Of course it’s pretty well known that Microsoft requires a premium Exchange CAL to use Personal Archives, and that you also must be running the Enterprise Edition of Exchange Server 2010. Fair enough, even though I think personal archives is a feature that every company small or large can really benefit from and should be something Microsoft is pushing harder. What ends up being a confusing topic is what version of Outlook is needed to access the personal archive, and this is where our client ran into snags.

Microsoft has until recently been very confusing on the topic. Until the 17th of March, this page included the following text:

“Personal Archive is available only when you use Outlook 2010 as part of Microsoft Office Professional 2010 or Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 with a volume license.”

As of last week that sentence has been removed and replaced with a link to this page, which spells out the licensing requirements. To summarize, according to this you need to be running a volume licensing version of Office Professional or a stand-alone retail license of Outlook to access the personal archives. Which brings me to my client’s situation – they prefer to purchase Office with their PC purchase, which Microsoft of course encourages through the Product Key Card add-on that comes pre-installed, just purchase a code for the version you want and it’s unlocked. Unfortunately, there is NO Office Bundle that they can buy this way that will let them access personal archives. It’s either volume licensing or stand-alone editions of Outlook. (Note: versions of Outlook 2007 can also access Personal Archives with a recent patch, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion)

So kudos to Microsoft for getting their act and language together around what version can do what. We have to give them a big raspberry though for leaving the retail market pretty much high and dry when it comes to a version of Office that can be bundled with a new PC purchase that supports Personal Archives. We also have the give them another shake of the head for parsing the features of Exchange and Outlook so much that you need an advanced degree in confusing marketing to figure it out. So not only do you need Exchange Enterprise, and a Premium CAL for Personal Archives, you now also need a volume license edition of Outlook to do the job. This is the type of stuff that drives customers crazy.

To be fair, in Exchange 2010 Personal Archives can also be accessed through the Outlook Web App, but we think this leads to an inconsistent experience for the users. Here’s hoping that Microsoft finally wakes up and realizes the companies that pay top-dollar for the retail version of Office Professional deserve the same feature set as a volume license buyer.

Finally, in a separate but related topic, there is a lot of bad information out on the Internet around what you need to be able to import PSTs into someone’s mailbox or personal archive in Exchange 2010. I’ve seen blog posts that say you must have Outlook installed, that it must be a mailbox server, etc. As of Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1, NONE OF THAT IS TRUE.

To be able to import PSTs into an Exchange Mailbox for Personal Archive, all you need are the Exchange Management Toools. That’s it.

Happy messaging everyone!

It was a full year, and we’ve had the opportunity to work on some great projects such as Exchange 2010 migrations, Office Communications Server pilots, VMware migrations, and a host of other technology challenges. So busy in fact that it’s been tough to keep the blog up to date!

I’d like to share with everyone some exciting news. Every once in a while one of our customers comes to us and asks if we can procure hardware and software for them. The answer has always been that we can put them in touch with the right folks thanks to our industry connections, and we at Walker IT Group, LLC will help ensure everything is spec’ed out correctly.

This has happened often enough that after much consideration and planning, we are pleased to announce that we have officially become a reseller of IT equipment and software! We’ve put agreements in place with two distribution powerhouses: Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Through our relationship with these firms, we’re now able to offer our customers a wide selection of products from thousands of different manufacturers. When it’s time to purchase new equipment, please think of us, we’d love the opportunity to present you a free, no-obligation quote.

Additionally, we’ve also partnered with select companies that align well with our offered services in order to give the customers that ask for it the ability to have a “one-stop shop” for their IT Infrastructure needs. Please see our “Partners” page for more details on the current roster. We will periodically review our relationships and maintain a suitable mix based on the needs of our customers.

We of course recognize that many of our existing customers prefer to buy their equipment and software through their own sources, and we’d like to reiterate this doesn’t present a problem at all. The service you’ve come to expect from us will continue to be available regardless to where you’ve purchased your equipment or software.

Finally, while these partnerships are important to us, let me re-assure everyone that we primarily think of ourselves as a service provider. To that end, if the right solution for your business is from a vendor that we don’t have as a partner we won’t hesistate to recommend that solution for you – arriving at the right answer for our customer’s businesses is more important to us than proposing an alternate solution just because we happen to sell it. At the same time, we’ve carefully selected our current partners because we feel they offer some of the best solutions in the industry.

We’re excited about the opportunity to expand our offerings to our customers, and we weclome your feedback and comments.

What is it?

Microsoft KMS is a service that companies who have volume licensing agreements for their Microsoft Products can activate installed copies of their software.

