Cisco is virtually synonymous with data networking. So it’s makes perfect sense that they are the market leader in IP telephony, since VoIP rides the data network. This is called a converged network ‘systems approach’ and it begins with a single, resilient platform such as the Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISR).

The Value of a Systems Approach
A systems approach begins with a Cisco ISR and combines intelligent services and weaves voice, security, routing, and application services together, so that processes become more automated and more intelligent. The results are pervasive security in the network and applications; higher QoS for data, voice, and video; increased productivity and better use of network resources. Cisco ISR offers a comprehensive, future-proofed solution that minimizes network outages and ensures access to the most business-critical applications.

Cisco’s focus on integrating new infrastructure services with performance enables companies to create networks that are more intelligent, resilient, and reliable. For organizations of all sizes that need fast, secure access to today’s mission-critical applications as well as a foundation for future growth, Cisco routers provide a single platform for the delivery of concurrent data, voice, and video; embed security and voice services into a single routing system.

Unique Unified Applications
The Cisco Unified Communications Manager offers unique applications and services that are tightly integrated and available as a bundle in a single user license. These applications include:

• Mobile Connect with Single Number Reach – A single telephone number can ring up to 10 devices simultaneously and calls can transition seamlessly from device-to-device.
• Extension Mobility – Any user can log into any IP phone and receive calls not just on their own extension number, but all features and services and even key programming are moved to that IP phone.
• Presence – A PC or MAC software client that provides real-time user status, instant messaging, desktop phone control, directories and call logging, as well as IP softphone capability.
• Video using any video-equipped laptop, video-equipped endpoint, or even a compatible room-based video teleconference unit, video is automatically part of any voice call.
• Integrated Messaging – Receive voice mails as emails without impacting your email server and still enjoy a synchronized voice mailbox and message-waiting indicator.
• Personal Communication Assistant – a user web portal to allow users to program speed calls, mobility destinations, phone keys, even a web-based voice mail interface.
• And optional applications such as Unified Mobility mobile presence, Cisco MeetingPlace video and audio conferencing, Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) for automatic call distribution and reporting, and more!

Wide Array of IP Phones; Soft and Hard
Cisco offers a wider variety of IP phones than any other manufacturer!

• 6900, 7900, 8900, and 9900 series IP phones that can include video cameras, color VGA touch screens, VPN, WiFi, and Bluetooth headset connectivity
• Cisco IP Communicator (CIPC) softphone for PC’s
• Cisco Unified Personal Communicator (CUPC) softphone for PC’s and MAC’s
• Cisco Mobile for iPhones and iPads
• Cisco Jabber for Andriods
• And introducing the brand new CISCO CIUS TABLET with docking station

Remote User Connectivity
An important part of Unified Communications is anytime/anywhere access. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) firewalls offer unique methods for connecting to your office network from remote locations, all of which provide secure and encrypted communications.

• Using Cisco’s UC Phone Proxy allows a Cisco IP Phone to operate outside the office over any public Internet connection without the need for any additional equipment or hardware.
• Virtual Private Network (VPN) software-based clients using standard IP Sec and/or Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocols. SSL provides the added capability of VPN over any browser. There’s no need to load additional VPN software or do any special configurations.

Conclusion
In short, a Cisco IP Telephony solutions provides:

• Everything you need for your network: With the broadest portfolio of products designed and priced for small business, we’re ready to help with your technology needs – both today and tomorrow.
• Experienced Partners such as CWPS, Inc: We understand your unique needs and design, deploy, and manage a complete solution that’s tailored to your organization’s objectives, so you can focus on your business.
• It just works: The reliability, security and performance you expect from Cisco and CWPS.
• Provide unparalleled services performance and investment protection!

For the most part, the typical 9-5 business days are over. You know, the days when five o’clock would roll around, you’d leave work, get home and drop your briefcase at the door until the morning. For many people this hasn’t been the case for many years. Companies have gone global, requiring them to work before or after hours to communicate with their business counterparts. Even if a company hasn’t gone global, they still feel the pressure of competition and technology has enabled us to stay connected and productive after hours.

Though most of us would rather work only eight hours a day, this is reality. To compensate, businesses should be looking for ways to reduce their idle time- time spent away from their core business processes. Other than socializing, which is a separate issue, the main cause of idle time is technology struggles. For smaller businesses with no IT department, it’s configuring and maintaining technology and taking issues into their own hands. For larger companies with an IT department it is doing everything themselves, wasting time, effort and money.

