Fave raves: six enterprise products readers love

Six must-have products in readers' own words

1) AppRiver's Microsoft Exchange Hosting with Shoreline

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Antonio Palumbo, IT manager with Blue Man Productions, in New York, says …

When I came here, Blue Man management had started the process of moving from [Alt-N Technologies' MDaemon e-mail server] to AppRiver by putting any new employee on AppRiver Exchange Hosting. I was happy about that, but I wanted to be sure we had everyone on AppRiver. With MDaemon, we were constantly getting bombarded with trouble tickets, so every time we moved a user to AppRiver that would mean one less problem because Exchange Hosting is so solid.

I knew that getting everybody on the same e-mail system, with unlimited storage, was going to make everyone's life a lot easier and simpler. (Storage is a huge issue here -- the original Blue Man, which started 20 years ago, literally still has every e-mail stored).

Today, all that storage is no longer a problem. It's on AppRiver's servers and backed up constantly, with redundancy across the AppRiver infrastructure. Plus, end users can check their e-mail anywhere in the world as long as they have an Internet connection. So, a huge chore has been lifted.

Blue Man is a very fun, mobile and young company. Everybody knows Blue Man for the theatre production, but we also have a school, the Blue Man Creativity Center in New York for children. E-mail, of course, is a huge part of that. People don't just sit at their desks at Blue Man. They're always walking around, and traveling internationally, and the fact that they never have to be concerned about getting their e-mail means they can focus on their creative strategies.

A lot of folks here have company-issued BlackBerrys, of course, but they also have iPhones. AppRiver is one of the first companies to offer iPhone support, with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. That was a huge plus for us. In the corporate environment, when folks come in with iPhones, and say, "Hey can we set this up with Exchange?" nine out of 10 times the answer is "No." But here at Blue Man, it was a definite, "Yes," and that makes things flow a lot easier.

Every piece of e-mail, no matter the device, goes through AppRiver servers. We have over 600 users, who each get more than 100 to 200 e-mails per day, so we do huge volume. AppRiver helps me sleep easy at night.

For management, AppRiver provides us with the Secure Hosted Exchange with Shoreline interface, which is amazing. I can log into a public Web site, with a secure connection, from anywhere in the world and create an e-mail account on the fly. From the application standpoint, I go into Shoreline, download a password request form, hit 'next' and everything is configured for me – e-mail accounts, servers, public folders, calendars.

Accounts are easy to set up, and the return on investment is unbelievable. By using AppRiver we save anywhere from 25% to 30% per year, depending on the user base, which changes month to month. First, we don't have to buy more hard drives and, from a support standpoint, we have no need to have a full-time Exchange administrator. That saves us $100,000. And AppRiver pricing is very aggressive per user.

We would have been crazy not to go with AppRiver.

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2) BeyondTrust's Privilege Manager

Ned Cahill, IT director at Schnabel Engineering, in Glen Allen, Va., says …

We were running Symantec, and a year to a year and a half ago, an upgrade broke all the servers and was a disaster on the laptops. It took us four or five days to get it working correctly.

We said, 'There's got to be a better way. How do we stop malware from coming in, other than fighting these ridiculous virus programs constantly?' Then the idea came up, 'You know, if they're not administrators, the software can't install.' And we thought that was a brilliant idea, and started futzing around looking for tools that would accomplish the task.

We needed a tool that would let us balance what users need to do their jobs against what we need to keep malware from coming in. Compliance was an issue, too. I work with engineers who installed software because it was the tool they needed to do their jobs at that moment regardless of licensing issues.

They wouldn't do this to be evil, or to screw the vendor – they would do it because it was the shortest path to the answer they needed. But they were installing software that we (IT) thought we could get bit in the butt on, and we decided that had to stop, too.

Surprisingly enough, we didn't find many tools and those we did find were homegrown, difficult to set up and deal with and didn't really fall under Active Directory, which is big for us. It wasn't until we discovered the term "least privilege" that we came across BeyondTrust. We downloaded Privilege Manager and in about an hour, we had accomplished what we were looking to accomplish, which was pull administrator rights, but still give users the ability to do their job.

BeyondTrust also is very good with support. If you have a question, and send an e-mail, you’ll get an answer that day. You don't get that with a lot of vendors, so I like that. I want to be a big fish in somebody's small pond.

