Intel's SSD Drive Pricing bringing them into the mainstream

We have noticed great pricing on Intel's SSD hard drives making them a great alternative over the older spinning plate designs of the past years. Why do you want to jump to this technology? Speed! Once you have jumped to SSD technology you will never go back. I currently boot into my systems in less than 30 seconds and that includes my login. If you don’t need extra storage than you will probably be able to get by with a 250GB drive. This is a great size for office workers that are attached to network servers that are storing all their information up to the server and have no need for great amounts of local storage.

If you need more, than go with either a 500GB or 1TB. They too are very reasonable but are more of a premium than their spinning platter counterparts. Be sure when you are getting a quote for your new workstation that you ask for a comparable price for a SSD upgrade on your new system. Believe me when I say that it will bring a big smile to your face.

Ingram Micro Cloud Summit (Part II)

The Ingram Micro Cloud Summit used both general meeting sessions and breakout sessions to get its enormous amount of content out to us. While much of the general sessions material discussed the "Why the Cloud", I think that most of us that were there did not need to be convinced that the trend for most software manufacturers is for them to learn how they can leverage "The Cloud" advantageously with their products.

One of the major categories of software/services that I saw here was for offsite storage. From the fire sharing applications like OneDrive and SharePoint from Microsoft and DropBox to Backup and Disaster Recovery from Acronis, Veritas and Azure. There are a lot of options to enhance how you work and how you protect your office's data.

Ingram Micro Cloud MarketPlace is looking to add more and more vertical applications to its portfolio of products as well and providing bundles to make it easier to manage and supply services that these vertical markets can take advantage of. One of the first vertical markets that IMCM is working on is the legal profession. Some of these applications include: Office 365 E3 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and more), Law Toolbox (Matter Time Management), RPOST (Encrypting), Rmail, Trend (Virus Protection), Dropbox for Business (secure file synchronization and file sharing), and Acronis (Backup and Disaster Recovery).

While many of the products in the Cloud MarketPlace are considered to be horizontal in nature, covering a wide variety of business types and needs, having a distinct set of applications that fit together well for a specific industry helps to us to bring our customers a good offering to choose from for their business processes.

Ingram Micro Cloud Summit (Part I)

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit that was held at the JW Marriott in Phoenix Arizona. It was a three day event that covered many new products and services that are or will be shortly available for our customers. While Microsoft's cloud offerings were a main focus, new product lines that enhance Office's capabilities were also shown. In the sales area, Dun & Bradstreet is offering a service for $25/ month that provides access to their large company databases to enhance your sales contact collection as well as gathering financial ratings about your current or prospective clients. They charge you $0.75 per returned record that is changed against the $25 retainer that is charged each month. You can purchase larger amounts is your search needs are greater but they must be purchased in $25 increments. Their app uses Excel as its reporting medium and has seven different functions to choose from.

HPE announced some interesting new server offerings on WednesdayWednesday that could be very interesting. They are bringing several network functions together in a single box, including: Server, Firewall, Switch, Antivirus and more. Their intent is to bring this product to market as a HaaS (Hardware as a Service). While we are waiting for more information on this in the next couple of months I will be sure to give you more detail then.

 The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace (IMCM) also announced that Azure directory services were being made available and Microsoft announced 'Project Madeira' during u very interesting demo. 

Microsoft's "Project Madeira," a new, cloud-based business application that's built on the company's Dynamics NAV platform, is now available as a public preview for U.S. organizations.

Expected to become generally available in the second half of 2016, Madeira is described by Microsoft as a multitenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that runs out of the Azure public cloud.

Madeira integrates tightly with Office 365. One benefit of that is users performing business functions can reduce the time it takes them to jump back and forth from Office applications. For instance, Madeira "automatically identifies business context such as invoices and quote requests within Outlook, and presents the user with the tools and data needed to take immediate action -- all without leaving Outlook," wrote Perisic.

In fact, Project Madeira features are accessed primarily through Microsoft Outlook.To try out a preview of this product you can sign up for the preview here. 

there is so much more that I can talk about thisconference that I will try to let you know about in the next few days. See you soon!

Microsoft Vista Support ending in less than a year

The extended support time frame for Windows Vista will expire one year from this week on 11 April 2017. That will mark the end of 10 years of total support for the operating system. Vista never really had a following but it did achieve 19% adoption at one time until Windows 7 came along.

There are still about 25 million computers running Vista still even though it has less than 2% adoption today. So what options do have? You can purchase a new computer or you can try to find an upgrade option to Windows 7. Looking at Amazon there are several options for around $75. However, I would suggest that you replace the hardware with a new system instead of upgrading just the operating system.

If you decide to take the software upgrade route, run Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to make sure all of your hardware and software are compatible. Based on my experience Windows 7 ran very well on Vista era hardware and should be OK on many of those systems.

You should also consider the amount RAM in you system as well. Windows 7 will run on 4GB’s of RAM but does a much better job with 8GB’s.

While holding onto older hardware and upgrading to modern versions of Windows are not upgrades that are full of performance increases – it will at least get you onto an OS that has more support left than Windows Vista itself.

In today’s security landscape it is extremely important to be actively protected from security threats.

Bottom Line: The best option to choose that will result in the best performance for the money that you are spending is to purchase a new device to upgrade from Windows Vista. You will not only get current and better performing hardware but you will also be on a more modern operating system that is ready to handle the security threats that are out there.