Outsourcing is the answer. At CWPS, we’ve worked with companies as large as the Coast Guard and as small as a doctor’s office. We’ve been a company’s entire IT department and we’ve been simply a help and support desk available 24x7x365, whenever a customer needs us. We have saved businesses from disaster by recovering key files at a moment’s notice with our Easy Data Protection.

CWPS is available for on-site engineering support to take care of many pain-staking processes businesses have to handle with when dealing with technology. We offer firewall services so your business network is safe. CWPS can even take care of identifying what is working well and what needs attention in your business by providing a comprehensive review of your environment.

Though the business environment is competitive and constantly expanding, that doesn’t mean your IT headaches have to. For small businesses, worry and focus on key aspects of your business. Let CWPS take care of your technology. For business IT departments, we’re not trying to take your job, we’re just here to help out wherever needed. We’ll do our jobs, so you can do yours.

Connected Workplace Solutions is proud to announce our new partnership with Riverbed Technology, Inc., a worldwide leader in network optimization tools.

By partnering with Riverbed, CWPS is your single source for cutting-edge tools and resources to design, build and maintain a superior, secure, optimized infrastructure.

Count on CWPS and Riverbed to help you:

• Accelerate the broad range of applications you care about most
• Reduce costs by consolidating file, email, and application servers from remote branches
• Cut bandwidth usage by 60-90 percent – while improving performance 50x
• Get real-time visibility into application and WAN performance
• Optimize performance while maintaining security and compliance
• Deploy in minutes and integrate seamlessly into the most complex environments

Contact us today to learn more about Riverbed WAN Optimization Technologies.

After having struggled with this for a mind-bendingly long time, I’ve finally found a solution that allows you, the Administrator, to deploy a Group Policy from a 2008+ server that allows you to manage Power Settings on XP and Vista/7 workstations.

Previously, as anyone who has lived this dream can attest, it was damn near impossible to do this from a 2003-based server, as the Group Policy settings didn’t propagate to Vista/7 workstations. The best you could do was to select “High Performance” as your power scheme…

and hope against hope that none of the workstation manufacturers decided that “High Performance” was as follows:

Figure 1: Bite me, Dell

Even if you thought you’d be clever and create your own “Always On” power scheme on the server and then select that as your “Active Power Plan” in Group Policy, you’d quickly find out that the only power-related setting you could change was the display timeout. Useless.

For Server 2008, the game has changed!Took long enough, no?

So, on your server, go to Start > Administrative Tools > Group Policy Management and drill down through your domain until you find the “Default Domain Policy” item in your “Group Policy Objects” container. Right-click on it and choose Edit:

Really? Default Domain Policy? If you already have special Group Policies or are more well-versed in the granular application of Group Policies to your organization’s computers (this is a Computer and a User-based setting), feel free to use whichever Group Policy you deem worthy. This is just the quickest way to apply these settings across the entire domain.

You SHOULD run a GPResult to verify that the settings applied here aren’t overridden by other default policies—particularly if you’re running Small Business Server 2008.

You should NOT apply power settings to the Default Domain Policy if you are intending to implement a power scheme that is not of the “Always On” variety.

Remember that the Default Domain Policy applies to everything in the domain—including servers. Will a server go into sleep mode if you set the Default Domain Policy to do so after 20 minutes? I don’t actually know, but I don’t plan on finding out.

So, once you’re editing the policy (right-click, Edit), drill down through Computer Configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Power Options…

You are going to want to create new Power Options and Power Schemes for each OS type that you have in the organization.

For more details on this process, I’d recommend reading Alan Burchill’s post here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/grouppolicy/archive/2009/09/30/configuring-a-power-plan-with-group-policy-preferences-by-alan-burchill.aspx

Ultimately though, this is what you’ll see on a SBS 2008 (non-R2) server:

You can see that I’ve created a Power Options set and a Power Scheme set for Windows XP.

I then did the same thing under User Configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Power Options (you know, just to be safe):

I also made sure to set the old “Administrative Templates”-based settings back to “Not Configured” so as not to override these new settings.

Unfortunately, as we see in the screenshots, when you’re configuring these settings on a SBS 2008 (non-R2) server, or any other 2008 non-R2 server, you cannot add power schemes for any OS other than Windows XP:

I also didn’t have any Server 2008 R2 Domain Controllers or Member Servers that I could adjust this Default Domain Policy on.

