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Windows Licensing Change – Processor to Core-Based

Dezarae Loewen -[Inside Product Manager & Microsoft Licensing Specialist]2015 Partner Logo

Microsoft is looking to release the newest version of Windows Server sometime in the second half of 2016. With this new significant product release, comes a change in not only the product but the licensing structure as well.  This article will take a look at a few of the new changes that Microsoft has made to Windows Server.

Windows Server 2016 will continue to come in both the Standard and Datacenter versions.  However, there now will be more differences between the two than just virtualization rights.  Datacenter will now include additional storage replication capabilities, a new network stack, and a new shielded virtual machines and host guardian service.

The major change with this new release is that the licensing moves to a per core model.  Windows Server 2016 will use a 2 core pack instead of the processor based model in Windows Server 2012. To license a physical server, all physical cores must be licensed with a minimum of 8 core licenses per physical processor.  The minimum cores per physical server is 16 cores.  Microsoft has stated that the price of the 16 core license of Windows Server 2016 will match the price of the 2 processor license of Windows Server 2012.  Those systems with up to 4 processors and up to 8 cores per processor should not see any change in cost from Windows 2012. However, pricing can get more expensive than the previous licensing model the higher the processor core count on each physical server.  This change to a per core license model does not do away with CAL requirements.  Windows CAL’s will still be required for each user and/or device accessing a licensed Windows Server.

2016 Server Licensing

With this expected release coming later this year, now is a great time to purchase Windows Server 2012 with software assurance.  By adding software assurance to your Windows purchase today, you will be guaranteed the right to a free license upgrade to Windows 2016 at its release. Once the software assurance term ends, the processor licenses will then be exchanged for a minimum of 8 two-core pack licenses or the actual number of physical cores in use.

For any additional questions, please contact your Keller Schroeder Account Manager for more information, including what Software Assurance and migration benefits your company is eligible for as well as how to purchase new licenses before these changes take effect.

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

New Year’s Resolutions for Application Owners & Managers

Rob Wilson – [Business Unit Director – Application Solutions]

2016 Goals

Just in case you were having a hard time coming up with your goals and objectives for 2016, we wanted to pitch in and help. We asked some of our application developers, architects, and owners to contribute New Year’s resolutions for software application professionals. If you are responsible for owning or supporting an application at your organization, this list is for you.

Check your logs

Make it a goal to monitor your application logs proactively. It could be that errors are occurring behind the scenes that do not surface on the display. Proactively monitoring your application logs may help you identify smaller issues before they become large ones.

Upgrade your solution

Are you at the current release in your packaged software? Do you have a custom written app that was developed for an older version of .NET, Java, or another platform? If so, you may be missing out on some of the latest features or making yourself vulnerable to security risks that have been addressed in future releases. Make it a goal to get your packages and platforms up to date.

Archive and purge old data

If you have data that is old and irrelevant to your existing applications, it may be taking up needed space and causing performance degradation on your servers. Resolve to archive and purge that data in 2016 and maybe you will get a performance boost in your data intensive applications.

Give some needed attention to your mission critical applications

Have you developed mission critical applications in Access, Excel, or another platform that they have outgrown? Bite the bullet in 2016 and rewrite those applications on a more robust, multiuser platform such as .NET, Java, or SharePoint. The advantages will be immediately recognizable.

Make your web site mobile friendly

If you did not get the message in 2015 that Google will not include non-mobile sites in its mobile index, then you need to get motivated right away. Mobile devices are prominent. Google has said that more searches are performed now from mobile devices than from desktops in some regions. If the Google threat alone does not motivate you, focus on the improved user experience you will be providing to your employees, customers, and prospects.

Get a handle on your source code

Is the latest source code for all of your custom applications checked in to a central repository? Is it backed up regularly? If one-off applications do not make it into the repository, or if developers do not check in their latest revisions at the appropriate times, then you may put yourself in a precarious situation if those developers are unavailable or their workstations are compromised. Make 2016 the year you get a handle on the source code situation.

