Microsoft Office 2013: Office for the Cloud | IT Solutions Provider

Microsoft Office 2013 has adopted the look and feel that Windows 8 and Server 2012 already has, giving it a new cleaner look while retaining the features and functionality that you have used and become accustomed to in the previous version. Microsoft has realised that users of Office today not only use computers but are starting to rely a lot on their smartphones and tablets and, therefore, Office 2013 will work on these devices. Along with this, Microsoft has also integrated it into the cloud meaning you can access your documents on the move and on devices that do not even have Microsoft Office 2013 installed. Even creating this article in Word I was able to read it on my smartphone which does not have Office installed.

You can link your Microsoft account to your Office 2013 installation and then stream your Office 2013 programs to other computers, save files to SkyDrive and access them anywhere you have an internet connection, which is handy should you need to use other computers that you have not used before. The cloud is your own personal storage space in the sky and Microsoft’s implementation is called SkyDrive.  When connected to your Microsoft Office 2013 you can access and share your Word documents, Excel spread sheets and other Office files. You can also have one of your files open and have a colleague open the same file and work on it at the same time.

Messaging is now fully integrated into Microsoft Office and with the recent merge of Messenger and Skype it means that you can have your Skype profile linked to your Office applications and this is known as your “presence”. You can see who else is working on the same documents that you have open and start a chat session with them should you need to discuss the documents.

It is evident to see that Microsoft has really spent some time on this latest release of Office and apart from all the new features introduced they have made it much more user friendly and easier on the eye. The built in help and support is more intuitive, giving you a better understanding of the available features and how to use them. Gesture support is also included along with a usable onscreen keyboard which is aimed for the tablet and touch screen user market.

Microsoft has released several flavours of this new package, which are as follows: 

·         Home & Student: has the main components Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Can be   bought retail and is not to be used commercially

·         Home and Business: Includes Outlook

·         Standard: Has Outlook and Publisher included and is only available via volume licensing

·         Professional:  A retail version that includes Outlook, Publisher and Access

·         Professional Plus: Only for volume licenses and includes all of Professional and InfoPath and Lync.

Mark Fidler – Technical Support – Celerity Limited

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Protecting Your Oracle Databases With IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) | IT Solutions Provider

Backup of Oracle databases can be taken using TSM for Databases (formerly known as TSM TDP). The normal TSM backup methods do not apply with Oracle - instead of TSM managing the backups, this function is performed within Oracle using the integrated backup and recovery tool, RMAN.

 

TDP for Oracle allows full and incremental backup functions for the following objects in an online or offline state:

• Databases
• Tablespaces
• Datafiles
• Archive log files
• Control files
• Full database restores while offline
• Tablespace and datafile restore while online or offline

It is good practice to work with an Oracle administrator to develop a backup strategy as both the administrator and RMAN are better placed to understand how the Oracle databases and recovery logs fit together. Thereafter, TSM exists only as a back-end data store for the Oracle backups, where RMAN considers TSM to be its media management layer (MML). RMAN decides the files that need to be backed up and passes those files to TSM, while also maintaining the files needed for restore and expiry operations. This information is stored in a separate Oracle database, referred to as the 'catalog', which contains metadata, or in the source database’s control file. When backup, restore or maintenance activity occurs; RMAN connects to the catalog and manages the metadata, creating a record of database backup objects to be backed up. While this effectively creates another Oracle database to manage, the alternative of using control files instead of the catalog can result in TSM becoming out of sync with Oracle, so is best avoided. In addition, data deduplication techniques can be used to reduce the amount of data stored in TSM during the Oracle backup.

 

As well as requiring the base TSM client to be installed (TSM Client v6.4), TSM for Databases will need installing also, along with an appropriate license. The TSM and TDP software must be able co-exist with the environment on which Oracle is running and so is available in either 32-bit or 64-bit. The license is typically located in /usr/tivoli/tsm/client/oracle/bin64/agent.lic. It is also possible to backup the Oracle databases via LAN-free methods - TSM Managed System for SAN Storage Agent will need to be installed on the same system as the TDP for Oracle software.

 

A standard TSM options file is required and a second (RMAN) options file is required for Oracle which is very different from a standard file, so the TSM administrator needs to understand the structure and contents of the file. The RMAN options file contains entries that are specific to the Oracle environment, including location of logs, TSM for Databases code and location of the options file itself. The Oracle DBA then creates script which runs the backup. Finally, a TDP password then needs to be set using the tdpoconf command and the password directory must be owned by the userid that is running Oracle.

