Author:  Tyler Holman

Microsoft Office 365 is the best cloud app of 2011, according to CRN. Listing the 15 best products of 2011, the magazine said that Office 365 was 'the real deal, and it blows away Google Apps.

So, what's so great about Office 365? CRN cites price as one of the primary draws, with subscriptions starting at $6 per month per user, which is actually a dollar more than the monthly pricing for Google Apps for Business. Office 365 also came out ahead because of its ease of use, since it's possible to roll out full functionality across large enterprises in a matter of minutes.

Office 365 offers more than just a version of Office in the cloud, including Exchange Online for e-mail, SharePoint Online for document collaboration and sharing, and Lync Online for communications.

Since its launch earlier this year, Microsoft says that Office 365 has been growing eight times faster than expected. Despite some issues with downtime, overall the reaction to the product has been positive, and it is a true competitor to Google Docs. The biggest benefactors of their competition are, of course, their customers. You can bet that Microsoft and Google will both be working hard to entice users with new features and more stability as the cloud becomes more and more important to their business.

Other products that made CRN's list included the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Mac OS X Lion, the HP TouchSmart 9300 Elite, and LibreOffice. The best product of the year? Apple's iPad 2.

Author: Markus Klein

Introduction

Exchange Server 2010 Edge Role provides a way to place Exchange Servers in the perimeter network (aka DMZ) that route messages from external to the internal messaging system and vice versa. The edge server role existed from Exchange 2007 and reaches its second release with Exchange Server 2010.

Designing Edge Server Implementations

If an administrator decides to implement relay servers that will typically reside in the DMZ and choose to create them based on Window Servers, then Exchange Server Edge Roles may be the appropriate solution, particularly when the company uses Exchange Servers as their primary messaging environment. Additionally, it might be very interesting to choose Exchange as relay servers.

An Exchange Edge server is a Windows Server 2003 or 2008/R2 based system that is not member of a domain, however, it is a member of a workgroup. This is the most important design thing; otherwise the Active Directory Domain would need to cross internal firewalls, which is quite unsafe.

Edge Servers are a specific design of Hub Transport Servers that don't rely on Active Directory, their "Directory Service” is the "Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service (ADLDS), which probably was better known as "Active Directory in Application Mode (ADAM).

Figure 1: Exchange Edge Server Concepts & Design

The setup of an Edge Server is quite easy and straight forward; you would only need to choose the correct role in the Exchange Server Setup Utility.

Figure 2: Choose the correct Role in SETUP.EXE

The Edge Server system provides the following functions:

1. Accept incoming Email from external
2. Accept outgoing Email from internal
3. Check if Email is SPAM and probably delete or reject it
4. Check if Email is Virus infected and probably delete the virus or reject the mail
5. Check if Email is for an existing user and probably reject the email

When implementing Edge Servers, a very importing decision is to choose a suitable Antivirus & Antispam solution which is specifically designed for Edge Servers, but in general the most well-known Antivirus Solutions provide this support.

To setup an Edge Server Role using the command line, the syntax is as follows:

Setup.com /roles:EdgeTransport /InstallWindowsComponents

The parameter /InstallWindowsComponents makes sure that missing Windows componects are added automatically to the SETUP component. After a successful installation it is recommended to install the latest cumulative update, as of now this is CU6 and can be downloaded here:

Figure 3: Edge Server Console in action

As you can see above, there is no difference in Exchange Server Console. The properties of each server are:

1. Anti-Spam (for enabling Content Filtering, IP Allow List, IP Allow List Providers, IP Block List, IP Block List Providers, Recipient Filtering, Sender Filtering, Sender ID and Sender Reputation)
2. Receive Connectors (for configuring from which IP address emails are accepted)
3. Send Connectors (for configuring where to send internet emails to)
4. Transport Rules (for modifying emails before sending them to the internet)
5. Accepted Domains (routable domains for which Exchange is responsible)

The following ports need to be opened on the firewalls (Edge or backend Firewall):

Table 1

In general companies need to provide high available messaging solutions. Due to Exchange Server Edge Roles operate on Windows Sockets (IP address + IP port) the easiest way to provide high availability is through "Network Load Balancing". For Exchange Edge this is the only and supported concept.

