Video Review: Solarwinds Virtualization Manager

Solarwinds Virtualization Manager ensures your IT department is agile enough to solve problems before they arise, provides the insights needed to accurately gauge the status of your infrastructure, ensures accurate provisioning of resources, and much more – all under a single pane of glass. Don’t forget to check out our written review here: “Information Overload? There’s an app for that”...

Choosing office and communications productivity suites

Every company needs an office suite; some grouping of applications that allow for document creation.  Frequently, these office suite are directly integrated into communications suites.  Combined, these applications form a productivity suite. Frequent document types created are word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.  Most of the world will know these as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.  There are, however alternatives to Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Apple’s alternative – iWork – is gaining momentum at a surprising rate.  Google Apps is also steadily gaining followers, despite being largely an online only proposition.  (Desktop and mobile clients exist, but their current value for content creation is questionable at best.)  IBM offers Lotus Symphony while the open source community offers Libre Office, both of them descended from the now largely defunct Open Office. All of these packages can “get the job done,” but some do so better than others.  Microsoft’s suite is certainly the most established productivity suite, and with good reason.  Office includes Outlook, arguably the single best email client ever developed.  Office integrates with a plethora of collaboration and communications software ranging from Sharepoint and Exchange to Lync.  These applications in turn integrate with other applications; the “full stack” Microsoft productivity approach is nothing short of amazing. The fly in the ointment is cost.  Microsoft is expensive.  The advantage to Microsoft is the integration with all the various components, but actually licenceing the totality of those components starts driving the cost per user north of $1500 per refresh cycle. iWork offers only a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application with their productivity suite, but on the flipside it starts at $80 per user and goes down from there.  (Apple volume licenceing starts at 10 users.)  This is a critical consideration as Macs are starting to...