Have a security assessment performed

Do you have sensitive information in a database? Do you integrate with Active Directory or another directory service every place that you should? For every high profile data breach that hit the news in 2015, there were more data breaches that went unreported and possibly undetected.  Learn from the mistakes of others and have a security assessment performed by an experienced, quality partner.

Learn something new

There are plenty of free online resources that you can use to keep your skills relevant and up to date.  Try GitHub (https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com), or the free Pluralsight (https://www.pluralsight.com) subscription that comes with a MSDN license.  Spend a few hours to make sure your next project takes advantage of the latest software tools and runs as efficiently as possible.

If you need assistance accomplishing any of your Applications New Year’s Resolutions, contact your Keller Schroeder Account Team. We are here to help!

 

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

Azure Rights Management Service from Microsoft

Microsoft Azure

Chance Webster – [Systems Engineer]

We have all seen stories on the news about company information being accidentally disclosed because of employee error or stolen during a breach of a company’s security infrastructure.  In many cases, company’s data is critical and confidential, and protecting this vital asset is a high priority.  The problem that organizations often face is protecting the company’s data within a budget that adequately aligns with the risk of data loss.

 

While there are many solutions available, Microsoft has developed a strong solution with the Azure Rights Management Service which natively integrates with many applications already in use within the business.  The Azure Rights Management Service is a cloud based Rights Management platform that provides a holistic approach to protecting your information within the Office 365 platform.  This service allows information owners to maintain access controls over the data that is being sent via email, stored on portable media, or even within the organization.  In addition, Azure Rights Management can be configured to provide notifications, either on-demand or by using a Rights Management template, that the data has been accessed by authorized users or that unauthorized access has been attempted.  Additionally, as part of the Azure Rights Management Premium service, this same protection can be extended to your on-premise Exchange, SharePoint, and File servers without a need for additional infrastructure that typically requires significant effort to implement and maintain.

 

Azure Rights Management Devices

An additional feature of the Azure Rights Management service is the Office 365 Message Encryption service.  This service provides an easy to use email encryption platform that requires very little setup and integrates with your existing email infrastructure.  Internal users can easily encrypt emails without a need for cumbersome setup time or need to exchange email certificates with a recipient in order to send an encrypted message.  Recipients of messages encrypted by the Office 365 Message Encryption service will find it easy to use and without a need for any additional setup.

 

The Azure Rights Management service is included in the Office 365 E3 and E4 plans or available for separate purchase for use with other Office 365 plans.  For on-premise infrastructure or for additional features such as tracking of RMS protected documents, Azure Rights Management Premium is available for separate purchase or as part of the Enterprise Mobility Suite or Enterprise Cloud Suite.

 

For more detailed information on Azure Rights Management Service and how it may help with protection of your organization’s data, contact your Keller Schroeder Account Manager.

 

 

 

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

The Results are In

quality survey form with red pencil showing marketing concept

As a Microsoft Gold Competency Partner, Keller Schroeder annually participates in a customer satisfaction survey to gain valuable feedback regarding our services.

For the past 6 years, our clients have been asked to rate these services based on several key performance indicators. As in previous years, Keller Schroeder significantly outpaced partner averages in categories such as the quality of our products, customer satisfaction, and the technical competency of our staff. Our customers would also highly recommend Keller Schroeder, feel they receive great value from the services they receive from us, and are confident in our ability to meet their needs.

2015 Survey Results

AI-Gold-Black

Does your company need assistance with Microsoft? Contact your Account Manager at Keller Schroeder for more information regarding our Microsoft skills and how they might benefit your organization.