There are two ways to provide "Load Balancing":

1. Hardware Load Balancer
2. Software Load Balancer

With the underlying Windows Operating System you still have a "Software Load Balancer" included called "Network Load Balancing", so in general this is your first choice if no company internal concepts omit it. Windows Network Load Balancing is supported for single network interface card or those with two network interface cards. The configuration of NLB is nearly the same and quite easy using the NLB Configuration Wizard. If you would like to configure using the command line, then WLBS.EXE or NLB.EXE will become handy.

After another (second) installation of Exchange Server Edge Role with default configuration is quite easy to finish. To configure your second Edge Server the same as the first one, you can transfer the configuration quite easy.

1. Export the configuration using the following command line:
   ./ExportEdgeConfig -cloneConfigData:"C:\CloneConfigData.xml"
2. Modify the XML and replace the name of Edge Server1 with the one of Edge Server2.
3. Validate Configuration and create a new answer file.
   ./ImportEdgeConfig -CloneConfigData:"C:\CloneConfigData.xml" -IsImport $false -CloneConfigAnswer:"C:\CloneConfigAnswer.xml"
4. Import the modified configuration using the following command line:
   ./ImportEdgeConfig -CloneConfigData:"C:\CloneConfigData.xml" -IsImport $true -CloneConfigAnswer:"C:\CloneConfigAnswer.xml"

To finally enable Edge Server Synchronization, you need the following PowerShell command on your Edge Server(s):

New-EdgeSubscription -FileName "C:\Edgeinfo.xml"

Now, we need to copy the Edge subscription file to the Hub Transport server in Exchange Management Console and click "New Edge Subscription>New Edge Subscription Wizard". If you experience any errors, the application log will help you troubleshoot the issue.

To enable a full synchronization we need the following cmdlets in Exchange Management Shell:

Start-EdgeSynchronization -Server <Hub> -TargetServer<Edge> -ForceFullSync

Author:  Josette Rigsby

Microsoft is adding new features its least expensive Office 365 subscription tier, the Kiosk Worker Plan. For a few additional dollars per user per month, users receive some useful capabilities and twice the email storage.

Office 365 is a software and services offering from Microsoft that includes Microsoft Office and cloud-based access to Exchange, SharePoint and the software formerly known as Communications Server - Lync.

The latest batch of changes affects the lowest subscription levels, the kiosk worker plans: 

• K1 -- Costs US$ 4 per user per month and targets users without a dedicated PC who need occasional access to Web email and internal sites and only view Office documents
• K2 -- Costs US$ 10 per user per month and targets users without a dedicated PC who need occasional access to Web email and internal sites; users can view and make basic edits to Office documents

There is also an Exchange Online Kiosk plan that includes basic messaging and calendaring for US$ 2 per user per month. Microsoft has decided to add a few bells and whistles to these bare-bones subscription levels.

The New K-Plan

K-plan subscribers will soon have several new options. Key changes include:

• Support for Exchange ActiveSynch -- This will allow users to synchronize email to their mobile devices using ActiveSynch instead of the much less full-featured POP protocol
• Doubling email storage from 500MB to 1GB
• Support for Exchange Online Archiving (EOA), including legal hold and unlimited, as an add-on; Microsoft is also offering this add-on for other subscription levels

Microsoft has not announced when the latest batch of changes will be available, but Office 365 has a quarterly release cycle, so the end of Q1 2012 is a reasonable assumption. The new features will cost US$ 3.50 per user per month, but they are not required. If users elect not to use the new features, their k-plan pricing will remain unchanged.

Author:  Debra Littlejohn Shinder

Takeaway:

Office 365 is bringing together Microsoft's various online productivity tools, from email to Web Apps to communications services. Deb Shinder explains why she thinks this suite is a winner.