What’s covered?

As of this writing, KMS covers all volume licensing editions of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2010.

What are the benefits?

KMS makes it possible to deploy and activate the products listed above WITHOUT DISTRIBUTING YOUR LICENSE KEYS TO ANYONE. Think about it – by using KMS you no longer have to build unattended installations with your license keys in the answer files, or give your license keys out to your IT team responsible for deploying software.

Another benefit is that after a set period of time (by default 6 months) if a computer cannot contact the KMS server the software is “deactivated”. This is useful for laptops that are popular theft items.

How does it work?

Every computer running Windows Server 2008, 2008R2, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 has the ability to become a KMS server. Additionally there’s an add-on for Windows Server 2003 that does the same thing. For Office 2010 activations there’s a small installation program available from Microsoft that will add support to an existing KMS server, however this can only be run on a KMS server running on Windows 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Windows 7.

When you turn on KMS  server it publishes an SRV record to DNS with the server name and port (default is 1688). The record name is _vlmcs, and there is one per domain. The volume licensing editions of the products listed above are setup to use KMS by default. They will attempt to contact the KMS server listed in the SRV record and request an activation. By default they try every 2 hours until they are activated, and then they check in once per week. If they cannot contact the KMS server during the one week period (such as a laptop used by a travelling sales rep) no problem – it stays activated until six months have elapsed.

The protocol is designed to be very lightweight and resilient. You can have multiple KMS servers, but keep in mind that there are minimum thresholds of unique activation requests that must be received before KMS will activate. If you have a big network you may consider multiple KMS servers by site, but to do that you need to run some script commands on each client to specify the KMS server to use.

What if the KMS server fails? With a default config it’s easy. Just delete the _vlmcs SRV record, install a new KMS server, and activations will switch to the new server over time.

Sounds easy – what’s the catch?

A few things. First, to activate a given product class, a minimum number of requests must be received. This is to prevent someone from installation a KMS server with your key at home, say a Windows Administrator who has your keys.

Once you reach those thresholds, at next check all copies will that particular product will activate. Note that you need 25 or 5 machines for Desktop OSs and Server OSs, respectively. It doesn’t matter what combination of OSs those machines are running.

Now there’s another catch that has caught many companies by surprise. When it comes to OSs (not the Office 2010 activations) KMS server will only activate products within the same product group or lower! So you want to install KMS on the highest level operating system you will run in your company. See the activation matrix at the end of this post.

Installing the KMS server is easy – simply activate the server installation with using the appropriate KMS product key for your company, available from the Microsoft Volume Licensing Center.

If you have machines that are not on your network at least every six months, you can activate that machine using retail codes or a MAK (multiple-activation key) that comes with your licensing agreement. MAK codes have an upper limit to the number of activations before you have to contact Microsoft. We think for medium and large organizations KMS will be the preferred choice, although MAK keys will certainly come in handy for special use cases such as laptops issued to telecommuters without VPN access to the KMS server.

There are a few other caveats to be aware of such as most of the administration of KMS happening through the use of Microsoft-supplied VBS files, but as you can see installing KMS can help ease the administration of license information in your organization and help ensure that your keys remain private and confidential. If you have further questions, feel free to sound off here. In addition, Walker IT Group, LLC offers KMS consulting services to help you determine the best use.

For more information you can review Microsoft’s Volume Activation section of TechNet Library.

IT has a history of latching onto hot trends and buzzwords, and the latest is no different: cloud computing. Let me first say that it’s an exciting concept, but not necessarily a new one. While it has evolved over the years, it’s had a number of names that date back to the early days of IT and MIS. Here’s a few you might have heard in previous decades: application service provider, hosted service provider, network computing, time-sharing, multitenancy. All of these are variations on the same theme – someone else hosts the system or application, the client using the system pays for only the portion they use, without the overhead expense of maintaining the infrastructure.

What may be different this time around is that a few key technology areas have come together, and the cloud is starting to make a lot of sense for businesses of different sizes. What’s different?

• Virtualization Innovations: VMWare and their brethren like Hyper-V are allowing companies to host multiple “virtual” servers on one physical machine by taking advantage of processor idle time.
• Bandwidth Increase: Internet bandwidth has dropped in price and increased in capacity, so the graphical, audio, and dynamic experience users expect can be realistically delivered remotely; all the way down to having virtual desktops.

From a business perspective there are some great positives to harnessing a cloud computing setup for your company.

