A few years ago, Nicholas Carr (a former editor of Harvard Business Review) set the cat amongst the pigeons with his thought-provoking book – Does IT Matter. With this book, Nicholas Carr forced us to re-examine some of our most basic assumptions about IT and business value and now he’s at it again with the revelation that an avatar, a virtual persona in the Second Life online world, consumes as much electricity as the average citizen of Brazil. You can read the full story here.
Everyone in IT knows that they have a key role to play in reducing the carbon footprint of their desktop and datacentre operations. The amount of savings possible in power consumption and emissions are quite staggering. According to Gartner, IT accounts for about 2 percent of CO2 emissions - the same proportion as the aviation industry - with PCs being responsible for 40% of the total carbon emitted.
One of the key technology solutions that can help to reduce the overall cost of IT operations is virtualisation. This is an area where Microsoft is developing capabilities to help reduce operating costs (particularly power consumption) and the carbon footprint of IT from the desktop to the datacentre. You can find out more about the Microsoft approach to virtualisation here.
Posted by Ian
Now that I have your attention with that rather sensationalist headline, let me explain: Tayside Fire & Rescue is one of eight fire authorities in Scotland, providing emergency services to over 400,000 people in an area covering 7000 square kilometres, whose PBX telephony system was proving costly to maintain and adapt to their changing communication requirements.
According to Gary Bellfield, Manager of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at Tayside Fire and Rescue, “The last time we wanted to implement a single analogue extension in one of our fire stations, we spent more than £4,500.”
Tayside has now complemented their PABX with a unified communications solution that enables them to provide a wider choice of communication options across their network of fire stations and administrative centres. The solution is also enabling more effective collaboration, document sharing and conference call facilities, all of which are helping to reduce the need to travel to meetings and increasing the overall productivity of their operations.
You can read the full story on how Tayside Fire & Rescue are using unified communications here
Now for the shameless plug – don’t forget that you can find out more about this and other public sector unified communication solutions by taking part in our Live Meeting (webcast) on Unified Communications on Tuesday December 11th. More information here
Back in September I did promise to run a Live Meeting (webcast) on the first Tuesday of every month between 10:00-11:00 on a technology topic of relevance to the Public Sector. Next month, because of a clash of commitments, I need to make the Live Meeting the second Tuesday – December 11th.
The topic is Unified Communications. The session will explore how Public Sector organisations can improve their communications with fully-integrated Internet voice (VoIP), messaging (email and instant messaging) and conferencing. The Live Meeting will also discuss how to reduce overall expenditure (e.g. travel costs) and help to meet reduced carbon footprint targets, through better communication and collaboration practices. Microsoft Unified Communications solutions are already enabling many organisations to achieve greater efficiencies in their communications, both internally and citizen facing, while helping to deliver more effective flexible and integrated working solutions that contribute to the productivity gains required by the Gershon review.
All you need to do to take part in the Microsoft Live Meeting on Unified Communications in the Public Sector on Tuesday December 11th from 10:00 -11:00 is to activate the following web URL on your browser and connect to the conference call line: Logon to: Unified Communications in the Public Sector
Conference call number (only required if not listening via the Internet):Telephone: 0118 909 2000 Passcode: 1796572
Also, you can find out more about Microsoft Unified Communication solutions here and replay any of the previous Live Meetings from our archive here
My thanks to my colleague, Ray Fleming, in the Microsoft Education team for keeping us posted on the latest news from the Microsoft IT Forum in Barcelona this week. While Ray has been working hard in the Spanish sunshine, the reality of winter has begun to set in this week in the UK. Short days, long nights, cold weather and the first signs of winter germs making office colleagues sniffle and sneeze their way through the working day.
Therefore, I was amused to come across this article on germs in the workplace, reporting on a research study completed by NTL:Telewest. I am sure that the fact that the sponsor of the research provides business broadband is purely a coincidence. However, it is another example of the productivity gains that can be achieved from deploying flexible and mobile working solutions. We are certainly not advocating that ill people should be made to work but there are advantages in being able to provide those with a cold in the nose with the option of working remotely and thereby reducing the risk of infecting colleagues throughout the office.