Microsoft has released a beta of its new and improved online productivity suite, Office 365. It comes in two editions, small business and enterprise, and makes it easy and cost effective to go "into the cloud" without giving up the familiar Microsoft server and client applications. Expected to be released in final form in 2011, Office 365 will include email, collaboration, presence/communications (IM and audio/video calls and conferencing), and both Office Web Apps and (in the enterprise edition) Office 2010 Professional Plus. Here are a few reasons that industry commentators such as Paul Thurrott are saying Microsoft got it right this time.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Security

Starting with one of the most important factors in choosing a cloud service, security has been the big stumbling block for many companies considering moving to the cloud. Microsoft's online services have been designed with security in mind. Office 365 applications are accessed through 128-bit SSL/TSL encryption so that if a transmission is intercepted by someone without authorization, they won't be able to read it. Antivirus signatures are kept up to date, and security measures are applied in accordance with the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing initiative. Exchange Online uses Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) to protect mail messages from malware, and it uses anti-spam filtering and antivirus with multiple virus engines.

The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is applied to Microsoft Online Services development, deployment, and maintenance. Microsoft monitors the systems continuously for suspicious activity and has a robust incident response protocol in place. Microsoft also does regular security audits. You can read more about the security of Microsoft Online Services in this whitepaper.

2: Reliability

After security, the most commonly mentioned area of concern regarding cloud services is reliability. Downtime means lost worker productivity and ultimately costs companies money. Microsoft Online Services provides a service level agreement (SLA) and has a 99.9 percent scheduled uptime. Microsoft has multiple datacenters, located all over the world, hosting redundant network architecture. If there is an outage at one datacenter, another can act as a backup. Customers hosted by the first datacenter are transferred to another, with as little service interruption as possible.

3: Compliance

Compliance with government and industry regulations is a big deal in today's business world. Microsoft Office 365 services have been certified as compliant with ISO 27001 standards, completed SAS70 Type I and II audits, and achieved the EU Safe Harbor seal. Microsoft has also added controls for helping customers comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).

4: Compatibility

In today's economy, many companies can't upgrade all of their desktop systems to the latest operating system. That's not necessary to use Office 365. Microsoft Online Services supports not only Windows 7 and Vista (SP2), but also Windows XP SP3. Even XP Home edition or Media Center edition can be used, although it doesn't support federated identity. Mac users can also access the Office 365 applications, using OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

The online Web portal for administration works with Internet Explorer 7 or later, Mozilla Firefox 3.x, or Apple Safari 3.x. The Outlook Web App can also be accessed with any of those browsers or with Google Chrome 3 and later versions.

5: Up-to-date versions

With Office 365, companies and their users get all the features and functionality of the very latest versions of Microsoft's server products. The services run on Exchange 2010 SP1, SharePoint 2010, and Lync. Client software is Microsoft Lync 2010 for Windows (Communicator for Mac), and the enterprise edition includes the licensing for Office 2010 Professional Plus.

6: Single sign-on

Assuming your network is running Server 2008 Active Directory on-premises, you can configure Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to achieve single sign-on, so that users can log on to the domain and be automatically authenticated to Office 365.

7: Exchange Online

Exchange Online gives you the benefits of Exchange Server 2010 without the cost and overhead of deploying it in-house. User mailboxes up to 25 GB are supported (administrators can reduce the capacity on a per-user basis), and personal archives provide more storage space. Attachments up to 25 MB are allowed. Users can restore deleted items, including items deleted from the Deleted Items folder. Even if an item has been permanently deleted or manually purged, it can be recovered if you enable Single Item Recovery (disabled by default). And if you, as administrator, delete a user, you can request that the mailbox be recovered for 30 days after the deletion.

Users connect to Exchange Online via Outlook 2007 or 2010, with such features as Outlook Anywhere (RPC-over-HTTP) and Cached Exchange Mode. With Outlook 2010, you get all the new Exchange 2010 features, such as conversation view, ignore, MailTips, personal archive, protected voicemail, and voicemail preview.

