DevOps is a huge buzz word of late, and for good reason. A company who fails to organize around this new culture of development and deployment will quickly find themselves falling behind the new pace of technology. In a nutshell,
Technology
Innovation is essential for success in business, but some people just don’t like change. If you’ve ever tried to introduce a new technology or a new approach to doing business to an organization with an established way of doing things,
We all know that taking a phone call on speaker phone from your desk in your open concept workplace is really irritating to everybody else in the office. Don’t do it. Pick up your phone or put on a headset.
The key takeaways: Global surveys of business leaders show that investing in technology is a key strategy for competitive organizations. When an organization falls behind in the innovation game, catching up with the competition can be nearly impossible. The full
Imagine having a whole extra workday to create and bring your ideas to fruition. You know what? Just by eliminating some of the most common time-wasters we all encounter almost every day, you can earn one back. Here’s how. “Oh
Imagine being in the midst of delivering exceptional IT service to your organization when suddenly an advertisement for cut rate vacations to Cuba pops up on your screen. That’d be quite distracting, wouldn’t you agree? That’s exactly what was happening
When we talk about Office 365 and the move to the cloud with our clients we’re often surprised to hear how disparate their opinions are. They usually know of the business agility and potential cost savings that come with moving
The IT environment has become more complicated as organizations begin hosting vital applications in cloud environments. There has never been a more critical time for businesses to gain a holistic view and complete control of their IT infrastructure. However, for
There have been reports of an issue in which the error “Subtask CheckPrereqs execution failed: Check Tenant Prerequisites” is received when running Hybrid Configuration Wizard. Microsoft recently released a fix to remediate impact. Symptoms: When you use the Hybrid Configuration wizard
It’s undeniable, big data is everywhere and is being generated by everything around us at all times. It’s changing the way organizations operate and changing how people work. Now more than ever business and IT leaders are forced to work
We are excited to announce that we are one of the newest sponsors of CollabCon 2015! Bringing together some of the brightest minds in the industry, CollabCon 2015 is a business and information technology conference that will help you discover creative and
Technology has changed drastically over the last 11 years. Remember when we had to use maps to get around? Us either. But back when Window’s Server 2003 (WS 2003) was first released that’s how we did it. Looking back, a
It’s a sad but well-known fact of IT life: many organizations feel they can’t afford or justify keeping a full-time dedicated SharePoint administrator on staff. So either the job gets added to some unfortunate soul’s already full roster of duties, or worse, nobody handles on-premises SharePoint administration duties at all – leaving the platform to fend for itself.
It took innovative thinking to successfully negotiate that contract for new equipment; the documents are signed and sealed and the equipment installed. Job well done. But it isn’t over yet. Because although today all the salient facts are at your
With more than 100 vendors operating in the market, IT service desk tools have become widely available and highly commoditized. Each year Gartner releases their ITSSM Magic Quadrant to help customers evaluate vendors and support decision making. The research is
Think the new Anti-Spam Legislation set to go into effect on July 1, 2014 is about email? Think again. Labelled harsh, penetrating and with powers to fine up to $10 million, the legislation covers much more than spam emails. Preparation
IT teams are under an increasing amount of pressure to improve inefficiencies with a continuously shrinking budget. As a result, business executives are involving themselves in IT operations more than ever. According to IDC predictions, approximately 56% of technology decisions
The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) has gained an increasing amount of attention over the last few weeks. Although the legislation has been in the works since late last year it is only now that businesses have begun to understand the
Microsoft has recently released a bulletin and fix for what they have deemed a critical vulnerability affecting the Office suite of products (which includes SharePoint and its companion Office Web Apps). The vulnerability affects both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 where
Thinking of moving your business to the Cloud? Making the decision to move to the Cloud can cut costs, inspire innovation, and improve productivity and efficiency; all things that can propel a business ahead of its competition. But the bottom
Having just returned from the mind-blowing SharePoint Conference 2014 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, I wanted to get my thoughts and impressions down while they were still relatively fresh. A LOT went down these past 5 days, and
You have heard the saying ‘we’re only human’? It’s a phrase we use to remind ourselves that we are prone to making mistakes. In your business, your team members do not intentionally enter incorrect data or lose information but it
At Navantis we see hundreds of SharePoint environments. Some we build, some we rescue and a lot of which we manage. Our clients run their business on SharePoint. It’s their communications portal, their frontend interface to applications, their internal or
Last week I underwent an intensive immersion in all things Yammer in a two day session provided by Microsoft and Yammer folks in Chicago, and I left with a newfound enthusiasm for the Yammer platform and its potential for adoption
There are a number of things I hold onto from my past, but my operating system isn’t one of them. Microsoft Windows XP was released in the fall of 2001 and has had a good long run, its support from
A large number of organizations rely on public folders for day to day business and they cannot get away from them. This becomes an issue for those organizations in that they are limited in their ability to migrate or upgrade
One of SharePoint’s most valuable functions is its Search Capability. Not only does it leverage the content that it crawls within your organization’s database, but it is also able to track the frequency each keyword is used in the Search
Certified for Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution Peopleworks is maximizing on industry trends to drive member engagement through online collaboration. Peopleworks supports an innovative and key differentiator in its forums and message boards section of the Online Portal. This forum and
As part of my job at Navantis over the years, I have sat in on hundreds of our clients’ meeting rooms. In many of those rooms, I see very elaborate and expensive video and teleconferencing equipment. I have seen many
