Upgrade je IT Service!
Organisaties groeien en IT-omgevingen worden vaak complexer en duurder en vormen een steeds grotere uitdaging om te beheren.
Ferranti Computer Systems levert end-to-end oplossingen, gebaseerd op de System Center Suite, waarmee u op de hoogte wordt gehouden van mogelijke IT issues en die u in staat stellen snel en effectief te reageren. Zo kan u eventuele problemen elimineren, downtime verminderen en de kosten verlagen.
Wil u horen én zien hoe het beheer van desktop tot het datacenter veel eenvoudiger kan?
Kom dan op 7 april naar het Microsoft Executive Briefing Center te Brussel voor het Ferranti System Center event. Tijdens dit event laten we u zien hoe de nieuwste oplossingen van Microsoft helpen het beheer van uw IT te vereenvoudigen.
Waarom mag u dit seminar zeker niet missen:
- De experts van Ferranti en Microsoft vertellen u alles over de laatste ontwikkelingen op het gebied van efficient IT beheer met behulp van de Microsoft System Center Suite
- In de expo ruimte maakt u kennis met productdemo’s van de verschillende System Center oplossingen en kan u terecht met uw vragen bij de Ferranti consultants
- U ontdekt hoe u als IT-professional veel effectiever en eenvoudiger alle IT-componenten kan beheren met een mooi ontworpen en goed beheerde System Center infrastructuur
- U verneemt van ons gedetailleerde informatie over hoe u uw business vooruit kan helpen met behulp van de nieuwste en meest innovatieve Microsoft System Center technologieën
PROGRAMMA
Plenair
11u30 Aanvang event met lunch
De expo ruimte is open vanaf 11.30 uur tot 18.00 uur. Hier kan je concrete vragen rechtstreeks aan de Ferranti consultants stellen en dit toelichten a.h.v. productdemo’s
13u00 Keynote
In de keynote heeft Ferranti Computer Systems samen met Microsoft aandacht voor de nieuwste trends en ontwikkelingen op vlak van virtualisatie, private/public cloud computing, alsook de nieuwste beheerstools om dit in goede banen te leiden.
Break-out Sessies
| 14u05 | De weg naar een dynamisch datacenter | Eenvoudig en veilig naar Windows 7 en Office 2010 |
| 14u50 | Break + Expo | |
| 15u15 | IT Service Monitoring en verder… | Geïntegreerd Service Management |
| 16u05 | Hoe zorg jij voor bedrijfszekerheid in je IT organisatie? | Zet je gebruiker centraal! |
17u00 Apero
Driving Efficiency and Agility with System Center’s Service Manager
Please join us as we introduce Microsoft System Center Service Manager and extensively demonstrate the latest addition to the System Center family of products. This Microsoft demo session will allow you to meet local IT Professionals and also hear from our Solution and Technical Sales Specialists, about this exciting new solution available from Microsoft that offers improved IT management and control for your Enterprise.
Objective
Learn and see System Center’s new Service Management offering directly from Microsoft.
Value to You
· Learn how System Center Service Manager can improve your IT management capabilities.
· Experience an extensive demonstration of Service Manager with real life scenario’s.
· Get introduced to new license optimization options that save your firm budget and time
Agenda
· Introduction – Kris Vandermeulen
· Demo: “System Center Service Manager in Practice” – Frederik Baert
· Q&A
More Information on Service Manager
Date/Time:
November 16, 2010 – 13:30 – 17:00
*Registration begins at 13:15
Location:
Microsoft BeLux, Corporate Village, Da Vincilaan 3, 1935 Zaventem
System Center Service Manager – E-Mail to Incident configuration
While I was preparing a demo environment on System Center Service Manager I wanted to show of the E-Mail to Incident functionality as it is a possibility to spare an awful lot amount of time towards service desk employees.
Now while I was following the procedure in the Admin Guide (or available here) and configuring Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft IIS – SMTP to drop mails in the drop folder, and the respective Service Manager settings, I found out that mails went from Drop folder to the Badmail folder. No logging of what was happening, so pretty difficult to find out what was going wrong. My first impression was that something was wrong with the SMTP server configuration.
So I thought of applying a dirty trick, and configuring System Center Service Manager to get its mails in the Badmail folder. However when that was configured, mails were disappearing suddenly, which caught my attention.
Apparently it was System Center Service Manager itself, that was causing the mail to be moved from the Drop to the Badmail folder.
I wasn’t able to find more information on the web, so figured out, that System Center Service Manager was doing this, because it couldn’t identify from which user the mail came, so it wasn’t able to map Mail User to Affected End User.
The reason why this did happen is that we have a two-domain setup, a Utility domain (comparable to the Dynamic Datacenter IPD) and an Office domain. For the moment Service Manager is installed in the Utility domain, and an AD connector was not yet configured towards the Office domain. After configuring the AD connector to include users from the Office domain, I retried sending mails, and they were picked up immediately.
Lesson learned: make sure that the user(s) that are sending mails to the support address which is configured for e-mail to incident conversion are known within System Center Service Manager.
Seminar – ICT Challenges in the Public Sector
Long time I have been blogging about what’s going on. We have been very busy providing customers with presentations, working on offers, you know how it goes.
However today I would like to put the attention on our bi-yearly seminar we organize specifically towards the Public Sector (Local, Regional and Federal Gov, Healthcare, Education) in which some of the vendors we work with position their solutions, and in which Ferranti covers its integrated solutions.
A very interesting seminar in order to quickly get a grasp of what’s going on in the market today, and which solutions are definitely worth to have a look at.
Additionally we have Peter Strickx, CTO at FedICT as a keynote speaker on eID and its use in the sector.