Users can also connect via Outlook Web App if they don't have the Outlook client installed, over any of the most popular Web browsers. There is a Light version that supports older and alternative browsers.

Mac users can use Microsoft Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition (free update for those who use Entourage 2008). IMAP and POP access are supported, and Exchange Active Sync for mobile devices (Windows phones, Palm devices, iPhone/iPad, and some Android and Nokia devices) is also supported.

8: SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online makes collaboration easy. You get 500 MB of storage per user account with a storage quota of up to 100 GB per site collection. Your company can have up to 1 TB total storage. Your SharePoint sites work with all Microsoft Office 2010 applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, InfoPath, SharePoint Designer, and SharePoint Workspace. Sites can be accessed via IE 7/8, Firefox 3, or Safari 3.1.2 and through mobile devices including Windows Mobile 6.5.x, Windows Phone 7, Apple iPhone 2.0 and above, and Nokia E and N series.

With Microsoft Office 2010 applications and SharePoint Online, two or more users can edit the same document at the same time. If you don't have Office installed, you can use Office Web Apps to work with your documents in a Web browser. Also supported is PowerPoint broadcasting, which lets you broadcast your slide shows across the Internet even to people who don't have PowerPoint. And you can manage documents offline and have everything automatically synchronized back to the server when you reconnect -a big plus for those who worry that cloud computing means being unable to get work done if you don't  have an Internet connection.

Your SharePoint sites are protected against viruses and malware by Forefront Security for SharePoint.

9: Lync Online

Lync Online is the communications service component of Office 365. You can also purchase it as a standalone service, for providing users with instant messaging, audio and video calling between PCs (PC to PSTN calling is in the works but won't be available at release), Web conferencing, and presence. With the Lync 2010 client software (available at no extra charge)),, users can send IMs (the text of which is encrypted) and display presence status and monitor presence status of others. Lync integrates with Outlook so users can find and communicate with others from within Outlook (
("click to communicate"). Presence information can also be updated based on Exchange calendar information, and it integrates with SharePoint Online. Users can also transfer files during IM conversations.

Users can connect to Lync Online directly over the Internet (without having to be on the corporate network via VPN or RAS), but file transfer is not available in that situation. Thanks to the federation feature, users can also IM people in other organizations that use Lync Online or host their own on-premise Lync servers. This requires that a federated relationship be set up by the administrators in both companies.

Users can attend online meetings with audio, video, and Web conferencing using the Lync client or using a phone with a PSTN audio conferencing service. Data sharing, including desktop and application sharing, whiteboard capability, and document sharing, is supported.

10: Office Web Apps

Microsoft Office Web Apps is part of Office 365, but it doesn't take the place of the full-featured Office applications; it supplements them. For sophisticated document creation and manipulation, you need a rich local application. But there are times when you're away from your Office-equipped computer and need to do a quick edit. That's where Web Apps come in. No matter where you are or what computer you're using, you have access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and you can create or edit content and post it to your SharePoint site or save it in your SkyDrive folder.

You get the same familiar interface you're used to with traditional Office applications, and documents display the same way they do in the desktop apps. You can even view files on many popular mobile devices, including Windows phones, iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, and devices with Opera Mobile 8.65 or Openwave 6.2 and later.

Supported file types include both older Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and the new XML-based formats (.docx, xlsx, pptx). Users can print Word documents and multiple users can edit a document simultaneously.

Bonus reason: A (somewhat) catchy name

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but when it comes to tech products, monikers matter. Even though folks made fun of the iPad's name, I wonder if it would have caught on as quickly if it had been named "Apple Tablet"or "Newton". Microsoft is notorious for boring product names, and certainly BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), the predecessor to Office 365, was one of those. The new name for the improved service is at least shorter, a little catchier, and actually means something (365-days-per-year availability...although it does make one wonder what happens on leap years).

Author:  Paul Sloan  

Marc Andreessen  (Credit: Andreessen-Horowitz)

Marc Andreessen's view of the world boils down to software.