This is the first blog in a series of posts related to “Migration” and “Upgrading” to the latest SharePoint 2013 Platform. Many of our Enterprise customers are hearing a lot of good things about the new features and functionalities. They
I have implemented System Center 2012 Configuration Manager for many clients, and while many of them use it just for their desktops or laptops, they do not use it for their servers. For various reasons, they are reluctant to add
Today, I’m going to give you a brief introduction to PowerShell 3.0, the newest version of the PowerShell family that comes built in with Windows Server 2012. For many years, there has been a controversial topic among the Microsoft and
Are you a project manager who is continually calling Accounting to ask for information on your jobs? Do you ask questions like: What are my commitments? How am I doing compared to my budget? What is the Net Profit on
Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 have been out for a while now. There is a lot that is new and there is a lot that is awesome in this release. For a complete list, please see “What’s
The clock is ticking for those enterprises who still have SharePoint 2003 deployments, and the distant drumming begins for those who have any investment in the SharePoint 2007 platform. Microsoft’s support of both of these products have recent or upcoming
I get asked the question “What are you working on these days?” a lot. Well, one of my responses is, that I spend a lot of my time of late having conversations with our clients around Office 365. When I’m
When I first encountered Visual Studio 2008 Database Projects (or “Data Dude”), I was truly blown away. Database development suddenly got real. For too long database development was delegated second class status – all of the work in the database
Online meetings are integral to successful businesses. The beauty of virtual rendezvous lies in their convenience and cost effectiveness: members from around the globe can meet at a specified time and confer with one another without incurring travel costs. A
In the grand old tradition of “Top x” lists, here’s my own (highly biased) take on the best features of Microsoft’s newest client operating system (in no particular order). Keep in mind, my perspective is that of a power user,
In an effort to go towards a user-centric environment, Microsoft introduced a new method of deploying applications in ConfigMgr 2012, entitled Applications Management. It provides a way of deploying an application to a user by associating a user with a
I was reviewing some of the available CRM content off various websites and I was amazed to see that, for the most part, IT professionals are still talking about traditional uses of CRM. By traditional, I am referring to Contact
Recently I installed an instance of TFS 2012 and TFS 2012 Build for a client. It is a simple setup with TFS 2012 on one server and TFS 2012 Build (one controller and one agent) on another server. The client
One of the key features in SharePoint is the ability to create customized sites and to save these as “Site Templates”. You can take a site that you have spent hours configuring to a specific customize format including creating document
I just installed Visual Studio 2012, and was pleasantly surprised to find a new storyboard tool based on PowerPoint! When you run the tool, you get regular PowerPoint with a set of shapes preconfigured to work together that represent common
One of the key limitations in SharePoint 2010 is flexibility in the navigation structure to span multiple site collections. This isn’t possible without significant custom development in SharePoint 2010 and is one of the more exciting features in SharePoint 2013.
One of the cool new features in SharePoint 2013 is the ability to use the Term Store to drive navigation. In my previous post, I created a Term Set called Diseases. Let’s use this to now drive the navigation for
In the new SharePoint 2013 preview environment (sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site and you can create your own environment) you get a very nice “Central Admin” type tool for managing all your site collections. By default, you
The SharePoint 2013 preview has been announced and there are some interesting new features, although from my perspective, this is less a revolution than SharePoint 2010 was based on what has been announced so far. Here are some of the
Maturing Enterprise Content Management has become a critical success factor in managing information in global organizations. In many cases, we see organizations who have implemented traditional ECM solutions such as LiveLink, Documentum, Filenet, etc. five to ten years ago. Many
In my visits with customers, I have noticed a new “sprawl” phenomenon – multiple SharePoint farms. In most cases, you only need a single SharePoint farm. There are some good reasons why you might need a second one (for example,
One of my colleagues sent me a couple good articles on SharePoint Governance specifically related to manufacturing companies. http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240036242/Microsoft-SharePoint-best-practices-begin-with-governance-experts-say http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240035866/More-manufacturers-turning-to-Microsoft-SharePoint-collaboration Some good insights and we would agree with most of the suggestions in these articles. I especially like this comment:
There are many “off the shelf” SharePoint training programs. These include online courses, computer based training and in classroom training sessions. When we do training, we target the following audiences: IT Staff Developers Site Owners (those with Design or Full
Metadata is information that describes, classifies or identifies a piece of information. Metadata is typically described as a set of attributes that help to describe or classify an object. For example, here are just some of the metadata attributes for
We have many customers who are upgrading from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Their existing SharePoint implementations vary from full blown intranets, local collaboration sites, or application portals. We find many cases where one line of business implemented
SharePoint 2010 provides a container approach to partitioning information, security boundaries and infrastructure: When you design your SharePoint governance strategy, you can apply decisions on how the platform is divided at each layer in the model. For example,
When we engage organizations in SharePoint Governance Strategy projects, we’re working with the organization to help define their overall approach to implementing, rolling out and operation of their SharePoint platform. The typical deliverable is a large document that provides the
Like many IT projects, SharePoint projects experience significant failure rates or do not achieve their desired objectives. One of the key reasons for challenges with rollout is the failure to establish a formal governance program for SharePoint. This may lead
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