So don’t hesitate to register, as it will be very interesting, and good food will be available as well 
Announcement DPM 2010 SCUG Info Session
Some advertising for one of my co-workers who is focusing on System Center management products. He will be providing an info session on What’s new in DPM 2010 for the System Center User Group (SCUG) at the Microsoft offices.
More info can be found here.
The event will take place on 3rd of March at 18h00. Registration can be done via this link.
Infrastructure Optimization – Building a business case for IT Projects
It has been a while since my last blog post, however it has been busy days the last few weeks, mainly talking to customers about lots of stuff, ranging from networks, unified communications, virtualization, till the management of it all.
Of course this is all very interesting stuff from a technological point of view, but is this the way we have to sell it towards business ? Although I have a pretty good feeling with the technical part of the newer technologies, I am more and more convinced that it becomes too difficult to explain to less technical people or business why technology X, Y, Z are so important to invest in.
One example, I experienced this week, we were on a prospect talk in a smaller hospital. During the talk a call came in (via DECT phone) from a nurse asking for the pc with internet for a patient who asked for it. Currently the hospital uses a laptop with a 3G card to provide this service, and invoicing a very low price for this. This means losing money to provide for this service. Not very healthy I would say.
So I came to talk about using wireless technology to provide this additional service, making use of the current bandwidth to the internet, and improving service towards more patients than they were now able to satisfy. The customer provided me with the feedback that they already talked about wireless with their board of directors but that it wasn’t withheld because of the financial investment needed.
However they didn’t bring a business case for wireless but merely talked about technology, knowing for themselves what the possible business cases were, but not translating these in figures and use cases towards the financial director.
Going further on the wireless talk, we came into 2 more business cases why wireless would be a reasonable investment, and being able to quantify the value of it, by being able to reduce personnel costs for administrative work requested by federal government, and by using the same wireless network for tracking expensive medical equipment (which gets lost sometimes).
Just providing one specific example I have experienced in talking with customers and prospect customers.
Now how do we have to look to IT then, in order to qualify and quantify the necessary investments ?
Well I would say – use the (Microsoft) Infrastructure Optimization model to build up your business case. OK I know it is Microsoft, but the model is actually perfectly usable independent of Microsoft technologies, it is being developed together with Gartner, and MIT – ensuring there is analyst and academic research-related backing of the model.
Core Infrastructure
The Core Infrastructure model includes the capabilities your organization needs to deploy and manage PC’s, Servers and other devices. Organizations that increase their levels of Optimization in Core Infrastructure generally realize lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improved infrastructure flexibility.
Business Productivity Infrastructure
The Business Productivity Infrastructure model includes capabilities that amplify the productivity of users and business units. This category includes capabilities such as Collaboration, Unified Communications, Enterprise Content Management, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search.
Application Platform
Application Platform model capabilities profile the organization with the ability to acquire or build applications that support the business of the organization. Application Platform capabilities include Development, SOA & Business Process, Data Management and User Experience. In addition this model shares the Business Intelligence capability with the Business Productivity Infrastructure level.
Now what is the model exactly, it is nothing more or less than a maturity framework, a model with relevant assessment questions to qualify in which stage you are from the maturity model:
Based on the assessment you get proposals for improvement projects, which you can plan, implement and afterwards benchmark whether it has provided you the benefits you were hoping for.
I have been reading on it already for a couple of years, but it felt difficult to apply the model, which is off course US based and not really sized for the typical smaller Belgian market. However the last couple of weeks I have been looking deeper into it, and the longer I look at it, the more I am convinced it is a nice framework to be used as a guideline to define IT Strategy, follow up on IT projects, and more specifically to quantify if the IT Project investment provides the promised benefits. It is also very usable to prioritize your IT projects, as most of us are limited to time, resource and budgeting constraints.
Additionally you can use the model to align your IT projects to specific business cases, which is the goal of every IT project: Provide with IT added value to support your core business.
Based on the model there is a ROI calculator as well, which is being fed with data from a lot of companies all over the world, additionally fed with data from analyst IDC, providing you with some way of benchmarking your benefits.
Here is where my problem lies with the framework: the data is more or less accurate or usable for IT environments with more than 500 pc’s/users… hmmm… we have a lot of environments in Belgium where we have to do with less…
So what are the next steps… I am working on creating some ROI studies with a set of our customers with different numbers of pc’s, and will re-evaluate the ROI of projects after the project improvement implementations in order to get a clear view on what the benefits of using the IO model are.
Last note to conclude my first blog posting on Infrastructure Optimization, whether you are able or willing to use the ROI tooling or not, it is still interesting enough to learn and apply the model in your day-2-day IT Management and architecture definition work.
In case you would be interested to talk with me on Infrastructure Optimization and how it could be applied to your organization, going from small to large, don’t hesitate to contact me
More to come on this topic in the coming weeks…
Some additional info:
Big news: Microsoft and HP team up to move IT forward
Announced today: Microsoft in combination with HP Converged Infrastructure
In order to provide some evidence for yesterday’s blog posting, Microsoft and HP today announced a joined three-year agreement, worth $250 million dollar, to provide a new infrastructure to application model, to advance cloud computing and reduce the costs and complexities of IT.
The development of the solution will be focused on joint technology and about integration of HP Proliant Servers, HP BladeSystem Infrastructure, HP Storage, and integration with the HP Insight Management tooling as well as with System Center. On top of that integration of Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Suite (or System Center Essentials) to facilitate dynamic management of virtual and physical systems.
The above mentioned is a quick summary of the blog item to which I have linked, additionally you can find the Press Release and video conference here.
In the coming days, I will provide you with additional information of other vendors and solutions that provide a similar infrastructure environment.
