Cobweb Solutions Blog - The UK's Leading Cloud Provider

Finally...

Well anyone that has ever read any of my blogs before will know I've been doing an MBA at Portsmouth University. After three years of slog it's finally finished! I'd love to say writing 15000 words on 'Information Security, it's importance to a business and whether this is affected by the current economical climate' was a pleasure to write but well, you wouldn't believe me and would be right not to. The last 1500 words were a struggle. Watch out for a whitepaper on it coming soon!

On a totally unrelated note whilst looking in to the differences between WSS2.0 and WSS3.0 (Hosted SharePoint) I found this - here

Well done Microsoft, an easy to understand comparison document! Can we have more like this please?

Mark 

Rogue SharePoint deployments cause security menace

If you're a business manager and you constantly struggle getting simple & flexible solutions for data management from your internal IT guys, then the chances are you're working around this with a rogue SharePoint deployment

"Gartner estimates that 30% of SharePoint servers are rogue deployments, launched by business managers without the IT department's knowledge. SharePoint is easy to set up and easy to use, which makes it popular with the power-user crowd. That might be nice for Microsoft's pocketbook but not for IT pros. Rogue deployments are not likely to be very secure"

So what's the quick, secure and flexible solution? Simple - buy hosted SharePoint

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Cobweb happy to support IE8 for all our Hosted Services

Good news, it's official - Following the release of Internet Explorer 8 last week, Cobweb are happy to confirm full support for all of our managed services using the released version (RTM) of IE8. If you're still on a beta version, Microsoft recommends you upgrade as there may be a few minor issues.

WSS 2.0, WSS 3.0, Dynamics CRM 4.0, Hosted Exchange 2003 & Hosted Exchange 2007

http://www.exchange2007.com/2009/03/exchange-2003-2007-owa-and-internet.html

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Good news!

Cobweb completed its annual external audit against our three ISO systems last week to ensure that we are still compliant. I'm very pleased to say we are and with probably the cleanest audit ever. Anyone that has put one of these systems in across a business will know the difficulty and complexity involved so you can imagine having three is a real challange to get right. But it seems like we have!

The three standards we hold are ISO9001 - Quality (since 2004), ISO27001 - Information Security (since 2005) and ISO14001 - Environmental( since 2008)

These systems are much more than a badge to Cobweb. They are the principles on which the business is based. Secure, reliable, robust and quality services backed up by people that care about what they are delivering and wanting to get it right for the customer.

An extra special well done to our Management Systems team. There have been quite a few changes as people move around the business but they've acquitted themselves admirably and shown they are more than up to the job at hand.

We don't get it right everytime, but 99.9% isn't bad is it? :)

Mark

Hosted Services – no assembly required

Microsoft has worked hard over the years to simplify the installation and configuration of their software... Next-Next-Finish - Job done, server is working, the boss is happy. Microsoft has also worked hard to provide supporting documentation and tools to assist with the design of systems. That's what I'm going to talk about here...

There's a great article from Neil Hobson, an Exchange MVP, on the sizing of Exchange solutions which pulls together a number of these tools to analyse, calculate, plan, design, stress-test, load-test and finalise your system design. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of technical documentation is available for download if you want it.

What's most worrisome though is the massive possible variance in the results from these tools – first up, you need to estimate the profile of your users; light, average or heavy-user, based on the number and size of emails they typically send. Some wrong numbers here or some increases in mail usage can throw those results out of the window. Why do I say this? Because we know how easy it is to get this wrong. Take a look at the article – have you got you CPU-core and storage group ratios right for the RAM you have in your servers?

Capacity planning, which includes performance planning too as an over-capacity platform equals performance issues for sure, is the biggest single challenge for any hosting company. If you don't get this right it goes very wrong, very quickly. My teams spend a lot of time working with these tools modelling and re-modelling our system designs using actual production user profile data, and despite our best efforts the resulting designs vary in more ways that you'd imagine. We overcome this issue with an N+1 model for redundancy with an additional +1 added for capacity, i.e. we always have at least 1 more server or cluster than we need in the already redundant solution.

Using a hosted service completely removes the unpredictability of capacity management. There are no issues with increasing or decreasing user numbers, no worries about the impact of increased usage profiles, more traffic, email volumes or variables which are out of your control.

So don't read those documents and don't download the storage stressing tools – you don't need the stress!

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain