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.

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 brings together a host of innovations designed to help users work more efficiently and effectively so they and their organizations can deliver better results faster.

These innovations include:

 * Improved productivity through easy-to-create and easy-to-share documents.
 * Tools to effectively manage an ever-increasing workload such as e-mail.
 * Better management of network bandwidth and storage by reducing file size.
 * Simplified, instant, and secure collaboration through instant messaging.

The Windows Vista operating system is the largest innovation of Windows® software ever.

Choosing to implement a business solution such as this can be daunting.  Get it right the first time!  Review our whitepaper: “Six Things to Look for in an IT Partner.”

Windows Vista is the largest development project and largest investment that Microsoft has ever made-bringing significant benefits and improvements.

It is fundamentally different from any earlier version of Windows, and this difference is already sparking innovation and opportunity across the entire computer industry.
An elegant, new user interface enhances functionality.

It helps streamline tasks and provides search-based navigation.

In the hands of your employees, Office Professional Plus 2007 and Windows Vista can be powerful tools-improving the way people work as well as supporting and enhancing your IT infrastructure and management.

The release of Microsoft Vista is changing the way businesses get things done.  Below are 10 ways your business can improve productivity with the implementation of Microsoft Vista.

1. Safely Secure and Backup Your PC
With Microsoft® Windows® Backup and Restore, you can easily schedule automatic backups of documents, files, and even entire hard disks. More easily recover lost files with new Windows VistaTM Shadow Copy and improved Microsoft Office Document Recovery

2. Organize it your way.
Enhancements to Windows Vista Explorer let you use file properties to intuitively sort, organize, and view your files—including work created in Microsoft Office. Use the new Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 To-Do Bar to see your daily tasks and appointments in an integrated view, so you can get a quick grasp on your priorities.

3. New and better ways to see and do your work.
Innovative navigational tools in Windows AeroTM make it easier to get to recently used documents and programs. The new Microsoft Office Ribbon replaces menus and toolbars with task-related commands, tabs, and visual galleries.

4. Centralized customer information.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager consolidates all customer and sales lead information in one location: e-mail, communication history, relevant documents, sales opportunities, and more.

5. Professional design made easy.
Make your business stand out with new SmartArt graphics. Easily save Microsoft Office files to PDF or XPS.

6. Protect your inbox, your data, and your peace of mind.
Improved junk mail filters in Office Outlook 2007 and new anti-phishing technologies minimize junk mail and potentially harmful e-mail messages. Windows Defender** provides built-in tools for detecting and removing spyware.

7. Stop searching. Find.
Instant Search in Windows Vista and Office Outlook 2007 helps you quickly find what you’re looking for—documents, media, programs, e-mail messages, and more—on your PC, across your network, and throughout your e-mail.

8. Work virtually anywhere.
Windows Meeting Space lets you easily share files directly from your PC to other Windows Vista PCs over one-time, wireless, or peer-to-peer networks. Windows Vista Remote Desktop Connection allows you access to files on your office PC from another computer.

9. Small budget. Big marketing.
New Marketing Campaigns in Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager combined with new Microsoft Office Publisher E-mail Merge capability enables you to manage marketing campaigns and to deliver targeted marketing communications to your customers.

10. Stay in sync with your business.
Easy synchronization of information with Windows Mobile® devices gives you access to e-mail, business contacts, customer information, documents, and presentations while on the road.

Find out how to roll-out Microsoft Vista to your enterprise. Learn More

Organizations today are facing several unique data challenges: the proliferation of data and systems across their enterprise; the need to provide employees, customers, and partners with consistent access to that data; the desire to better equip information workers with meaningful information to drive informed decisions; and the mandate to control costs without sacrificing application availability, security, or reliability.

SQL Server is Microsoft’s next-generation data management and analysis solution that will deliver increased security, scalability, and availability to enterprise data and analytical applications while making them easier to create, deploy, and manage.

SQL Server provides an integrated data management and analysis solution that will help organizations of any size build and deploy enterprise applications that are more secure, scalable, and reliable, maximize the productivity of IT by reducing the complexity of creating, deploying, and managing database applications, and empower developers through a rich, flexible, modern development environment for creating more secure database application.

In today’s connected world, data and the systems that manage that data must always be available to your users. With SQL Server, users and IT professionals across your organization benefit from reduced application downtime, increased scalability and performance, and tight security controls.

One of the key barriers to developer productivity has been the lack of integrated tools for database development and debugging. SQL Server provides advancements that fundamentally change the way that database applications are developed and deployed.

The challenge and promise of business intelligence revolves around providing employees with the right information, at the right time. Accomplishing this vision demands a business intelligence solution that is comprehensive, secure, integrated with operational systems, and available all day, every day.

SQL Server is part of the Windows Server System™ – a comprehensive and integrated server infrastructure that simplifies the development, deployment and operations of a flexible business solution. For more information about SQL Server and how to best implement this in your business, contact Digital Reach.

Network Administrators rely on the ability to manage desktops, and servers, within their IT environment through an automated process. To manage today’s Microsoft Windows enterprise relies on the ability for centralized system configuration, software deployment, desktop security, and desktop support.  Desktop Management means a network administrator can managed 1000 desktops just as easy as they can manage 3 desktops. By implementing a Desktop Management solution from Digital Reach, companies increase the efficiency of the administrator while providing end users with a workstation that is consistent and secure.

With all the configuration settings that make up a user’s workstation, management of individual machines can be a comprehensive task. Mapping drives, connecting printers, applying user policies, and creating email profiles, just to name a few, can task an IT department beyond their ability to sustain the everyday needs of the enterprise. A comprehensive desktop management solution can restore efficiency to a spread-thin IT department.

To learn more about Digital Reach’s Desktop Management Solutions, click here.