CCEX

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner

Capitol Computer wants to wish all of our customers a happy and prosperous new year.

The staff at CCEX is looking forward to exciting 2008 with all of the innovative technology soon to be released.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the exciting new products we are currently testing and deploying:

Exchange 2007 SP1 was released in November which improves the stability and reliability Exchange 2007. Exchange 2007 provides the following benefit over Exchange 2000 and 2003: additional security and encryption, better integration with Windows Mobile 6 Smart Phones, Unified Communications support, and a completely rewritten interface for Outlook Web Access that looks more like Outlook and allows you to open attachments on remote computers without requiring Microsoft Office to be installed.

Office 2007 SP1 was released in December. Office 2007 has been completely re-written and sports a brand new interface called ribbons. This new interface takes a bit of getting used to, but you’ll soon find is a very logical grouping of functions. Some other features of interest are: support for Unified Communications, Outlook no longer requires Word as a rich text editor, and “Outlook Anywhere” allows you to connect to your Exchange Server from anywhere in the world without requiring those pesky VPN connections.

Response Point Phone System is a new product released by Microsoft in October. Response Point run over standard networking equipment instead of proprietary phone switches. This reduces cost and also allows Capitol Computer to manage your network and your phone system. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have to call one company when setting up accounts for new employees? Response Point has a built in Voicemail and Speech server. No more, “Press 103 to speak to John” Just say John and the auto attendant will automatically forward your call. If John is not at his desk, the call can either be sent to Voicemail or forwarded to his cell phone without the caller ever knowing. Voice over IP is the future of Office Telephony and Response Point takes it one step further. Response Point also has integrated support for Unified Communications.

Unified Communications is going to be a popular buzz phrase in 2008. It’s not actually a product, but a way of linking all of your communication devices and software together. It can be difficult to explain, so I’ll give you an example instead: You get a phone call on your Response Point phone system; on your PC monitor, Caller-ID information pops up. The caller’s phone number happens to be in your Outlook contacts list, so on your screen you’ll see the number, full name, e-mail address and picture of the caller. Let’s say you decide not to answer the call, and they leave a voicemail message. That voice mail instantly shows up in Outlook, on your Windows Mobile phone, and on your desktop handset. That message can be played from any of those devices. Here’s another example. Say you’re on a business trip and need to get someone’s contact info into Outlook. Just pull out your Windows Mobile phone enter their contact information, even take their picture. Within seconds of hitting save, all that data is transferred back to your Exchange Server wirelessly, including the picture. You can get further unification by using Microsoft’s new IM (Instant Messaging) client.

Windows Vista SP1 is due in March, 2008. Once released, we’ll be reviewing the reliability, stability, and compatibility of Windows Vista at which time we will decide whether or not we recommend Vista for business use. We currently do not recommend Vista for business use.

Watchguard Firebox X series replaces the tried and true Firebox III series which will reach end of life in April, 2008. We are recommending that our customers budget for an upgrade to an X series Firewall in 2008. There’s not enough space to list all of the new features, but the features we’re most excited about are: faster throughput, higher packet rate, QoS (Quality of Service), and Multi-WAN support. QoS allows you to prioritize traffic. For example, have you ever sent out a large e-mail to a big group of people and it slows you internet down for the next few hours? Well with QoS, we can just give e-mail lower priority so that it doesn’t interfere with Internet Traffic. Multi-WAN allows you to bind multiple Internet connections together so that if one connection goes down, your business will not experience any downtime due to the redundancy of Multi-WAN.

If you are interested in discussing how any of these updates can streamline your office, please feel free to give us a call.

Written by: Jeffrey Pena