Is Google Music for You?

We all like to have a lot of our music readily accessible on our portable devices.  It is handy for exercising and just to share songs as we are on road trips or with friends and family.  When Google released their music package, naturally our curiousity was piqued.

We had our staff member who owns an Android Evo try out this service.  Technically it can work with the iPhone, but getting a App is necessary or at least recommended and our thought was it would be better to test the program within Google owned and developed technologies.  We wanted to try this on an Android because of this thought.

So, 5,500 songs in this database, what was the experience?

First of all, the uploading time is brutal.  The 5,500 songs took our high speed internet connection over a day to upload all the music.  Way longer than we expected this to take and we can normally pull a 50MB file in under a minute…  the 40GB of music, we thought might take an hour or two and was shocked that it took just over 30 hours.  For an average user with home based cable, assume at least an hour per GB of music.  If you are an audiophile while 15,000 songs, you may want to set this computer aside as you may not see it for 3 or 4 days!

When the songs were loaded, an odd thing happens with the artists.  If you have a artist like Billy Joel doing “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on an 80′s hits CD, it will display that CD under the artist Billy Joel, but then when you click it, it shows all the song names, but not the artist in that list.  It’s cool in one way, as you can see all the albums and you don’t have to go to the “Albums” tab in order to get all the songs, but annoying if you are not sure what song you had from the 80′s hit CD.

Google Music has some other quirky things too, but it does work extremely well, and now there are over 6,000 songs on my phone (they give you about 500 for free…)  “I would recommend it as a cool solution, but not flawless” was our experience.

Data Recovery Means that the Infrastructure was Faulty!

Often people call a computer company like ours when their data needs to be recovered.  All of their company files were on a computer or a server and the company either didn’t believe that data backup was important or they had an older system like tape backups that failed to get all of their data back.

When looking at data recovery, it is key to understand a few details.

• It is always more expensive to “recover data” than it is to properly back up data
• It is critical to most businesses to not lose their data.  In fact, with a major data catastrophe, most companies will quickly go out of business (try “remembering” who owes you money…)
• Data recovery is something that can save your hide if your company hasn’t invested in the IT infrastructure to do consistent backups
• Tape backups often fail when servers and data need to be re-built.  (Have you ever tried a “data recovery test run?”  Pretending your systems went down and seeing what your IT team or company can get back for you?
• Repairing a hard drive properly is an extremely complex and stressful activity for a data recovery specialist.  One or two wrong steps in the process and all of the data is gone!

Data Recovery in Las Vegas is expensive, but the alternative…  losing all your data will wipe out most companies!

Sonicwall WXA for Las Vegas Companies With Remote Workforces!

If you are responsible for a company in Las Vegas with remote employees who are required to access data over the web, you may want to consider the Sonicwall WXA for business.  If you don’t want your valuable employees waiting around for valuable files, this appliance may be perfect for your Las Vegas business.

Where the Sonicwall WXA fits best:

• When an increase in bandwidth is needed
• When an increase in speed for file transfers is needed
• When a lot of the files are already on a server and the remote user is making modifications.

We were impressed by a demo we got from Sonicwall when we first started selling this solution.  We had a repository of .jpg files on another server.  These were high quality .jpg’s and the first file took about 35 seconds to transfer over.  Subsequent files of the same size and type took about 5 seconds each.

If you need increased speed for remote users in your organization, getting a demo on the Sonicwall WXA solution may be just the thing for your Las Vegas company!

Cloud Based Microsoft Office — Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is the company’s foray into cloud based office applications. It’s meant for people who are constantly moving from platform to platform and want a fixed environment to work on their documents based on the tried and true MS Office platform. It is accessible through most web browsers on any major operating systems, including mobile OS’s.

It brings with it a subscription model that offers far more flexible pricing schemes to customers, allowing them to pay per user, per month, without ever worrying about purchasing a product that could be rendered obsolete within a year or two.

It eliminates practically all installation, deployment, and local maintenance costs, while providing up to 80% of the functionality that employees actually use. In addition, certain plans offer a desktop based application rental agreement as well, allowing customers to use a locally installed version of Office 2010 Professional Plus when available, and the cloud based Office 365 when not. It goes without saying that synchronization between the local and online versions of files is seamlessly integrated in all current Microsoft applications. Office 365 at least demands a review by all corporations. Your local service provider can help think through such a decision.

Corporate Policy for Social Networking

In an age where a majority of US residents have their own online presence, it is important to consider the impact of such presence on corporate reputation and representation. Employees, whether deliberately or not, represent their company in their online behavior. This representation can either enhance the reputation of their organization, or tarnish it. Thus, guidelines are in order.

A company with high profile employees should make clear that any information shared publicly could either represent the employees’ own personal perspectives or the company’s. Thus, guidelines should recommend to employees to make explicit in online posts which point of view they are sharing.

Additionally, staff should be clear of the repercussions of reckless information sharing on social networks. While it isn’t in any company’s authority to actually police the social networking activity of its employees outside the work environment, it should be clear to all staff what the consequences are for such sharing, in the short-term and in the long-term.

The Cautious Vs. the Bold

Many large IT departments exercise a significant degree of caution in ensuring their networks function well. This generally involves staying a version or two behind the latest technologies. However, greatness often requires boldness. This has been a balancing act that companies throughout history, from IBM to Apple, have struggled with. Very often, IT departments have stayed on the conservative side of this spectrum — technology generally undergoes a serious amount of testing and waiting before it is deployed slowly throughout the enterprise, generally a couple of years behind the technology that workers themselves use at home.

In the days when companies could not experience stability of a product till the third version, it was understandable. However, these days, far fewer testing cycles are required, and products are far more stable and secure from the onset than before. Thus, the models of extreme caution might not be applicable anymore.

While there might always be a need for some level of testing and planning before an upgrade, it’s important to keep in mind if a large delay is actually hurting the security, stability, and performance of your network, rather than ensuring it. Your IT service provider can help you determine how much caution, and how much boldness, is worth implementing in this day and age.

The Transition of IT Specialization

The IT systems arena is undergoing a massive transition decades in the making. This transition is what all IT workers must take heed of and rapidly rework their mind frame towards. In summary, networking technology has finally reached a level of maturity where IT competency needs are tangibly shifting from fixing and maintaining systems infrastructure to exploring and innovating new systems applications.

For the past two decades, a corporate IT Department’s primary function was to serve as the backbone of support for company operations. Only as a secondary priority have IT workers considered leveraging technology towards the expansion and drive of new paradigms of thought and direction for the company. While many have anticipated a theoretical flip of these priorities for years, that age has finally dawned upon us. Systems infrastructure is finally commoditized to the point where IT components have for the most part met the 15 year long dream of ‘plug and play’. Thus, the focus is finally shifting from ensure uptime, upkeep, and troubleshooting to contemplating novel, groundbreaking applications of technology.