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

My Top 5 SharePoint 2016 Features

Matt Mulherin – Applications Consultant

Sharepoint Roll-over

 

SharePoint 2016 is scheduled to be released in the second quarter of 2016 with many new features for both cloud and on-premises (on-prem) deployments.  Of the 26 new SharePoint 2016 features listed on Microsoft’s TechNet site, I will highlight my favorite five.  The big focus with SharePoint 2016 seems to be helping organizations to bridge the gap between their on-prem SharePoint data with their Office 365 data, which Microsoft refers to as Hybrid.  Many organizations still choose to use the on-prem SharePoint product and do not want to fully commit to the cloud (SharePoint Online via Office 365).  Some organizations may choose to invest in some of the Office 365 offerings such as email, Office web applications, and OneDrive.  I understand the hesitation of some organizations to fully commit to the cloud, and based on the SharePoint 2016 features, it appears Microsoft also understands this.

Here are my five favorite features:

  1. New Hybrid in SharePoint 2016
  2. Sharing Improvements
  3. File Size and Name Limits Improved
  4. Mobile Touch Friendly Interface
  5. Protect the Organization’s Sensitive Data

 

New Hybrid Support

Is there confusion around your organization’s strategy regarding where to store documents?  Some organizations have two OneDrive deployments, one on-prem and one in Office 365.  If so, SharePoint 2016 can remedy this by redirecting the on-prem OneDrive to the Office 365 OneDrive.

Does your organization have sites on-prem and in Office 365?  If so, you can help your users by allowing them to “pin” a site, which will add the site to a combined list of sites that can reside on-prem and in Office 365.

Do your users complain they can’t find information because some of it is on-prem and some in the cloud?  One of the most highly anticipated hybrid features allows users to search both on-prem and Office 365 content in one place.

 

Sharing Improvements

Collaboration and the sharing of information between your employees is key to the success of any company.  SharePoint 2016 boasts some new and improved sharing features.  Users will be able to do the following:

  • Create and share folders
  • View sharing hints
  • Quickly see who the folder is shared with currently
  • Share with other members
  • Take advantage of improved invitation email
  • Approve or deny a request for access with one click

 

File Size and Name Limits Improved

SharePoint has historically blocked files larger than 2GB and files with certain characters in the name.  In SharePoint 2016 users can upload files up to 10GB in size and the names of the files can contain special characters like &, ~, {}, leading dots, and the name can be longer than 128 characters.

 

Mobile Touch Friendly Interface

People are increasingly accessing the internet through mobile devices.  With SharePoint 2016, users can utilize their mobile devices to interact with SharePoint using a newly designed touch enabled interface.  Here is a screen shot of what it looks like in the Preview version of SharePoint 2016.

sharepoint-2016-collaboration-experience

 

 

Protect the Organization’s Sensitive Data

Responsible organizations today use a variety of controls and policies to keep their data safe and secure.  Sometimes users will unknowingly upload documents into SharePoint with private information in them (e.g. Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, etc…).  SharePoint 2016 has a way to help find this sensitive data and assist in the process of removing it.  SharePoint Administrators can run reports that find sensitive data residing in SharePoint and OneDrive documents.  The exportable reports identify offending documents so the document owners can properly protect this sensitive data.

 

More to Come

As we think about the next version of SharePoint, it appears Microsoft is focused on delivering value to customers as part of their on-prem deployments, while at the same time making it easier to take advantage of cloud innovation thru hybrid deployments of SharePoint.  New features are being developed and we know they be will categorized as improved user experiences, cloud-inspired infrastructure, and compliance and reporting.  Keller Schroeder is committed to our clients utilizing SharePoint and we plan to publish more insights about the exciting new features of SharePoint 2016 in the future.  Stay tuned!

