies.  Available to Microsoft customers participating in the Software Assurance Program, our offering for the Deployment Planning Service centers around a 1-day engagement delivered by certified partners like ourselves.  As certified partners, our team has the skills to deliver this offer to you, as well as access to tools and templates specifically developed by Microsoft for this offer. 

Through the engagement, we will provide you with:
* a comprehensive introduction to SharePoint 2007,
* an understanding of how you can leverage the platform to drive your business initiatives, and
* a well-integrated deployment plan.

A well-integrated deployment plan can help lower costs, optimize your business productivity infrastructure, and help you plan a more secure and well-managed collaborative infrastructure that supports the key capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007:
* Portals and Collaboration 
* Web and Enterprise Content Management
* Enterprise Search
* Workflow
* Business Intelligence

We look forward to the conversation of how SharePoint Deployment Planning Services can help your organization transform your content management, collaboration, and search strategy to reach your highest business potential. 

Let us help you take the first step on the ROAD TO SUCCESS in planning your organization’s SharePoint deployment.  More info...

p.s., this program offering is paid for out of your existing Software Assurance Benefits Training Vouchers, which would be converted to Packaged Service Vouchers (3:1 ratio for one-day planning session), by your Software Assurance benefits administrator.

What is SharePoint?  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

What is a Smart Host?

No, it's not a party where the host has a high IQ.

A smart host is a type of service where your incoming e-mails are routed (relayed) through an intermediate e-mail server rather than directly to your e-mail server.

Why would you want a smart host (e-mail relay server)? 

Consider the case when you have to take your Exchange server off-line for periodic maintenance, or when the server is down for any other reason (unscheduled outage).  What do you think happens to e-mails that are sent to your e-mail server when your server is offline?  The first thing that might happen -- and a lot of this depends on the sender's system -- is that the sender of the e-mail will get notification back that the delivery of their e-mail to you has been delayed.  Most Microsfot Exchange e-mail servers are configured to re-send e-mails a number of times over a 48-72 hour period in an attempt to get the e-mail to go through successfully.  Some systems do not try and re-send; and some systems may not give you a notification that the e-mail did not go through.

In order to give you peace of mind that you'll not lose incoming e-mails if your server is down for any reason, you'll want to consider signing up for a smart host service.  What the smart host does in normal operation is simply allow your e-mails to be first routed through their server, before forwarding them on to your e-mail server.  If your e-mail server is down for any reason, then the e-mails are queued up on their server until your e-mail server is back online.  Some services will also add extra spam detection to boot.

Ask SyncraTec is this is something you think you might need.  We'd be happy to discuss the finer points, and help you get it configured properly, if it something that makes sense.

We're up-and-running with Hyper-V. This is the latest virtualization technology from Microsoft, included with Windows Server 2008. Until now, we've been using Virtual Server to replicate multi-server environments for testing complex application software upgrades. We'll have four servers running in order to test the installation and configuration of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in SharePoint Integrated Mode (SPIM). This is not something you want to do in a live environment, without thorough integration testing. The benefit of SSRS/SPIM is that off-site end-users will be able to access back-office management reporting, with click-of-a-button ease, much like accessing a document library on SharePoint, through a corporate extranet (without the need for a VPN connection).