Sometimes, the business value of technology can be somewhat unexpected!
If you would like to receive a copy of the Microsoft Flexible Working Solutions for Local and Regional Government – Benefits Paper, developed in collaboration with the Microsoft Local Authority Shared Learning Group, send an email to: lrg@microsoft.com
Yes, I know you might still think of SQL 2005 as a new product, but SQL 2008 is nearly with us and there are many reasons why people are looking to upgrade. There was a useful session at IT Forum which looked at the release of SQL 2008, and explored the new facilities that it will provide. In a nutshell, it promises:
Posted by Ray
There's a phrase - "Enterprise Search" - which summarises the next step in effective use of technologies for collaboration, data sharing and making your institutional memory more accessible. By this I mean, when anybody in your organisation publishes a piece of information that they want to share, you need to make that information available to other people in an easy way - a way that doesn't require them to remember where that information is stored. Another step in journey towards improved information availability is the expanding range of options available to help you to search your internal IT systems.
I wonder how many people know about our Search story for the enterprise? It seems that it's mostly the SharePoint enthusiasts and not many others. This is likely to change following our recent launch of our new Microsoft Search Server (MSS) 2008 - there's plenty of information on this at: www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch
At IT Forum today Richard Riley talked us through the two flavours of search available, which are:
The big area of investment in MSS 2008 is Federation. This means that it will display the results from other search engines or applications displayed alongside local results. MSS will send a query to other search engines or data query services and format them for the user.
The benefit of Federated search is that you can anticipate that users may be intending to find a wide range of information. Somebody searching within your organisation for "data protection policies" could be looking for information on your data protections policies (likely to be on your internal portal), or they could be looking for Internet articles or definitions. By using Federated search, you can produce internal and external sources on one page of search results. You can also use this method to search your internal SharePoint and your own public-facing website, which may be hosted on a completely different IT system.
Some of the launch partners with connectors are OpenText, Business Objects, Cognos and Symantec plus around 10+ others.
"The value in virtualisation technology moving forward will be in the management and the operating system rather than in the virtualisation stack."
I attended an interesting session at IT Forum today from Guillaume Field, from Dell. He started the session off by saying something along the lines of "you are all buying way too many servers and we want you to stop". Controversial stuff to hear from a guy at Dell. However, he then went on to say that that all these servers people are buying are doing the wrong thing and virtualisation is the way to get them back on track.
It seems that of all the power put into a data centre, only 4% of it is actually turned into compute power. Match this with the fact that most servers are only at around 5-15% utilisation you can see what Guillaume is getting at with his opening statement. By continuing with the traditional model of 'new application=new physical server', we are seeing compute power increase and utilisation decrease. Dell's data centres are so full that they are only allowed to implement a new server if they remove one. Without virtualisation this would limit their ability to grow their business.
The power of the new x86 servers is still growing according to Moore's law, so theoretically as Dell does replace servers in its data centre with a strategy to virtualise, they will see utilisation increase as compute power increases.
The point about the value being in the management is absolutely crucial to this and Guillaume's outlined Microsoft's strategy to have one Management interface for all its virtualisation products (Terminal Services, SoftGrid, Virtual PC and Virtual Server). Naturally the Management Interface to do this is Microsoft System Centre which is also the tool you are using to manage the rest of the estate. Simple!
In a recent survey, 70% of (male) drivers said that their driving skills were "above average". Which tells you that most people think that they are better drivers than the others on the road. Well, PC security is probably like this - most users think that they know more about making the right decisions than the "average user". Which means they are likely to think that security features are there to protect others from their own mistakes - whereas they themselves, surely, don't need security measures because they know what they are doing. Of course, you know this isn't true (except, of course, in your case!)
So this morning at IT Forum, I joined a security session with Rafal Lukawiecki & Steve Lamb, subtitled "How to do more business with less risk". I was interested to hear their perspective, because my main experience of IT is as a user, and security always seems to be designed to get in my way and is designed to stop me doing things I need to do (okay, I'm realistic, and do recognise sometimes that it's there for my benefit)
Rafal and Steve's perspective was that while there are many new areas of security that are built-in to Windows Vista, there are 3 or 4 key features which everybody should be looking at, and thinking how it will help them to manage their IT infrastructure.
