The BitLocker feature was introduced in Windows Vista and allowed you to encrypt the content of your hard drive.  Now in Windows 7 they offer BitLocker To Go which allows you to encrypt portable USB flash drives.

First open up My Computer and Right-click on the flash drive you want to encrypt and select Turn on BitLocker.

After BitLocker initialized the flash drive you will need to enter in a password to unlock the drive.  You can also set up a Smartcard which are usually used in a work environment.

Next you will be prompted to store the recovery key which is used in the event you lose your password or smartcard.  If you store it as a file make sure that it is not on the same drive that you’re encrypting.  

After the key has been saved as a file or printed you will see a confirmation message.

Finally you will be ready to start encrypting the drive so just click the Start Encrypting button.

While it is encrypting there will be a progress screen displayed.

A successful encryption of the USB flash drive will change its icon to show its encrypted with BitLocker.

Notice that the drive icon will change to show its encrypted with BitLocker where the gold lock indicates it is locked up and the gray lock is displayed after you have unlocked it.

Right-click on that icon to bring up options to manage BitLocker encryption.

The next time you plug in the drive to a Windows 7 machine you will be prompted to enter the password to gain access to the drive.  You can also always have it unlocked on specific machines in the future.

You can also use the encrypted drive in Vista and XP.  Here we will look at how it looks in XP, when you plug it in you will be prompted for the password to launch BitLocker To Go Reader (the utility is installed automatically on the drive by Windows 7).

BitLocker To Go Reader is a Windows Explorer type navigation utility for showing the content of the drive.

With a BitLocker encrypted drive you will only be able to read and copy files.  If you need to add files or change them you will need to use a Windows 7 machine.

This is a great way to easily make sure sensitive data on your USB flash drive is safe.  Right now anyone who has Windows 7 can use this feature.

What this technology deployed system wide across your network? Read our prior post on this topic here

If this describes your company, how do you support and protect your remote or branch office locations? Virtualization is one way to manage such an environment. Here, we will take a look at several challenges you may face with remote locations and how virtualization can improve overall performance.

With several locations, you likely have several redundant hardware pieces. As each location relies on its own server, your maintenance costs are likely multiplied by the number of remote locations. The protection you have on the hardware in your central location must be extended to each of your remote locations – can you do this seamlessly? Unless you have already taken advantage of having a virtual environment to manage your remote locations, you may find protecting those pieces is time consuming and costly.

What happens when a server in your remote location or branch must be replaced? Unfortunately, the process is not as easy as unplugging one server and plugging in another. Servers must be configured according to your corporate processes, data storage, network infrastructure and security. In a virtualized environment, this process is simple to provision new systems and is completed in a central location, eliminating risk and allowing for seamless operation in the process.

All the data captured and maintained by your remote and branch office locations is vital to the success of your overall business. Not only does the remote location need to access this information, it also needs to be captured by your centralized data center to implement into your customer relationship management (CRM) solutions or other enterprise applications reliant on customer data. With virtual systems in place, you not only make this data available to all, users can access what they need from the desktop to drive optimal collaboration with colleagues and customers.

Finally, think about your business continuity plan and the uptime required to deliver consistent and quality service to your customer base. If your network goes down at your remote location, can it easily be brought back online so as to seem transparent to customers? Can this location default to the centralized network in the event of a failure? The answer to both questions is “yes” on a virtual platform.

A virtualization environment will bring all of your systems under your centralized roof to ensure complete redundancy at a fraction of the cost of multiple physical servers; complete failover protection in the event of an issue or outage; easy provisioning of new server space; and total network protection as it is driven solely from your data center. Eliminate costs and worry you don’t need and can’t afford by moving your total system to a virtualized platform.

Want to know more about virtual solutions and how it can simplify the management of your remote branch locations? Contact DataSource Solutions today.

What you might not realize is that if you are using Outlook 2007 and Exchange at work, you’ve got everything you need to send out a poll through email.

Compose a new email in Outlook, click the Options tab and select Use Voting Buttons.  Here you can choose the defaults or create your own answers to the poll question.

If you select Custom just type in the answers you want to appear in the Use voting buttons field, separated by a semicolon.

Now you have the custom answers listed.  That is all there is to it!  Now send off your message.

When the recipient opens the email there will be a message advising them to respond by using the vote button which includes the custom responses.

After the recipient has made their choice a box will pop up verifying the poll response and an option to add additional information in the email.

When they respond you will have a flag on the email advising they have answered the poll … similar to a read receipt.

To view the totals of the poll, you can open up the original message in your sent message folder, and then click on the Tracking button. You’ll see a list of totals underneath the ribbon, and then a list below that of all the responses.

I can imagine plenty of possibilities for this feature in the office.  What types of polls do you think would come in useful where you work?

What’s a Trojan anyway?

