Invest in a winning combination. Windows Vista® Business and Microsoft® Office Professional 2007 provide powerful tools to help you manage your business. Add Microsoft Windows® Small Business Server 2003 R2 (SBS 2003 R2) and Windows Mobile®-powered smartphones, and you’re ready to take your business to new heights.

Built-in Peace of Mind
Stay focused on your business, knowing that your data is protected by the security enhancements and data backup capabilities of the Windows Vista Business operating system and Office Professional 2007. Add SBS 2003 R2 for an affordable network and backup solution that will help keep your business running smoothly. Then include Windows Mobile for security-enhanced instant access to e-mail and documents from your smartphone in a cab, airport, café, or anywhere business and life take you.

Getting It Done Just Got Easier
Save time and stay organized with Windows Vista Business and Office Professional 2007. Easily find and organize information on your PC, in e-mail, and on the network. Together with SBS 2003 R2, you’ll have a central place for storing customer information, making it accessible from notebooks, Tablet PCs, or Windows Mobile-powered smartphones.

Create internal team sites for group collaboration using integrated Microsoft Windows
SharePoint® Services technology, which also has new mobile access capabilities.

The Workplace Unplugged
Your workplace isn’t just the office—it’s wherever you happen to be. Connect to company information and communicate with the people you need with Office Professional 2007 and Windows Vista Business. SBS 2003 R2 enables access to e-mail, internal Web sites, network files, and other programs from other PCs with Internet access and Windows Mobile-powered smartphones when you’re out of the office. Lose your smartphone and rest assured—the data on the smartphone can be remote-wiped instantly.

Customer Information at Your Fingertips
Keep customer information at your fingertips with Windows Vista Business and Office Professional 2007. Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager lets you easily store, share, and access consolidated customer and sales-lead information, and SBS 2003 R2 helps boost team performance and customer service because your entire customer contact database can be backed up, and shared and accessed remotely. Be responsive to customers even when you’re not in the office, with access to this same information from your Windows Mobile-powered smartphone or Pocket PC.

Learn more by contacting a Microsoft Small Business IT Consultant from Digital Reach. We can help your business thrive. Our Microsoft IT Consultants have undergone training to help them better respond to the special technology needs of small businesses. By focusing on your unique IT needs, a Microsoft Small Business Consultant can assist you in making smart technology decisions for your company.

Fort Worth, Texas IT Consultanting - Get the right solution for your needs.

If you are running Microsoft Exchange Server in an Information Technology IT environment, you must take additional measures to guarantee the correct operation of your Exchange Server post-Daylight Savings Time.  You will need to use the Exchange Calendar Update Tool.

Daylight saving time is a system to set clocks ahead so that both sunrise and sunset occur at a later hour. The effect is more daylight in the evening. Many countries observe daylight saving time. Most of these countries have their own rules and regulations for when daylight saving time begins and ends.

The dates of daylight saving time (DST) may change from year to year. Microsoft Outlook users have to update their Outlook calendar every time that the DST rules change. The dates between the previous DST rules and the current DST rules are referred to in this article as the “extended DST period.”

The solution that is presented in this post involves the Microsoft Exchange Calendar Update Tool (“the Exchange tool”).

Based on customer feedback, a new version of the Exchange tool was released on August 13, 2007. This article refers to the new version of the Exchange tool. If you are running an older version of the Exchange tool, uninstall it, and then install the new version.

The new version of the Exchange tool includes the following improvements:

support.microsoft.com/kb/941018/

With an IT consultant from Digital Reach, you can rest easy in knowing your systems are always “up-to-date” with the correct patches, versions and rollouts to limit downtime and maintain productivity. Digital Reach offers IT consulting in Fort Worth, Dallas, Richardson, Plano, and the surrounding DFW / North Texas area.

BizTalk Server 2006 - Release Two - is now available.  BizTalk Server is a business process management server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Beta 2 is now available from the Microsoft Connect Site. If you are not a member of the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 connect community, you can still get a copy of the beta through the Microsoft Connect Site.

Microsoft BizTalk RFID is an innovative device management and event processing platform at the edge of the enterprise. It is designed to provide a scalable, extensible platform for development, deployment, and management of rich RFID and sensor solutions.

