IT CHALLENGES

I am IT manager in large insurance company, and we are preparing to adopt Windows Server 2008 R2. As per recommended best practices, here is what I would be doing: 1. Build a 50GB fixed size VHD with Windows Server 2008 R2 installed inside. Let’s assume I have 45GB free space left. I declare this to be a master VM and check it into System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM) and I have a 50GB file copy. 2. I check out the master VM and get another 50GB file copy. I wait for the file copy to complete, including presumably 45Gbs ...

I work in a school district in Michigan where the government is constantly cutting school budgets at every available opportunity. My district has four sites. We have all Windows 2008 R2 servers and have just purchased Windows 7 for all our workstations. I still want to provide good equipment and software for the students to learn on the best available technology, but doing so is difficult with a limited budget. We have recently started utilizing desktop virtualization technologies like N-Computing and find the pricing structures difficult to follow. I have one computer that runs seven workstations, and I have to have ...

I own a small IT consulting and services company, with several local, small businesses as my clients. One of them is an eight-employee branch office of a PR firm in San Francisco. Everyone at the PR firm uses laptops. These are PR folks, and they live on their computers. When they’re in the office, they’re working on the laptops. When they’re out of the office, they have the laptops with them. If you take their computer away, they’re dead in the water. So the thing I’m wrestling with is, how do I maintain their laptops if I have at most ...

Group Policy is my favorite part of managing a Microsoft Windows network. I want to use the power of Group Policy to stop all the software that makes its way onto my network. Everyone who logs onto a computer on my network wants to install things that I don’t want there. I have successfully stopped them from downloading off the internet through my firewall. My big problem now is CDs and USB drives. The software that we run prevents me from making everyone use a guest account. I’ve tried methods of blocking certain extensions on removable devices, but some crafty folks ...

We’re a small government research company with hundreds of clients. We are using Linux and Apache for our public web servers, all hosted in a remote data center. We have a massive repository (hundreds of GBs) of research documents (PDF, Word, Excel) that are available to our customers on a subscription basis — once they’ve paid for a subscription they can login to our web application and access any of these hyperlinked documents, which are currently just sitting on our web server. These documents do not have any sort of protection on them, and the hyperlinks can be shared with ...