If I did, I could have simply added the Group Policy Management Console and gotten to editing the GPO, per the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsYkbLzVsM8&feature=player_profilepage#t=12s

Thanks to Jeremy Moskowitz, by the way!

But again, I don’t have any R2-based servers on the network, so I can’t add a Vista+ Power Plan to the policy.

LAME!

***BREAK POINT***

If you do have a Server 2008 DC or Member Server, please skip this next section and go right to Adding a Power Plan for Vista+

So, to add this new policy, I had to find at least a Windows 7 Domain Member machine that I could install the Group Policy Management Console on. I located one, and logged on as a Domain Administrator.

Here’s what’s next:

First, you need to download the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 (select Win32 or x64 depending on your current Windows 7 OS type as found by checking the Properties of My Computer):

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d

Next, go ahead and install the RSAT package you just downloaded. You can skip the reboot for now.

Finally, you need to go to Control Panel > Programs and Features and click on the “Turn Windows features on or off” link. Drill down through the feature list as shown until you can check the box next to “Group Policy Management Tools” and click OK:

Thanks to Jeremy Moskowitz’s video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsYkbLzVsM8&feature=player_profilepage#t=121s

You will indeed now have to reboot after installing this feature.

And hey… once you restart, log back in as a Domain Administrator, find the Group Policy Management console:

…and find your way back into editing the Default Domain Policy, you will find that which you seek:

Adding a Power Plan for Vista+

aka. Another Wonderful “Gotcha!”

After trying to add the Power Plan like the above screenshot, I discovered that you couldn’t set the timeouts to “Never,” you could only select a number of minutes. Double lame! Not wanting to set the number of minutes to “0” and having to cross my fingers in the hopes that the client machines didn’t take it literally and all go to sleep at the same time, I wanted to find out whether or not a “0” would equate to “Never” in the normal Power Plan settings:

On the 7 machine that I installed the GPMC on, I added a new power plan from the Control Panel > Power Options:

I named it [CLIENT]-AlwaysOn… and proceeded to edit it to as many of the “Keep this computer running all the time” settings as I could find:

I then checked the properties of the Power Plan in the Default Domain Policy… and yes, a “0” is equivalent to “Never.”

Phew!

(Having to always create the Power Plan on a 7 machine would have sucked!)

So, back to the policy creation… I created the Vista+ policy in both User Configuration and Computer Configuration… and just a tip to save you some time—you can copy-paste

I then ran a GPUpdate /force on my test workstation… aaaand…

Windows XP: Great Success!

Windows Vista & 7: FAIL.

I could see that the new power policies (both the “CC” and “UC” ones I’d created earlier) showed up in the end users’ Control Panel > Power Options, but had no idea why the Vista/7 “Power Plan(s)” weren’t actually being set as active… I confirmed that I’d checked the box for “Set as the active power plan”… after Googling, I found this:

So… change both your “User Configuration” and “Computer Configuration” power plans to “Update” while making sure the “Set as active power plan” checkbox remains checked:

Run another GPUpdate /force and you should be in business:

There, I just saved you 8 hours of your life. You can thank me later

When supporting IT systems it is very easy to get into “reporting” mode when alerting the customer of issues on their system. A lot of times, IT staff will report issues that are happening with a system to the customer. While the customer would like to know about these issues, they also want to know what can be done to fix them.

As an operations support provider, presenting issues to the customer without a solution winds up looking like an excuse for not delivering on whatever deliverable is in impacted as well as not taking advantage of the opportunity to grow business.

To avoid this trap, it is helpful to train staff to provide solutions with every problem. Something as simple as having a field for “solution” on the same document used to record the issue is helpful. Repeating the message to staff in each and every meeting also helps reminds folks that each issue needs a solution. The key is to make sure that everyone on your team is thinking the same way. The mentality should be being a solutions provider and not just minding the shop.

Why is this so crucial? As the provider of the operations support, why wouldn’t the customer turn to you for providing the solution as well? For example, reporting a slow link between sites is certainly helpful to your customer, but reporting a slow link along with a suggestion of how to improve link quality and/or speed is what keeps a customer your customer.

It is fairly straight forward that you would be able to pitch the solution from a cost and implementation standpoint. A project plan and cost analysis is also something you want to give your customer as well. The more complete the thought, the less thinking your customer has to do and the less likely they will shop the idea. Identifying issues without a solution and plan of execution is really just giving your customer a reason to go to your competition.