Spam is on the rise. The latest data from the German email security firm, Eleven, released in June, notes that malware particularly has been rising throughout 2010. Spam uses up your disk space, backup space and bandwidth—as well as squandering away your employees’ productivity, your IT budget, all while putting your data at risk.

Of course none of us enjoy receiving unwanted email, but for a small business the risk is really about Trojans that arrive with spam—and which are hidden in nearly three-fourths of these unwelcome messages. A “Trojan” is a file, usually in the form of an email attachment or a download link, which masquerades as something it is not, ready to steal your company data or install malicious programs on your office network. While careful employees know not to open potentially malicious attachments, they may just as easily fall victim to phishing emails asking for your company’s identifying information or critical data.

Stopping spam before it starts

As a business owner, the safest way to stop spam is to block it before it even reaches your network. This is especially true for businesses like law firms and others that must retain communications for a designated period of time. The last thing you want to do is save spam for posterity.

Software solutions, from companies like McAfee and Symantec, can provide a layer of security, although they often prove costly and time-consuming for an IT department to maintain. Installing a security appliance, however, can usually prevent 99% of spam messages, with a very small number of false positives. This is a gatekeeper to the outside world, a device that sits between the Internet at large and your internal company network, making sure nothing malicious goes in. It may also be necessary for auditing purposes, so that you can later trace who, when and what information entered and left your company network.

Disgruntled but not disastrous

For small businesses, the threat isn’t only about what comes in—it’s also about what can go out. Imagine a situation where you must lay off an employee. What might be the effect on your business if he returned to his desk only to send a disparaging email to all of your clients? IT security must think about the “insider” as much as the outsider.

IT staff often grant excessive access rights because it is simply easier, and few companies review or revoke what an employee can access until it is too late. To protect your business, it’s important to have access privileges in place, giving each person only enough to do the job at hand. It also makes it fast and easy to revoke all rights when an employee is terminated.

Email is a necessary and integral part of doing business today. Now that you understand the risks and the solutions available, you’re ready to make your office network safe. If you have questions, feel free to contact DataSource for more information. We have years of expertise in both software and hardware email security management.

When you implement a virtual platform, you have a whole new world of testing opportunities at your fingertips that will negate the need for all of the physical hardware provisioning and distribution to foster your software-based testing environment. You can take your solutions from the lab to the market in times previously unheard of, securing your strength in the market and demonstrating your dominance to the competition.

What would it change for your world if you could stage the testing in an environment that was easily modified at any step of the process? With virtualization, you have a lab and a staging environment that no longer has the physical limitations of the traditional process. You gain the benefit of flexibility to provision new environments as needed, as quickly as needed, and to manage application configurations at any step of the process from release to production.

Such flexibility in your testing allows you to apply any number of different elements to the testing environment to ensure your product is ready for deployment. The ability to provision different configurations allows your test and development staff to capture bugs and improve resource utilization by the consolidation of virtual machines on fewer physical resources. In other words – your team is able to do more with less.

In the deployment process, virtualization allows your team to more easily provision, clone, patch and test the configurations before they are deployed to production. You no longer have to rely on simply creating the most likely test scenarios; you can now create tests and environments that would emulate any possibility and apply the necessary fixes before the solution ever gets to the end user.

Any bugs in the process that could impact these areas are much less expensive to fix before they are released and become a bigger problem. In the past, you may have had to weigh the cost of testing and QC against the risk of the problem. Now, you can eliminate the issue completely.

In partnering with a proven virtualization provider, you can create the virtualized environment necessary to enjoy these benefits of faster time to market, use of fewer resources and the elimination of problems before deployment.

All of these benefits help your bottom line – are you ready to learn more about virtualization and how it can improve your lab process? Contact DataSource Solutions today to find out how.

Let’s start with your Inbox in Outlook 2010.

All of your emails are now grouped into conversations based on the subject of the mail. A random sampling of internal employees’ Inboxes averages a 40% reduction in the number of items seen in the Inbox! All this is from simply grouping and hiding the older, redundant content of conversations. A single-click on a conversation item will show you the content of the latest email in the thread, enabling you to quickly read and triage an entire set of messages.

“Hey, what about the stuff I’ve sent in that conversation?!” We’ve got you covered! If you expand a conversation you’ll get to see all of the older messages that make up that conversation, and you’ll even see your Sent Items right inside the conversation – since the email messages you send in a conversation are just as important as those you receive:

If you’re an email filer we’ll also seamlessly show you items in the conversation you’ve filed in any other folder in your mailbox:

So no matter what your workflow is for storing and organizing your email, the new Conversations experience in Outlook 2010 always shows you the entire conversation every time, everywhere.