Digital Reach’s comprehensive IT consulting can help you deploy key business efficiency solutions throughout your enterprise.  To contact a Digital Reach IT consultant, click here.

As the support of devices becomes more complex, organizations are looking to take advantage of other support resources outside of their own four walls — namely, outsourcing of employee IT support services.

A recent study by IDG Research Services confirmed that the level of IT support for highly productive employees ( or potentially productive employees ) could improve.  The study asked 700 IT decision-makers worldwide about what kinds of support services they offer their companies’ workers.

The study looked at employees’ usage of multiple computing devices, including mobile phones. “Whether you’re a small, medium or large organization, you can’t operate your business processes today without having enabling technology and tools to access information and create business events,” said IDG. However, while 49% of respondents worldwide indicated that their employees were using multiple devices, the U.S. lagged behind with only 39% of American respondents indicating the same adoption rate.

Companies are considering outsourcing IT services to increase their ability to respond or because of the complexity of the support situations.  If technology doesn’t work properly or quickly enough for employees, you tend to see a real drop in morale. As more consumer devices are brought into the work environment and employees are asking for support, companies are increasingly wondering if there is a better way to support those devices in a more cost-efficient manner with improved quality of service and higher employee satisfaction.

Contact Digital Reach to learn how implementing a proactive approach to IT support can help you save time and money while increasing employee productivity.

A recent survey by IDG Research Services found that enterprises would be better off if they offered more targeted and strategically-focused IT support for their employees.  The study, which focused on 700 IT decision-makers worldwide, asked with kinds of support services they offer their companies’ employees. 

The study found that companies are increasingly shifting from using standardized, one-size-fits-all IT support services, and are instead adopting flexible service strategies that place the highest priority on meeting the needs of mobile employees who work directly with clients and drive company revenue. 

High-producing employees such as salespeople are often on the road working in a wireless environment and presenting to clients. Their job function means the level of IT support for a mobile salesperson is more important than that of an executive VP.   While reactive support might suffice for a VP, proactive support is necessary for a sales team.  Proactive support means that you limit the chances of a catastrophic support event occurring during an inopportune time….such as during an important sales meeting.

Only 46% of US respondents said that their organizations and increased IT support to end users over the last 5 years while 55% had done so.  Those organizations that were able to increase IT support had a higher level of productivity among their employees.

Discover how Digital Reach can help you provide a higher level of IT support to your high-productivity employees. Learn More

Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight enables developers and designers to easily use existing skills and tools to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace” required. Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.

Mash-up and incorporate services and data from the Web by taking advantage of the Silverlight support for LINQ while accessing that data with common protocols like JSON, RSS, POX, and REST.

Increase discoverability of rich interactive application (RIA) content that can be indexed and searched due to the text-based XAML format that describes interface and content in a Silverlight-based application.

Rapidly scale applications with Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live to host and integrate software services and media content.

Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live offers a free streaming and application hosting solution for delivering high-quality, cross-platform, cross-browser, media-enabled rich interactive applications (RIAs). With the ability to author content in Microsoft Expression Encoder and other third-party editing environments, Web designers maintain complete control of the user experience.

In the past an organization’s computer systems were centrally located in the company’s data center and the duty to keep those systems running smoothly was responsibility of Computer Operations IT personnel. Disaster recovery and contingency planning are the responsibility of the IT department, whose focus is to ensure that business applications within the IT environment are available as required by its useres.

Today’s IT environment is much more complex to manage. Business information is spread out among varying mediums as LANs and departmental systems have replaced the mainframe.

Further, the emphasis on the computer and resident information has given way to an emphasis on ensuring continuity of the processes that keep the business running. Risk management and business continuity planning, therefore, must become critical components of business operations.

In order for managers to make informed decisions about whether to assume, avoid or transfer risk, and implement cost-effective security solutions, it is essential to adopt a methodology that addresses the issues in terms of cost and benefit.

It is important, therefore, to understand the basics of risk managment by comparing the quantitative and qualitative approaches to risk assessment practices.

