Archive

… often aren’t found in smaller IT shops! It’s sad but true, smaller shops often don’t follow the “rules” for an IT rollout, at least not when compared to the big guys.  The big guys with their big budgets will plan, test, lab, torture-test, and “what-if” an IT rollout to death before committing it to …

Every now and again you buy something that just flat out works and you want to tell everyone.  Well, that’s the case today.  I just went out and bought a new HP LaserJet Pro 1536dnf MFP unit for home and it is a smashing piece of kit!  Now, I’ve always been a big fan of …

If you spend any time at all with systems you’ll know that, eventually, there will come a time when you have to perform a migration from your trusty but “tired” old server to some shiny new piece of kit.  Depending on what the new platform is you might have access to some nice built-in tools …

The Challenge You want to create a dashboard which will automatically refresh itself on a regular basis The Solution This is easily accomplishable using a SharePoint Web Part and little bit of scripting, JavaScript in this case, to be precise. How to Accomplish This Task Start by going to the page you want to edit, …

What the issue is In Central Administration, there are two rules that appear to cause a lot of headaches for SharePoint admin’s. These include the following two rules. Drives are running out of free space. Drives are at risk of running out of free space. What’s the (conservative) suggestion These will be set off and …

A big chunk of the customer base I deal with at itgroove are small offices that have single or dual server infrastructures.  In many cases they want to allow their staff to remotely access systems and resources at the office.  There are two very good tools available to this SMB space to control and secure …

I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s SBS products.  I got into SBS in a big way with the release of SBS 2003 and installed quite a number at various client’s in the Lower Mainland.  At itgroove the trend continued and we’ve had good success with SBS 2008. SBS has always been a fabulous value proposition …

You need a belt to pull this off

One bad thing about IT is that we love our lettered acronyms for all things tech – IT, AD, DC, NAS, SAN, iSCSI, FCoE, SATA, SAS – it goes on and on and on.  We literally swim in an alphabet soup of acronyms which can be confusing enough for us techies and totally incomprehensible to …

We’ve had a few new customers ask this question lately and the answer really is, “It depends”. In most cases we like to see a proper server go in, usually loaded with SBS, because we like the control provided by having a proper Windows domain along with a properly configured server (or servers, as the …