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View From Above by Ron Miller
As business users increasingly find themselves connecting to the internet away from the office, the cloud and mobile devices grow ever more important. This blog will look at ways these issues are affecting IT and the ways companies link data so it's updated wherever you are.


LATEST POST:

Follow the money to iOS

November 26, 2012 - In spite of having dominant marketshare on mobile phones and with Apple losing substantial marketshare in tablets this year, when it came to online shopping on Black Friday, iOS users spent more than Android ones by a large margin.... READ MORE


Samsung's Android Camera - Cool, But Who is Going to Buy it?
Posted in Can you hear me now? Tales from a Cisco voice instructor by Dave Bateman on 2012-11-25 17:00:26

As you well know by now the most popular camera nowadays is a cell phone. Almost every cell phone has a camera and many people have taken to using them as their primary camera. There are still the hold outs that want a “real” camera. There are still those, like my sister-in-law, that feels if it doe…READ MORE


The IT Department in the Sky
Posted in Unchartered Waters by Matt Heusser on 2012-11-26 15:46:06

I am in Germany!

or … almost.  I started the article on the way to Germany.  Now, on the way back, I am interested in something else.

I want to talk about the plane.

Better yet, how smart IT is turning itself into a profit center on my airplane.

You see, it wasn’t an airplane.  Not …READ MORE


UK PowerShell group – December 2012
Posted in PowerShell for Windows Admins by Richard Siddaway on 2012-11-26 14:27:42

Last meeting of 2012 – PowerShell jobs and scheduled tasks When: Tuesday, Dec 4, 2012 7:30 PM (GMT)Where:
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

PowerShell jobs provide the ability to perform long running background tasks. With the introduction of cmdlets to schedule tasks the possibilities increase
Notes
Ri…READ MORE


Good News, Bad News: MS Changes Beta Regime for Cert Exams
Posted in IT Career JumpStart by Ed Tittel on 2012-11-26 15:43:46

Upon checking in with the MS Learning Born to Learn blog this morning, I discovered a 19 November post from Psychometrician and Cert Exam Maven Liberty Munson entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know about Beta Exams: Part 2 (Beta Availability).” It includes some extremely interesting news that led m…READ MORE


Content Management, Part II - A growing divide
Posted in The Business-Technology Weave by David Scott on 2012-11-26 11:03:26

Please see Part I below, or here. 

Management of content is already well underway in some organizations – with varying degrees of success.  But for most others it is a looming imperative.  If you do not have a method for determining and using your information effectively throughout the organ…READ MORE


"Real Windows 8 users are not using the Metro apps."
Posted in Windows Enterprise Desktop by Ed Tittel on 2012-11-26 16:32:39

Today’s blog title is a verbatim quote from David Gewirtz’ absolutely fascinating ZDNet story entitled “Dogfooding Windows 8: six long-term Windows users tell all.” It also nicely summarizes my own attitudes and experiences as far as Windows 8 goes. The premise of the story is that Gewirtz interview…READ MORE


Follow the money to iOS
Posted in View From Above by Ron Miller on 2012-11-26 09:16:08

Mirror on the wall, which mobile platform is the most lucrative of them all? If you believe IBM it is iOS. As for Android? It’s not even close.

IBM published an infographic via Kara Swisher from All Things Digital on Sunday with all kinds of interesting Black Friday data. Overall online sale…READ MORE


Enterprise IT: The 80/20 Budget Dilemma (Part I)
Posted in From Silos to Services: Cloud Computing for the Enterprise by Brian Gracely on 2012-11-26 10:00:00

[This is the first in a series of blogs focused on strategies to address the 80/20 Budget Dilemma in Enterprise IT]

It’s widely acknowledged that the majority of IT organizations spend about 80% of their budget to maintain existing applications, leaving only 20% of the budget left for new proje…READ MORE


At Times Customer Is The Main Cause Of Project Failure
Posted in Quality Assurance and Project Management by Jaideep Khanduja on 2012-11-25 19:22:02

Here below is a lovely comic strip from acentre.com on Managing Project Scope. This is self explanatory in telling how projects go haywire just because of non serious stakeholders, keeping lot of leverage and flexibility in changing scope and requirement.