Here are those key security features:
Two excellent security nuggets from Rafal and Steve:
The overarching message was:
- You need tight security to make your systems reliable, and keep your data secure
- Your users want ease-of-use, and security gets in the way of that sometimes
The answer is to find the right compromise, because too much security will encourage users to find ways around your security; too little security might make your users happy but give an unacceptable risk for your business systems.
One recommended way to get your users on your side is to show them what the implications are if they don't pay attention. For example, if a user leaves a computer logged on, and leaves their desk, what information could another person see? Or who could be emailed from their Contacts list? Simple examples help to reinforce the message that a simple step like locking your machine (Windows Key + "L") is simple and improves security significantly.
Steve's blog is a good source for further information on this subject, and to explore the subject further.
Vinny Guloto, General Manager for the Malware Protection Centre, presented today on the work that the centre is putting into the world of threat research, and both reactive and proactive response.
One of the interesting slides that Vinny used was about the history of development of industry standards in anti-virus development, and how the anti-virus marketplace has grown. It was broken down into:
More than 3,400 new software vulnerabilities were reported in the first 6 months of this year (please note, this isn't 3,400 vulnerabilities in MS software, but across the whole software marketplace that could threaten your PC or data). Seemed like a lot to me, until Vinny explained this is actually a decrease in a six month period for the first time since 2000.
Windows Defender is a piece of free software from MS which looks for things like adware and spyware, rather than specifically "malicious" software - it isn't anti-virus software. Using Windows Defender as an example, he shared some statistics:
After the presentation, it is often the Q&A which contains a startling revelation. And this session was no different. Following a question about how things are changing, he threw in a statistic that was almost a throwaway - that the Malware Protection Centre have found that with Defender, Windows Vista machines have 3 times less "potentially unwanted" software than other Windows machines. Which provides a real life example of the way that the security built into Windows Vista is delivering (silently!) benefits to both the end user and the IT team running their networks.
To read more about the work that Vinny's team do, check out their Microsoft Malware Protection Center Portal
Posted by Ray, at IT Forum
I'm at the IT Forum event this week - it's a week long tech-fest about current and future technologies from Microsoft. This year's event has 5,200 delegates and we're all sitting in a conference centre on the shores of Mediterranean in Barcelona (not quite as wonderful as it sounds - it was 10-degrees when we got here, and I didn't even think I needed a coat...brrrr). We're joined this year by around 100 IT staff from public sector organisations around the UK, all here for the same thing - to get a behind-the-scenes, and in-depth look at the software that runs their services, and to see how new releases can help to improve your service delivery.
I'm going to do my best to bring you some of the headlines of the event, and their relevance to you.
Windows Server 2008
The opening keynote focused on Windows Server 2008 - the first of a launch wave of products due to be launched on 27th February. It will bring a wide range of new features and functionality which will be useful, such as:
More detail on the Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V announcements
Virtualization*
This has been the buzzword of the afternoon. And what's available helps meet some of the the unique challenges of public sector IT systems supporting a range of different departments - the expectation from users that they can run whatever applications they want, at the drop of the hat. Oh, and that you'll keep the IT Services up and running whenever they need access.
We've got virtualization technologies coming out of our ears at the moment - Applications virtualization (through SoftGrid/Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack); Presentation virtualization (through Terminal Services); Desktop virtualization; and enhanced Server virtualization (through Windows Server 2008).
More info on the System Center announcements
* Which is it? Virtualisation or Virtualization? Normally, I go for UK spellings, but the latest versions of the Oxford dictionary seem to be shifting to a more agnostic approach on Americanised spellings - on this occasion, I'm going to go with it, because we've got product names in here too. Does it really matter? Do you care? I've know that some of the online training providers find they get a lower completion rate on versions using American spellings - sometimes 50% of the normal rate. Does that mean I've lost half of you half-way through this article? Discuss...