Latest News from Mike Talon

Life at a Law Firm’s IT Department

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Though we may have finally hit the bottom of the economic slide (and the jury is still out on that one), we in the IT profession have faced more challenges over the last 12 months than most of us have had to deal with in our entire careers prior to that. The interesting thing is that for most folks in the IT industry in general - and in the legal community specifically - this type of budget pressure on the IT department is nothing new.

Into Each Engineer’s Life, Some Migration Must Fall

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:45:00 EDT

Into each engineer’s life, some migration must fall. What started out as a simple necessity when something broke; has evolved over the years into something that gets done about once every three to five years. Hardware doesn’t break as quickly as technology changes, creating a double-edged sword for the folks on the front lines of the technological revolution. Instead of an easy and manageable flow of workloads from one platform to another, we’re instead faced with a mad dash to get everything onto the new hardware platform before 1) the old one gets so outdated nothing works properly anymore or 2) the end-users threaten us with bodily harm because there’s too much downtime for the migration.

The Case For 3rd Party Software

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:15:00 EDT

If I had to classify the questions I get on a routine basis, among the first in the list would be “Why should I buy software for reason X when Microsoft has built it in free. X could be anything from firewall software for desktops through availability tools for SQL Server. It’s absolutely true that Microsoft builds a ton of great tools into their products these days, but that doesn’t mean you should rule out the need for 3rd-party solutions, and here’s why.

Of SCR and CCR – Double-Take and Things

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:15:00 EDT

Over the course of the last 18 months, many more clients have been experimenting with the new data protection technologies in Exchange 2007, most notably Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Server (or Standby) Continuous Replication (CCR). These tools were included with Exchange 2007 RTM and SP1 respectively, and celebrated a milestone in the history of Exchange Server. Microsoft recognized that to get more companies to switch to, or stick with, Exchange Server, a compelling story for data protection had to be introduced - in much the same way as the Walrus and the Carpenter needed to create stories to convince their oyster friends to follow them. Hopefully, it’s not to the same end as the Walrus and the Carpenter (you can read the entire narrative poem here), but at least in theory, they are the same.