We have 400 users scattered nationwide, and 100 of them can be anywhere in the world. We're in foreign countries all the time, and users have to be able to connect and work. It's very tricky to do if you take away their admin rights, but we've had no problem at all. I don't want to keep adding support people as we hire. I want my support guy to be able to take care of more and more people, and these kinds of tools help.

And BeyondTrust is transparent to users. It installs through an Active Directory policy. We did the installation in about three hours – we just told everybody to reboot. It was great – and not having to spend my nights chasing down a virus has been fantastic.

3) Apple's Macintosh computer

Jake Seitz, enterprise architect at The First American Corp., in Santa, Ana, Calif., says …

My all-time favorite product is the Macintosh.

The first time I got my hands on a Mac was probably in '85 or '86, at the computer science lab in college. That was the beginning of the desktop phenomenon. In late 80s, everybody started going with Windows as well, but the Mac just kind of stuck with me.

In the corporate environment, we use Macs for just about everything – for audio and visual, for videoconferencing, for typical tasks, like Word and Exchange. So really, from my perspective as an architect, I use it for just about everything. Of course, I also use Windows machines at work. Each has its pros and cons.

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The corporate policy here is Windows-based, but you can opt out for a Mac and receive partial support. "Crusade" is probably too strong a word, but I definitely have persuaded some folks here at work that Macs might be the best fit for them, so we're starting to see more and more Macs pop up.

Today I use an iMac. My favorite features are videoconferencing and audio editing. If I need to use a Windows platform, I remotely connect to it from my virtual desktop and do whatever I need to do. But probably 90 to 95% of the time I'm using the Mac.

4) Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1

Bryce Morrow, CTO at The Beck Group, in Dallas, says …

We'd been using Lotus Notes since around '97 timeframe, and by 2006 we felt it had atrophied. That's when we really started talking about needing more integration between CRM, other applications and e-mail.

Integration is our business, not from a technology standpoint, but from a business-process standpoint. We have done a good job of becoming an integrated firm, so I felt like we needed a product that would allow us to do more of that – be integrated and grow in an integrated manner. That's not to say Lotus Notes couldn't do that, but we didn't have the staff to continue developing for it at the rate we needed.

In July '07, I started looking at Google Apps and Exchange. I felt that the online application service was around the corner -- and by that I mean Google serving up applications, Word documents, spreadsheets, and the like – but it wasn't quite ready at that point and I wasn't willing to take the risk.

I was pulled to Exchange because of the entire Microsoft suite – not only Exchange, but MOSS [Microsoft Office SharePoint Server], LiveMeeting, SCCM [System Center Configuration Manager], six or seven products – and I felt that would give us a good jumpstart on integration with the infrastructure and with non-Microsoft and business-critical systems and applications.

We made the decision to go with Exchange in January of 2008, and went live Aug. 18.

We are running 13 virtual servers in our Exchange environment with 1,000 users on three physical hosts. We use VMware ESX server connected to Apple Xserve RAID storage.

The Exchange environment has outperformed our expectations. The virtualization piece really makes the servers easier to manage from an administrator's standpoint. The learning curve for our employees has been minimal, and they are able to do things in Outlook that were not possible in the old system.

For example, the way we archive e-mails for legal purposes is so more streamlined now. At a job site, what used to take, say, an hour, now takes 10 minutes. And, before when users archived documents out at a job site, they never knew what was happening. The screen locked up and they had to wait. Now they see a progress bar. It still may not move as fast as they'd like, but at least they can see the progress, and it has drastically reduced our remote location e-mail archival issues. That was a huge productivity gain for us on the project – and a very important one at that.

5) Sophos' Endpoint and Security Control software

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John Endahl, senior information security administrator at Tech Team Global, in Southfield, Mich., says …

When I first came into the organization five years ago, we were using another company's endpoint security product. It was one of the top three products, but we kept having issue after issue with it and the support was absolutely horrible. When it came time to renew our contract three years ago, we could pay almost double the cost for a better support contract, or we could switch to different product.

