Brainlitter - Inside the mind of Sean Wallbridge

Technorati: 8H833AZX68VQ Every once in a while I find myself at Portableapps.com because its uber handy. Essentially, they have taken a number of popular applications and turned them into standalone applications (the “install” process simply creates a folder structure and an EXE to launch and doesn’t install to the registry, start menu, etc.). In other …

Is good SharePoint (and/or General IT) support from an outsourced company expensive? The answer to that question depends a great deal on who you ask, and on the perspective you take on the value of a solid IT provider. Allow me to explain: Simply looking at the hourly rates most experienced, professional IT providers ask …

Oh gawd. The world is running out of IP Addresses and according to some, it happened 2+ years ago. Meh. But, IPv6 is coming and of course, Windows for a long time now has had native support for it. The challenge is, with DNS registrations, quite often you’ll get the IPv6 response from a ping, …

If there’s one thing small business owners like, it’s doing things for themselves. After all, not only did they start their own companies, but many have learned that working as your own bookkeeper, salesperson, or even janitor can be a great way to save on billable hours. Can the same thing work for IT or …

Someone asked today what/how we name our servers (what is the logic behind it?).  Here’s an illustration which breaks it down visually: Some of the benefits of this convention include: Consistency Sorting Identifying locations and assets Easy to remember

itgroove Recommendations from the Field The following are recommendations from itgroove for Server (virtual or physical plant) Best Practices. Customers may not always listen or have the budget, but it won’t stop us from trying to protect them… Redundant Power Supplies – protect yourself against a single point of failure UPS – (Uninterruptable Power Supply) …

My colleague Robert Dick has started a blog (maybe a little at my nagging). He has a lot of valuable experience that no doubt others will benefit from, so please head on over to The Beagle” and get ready to some learnin’ from the old pro. (really old… like, he can still vividly remember storming …

Yo, while I have generated a wildcard cert before (more expensive, supports any prefix such as www.itgroove.net, portal.itgroove.net, mail.itgroove.net) it has been a long while and I figured while it may seem obvious after the fact, the scary bit is wanting to make sure you have the CSR (request) format correct before you submit it …

What can I say? I prefer nice blue event logs when I check the health of my servers. This helps draw my attention (eyes) to the reds and yellows that might appear. And because I, like most others, connect to these servers via RDP (Remote Desktop), I end up with a bunch of clutter in …

The next version (or renaming) of BPOS, the Microsoft Online Business Suite (SharePoint, Exchange, OCS which is now Lync) is looking pretty shiny. Looks to hit in early 2011 and also encouraging, it looks like Canada won’t be the forgotten stepchild that gets the products and services 6 months later this time.   Details This …