From where he stands, as the guy who co-founded Netscape Communications and now co-runs the powerful Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, no industry is safe from software. Or, as Andreessen put it in a much-discussed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, "Software is eating the world."

Software has chewed up music and publishing. It's eaten away at Madison Avenue. It's swallowed up retail outlets like Tower Records. The list goes on.

No area is safe--and that's why Andreessen sees so much opportunity.

Fueling his optimism: ubiquitous broadband, cloud computing, and, above all, the smartphone revolution. In the 1990s, the Internet led to crazy predictions that simply weren't yet possible. Now they are.

I caught up with Andreessen to talk about 2012 and software's onward march.

Q: Let's start with smartphones.
Andreessen: I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones. Feature phones are going to vanish out of the developed world and over the course of five years they'll vanish out of the developing world.

Q: That's a big deal because?
Andreessen: That's a big deal because that's the key enabling technology for software eats the world broadly. Because that's what puts the computer--literally puts a computer in everybody's hand.

Q: In a way that the PC industry couldn't?
Andreessen: Most of the people in the world still don't have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone.... If you've got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category and serve you as a customer no matter where you are in the world in just gigantic numbers--in terms of billions of people.

Q: Does that mainly help existing players, or also open opportunities for new businesses?
Andreessen: Both. If you're an Amazon or a Facebook or a Google or even a startup, the fact that you can potentially address 2 billion smartphones in the developed world or 6 billion in three or five years, in the entire world, it's just a huge expansive market.

But it also opens up new kinds of businesses. The big thing that happened in 2011 was sort of the rise of the verticals, and e-commerce was the hotbed of that. We saw the rise of a whole category of e-commerce category killers in verticals that 5 or 10 years ago couldn't support high growth companies because the markets weren't big enough.

Q: What e-commerce players are you thinking of?
Andreessen: We just did an investment in Fab, which is just growing by leaps and bounds, and there's Airbnb [Andreessen-Horowitz is an investor]. That company is growing vertically. Its software eats real estate, software eats home furnishings. Another very exciting company, which we're not invested in, is called Warby Parker, an e-tailer for eyeglasses. So it's software eats Lens Crafters.

It's just on and on and on across different verticals because of the number of consumers who a) have PCs, b) are on the Internet, and now c) have smartphones. I expect vertical specialization to continue and there to be killer Silicon Valley style software companies in all kinds of verticals and categories in 2012 and 2013 that weren't viable three or five years ago.

Q: Just e-commerce?
Andreessen: E-commerce was the hotbed of vertical personalization of 2011, and big fat vertical expansion goes into other categories other than e-commerce in 2012. It could be content. It could be new kinds of service providers.

Q: We've seen some already.
Andreessen: One I really like that we're not involved in is Uber. Uber is software eats taxis. It's almost entirely a smartphone-based application bringing towncars to you.... It's a killer experience. You watch the car on the map on your phone as it makes its way to you.

That's smartphone specific, and there's going to be all kind of things like that. Task services like Zaarly and Taskrabbit are delivering a sort of distributed mobile workforce available on demand through your smartphone.

These are slicing and dicing different aspects of the economy into vertical slices or category slices and making them available via smartphones hooked to these really powerful networks with cloud computing on the back-end. We're just seeing a pattern of companies doing this over and over.

Q: So who should be scared in 2012?
Andreessen: I think 2012 is the year that retail--retail stores--really starts to feel the pressure. And I don't say that because I don't like retail stores. I loved going to Borders. I thought it was a great consumer experience. And I was a huge fan of Tower Records.

But the economic pressure is huge as e-commerce gets more and more viable and as these category killers emerge in the superverticals. If I own mall real estate or retail stores in cities, or if I own chains like electronics chains, I'd be concerned.... I think electronics and clothes are going to be a real pressure point. Home furnishing is going to come under pressure. It's going to get harder and harder to justify the retail store model.

The model has this fundamental problem where every store has to have its own inventory and every store is also a warehouse. The economic deadweight of that entire inventory in each store--that's what took down Borders.