While there are a number of ways to identify, analyze, and assess risk, there is little real understanding of the process and metrics of analyzing and assessing risk. Certainly everyone understands that “taking a risk” means “taking a chance,” but a risk or chance of what is often not so clear.

Learn more about Digital Reach’s comprehensive risk management solutions.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a trusted, productive, and intelligent data platform that enables you to run your most demanding mission critical applications while reducing time, cost of development and management of applications.  All this while delivering actionable insight to your entire organization.

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 builds on the management capabilities of previous versions and provides a variety of tools and frameworks to help you manage your enterprise data environment. The comprehensive management automation capabilities of SQL Server 2008 reduce the administrative overhead that is required to maintain data services and ensure compliance with change management policies. A new end-to-end performance monitoring and analysis suite helps you to optimize the responsiveness and scalability of your SQL Server services across the enterprise, and the scalable management interfaces and tools help you to reduce server management effort and focus on higher value activities.

Each release of Microsoft SQL Server has brought innovative manageability features that help reduce the total cost of ownership of your data services solution by automating administrative tasks, centralizing management, and enabling administrators to focus on higher value, strategic activities. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 builds on the enterprise class manageability capabilities of earlier releases, and introduces a comprehensive performance data collector, warehouse, reporting, and policy-based management solutions that give you unprecedented control over your SQL Server–based enterprise data services solution.

Use the manageability capabilities of SQL Server 2008 to:

- Automate maintenance, best practices, and configuration management to reduce administrative overhead.
- Analyze and optimize data services performance across the enterprise.
- Scale administrative operations easily and manage data services of all types throughout the organization.

SQL Server 2008 builds on the management capabilities of previous versions of SQL Server and provides a greater variety of tools and frameworks to help you manage your enterprise data environment. SQL Server 2008 provides the tools that help you to scale your data environment to meet the growing needs of your company and to optimize the performance of these databases across your enterprise. It also provides functionality to relieve database administrators of day-to-day maintenance tasks and reduces management overhead through automation.

For more information about SQL Server 2008 and how best to integrate this into your IT environment, contact Digital Reach Inc.

Located in Dallas, Texas, close to Fort Worth, Digital Reach Inc. is a one-stop shop for IT support needs.  Targeting businesses in Dallas, Digital Reach offers products and services for security management, network security and design, managed IT services, outsourcing IT and email security.  Digital Reach is known for its total managed IT solutions.

Dallas businesses are becoming smarter and always go for a complete solution to their IT requirements.  Digital Reach’s outsourced IT solutions come with highly-experienced engineering support staff that ensure proper monitoring and maintenance of the IT infrastruture. This helps local Ft. Worth and Dallas companies lower their network ownership costs and increase revenue.

Some businesses in Texas require more than IT support to ensure the smooth running of their business. Computer support Dallas, by Digital Reach, came up with a solutions package that includes enterprise monitoring, scheduled audits, virus scanning, proactive maintenance, asset reporting and tracking, and managed file and print servers.

Computer support Ft. Worth, again by Digital Reach, works hard to ensure that all your basic IT support requirements are covered. Outsourcing IT services in Ft. Worth lets you enjoy engineering support for a specified number of hours in a month. The support staff is composed of highly skilled and experienced network support engineers whose tasks include the monitoring and maintenance of your IT environment.

Texas businesses requiring IT support or IT outsourcing can now enjoy the same things that Fortune 500 companies do.

For all your IT support needs, consider Digital Reach Inc.

The Microsoft / Novell partnership announced a joint interoperability lab is now open for business.

“Customers want interoperability out of the block,” said Microsoft’s director of open source technology strategy, Sam Ramji. “The lab’s built, staffed and powered on and will be run by Microsoft’s Tom Hanrahan who was hired away from Linux.”

The two companies plan to focus on server-side issues like virtualization, directory and identity services, and management according to a story released by Information Week. There is no shortage, the story reports, of work to be done to ensure better interoperability between Microsoft products and Linux. 

Novell and Microsoft are working together to make sure SUSE Linux runs well in a virtualized environment on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft’s Viridian Technology.  It is also working to make sure it runs well on XenSource virtualization.  The findings will be used as input for the Viridian and SUSE Linux service packs.