 

Typical Oracle Backup Environment:

The RMAN options file basically defines some environment variables. The location of these files will be site dependent. As a minimum they should set three DSMI variables as shown below (typical example).

 

DSMI_LOG /u01/app/oracle/admin/tsm_rman
DSMI_DIR /usr/tivoli/tsm/client/api/bin64
DSMI_ORC_CONFIG /usr/tivoli/tsm/client/api/bin64/dsm.opt

Best Practice

From a TSM perspective, consider creating a separate domain for Oracle backups, to ensure that backups are segregated and that distinct backup management policies can be applied. The Oracle server should be registered as a separate node to the base client and should be defined with 'backupdelete=yes’ option to allow RMAN to manage the backups. In terms of the TSM management class definition, the copygroup should be setup to keep one active backup forever, with retonly and verdelete values both set to a value of 0. Remember - RMAN is handling the retention of backups. Optionally, the TSM administrator can define a clopt (client optionset) that assigns a specific management class to a specific database being backed up.

 

Jeff White - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited

Can Agile Replace The Traditional Prince Methodology

Historically a large proportion of companies have used Prince2 or a derivative for their standard project methodology. However, over recent years the move of companies to a more dynamic and flexible approach to projects has increased. There are a variety of these new approaches e.g. scrum, lean etc., which generally are more about being adaptive.

There are some common misconceptions about the agile methodology:

• It is only related to development projects.

• “Agile” is an undisciplined process of simply writing code with no planning, no documentation, and no disciplined methodology for how it is done.

• The only way to be “agile” is to implement pure agile methodologies such as Scrum.

• At one end of the spectrum is the most extreme forms of traditional plan driven, control-oriented methodologies like the Waterfall process; at the other end are pure agile approaches like Scrum, with nothing in between.

Waterfall Model

The truth is that:

• Implementing an “agile” process requires just as much or more discipline as traditional approaches such as the Waterfall model, but it is a different kind of discipline. Rather than relying on rigidly defined and prescriptive methodologies, agile approaches rely much more heavily on the training and skill of collaborative, cross-functional teams to adapt the methodology to the problem that they are attempting to solve.

• Pure forms of agile like Scrum have many advantages, but they can be very difficult to implement and are not necessarily appropriate for all business environments and projects. Many businesses require a balance of control and agility, which may be more suited to a hybrid approach.

• There are many ways companies can become “more agile” without necessarily going to the extreme of a pure agile approach, but it may take a more sophisticated approach to blend together the right combination of agile and non-agile methodologies and practices to craft a customised approach.
 

Agile Model





How can companies fit agile methodologies into an overall business strategy that provides the right balance of control and agility for their business?

Traditional project management e.g. Prince involves deliberate planning and control methods which makes the project life cycle phase easily identifiable. Tasks are generally done in an orderly sequence, which requires a significant part of the project to be planned at the start. This assumes that the events affecting the project are predictable and that the tasks in hand are well understood. The main strength of this approach is that it emphasises the importance of requirements. The down side is that some projects do not follow a sequential flow and the clients or stakeholders quite often find it difficult to completely state all of the requirements at the beginning of a project.

Agile project management is a highly iterative and incremental process where all parties actively work together to understand the scope, identify what needs to be built and prioritise functionality.

The best approach is generally to fit the methodology and practices to the business environment and problem that you are trying to solve, rather than force-fitting a project to a particular methodology, however, doing that requires a much higher level of skill and requires developing an understanding of the methodologies and practices at a deeper level. There are many companies that are locked into very cumbersome and bureaucratic traditional methodologies that do not see how to improve that situation because it can be so difficult to move to a pure agile approach with the added fear of losing control in the process.

One final thought is that many companies view project management as an IT tool, but there are many aspects of project management, especially Agile methodologies, that could and should be applied to business – especially management and sales approaches or virtually any corporate initiative.
 