At times customer is the main cause …READ MORE


HSTS : The HTTP Strict Transport Security
Posted in I.T. Security and Linux Administration by Eric Hansen on 2012-11-24 11:20:03

There’s a new RFC that was published this month (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797) about an additional layer of HTTPS for web browsing, called HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security).  The basic idea behind it is that the server tells the browser that only HTTPS is allowed, or where to find the sec…READ MORE


Serious Skype security flaw uncovered, then fixed
Posted in Security Corner by Ken Harthun on 2012-11-24 13:48:10

A serious security flaw in Microsoft-owned Skype allowed hackers to hijack accounts just by knowing the user’s email addresses. Details from this article at TechCrunch:
Skype faced a fairly serious security threat today [Nov. 14, 2012], thanks to a flaw in the system replicated by The Next Web that…READ MORE


Network Infrastructure Security: Intrusion Detection Systems – Part II
Posted in IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance by Robert Davis on 2012-11-24 00:12:33

Intrusion detection aids in reacting to network infrastructure incursions. Derivatively, the main value of intrusion detection is early incident or event awareness and subsequent, timely intervention resulting in a loss experience that is less than what might otherwise ensue from a security breach. …READ MORE


South Carolina Department of Revenue Incident Report
Posted in Irregular Expressions by Dan O'Connor on 2012-11-22 22:52:52

Some very interesting information in this report.

What really sticks out to me is;
1) This appears to have been targeted, the phishing attack. I wish it would say but I would think that what ever malware was executed by the email was modified to help avoid detection.

2) The account used to s…READ MORE


Fingerpointing Abounds In HP-Autonomy $8.8 Billion Debacle
Posted in Yottabytes: Storage and Disaster Recovery by Sharon Fisher on 2012-11-21 14:51:05

Acquisitions are hard.

HP announced this week that it was being forced to write off $8.8 billion of the $9.7 billion cost of its year-old acquisition of Autonomy.

Let the fingerpointing begin.

HP blamed the write-down on what it said were systematic accounting games that made the U.K. compa…READ MORE


Google RSS Reader for Windows Phone 8 : NextGen Reader
Posted in The Real (and Virtual) Adventures of Nathan the IT Guy by Nathan Simon on 2012-11-21 05:03:17

Okay so I got my grubby paws on a Nokia Lumia 920, so far so good, it’s definitely a whole new world.

The quick and dirty is that most apps we are used to are supported, awesome, a full list of what I use is forthcoming…. There is an official Facebook (from MS) which is different, but it gets …READ MORE


Fixing a table that has overflowed its primary key
Posted in SQL Server with Mr. Denny by Denny Cherry on 2012-11-21 09:00:38

During TechEd Europe I got a very scary phone call.  A very large table was throwing errors that the value being inserted into the primary key column was overflowing the data type that makes up that column.  In this case the data type in question was INT, so we were trying to stick the number 2,14…READ MORE


Black Friday: Don't Fall for the Hype
Posted in Cheap Computing by Robin "Roblimo" Miller on 2012-11-20 20:23:04

Last year, for the first time, my wife thrust herself into the heaving, pulsating mass of depraved shopaholics at our local mall on Black Friday. She says it was a horrible experience, and she’ll never do that again. But can’t you get great deals on Black Friday? Isn’t a 300-inch HDTV for $99 worth …READ MORE


Cisco Acquires Meraki
Posted in TechStop by Joshua Wood on 2012-11-19 16:44:21

Hi all, cloud is the off-premise dream that many managers of small or medium sized companies have dreamed of for years now. Someone else is responsible for the hardware, software and backups of some of your key services. Cisco has been working hard to make headway in the cloud managed space. Their r…READ MORE


Mission statement for the internal IT organization
Posted in Information Technology Management with a Purpose by S R Balasubramanian on 2012-11-19 08:35:23

IT departments in most organizations try to do its best to help organizations achieve their goals. Some of the IT departments are effective and some are not. Those who pursue their work with a purpose go farther than those who meander their way reacting to the situations as they arise. Those with pu…READ MORE


The History of Microsoft Technology
Posted in The 'How to' Blog by FirebrandInstructors on 2012-11-15 09:58:04

In the past 30 years Microsoft have developed Technologies that influence just about everything we do both in the work place and the comfort of our own home.

Most well known is the Windows Operating System; synonymous with the PC; which according to a recent Operating System Market Share Survey b…READ MORE