Who replied to who? Outlook 2010 makes it even easier to tell who replied to who inside of a conversation. Click on any individual message inside of a conversation to see a dotted line that shows which messages it replies to. This can be useful when a reply comes into a conversation that actually responded directly to an earlier message in the conversation, like Michael Affronti’s message in the conversation below:

Speed up your triage by acting Conversationally. By grouping all the related emails in a conversation together into a single item, Outlook 2010 allows you to save time by easily deleting, moving, categorizing, or marking the entire conversation as read in one click. Once you categorize a conversation, Outlook 2010 will automatically categorize new items that arrive in that conversation! The time savings can be significant – in one internal test,  employees reduced 46% of the actions needed to triage their Inbox in the new Conversations experience, as compared to Outlook 2007′s Date arrangement.

Reply and Reply All are smarter too, and will always reply to the latest message in the conversation. If you happen to open an older message in the conversation and hit Reply – say a flagged mail from the ToDo Bar, for example – Outlook 2010 has you covered with a new clickable warning will appear that allows you to instantly jump to the latest message in the conversation.

Ever have a distracting email flare up in your Inbox? The new Ignore button quickly and easily moves an entire conversation and any future items that arrive to your Deleted Items folder. Now you won’t have to waste time deleting each new email in your co-workers’ ongoing conversation about where to go to lunch today – that is, of course, if unless you’re hungry.

Want to slim down your Inbox? Try the new Clean Up button and watch it move all the older, redundant messages in your conversation to the Deleted Items folder:

Clean Up always keeps the most recent message around, ensuring you have all the content in the conversation while allowing you to delete the redundant messages. This can be a very effective way to free up some much-needed space if you have a small mailbox quota. Clean Up is even smart enough to keep messages that have attachments, flags, or categories. Clean Up is available on an individual conversation or a whole folder, and can be customized to move the redundant content to any folder in your store. For example, you can move the cleaned-up messages to an archive or filed folder in your mailbox, making it the ultimate Monday morning triage tool.

 Let’s summarize what the new Conversations experience 2010 can do for you…

• Reduce the amount of visual information in your Inbox by collapsing conversations into single items.
• See the entire conversation everywhere, including your sent items and the messages you’ve filed.
• Help you understand who replied to who when reading complex conversations.
• Speed up your triage by making almost every email action Conversational.
• Quickly hide annoying emails using the new Ignore button.
• Trim down the size of your Inbox without losing information by deleting older, redundant content using the new Clean Up button.

Want to test drive Office 2010? Contact us for a free hands-on demo

The “what if” situations are often easily overlooked as too many decision makers fall prey to the assumption there is always more time to get that last piece of the puzzle completed. As time goes on, this process eventually is overlooked until a failure occurs. By that point, a business continuity plan has quickly morphed into a survival plan.

Obstacles to full business continuity in the past have included the additional investment of redundant servers, storage and network infrastructure to have a reliable platform. When this was combined with the necessary backup in separate locations to deliver the maximum protection, this process proved to be time consuming and costly. As a result, many businesses did not take the time to develop comprehensive plan necessary to ensure business continuity.

A robust business continuity plan will ensure all applications and data are readily available across the enterprise. Site-wide disaster recovery ensures you don’t lose time or money. And, an automated fail-over and fail back plan ensures both planned and unplanned downtime don’t put you in a bind.

When virtualization is introduced as a method of creating a business continuity plan; the game changes. You no longer need to invest in costly physical hardware and software pieces to ensure you can be online even if a problem occurs. With the right virtualization service in place, you gain access to the necessary storage solutions, cross-site data management and replication technologies.

All of your information, applications, network infrastructure and data can be supported on a virtualized platform in a hosted environment so if a failure occurs, you don’t have to stop business. While you save on hardware costs, you also save in usage costs as you will only have to pay for the tools and space you need and use, not for a server that can hold ten times the amount of data you actually maintain.

Any interruption in your daily business processes will cost you money and cut your ability to generate a profit. Virtualization makes your business continuity plan simple to develop and flexible to implement. You can instantly switch to your secondary server if a failure occurs within your local office.

With a virtual environment, you can easily failover, access live data and continue operation without your customers ever knowing you were under threat of being completely down. A disaster can be an avoidable interruption to your business and a robust business continuity plan that virtualization provides, can ensure you have the protection you need at a cost you can afford.

Want to know more about how virtualization can provide you an easy and cost effective business continuity plan? Contact DataSource Solutions to speak with one of our virtual specialists.

What is Identity and Access Management and why do you need it?

Identity and access management, often called ID management or IAM, is an easy idea to understand. It means that only the right people should have access to the right parts of your network. Your marketing department should be able to view and retrieve advertising campaign images on your server, but they probably have no reason to view confidential contracts from your investors. The idea of identity and access management, then, is making sure everyone in your office has access to exactly what they need to do their job effectively—and nothing more.

