Articles by category: Engineer Knowledgebase

TechTip: Control Panel Items from Command Line By: Mike Shinn You can run a lot of windows tools from command line or start-run.  Here's a good sized list.  Some you use daily and others you probably knew there was something there for it but never knew what it was.  At the top are my favorites: CONTROL or CONTROL PANEL: opens the control panel window SERVICES.MSC: opens Servic... read more

The Seven Types of Power Problems: Summary of APC White Paper In today’s ever evolving technologically advanced world, our dependence on reliable power has become more and more crucial to the success of businesses world-wide. With the importance of power considerations in the IT world comes the need for standardization of terminology and communication. For both consumers and IT professio... read more

Office 2010  Overview and Opinions from the Team   Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 will be released to their business partners and the general public in May and June respectively. Many of CIO’s engineers have already been testing the Beta version of Office 2010 and are currently using the released version. In this article a brief overview of the new and improved fea... read more

StorMagic Storage Virtualization By: Andrew West, CTO Not too long ago, you had to invest a significant amount of cash into a shared storage subsystem (aka a SAN – Storage Area Network) to realize all of the benefits of server virtualization.  In the case of VMware’s latest version, vSphere, one of the most important benefits is arguably the ability to move a virtualized serv... read more

By: Peter Trinh  In the article, Introduction to NAS: Part 1, I introduced the NAS, discussed what they are, and explained their features.  If you missed reading that article, you can easily find it here.  In Part 2 of this article, I will discuss the physical features of NAS devices along with the market segments they are meant for. There are many types of NAS devices, whi... read more

This configuration has worked like a charm for us. It uses all of ShoreTel’s best features. We use it internally as well as have customers using it. Basically you are going to setup a workgroup that rings cell phones top down and puts the caller in queue till they get an agent via their cell. This works well for emergency or after hours support situations Use Case 1: During the fires in... read more

Introduction to NAS: Part 1 By: Peter Trinh This will be the first article within a series that will focus on NAS devices.  This article will introduce NAS devices, describe what they are, and discuss their features. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage.  They are essentially an external hard drive in a form of an appliance that connects to your network and currently serve an ev... read more

Here are your Windows 7 XP Mode + Shoretel PCM instructions:   Step 1) Have a PC with Windows 7 installed.   Step 2) Download the XP Mode setup packages from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx Follow the instructions on the Microsoft page.  You basically download Virtual PC first and install it, and then download the XP Mode virtual machine ... read more

Review of Microsoft Security Essentials Near the end of September of 2009, Microsoft released its free anti-malware all-in-one software solution to the public.  It is the successor to their previous commercially available security solution -  Microsoft Live OneCare;  which was discontinued in June 2009.  In this article, we will discuss the advertised features of Microsoft ... read more

Windows 7By: Chase Christian As you probably have already seen via their recent marketing blitz, Microsoft recently released their newest OS, Windows 7, towards the end of October. It comes in a time where Microsoft had more users still running Windows XP than running Windows Vista. Vista suffered from serious performance issues at its launch (as admitted by Microsoft) and many computer manufa... read more

Microsoft's DirectX 11: Coming Soon to a PC Near YouBy: Ryan Popke, CIO Solutions With the launch of Windows 7 we are seeing Microsoft's latest API (Application Programming Interfaces): DirectX 11. In this article I will discuss what new features DX11 adds to the Windows 7 experience, as well as a new product that uses DX11. All Windows 7 installs come with Microsoft’s DirectX11 capabili... read more

When we started implementing Microsoft DPM we went through a series of headaches as we tried to get it working continually and consistently. We went through a number of online resources as well as conversations with other geeks who had successfully used DPM. Overall it was a huge pain and I wished one resource would have broken it down from a holistic approach... read more