Kevan Dix - Project Manager - Celerity Limited

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IBM DCS3700 and DS3500 New Features

IBM DCS3700 and DS3500 New Features

 

IBM’s DCS3700 and DC3500 storage systems fit into the entry and midrange portfolio of IBM’s block based (SAN) storage products respectively. The DS3500 series is designed to offer midrange performance and scalability at a lower price point than the competition to bring the benefits of shared block storage to the smaller businesses or remote offices. Its functionality has evolved over time since the first DS3000 incarnation, as has its management interface, meaning the latest DS3500 series offers substantially more to users than the DS3000 series of old, in terms of usability, scalability, performance and functionality. Each system can support up to 192 drives, with different types and sizes all intermixed across one logical system.

 

The DCS3700 series is designed to embrace the new era of “big data”. Offering a drive density of 60 3.5” NL-SAS, SAS and SSD intermixed drives in just 4U of space, each system scales to 360 drives or 1.44 Petabytes of capacity in just 24U of rack space. While these systems are optimised for applications with high performance streaming data requirements, and offering more I/O performance and cache than the DS series, they run the same system code and as such are managed in the same way and have similar functionality. Furthermore these systems can offer further value when virtualised behind an IBM Storwize V7000 to take advantage of the “per tray” licensing model.

 

 

Both of these systems have recently been considerably enhanced since the release of firmware 7.84 (or later) managed with Storage Manager 10.84 (or later). The new code brings not only new functionality, but some fundamental changes in how the storage can be provisioned allowing for notable performance enhancements and massively reduced rebuild times in the event of disk failure.

 

Key Benefits

 

• Dynamic disk pools (DDP): An alternative to conventional arrays, D-chunks are used for data, parity and hot spare capacity and spread across much larger pools of disks than arrays use and so not only offer greater performance and space utilisation, but massively quicker recovery times as re-builds are not limited to a single disk, but all disks in the pool.

 

• Thin-provisioning: This further enhances utilisation by capacity only being used when data is actually written as oppose to just storage presented.

 

• IP Replication: Supported in addition to fibre channel mirroring of data to a second system for disaster recovery, this allows conventional TCP/IP networks to be used for data replication.

 

• Performance Read Cache: Allows a small number of SSD disks to be installed and act as a cache layer so hot-data is migrated to the faster disks from the higher-capacity disks, all seamlessly and automatically with no administrator input required.

 

• VAAI and ALUA support: Allows for increased performance and data-path integrity in virtualised environments.

 

• Simplified Offering Structure: More features included in the base licence (partitioning, FlashCopy and Volume Copy) and additional features supplied in performance, backup or DR options. Alternatively all functionality can be realised with a single super-key.
 

Edward Yates - Technical Consultant - Celerity Limited
 

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Endpoint Integration in VMware vSphere 5.1

 

Previously an independent product VMware vShield Endpoint has now been fully integrated into VMware vSphere 5.1 and is available as part of vSphere Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. But why move away from the conventional endpoint protection model you may be asking? Well let us take a brief look at what vShield Endpoint is and some of the key benefits it could have for you as a user.
 

What is vShield Endpoint
 

VMware vShield Endpoint allows third party anti-virus providers to utilise the power of VMware vSphere to offload agent anti-virus and anti-malware workloads to a dedicated security hardened tamper proof virtual appliance.

 

This appliance has a scanning engine and the stored anti-virus signatures and because unlike a guest virtual machine it never goes offline, it can continually update its signatures and provide the latest security to any new or existing guest virtual machine when they come online.

Scanning is done via the hypervisors introspection capability which reduces the vulnerability of the security software itself.

 

A management console to configure and control the virtual appliance is provided by the third party endpoint security provider and in some cases existing management interfaces previously used to secure physical and virtual environments can be utilised for this purpose.

Key Benefits

• Improved server performance through elimination of anti-virus agents from guest virtual machines
• Anti-virus software protected from attack by residing on a hardened secure virtual appliance
• Consolidation of all agents to a single virtual appliance means no more update storms
• A single virtual appliance covers all guest machines residing on its host reducing the CPU and memory footprint of the endpoint software
• Guest virtual machines deployed or moved to the host are automatically protected with the latest security definitions
• Streamlined deployment and monitoring in your vSphere environment

With the move towards virtualised desktop environments on the rise it seems inevitable that this new way of providing endpoint security will soon become the norm and with more third party providers already joining up to work with VMware we expect the product to progress and mature quickly.

Barry Knox - Technical Support - Celerity Limited

 

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