Winner of our business-card raffle at the Central Mass Business Expo (CMBE)

Congratulations to Maureen Raillo, CEO at W Limousine in West Boylston, MA!

Maureen_Beats Audio Winner_web

Maureen won a Beats Pill, and a Beats Pill character stand. (Beats Pill is a lightweight, portable, and wireless speaker that lets you bring music wherever you go; combined with the character stand, the value is over $250.)

Recommended practices – Part-1: Storage of unstructured data

This is a part one of a multi-part series on recommended practices for organizations and their end-users. Additional parts will be in upcoming newsletters.

Organizations create and consume data constantly, but not all have formal policies or practices that define the value of this data and restrict its amount and location.

Quality is difficult to define and even tougher to enforce; some departments and users save items solely for convenience, even though its value is minimal, while others consider everything they have ever said or done, even 20 years ago, to be worthy of permanent storage. Basically, there is no point to storing unstructured data (MS Office documents, PDFs, etc.) unless it has value to the organization; however, if you must store it, choose a method that allows some type of classification (like SharePoint with its searchable repository of metadata).1

Rather than try to enforce quality standards, many organizations impose limitations on the amount of data stored (since this can be controlled and monitored)2: Even though disk space is relatively inexpensive, backup, data-management, and data-security costs increase as data grows. Quotas also impose discipline; setting a quota allows the organization to get a picture of storage needs by individuals and by departments or functional groups. Quotas can also be adjusted as needed.

There are tools that manage unstructured data via audit/access controls and monitor via usage patterns; these are targeted (and priced) for enterprise-class organizations, but are moving downstream within the reach of more organizations. There are less-expensive tools (and policies included within Active Directory) that limit storage-space usage; limits are usually set by user or by department.

Finally, organizations traditionally assume, and try to enforce, that end-users save and store company data only at designated locations of on-premise equipment (drives mapped to servers, storage arrays, Network Attached Storage, etc.) or at authorized, Cloud-based storage locations; the idea is to save and secure company data where it will receive proper backup, security, and vetting. Saving company data onto personal computers, tablets, and mobile phones, where it might not receive regular backups and is more vulnerable to loss or theft, is discouraged.

The best place to start is to create a clear, unambiguous policy on the storage of company data with these guidelines:

Define what data should be kept and for how long
Define storage-amount limitations and enforcement
Define acceptable storage locations
Define responsibilities for retention
Once defined, processes can be created and tools can be acquired to manage and monitor this policy.

Our recommendations for storage locations:

Remove all data from end-user devices (laptops, mobile devices, etc.).
Map a Home folder for each end-user and restrict its rights to that user.
Move the end-user My documents folder to their respective Home folder.
Deploy a document-collaboration utility (like SharePoint or Google Docs) or create a Shared folder with appropriate subfolders to manage your shared, unstructured data.
Restrict shared access by department or functional group.
Our recommendations for storage management:

Define policies within Active Directory to limit storage space (as needed).
Archive older, infrequently-used data to less-expensive storage.
Monitor usage on a regular basis.
1. Visit “My ongoing rant about unstructured end user data storage”.

2. See Alan Radding’s excellent and relevant article “Keep end-user storage under control” at TechTarget and originally from Storage magazine in November 2006.

Bryley exhibits at the Central Mass Business Expo

Bryley Systems exhibited in the Technology Pavilion at the Central Mass Business Expo on September 8th, which was held at the DCU Center in Worcester, MA.

Pictured in our booth is Anna ; Account Executive at Bryley Systems.

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Anna D. achieves VMware Sales Professional certification

Congratulations to Anna who completed the significant training and testing to become certified as a VMware Sales Professional.

VMware is the global leader in virtualization and a key partner of Bryley Systems. A certified VMware Sales Professional has general knowledge in VMware products and business practices.

Anna has been with Bryley since 2010. She moved to the Sales team in 2012.

vmWareSalesProf

Summer Fun!

The weather cooperated as Bryley’s summer outing on Sunset Lake in Ashburnham was sunny, warm, and dry. The menu included standard-issue, summer-cookout fare with hamburgers, hot dogs, veggie burgers, salads, and desserts; plenty of desserts. Bryley also hosted SwiftecIT and other friends; daylight fishing and pontoon-boat rides (pictured) gave way to roasting marshmallows around the evening campfire.

Boating at the Bryley Summer Outing

We Have A Winner!

Congratulations to Geary at USI!  You’ve won the drawing for “Roy’s Almost 20th!”

For those who may have missed the news, Roy Pacitto, our Director of Sales, has been an employee at Bryley Systems for nearly 20 years!  Since we tend to get excited about this sort of thing, we decided to have a little celebration in honor of his many years of service, only to realize that Roy hadn’t actually finished his 20th year yet.  By this point, however, the drinks were already open, the cake was already out, and we were already assembled, so we decided to go ahead and celebrate Roy’s (almost) 20th anyway.

It was about this time that we made another realization.  Over the past (almost) 20 years, Roy has come to know a lot of people, and we wanted to get all of you in on the celebration as well.  As a result, we put together a little contest in which we hid an image of Roy’s (almost) 20th cake somewhere on our website, and those who found it were entered in a chance to win a $35.00 gift card.

To make a long story short, the contest is over and Geary is our lucky winner!  We hope that you will all join us in congratulating Geary and Roy in their respective achievements.

Roy Pacitto works almost 20 years at Bryley Systems

Bryley employees were recently celebrating Roy’s 20th anniversary when someone pointed out that it was a year early.  Since we already had a 20th-year cake, we ate it anyway.

Roy, a key member of the management team, started as service manager in 1995. He moved to the sales team in 1997; in the mid-2000s he became Director of Sales.  For his biography, visit https://www.bryley.com/about/management-team/.

Now that the cake is gone, we will continue the celebration by having a random drawing with a chance to win a $30 VISA gift-card.  To be entered into the drawing:

  • Find Roy with his 20th-year cake at Bryley.com.
  • Click on the photo and fill-out the drawing-submission form completely.

On August 12th, 2014, we will randomly select one winner from all of the entrants that complete and submit the form and will send that person a $30 VISA gift-card.

Note:  Bryley employees and their relations are excluded from this drawing.

 

Bryley Basics: More of Anna’s Windows 8 tips

Those of you running Windows 8 have probably experienced the new Photosapp, which opens the image in the full-screen, hiding everything else on the screen. It is really inconvenient for me, and I am guessing I am not the only one.  Here’s how to change from the default photo-views application in Windows 8, Photos, back to the Windows 7 version, Photo Viewer:

  1. Once in Desktop Mode go to the Windows Icon winIcon, right-click, and then select Search.
  1. A search bar will open; type Default Programs and then select.

 

  1. Select Set your default programs.

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  1. Select Windows Photo Viewer, select Set this program as default, and then click OK.

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You can use the same procedure to change other default programs.  If there is some type of Windows 8 default application that you are not happy with, this is the place to make those changes.

Gavin Livingstone interviewed by CEO-CFO Magazine

Gavin Livingstone, President at Bryley Systems, was interviewed by Lynne Fosse of CEO-CFO Magazine, which was published in the 4/28/2014 web-edition.

 

 

Jim Livingstone’s Retirement Party

Recently,  after 22 years of outstanding service, Jim Livingstone decided to retire from Bryley Systems, so we decided to throw him a surprise party.    We had such a good time that we wanted to share some of the footage from the party with all of you.

YouTube video