Retail runs at very thin margins. So if e-commerce takes a 5 percent or 10 percent or 15 percent bite out of your category, then it becomes harder to stay in business as a retailer. So I think 2012 is the year that that really kicks in.

Q: Doesn't this bode well for the e-commerce incumbents?
Andreessen: For sure, Amazon is going to do really well and anybody with major e-commerce is going to do real well. But the new companies in e-commerce verticals are providing a very differentiating customer experience that is much more like shopping as entertainment.

Fab has more interesting products and merchandising and presents them in a more interesting way with much deeper social interaction. At Fab, something like 25 percent of the purchases over Black Friday weekend were a result of Facebook referrals. There's a whole fun element to shopping and whole entertainment element and whole excitement element that the first generation of e-tailers were not very good at.

Q: Like Amazon?
Andreessen: I like to say that the first generation of e-tailers was really good for nerds. Amazon for me is--I love it--it's like the biggest warehouse superstore of all time. It's just awesome, and I love wandering up and down the aisles and it's like, 'wow, look at that.' If I do enough searches I can discover anything.

The new generation of e-tailers are much more appealing to normal people--people who like to go the mall, have fun with their friends and try on clothes and compare clothes, and go home and brag to their roommate what they got on sale, and all the rest of it. A lot of new startups are not only very viable but also growing very fast because they provide a very different experience.

Aren't there opportunities for startups to help?
Andreessen: Yeah, there's going to be a big opportunity for software assistance for the incumbents at getting better in the new world.

As an example, at eBay [where Andreessen is on the board], we bought a company called Milo, and there' a competitor called Shopkick. These guys expose local inventory on retail store shelves and make it available as part of the e-commerce experience. That's the kind of software that's going to be incredibly useful to retail chains as they seek to compete online because it unlocks the local inventory.

The other category is represented by Groupon and Foursquare [both also Andreessen-Horowitz investments] and a whole new generation of these local e-commerce platforms, which is bringing online the gigantic number of businesses in the world that aren't on the Internet today at all. Whether it's a restaurant or hairdresser or day care center or yoga center or lawn care firms and on and on, there are so many that just aren't online in any meaningful way today, even 15 years into the Web.

Advertising on Google doesn't do them any good because it doesn't matter if people come to their Web site, it's not how they get business. So there's going to be a whole set of new companies, like Groupon and Foursquare, that are going to unlock these local businesses that aren't even online today.

Q: If nothing else, Groupon has done a great job of getting local businesses online.
Andreessen: I've always felt that the criticism of Groupon has been unwarranted. People have really underappreciated what Groupon has done, which is they've created a way for small businesses that aren't online to spend money online and be able to dial up customers on demand. That's a really big deal.

I think Foursquare is a revolution in the local experience of cities and connecting to small businesses around you, through information and, increasingly, coupons and offers. Again, it's customer acquisitions. There are going to be more of these kinds of things--and a whole bunch of new ideas in 2012.

Q: And this all circles back to smartphones.
Andreessen: Foursquare was impossible before smartphones. There was no way to implement it. Then, there's the other side of this. There's the user app for Foursquare, but there's also going to be the merchant app for all these things.

Local merchants, like local restaurant owners, are going to have a smartphone app they can use to dial up customers on demand. Whether that's from Groupon or Foursquare--any of these companies can do that. A lot of small business owners are going to start running their businesses from their smartphones.

Paul Sloan

Paul Sloan has been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor-at-large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. He's now an executive editor at CNET News, overseeing startup coverage. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar.

White House tells federal agencies to improve records management by considering new electronic alternatives.

By Elizabeth Montalbano, InformationWeek
November 29, 2011

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which oversees recordkeeping for the federal government, has collected about 475 million pages of records a year for each of the last 10 years, according to a White House blog post by staffer Megan Slack. However, "federal agencies aren't keeping up with this heavier load," she said, which has prompted the president to ask agencies to consider electronic alternatives for recordkeeping.

"Making these records available and accessible to the public is an important step toward giving people clear and accurate information about the decisions and actions of the Federal Government," according to Slack. "That, however, is largely dependent on taking advantage of these technology advances and making information available electronically, instead of relying on paper-based archives."