We started a six-month process of evaluating products based on our criteria: It had to be simple to deploy and to administer. It had to have decent antispam capabilities for a gateway product. It had to have good technical support – which is really why we wanted to get away from our previous vendor. And it had to be something I was capable of administering on a day-to-day basis. We've got offices pretty much all over the world, and we're still expanding. I have to be able to look at what's going on at all these different locations, make sense of a problem, and if I'm not able to correct it immediately, I need to make sure I've got the support behind me that will get it resolved quickly. In the final analysis, Sophos had all the essential pieces without making the product so technically challenging that we'd have problems rolling it out.

What won me over from a technical standpoint was Sophos' updating mechanism. The other vendors released weekly or daily updates that typically would be megabytes in size. So every time an update came out, we'd be downloading a multi-megabyte file to a central server and then pushing that multi-megabyte file out to every single system over the local network. With Sophos, new definitions get released as they're ready to go. Sophos typically releases eight to 10 definitions a day. Those definitions are very small, like 4K each, which makes download and deployment much quicker and easier with a whole lot less network overhead. Because those definitions are so small, we can have our systems update every 15 minutes with no impact on the endpoints. This reduces the vulnerability window against any new or emerging threats.

Over last three years, Sophos has built a lot of additional functionality into the product. It has rolled out application control, for example, so we can stop unauthorized applications [like games or some business tools] from running on our network. It has also rolled out device control, so we have the ability to lock down USB devices, CD-ROMs, floppy disks, etc., to keep anything nasty from coming in from that particular attack vector. And it recently rolled out network access control as part of the product. Since all this added functionality comes at no additional cost to us, that's a return on investment we can really appreciate and show to our vice presidents.

As for support, normally the phone gets answered within the first four or five rings, and I have a tough time getting the person off the phone till that person has resolved the issue. … I've been amazed and impressed with the depth of knowledge every support person I've talked to has about the inner workings of the product. They get in there, know exactly what an error message means and know where to go from there.

6) Cisco Aironet 1142 wireless access point

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Erik Parker, a senior infrastructure analyst at Toyota Motor Sales, in Torrance, Calif., says …

We have about 2,800 access points deployed today across the country. The bulk of them are installed in warehouses, which is strictly for parts picking. But we also have them in all of our regional sales offices, for general usage -- laptops, guest access and for some specialty devices; our service training division; and, of course, our campus wireless, which covers the 22 buildings here. The campus wireless is used primarily by our guests, because we have so many vendors and consultants on campus, and then secondarily by associates.

On campus, where we've got tons of file sharing, larger applications, streaming video, things like that. The 802.11n wireless network is the first technology that's really allowing us to consider no longer running wires to the desktop. The throughput of 802.11g just wasn't quite high enough. But now the n-based access points are pretty much giving us the same throughput as a hard-wired 100Mbps link, while using a 40MHz channel width. (Read a test of 802.11n gear.)

We originally started testing with the 1252s, which is the ruggedized "n" access point and we saw phenomenal speeds. When we got the first 1142 in for testing, we saw the same types of speeds, but the 1142 has a couple of big advantages over the 1252 for the office area. One, it has an integrated antenna so it can be placed above the ceiling tile and, two, it runs off of normal 802.3af power. The 1142 is nice; we just plug it into our standard Catalyst 6500 or Catalyst 3750 PoE chassis and it powers up perfectly and starts servicing clients and connects to the controller.

The 1142's beamforming is one feature/functionality that is extremely cool, but because of our quick life cycle of being able to retire old protocols we won't get a lot of benefit out of. If you take away all the marketing terms and fluff and read the technology behind beamforming, it's really incredible. The fact that it's able to juice more power, or get a higher signal-to-noise ratio to each client on a per-packet basis, is amazing. Beamforming is allowing us to get higher speeds to our "g" clients because we're able to offer them a better signal-to-noise ratio overall. I know beamforming is part of the standard, as an optional piece, but how Cisco is doing it [in silicon] is cool. When you look at how many clients have so-so signal-to-noise ratios, increasing those will provide a huge benefit.

We have the 1142 running in a test environment currently. The first site rolling out all n-based wireless network is coming up the first week in March. That's a small remote service training site, so it'll only get about a dozen access points. By the end of this year, we'll probably have about 50 1142s deployed, mostly here on campus – between the two engineering buildings – and then by the end of next year we'll have 450 deployed, which will be all of campus. Once we're done, we'll be looking at about 900 users moving to 802.11n.

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