 

SharePoint-Server-2016-Update-1

 

Courtesy of the Microsoft SharePoint Team
by Carissa Carissa No Comments

Spotlight On…

Ty Nixon

Employee Owners: Ty Nixon

 

Ty has 9 years of experience in the Information Technology field.  Prior to his role with Keller Schroeder, he designed, implemented, and maintained server, network, and cabling infrastructure for 56 locations in a post-secondary environment with over 8,000 students.  For that institution, he carried the primary responsibility for 100+ Windows Servers, Active Directory, Exchange 2013, SQL Server, Systems Center, Sharepoint Server, Hyper-V, Cisco LAN, WAN, and wireless technologies.  He also led the design and implementation for SAN solutions, and designed high-availability solutions based on clustering, multi-homing, and replication.

In addition to his Microsoft and Cisco background, Ty has experience with Symantec Backup Exec, Simpana Commvault, and Websense security products.  He also has experience with infrastructure automation through the use of Powershell.

Ty and his wife Teresa recently moved to the area from Texas.  They have two young children – a son named Flint and daughter Ela. In his spare time, Ty enjoys spending time with his family and being outdoors. He loves riding motorcycles, carpentry and woodworking, and studying theology.

Contact the Keller Schroeder Account Team to learn more about Ty and how you can leverage his experience and skills to benefit your organization.

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

Reporting Solutions with SQL Server

Brett Romershausen – Applications Consultant

Are you looking for a great reporting solution and are not quite sure where to start?  You may already have one and simply not realize it.  If you have Microsoft SQL Express Advanced, SQL Server Standard Edition or greater, then you have SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) available at no extra charge. ssrsWith Reporting Services, you get a lot of great ways to present the data to the user.  The package allows for a mixture of tables, lists, charts, gauges, and maps.  A created report can be used stand-alone, as a sub-report within another SSRS report, or as a linked report.  Think of all the possibilities!  Besides traditional reports, now you can create dashboard style reports that combine charts and/or reports, chart trends, reports with a table of contents, and reports that allow you to drill down into the details. You can also design your own presentations in SSRS, such as a calendar view we created for a healthcare organization that displays data in monthly or biweekly calendar formats. Reporting Services has some neat features and visualizations built-in.  Some include:

  • Drop down lists and calendar controls for choosing selection criteria
  • Column sorting and grouping
  • Expand/collapse toggling
  • Use expressions to condition column visibility, table values, text and column formatting, building links to other reports or URLs, etc.
  • Link to reports from charts
  • Create report templates

SSRS ExampleSSRS reports can be presented directly to the user with desktop apps, web apps, or SharePoint.  Another built-in feature is exporting a report to PDF, Word, CSV, XML, and MHMTL.  In addition to viewing and printing a report via the provided viewer, you can choose to schedule and email a report in any of these formats. Here are a few other things to consider:

  • Choose which product to use to design reports — SQL Server Data Tools or Microsoft Visual Studio. At Keller Schroeder, we typically use Visual Studio, but the Data Tools product is available to you at no cost if you do not own Visual Studio.
  • Before the reports can be utilized by the users, they must be published to the SQL Report Server (included with SQL Server) or a SharePoint site.
  • If you have complex queries that are better suited for views or stored procedures in SQL Server, this is possible in SSRS.
  • In addition to reporting against SQL Server, SSRS can be used to develop reports against Oracle, MySQL, most ODBC compliant databases, and even SharePoint lists.

An important feature of SSRS is the ability to allow users to filter report data based on selection criteria or parameters. You can insert a dropdown parameter list tied to a SQL table.   You can configure optional selection criteria, required criteria, and criteria that allow you to select one or many values.  These features are based on a few simple settings when defining the parameters, and then you just need to account for them in your query statement.

There are links to some of my favorite free info for Reporting Services:

Wise Owl SSRS Tutorial Series

Wise Owl SQL Procedures and Programming Tutorial Series

Reporting Services Concepts

How to Locate and Start Reporting Services Tools

Conditional Formatting in SSRS

If you need help getting started or would like to hear how SQL Server Reporting Services can benefit your organization, please contact us at Keller Schroeder.

