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Monthly Tips, News and Views from Coyote Creek
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SEPTEMBER 2011
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President's Perspective
Welcome to this new and expanded version of Coyote Creek's monthly newsletter. For several years, we have published a monthly newsletter focused on a single technical topic and we've been pleased by the positive feedback from many of our customers.
However, now that we have a wide range of value-add consulting services and a base of over 400 customers, we felt that it was time to experiment with expanding our newsletter format. We want to keep the technical content as the center piece of the newsletter but we also want to keep you informed of what's happening at Coyote Creek, with our product partners and to share some ideas on how other Coyote Creek customers are getting maximum value from our partner products and our services.
We chose the title "Speaking from Experience" for our newsletter because we believe that the biggest benefit we bring to our customers is our independent, experienced and vendor-neutral perspective. But we want to hear your voice and get your feedback – please let us know what you think about this newsletter and how we're doing as your business partner. The door is always open! Sincerely,
Mike Faster
President
Technical Editorial
Microsoft Exchange 2010: Pain or Panacea?
Everybody talks about how wonderful Microsoft Exchange 2010 is, especially in regards to its high availability and disaster recovery features. With email being such a mission critical function, it's very exciting that this latest version of Exchange makes it possible for organizations to have rock solid high availability and disaster recovery programs. But is Exchange 2010 really a panacea – or do these new features make it such a pain to operate that the costs outweigh the benefits?
The Trade-Off
The answer to the "pain or panacea" question is that it could be either one, depending on your going-in expectations and your commitment to managing Exchange 2010 on an on-going basis.
Nearly all of our clients who have made the decision to upgrade to Exchange 2010 have done so because they want to take advantage of its disaster recovery and high availability features. If this is a draw for you, too, you need to keep in mind that the trade-off for getting this increase in up time is that Exchange 2010 is not a "set it and forget it" type of program. Having these features in place makes Exchange more complicated (as evidenced by its thick instruction manual!) and time-consuming to manage. And if you don't properly manage it, these features will not perform as expected.
On-Going Management Issues to Keep in Mind
If you install Exchange 2010 with its high availability and disaster recovery features, you'll be dealing with a lot more moving parts than in earlier versions of Exchange or in this version without these extremely useful features. Proper management means that…
- Database replication needs to be monitored – With Exchange 2010's Database Availability Groups (DAGs), your mail databases are being replicated between two or more servers. You need to continuously monitor this, to ensure that (a) the replication takes place and (b) the replication takes place correctly.
- Failovers need to be monitored – Once Exchange 2010's high availability features are set up, if there is a problem with one of your local servers it will automatically failover to one of the other servers in the DAG. But unless you have a monitoring system in place, bells and whistles won't go off and you can remain blissfully unaware that this failover has transpired. You therefore need to be monitoring your DAGs so that (a) you'll be aware when failovers happen and (b) when a failover does happen, you can figure out what went wrong and fix it.
- Disaster recovery scenarios require manual intervention – If something goes wrong in one of your data centers, failover to the servers in another data center is not automatic. This type of failover must be done manually. Monitoring is necessary to ensure that you are alerted if and when something goes wrong at one of your data centers.
- Patching is more time-consuming – As addressed in our previous article on Patching DAG Servers Patching DAG Servers simply uploading a patch onto a DAG server while it's still connected to the other servers in the group can cause serious problems. To patch a DAG server you must temporarily take the server out of the DAG, install the patch, test the patch, put the server back in service, and then repeat the process for each of the other servers in the DAG.
- Testing needs to take place regularly – We recommend that you test your high availability and disaster recovery systems at least once each quarter. Testing not only ensures that everything – including the local and remote failover processes – works properly, it also gives you a chance to take "practice runs," so that when a real problem comes up you know what to do.
Conclusion
In sum, Exchange 2010 really does have some very cool features, but these features won't take care of themselves. With proper maintenance, Exchange 2010's high availability and disaster recovery functions can be a panacea. But if you're not prepared for the extra monitoring and maintenance involved, you might find Exchange 2010 to be a real pain.
Need help with Exchange 2010? Give us a call. We're here for you.
Kevin Szady
Director of Technical Services
Technical Editorial
Customer Referral Program
It's in the nature of our work that Coyote Creek gets pretty close to many of our customers. In fact, we grow to be trusted advisers and business partners with many of our customers some of whom have asked how they can help us develop our business. There are many ways that customers can help ranging from providing quotes and case study information to providing referrals to colleagues who may need the services that Coyote Creek offers.
Although many of the best referrals are informal, we thought it would be useful to provide a framework – we're calling it a Customer Care and Referral Program - to ensure that all of our customers:
- Stay connected with Coyote Creek and have an open door to our management to discuss any issues of concern to them
- Understand how to help us with quotes, references and referrals
- Understand that, if they make a referral to us, we will keep them in the loop on our progress and that we'll do the best possible job for the company you refer.
We really do appreciate our customers business and we hope that this program provides an effective way to stay in touch and to show our appreciation for your loyalty and support.
Coyote Creek Success Profile
Coyote Creek Streamlines Complex Process for Rosendin Electric
 Rosendin Electric is an electrical engineering, power and communications provider. With over 2,000 employees, it is the largest privately held electrical contractor in the U.S. and has developed a 90-year reputation for quality designs and implementations.
One of the greatest challenges in construction today is the management of the information related to the physical construction of any project. This includes not only the design drawings, but the virtual building model, installation drawings, system and manufacturer data, calculations, specifications and the like. For major projects, this could exceed 10,000 discrete items, all of which are subject to multiple, asynchronous updates to all of these document families.
Rosendin Electric's IT and Engineering departments collaborated and determined that Microsoft SharePoint would be the right solution for their needs and would provide:
- A single repository for critical best practice documents and engineering instruction sets
- An area categorized by job site for all the drawings plus 3D and 4D business information models
- A secure Extranet capability to share documents with project partners
Coyote Creek undertook a full-blown SharePoint implementation compCoyote Creek undertook a full-blown SharePoint implementation comprising requirements gathering, a technical assessment, prototype development, software installation, approvals and rollout. There were no major problems with the implementation which has enabled Rosendin Electric's engineers to be more productive and efficient and to ensure that they are always working from the right set of drawings and are able to locate and share any document in seconds.
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Coyote Creek launches Microsoft Outlook Calendaring Workshop
We all know that Microsoft Outlook is the glue that holds communications together at most companies but, let's face it, Outlook can be hard to use and manage especially its calendaring and scheduling functions. To help reduce the frustration many users experience with Outlook, Coyote Creek has developed a lunchtime workshop to provide Exec Admins with the training to be able to handle Microsoft Outlook calendaring and scheduling tasks with ease and to minimize scheduling problems and IT support calls.
We will be making this workshop available in late September but we are looking for a couple of customers to help us fine tune its content and delivery. If you think that your Exec Admin team could benefit from this training and you don't mind being a guinea pig, please contact sales@coyotecrk.com.
Contact Us
Your primary contact with Coyote Creek is your Account Manager but you are welcome to contact our management team at any time. Please contact Terri Carney our Director of Sales, and she will get you talking to the right people at Coyote Creek.
About Coyote Creek
Founded in 1998 by a team of former corporate IT professionals, Coyote Creek understands the issues and complexities that are part of large-scale and high-growth IT environments. Pragmatic and vendor neutral, Coyote Creek brings deep expertise to help customers manage technology and project risk, inspiring confidence and creating peace of mind. For more information, please visit www.coyotecrk.com.
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