1. Lower equipment costs – there should be less capital outlay for servers and less operating costs on things like electricity and cooling since you are outsourcing the data center.
2. Dynamic sizing – Assuming you selected a good provider, moving your applications and data to the cloud can give you great freedom to add or subtract computing capacity quickly and easily as your business changes.
3. Peace of mind – Perhaps one of the biggest headaches for large enterprises and a nearly insurmountable obstacle for smaller operations is setting up disaster recovery. The right cloud environment promises to offer seamless and effortless business continuity in the event of a problem. Effortless for you that is, because all the risk is being borne by the service provider.

What’s not to like? Well there are a few things.

1. Loss of control and customization – Don’t get me wrong, cloud providers are continuing to add customization capabilities, but at some level you are forced into their perspective of how the environment looks or what it can contain. Don’t expect Google Apps to be hosting your Oracle databases anytime soon, for example.
2. Risk of hacking – By going with a big name in the cloud computing arena, you are increasing the risk that you are going to be a target for computer hacking. I hedge that by saying that it’s a slight increase that’s probably offset by the (hopefully) more sophisticated security systems used by a professional cloud provider. So let’s call this one a wash – it’s not really a con or pro for cloud computing.
3. Pricing Model Concerns – Depending on the pricing model used by the provider, scaling up in terms of users or percentage of computing power consumed could be detrimental to your budget.
4. Legal Concerns – It does not appear that your information stored at a cloud service provider has the same legal protections as documents stored at your place of business.

Wait, what’s that about legal concerns?

[DISCLAIMER: WE ARE NOT ATTORNEYS NOR A LAW FIRM, AND THIS ARTICLE IS NOT INTENDED TO SUBSTITUTE FOR LEGAL ADVICE. YOU ARE HEREBY ADVISED TO SPEAK WITH YOUR ATTORNEY TO DETERMINE THE ACTUAL LEGAL CONDITIONS IN YOUR AREA AND ANY POTENTIAL CONCERNS AS THEY MAY RELATE TO YOUR BUSINESS.]

Essentially, any information stored at a remote provider has less legal protection than that same information stored at your place of business. This is due in part to the Stored Communications Act of 1986.

This article from Wired Magazine illustrates what’s at stake.

Let me try to summarize the differences.

If the information is stored at your place of business, probable cause and a search warrant are required to enter your establishment to search for and seize the information. You must receive a copy of the search warrant, thus ensuring you know that the search is taking (or has taken) place.

If the information is stored at a remote provider, reasonable suspicion (a lesser legal standard than probable cause) and a subpoena are all that is needed. Prior notice is supposed to be provided so you know the search is taking place, but in practical terms can be delayed indefinitely in 90-day increments.

So what this means is that if you store sensitive information on the cloud, it has less legal protection that it would if stored at your place of business. It can be searched or seized and you wouldn’t have to be notified that this is happening.

You may be thinking ”well that’s all well and good, but I’m not doing anything illegal with my business so this doesn’t bother me.” In which case we would reply that we think most businesses aren’t trying to do anything illegal. However, because of this double standard you may want to think twice about placing your sensitive business information up in the cloud. While we at Walker IT Group, LLC strongly feel that the majority of government officials are honorable, we also do not think it’s a reach to think that there’s a possibility of one of your competitors attempting to mislead or coerce the judicial system in order to gain an advantage.

Consider another scenario – let’s say one of your customers, vendors, or employees is under investigation, and your company is drawn into the investigation with subpoenas and warrants served. With your information stored in the cloud you may not even find out that your data was seized. I don’t know about you, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea that potentially my customer list, in-depth financials, negotiated contracts and agreements, trade secrets, or other business documents might become part of the public record without having the opportunity to contest the search or ask for a gag order.

So if your company has decided that cloud computing is something you should be doing or are already doing, what are some of the things you should or could do?

1. First and foremost, consult your attorney or general counsel to determine what your business should be watching out for.
2. Scrutinize your cloud computing contracts and agreements. You may want to ask your attorney about making sure the terms around non-disclosure of your information includes some type of prior notice required by the cloud service provider if they are served with a subpoena.
3. Consider storing very sensitive business information at your place of business only, and not on a cloud service.
4. Contact your legislator and local chamber of commerce. It is very apparent that the laws have not caught up to how businesses and individuals use technology, and only our elected representatives can really fix that.

Ultimately we believe that cloud computing can offer many benefits to all types of businesses, but it falls on that business to make sure they understand not only the benefits but also the potential drawbacks.

Please bear with us as we work to get the website operational and content uploaded. Of course, your feedback is welcomed.

We plan to use this blog to talk about items of interest to the technology community, so please check back regularly for new posts. If you have a specific topic you’d like us to cover please let us know!