So if the idea is so simple, what’s the problem? The difficulties arise as you add new, distinct computer systems, add additional network services, and generally grow as a business with different types of departments, employees, teams, and projects. You often find that each of these “micro” pieces of your company have their logins, passwords and security systems in place (or, even worse, none at all). Proper identity and access management is about putting all these systems under one roof, speaking the same language, and making sure all the rules of access are clear and simple for your employees and your network to get along. As a result, your data and your network will also be more secure.

There are other benefits to getting your business in order with proper identity and access management. For auditing purposes, it is often necessary to know who accessed what and when, and to be able to retrieve accurate and timely records. This is only possible if you have implemented a complete IAM solution across your entire business.

Keep it Simple, Keep it Secure

Our goal then is clear: we want our company network to be secure, but we want the right people to access the right information whenever they need it. There are several Identity and access management solutions on the market, but I’d like to point to one which is both simple and secure, and very affordable: Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Active Directory component of Windows Server 2008 R2 is a powerful, and yet simple, way to manage identities. It works right out of the box, allowing you to configure and administer system, user, and application settings. In one central location, you can manage the identities and privileges of users, computers, groups, printers, applications—basically, anything on your network.

That’s the simple part. For security purposes Active Directory and Windows Server 2008 R2 keep your confidential data in safe hands. You can easily grant each user or group “rights” to open, modify, print, or forward information. You can now even keep your data protected when a user sends it outside of your network. For instance, you can grant a partner organization rights to authenticate on a collaborative project, while keeping the rest of your network off limits. Windows Server 2008 R2 is Internet-scalable, meaning that it can grow with your business and with your needs as you reach out to new employees, partners and projects.

Now that you understand what identity and access management is, and why it is so critical to your business, you’re ready to get started in your own organization. If you’ve got questions, contact DataSource for more information. We have complete expertise of identity and access management solutions like Windows Server 2008 R2.

The PowerPoint broadcasting feature allows you to quickly share your PPT presentation. For this purpose you can either use a public “PowerPoint Broadcast Service”or an internal SharePoint server. The PowerPoint Broadcast feature generates a URL which you can email or share with your friends and they can watch you deliver your PPT presentation right from their browser.

Once you are ready to deliver the presentation, hit the Broadcast Slideshow feature under the Slide Show tab.

Now hit the Start Broadcast button, you can also change the default broadcast service from the Change Broadcast Service button. On the second step, specify your Windows Live ID.

Once it completes the configuration, it will let you know the URL which you can share with the remote viewers. You can email this URL directly from the Send in Email link.

That’s it, hit the Start Slide Show button and your viewers will be able to see your presentation live in their web browsers. Once finished with the presentation, hit the End Broadcast button to end the session.

In today’s technology-driven communications structure, a lack of integration among channels can leave your internal operations complicated, redundant and costly. This is a problem for any company relying on voice, video, data, e-mail, SMS, MMS, faxing, social networking, chat, Web and any other communication channel to drive effective business practices.

                                                                    (source: Microsoft Corporation)

As a strategic platform, Unified Communications meets the need within the organization to integrate different  communication channels to drive streamlined performance. This technology process delivers such a benefit by incorporating programs and applications that easily integrate and communicate with each other. This platform delivers such benefits as streamlined processes, support for mobility, integration among disparate locations and bottom line improvements.

Streamlined Processes

Business processes are improved through Unified Communications as this platform creates an environment where employees can be right-fitted with the communications options that fit their needs and not the only way around. Too often, employees are forced to adapt to a set communication environment that is un-natural or involves too many separate steps.

The implementation of a Unified Communications platform enables all professionals to gain easy access to the corporate directory, e-mails and calls made to their office desk phone. It provides a platform to facilitate communication and collaboration in mobility that can deliver results.

Mobility Supported

Unified Communications delivers significant value in an environment where mobility is necessary for revenue realization. This increasingly mobile market demands solutions that provide for full network access to the mobile professional. They are often short on time and focused on mission critical activities, not finding the right number for bridging into a conference or the right spreadsheet on the network for the next customer presentation.

When a myriad of different communication solutions are integrated into one platform, mobility is better supported as one portal through Unified Communications allows for the operation of all communication functions.

Measured in the Bottom Line

One of the most important – and measurable – impacts of Unified Communications is on your bottom line. As budgets have become increasingly tighter, business travel has been significantly reduced. At the same time, the need for collaboration among team members and face-to-face interaction with customers is still as much a part of driving business success today as it was five years ago. Unified Communications allows for such practices to continue with tools like video conferencing and telepresence.

Unified Communications allows you to take advantage of telepresence and instant communications to speed time to market on solutions and deliver better service to customers. This technology platform enables simple, transparent, instant communications, desktop integration and full conferencing solutions.

Are you ready to benefit from a Unified Communications system? Contact DataSource Solutions for more information and to setup a free initial assessment.