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

Microsoft Software Asset Management

Dezarae Loewen, Inside Product Manager & Microsoft Licensing Specialist

social-media-checklist
Microsoft has recently undertaken an initiative to increase requests that customers do an audit on their Microsoft software.  Have you recently received a notice from Microsoft about a Microsoft Software Asset Management Review?  If you have, you know it can be time-consuming and most often result in unplanned software license purchases. This could mean putting off other projects due to the unforeseen purchase of licenses to get compliant.

dyanmics-1

Why does Microsoft conduct these reviews? They want to ensure that volume licensing customers stay correctly licensed under their programs. The most common causes of licensing issues are inconsistencies in versioning, product edition, server & CAL pairing, and companion products. Most companies find that they are non-compliant in one or more of these areas.  Some even find that they may be spending money on unnecessary software licensing.

 

What could help with this licensing confusion and potentially save you time and money in the future? The answer is a Software Asset Management (SAM) plan.  This is an ongoing plan to make it easier to identify what you have, where it’s running and whether you really need that software.  A SAM plan can help you cut costs, ensure that you have the best licensing programs for your organization’s specific needs, improve compliance and better prepare your organization for future software needs. A SAM plan can help your IT departments run more smoothly, and overall save time.

microsoft-partner-logoWe have several resources to help your company with your Software Asset Management needs. Whether you are in the midst of an audit or would like to get a better understanding of your Microsoft software, contact the Keller Schroeder Account Team. We are here to help!

 

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

Microsoft to Increase CALs – Effective 8/1/15

Increased-Cost

Keller Schroeder was recently informed that Microsoft is planning to increase the cost of their Client Access Licenses (CAL). On-premise user CAL pricing will increase by approximately 13% effective on August 1st, 2015. The list price for Device CALs will not change.

 

 

Which CALs are affected?

The following User CALs will be affected:

  • Core CAL Suite
  • Enterprise CAL Suite
  • Exchange Server Standard & Enterprise CALs
  • Lync Server Standard, Enterprise, & Plus CALs
  • Project Server CAL
  • SharePoint Standard & Enterprise CAL
  • System Center Configuration Manager
  • System Center Endpoint Protection
  • System Center Client Management Suite
  • Visual Studio Team Foundation Server CAL
  • Windows Server CAL
  • Windows RDS & RMS CAL
  • Windows Multipoint CAL

As a reminder, Device CALs will not be impacted by this price change, nor will CALs for any product not listed above (SQL, Dynamics AX/CRM, etc.).

If your company is looking to upgrade your Microsoft products, contact the Keller Schroeder Account Team soon to make those changes BEFORE the increase on August 1st. We will gladly answer any questions you might have and look forward to assisting you.

by Carissa Carissa No Comments

Spotlight On…

Paul Miller

Employee Owners: Paul Miller

 

Paul’s professional experience spans over 20 years across the IT departments of industries as diverse as Healthcare, Banking, Manufacturing and Distribution, Energy, and Broadcasting. Most recently Paul was a Senior Solutions Architect/Team Lead for Baptist Health Kentucky, where he supported over 3000 servers and 25000 clients. His roles included Project Management, Citrix Configuration and Support, Exchange Administration Active Directory Implementation, Acquisitions, Executive Advisement, Mobile Device Management, Domain Migrations, Network Analysis, Client-Server Configuration Management, Internal Security, Threat Response, Identity Management, and Staff Management.

Prior to his role at Baptist, Paul worked for several Fortune 500 companies such as Stride Rite Corporation and Kindred Healthcare. Paul served as Director of IT Systems for Physicians Primary Care, and also consulted for small and medium businesses in the Louisville, KY area. In these roles he implemented everything from Radiology Systems, Robotics, Software and Hardware Certification Processes, and Managed Client Solutions. He is a Senior Systems Engineer.

Contact the Keller Schroeder Account Team to learn more about Paul and how you can leverage his experience and skills to benefit your organization.

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