A presidential memo outlines steps agencies must take in the next several months to reforming current federal recordkeeping processes by moving to a digital-based system wherever possible.

Within 90 days, agencies must submit a report to both the Archivist of the United States and the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on how they will improve the management of existing and ongoing records--including emails and social-media communications. Their plans should include the use of cloud-based services or storage systems for digital recordkeeping, according to the memo.

Agencies also should include any obstacles they currently face or think they'll face as they move to the digital realm, as well as identify policies and programs that could bolster their efforts to improve how they maintain records.

The memo also mandates that agency senior managers prioritize the successful implementation of records-management and ensure they allocate sufficient resources to meet those requirements.

Within 120 days of submitting those reports, the director of the OMB, the national archivist, and an associate attorney general will issue a Records Management Directive specifying the steps agencies should take to reform and improve policies and practices.

That directive will focus on the creation of a more cost-effective and efficient federal records-management framework as well as the promotion of records-management policies and practices that are in line with specific agency missions, according to the memo.

Agencies also will be directed how to maintain accountability for recordkeeping, improve public access to records, support compliance with legal requirements, and how they should transition from paper-based to electronics records management wherever feasible.

The feds' historic attempts at digital recordkeeping have not always gone smoothly.

NARA began working with contractor Lockheed Martin on a digital archive of records back in 2001, a project that's had its complications and gone way over budget.

Still, the three-faceted system is up and running successfully, with one system for federal records, another system for the executive office of the president that deployed in 2008, and a third system for congressional records that was deployed at the end of 2009. The archive also has an online public access system for records that are freely available.

To help NARA manage the archive, the agency in October awarded IBM a $240 million, 10-year contract to operate and maintain it.

Our annual Federal Government IT Priorities Survey shows how agencies are managing the many mandates competing for their limited resources. Also in the new issue of InformationWeek Government: NASA veterans launch cloud startups, and U.S. Marshals Service completes tech revamp. Download the issue now. (Free registration required.)

Cloud computing reaches beyond data storage for IT

Such was the consensus of three market analysts during the COMDEXvirtual session "Preparing for the Next Generation." The extremely fast-paced changes happening in computer networking will have a profound effect on how enterprise business users procure networking technology. And while it isn't all happening today, it's not going to take years, either.

Nick Lippis, CEO of The Lippis Report, highlighted how the density of virtual machines to physical servers right now stands at about 15-to-1, but will soon approach 64-to-1 as enterprises look to get more out of their computing resources. The building blocks of that networking -- particularly Ethernet switching -- will need to keep pace, and Lippis said that about 25 precent of the Ethernet market at present is 10 GbE, with the transition to 40 GbE beginning and 100 GbE not far on the horizon.

All of those changes are "totally changing the traffic profiles and patterns occurring in cloud-based data centers," Lippis said, especially as companies look to converge networking, storage and computing as a way to provision those resources more effectively, and more and more mobile devices come onto the enterprise network.

Another factor is the increasing acceptance of cloud services, said Marshall Bartoszek, principal analyst, data center, ACG Research. With more ubiquitous usage of cloud-based services like Gmail, cloud providers are looking to increase their influence among IT decision makers.

"The cloud providers are looking to move up the value chain," Bartoszek said. "Everyone's seen the success that Google's had and now traditional managed services providers are looking to move up the food chain and provide cloud-based services. [They're] trying to leverage the competitive advantages they have today."

Bartoszek said what's happening is a "jump ball" in the data center: more and varied vendors targeting enterprise customers' IT spend. At the same time, noted Lippis, the larger data center vendors like HP, Oracle, IBM and Dell buying up networking assets to broaden their "cloud stacks" into networking.

It's a seismic shift for networking as a whole, said Zeus Kerravala, formerly of The Yankee Group and now founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. If cloud is the manifestation of more dynamically deployed, efficiently managed and easily accessed computing resources, it was inevitable that virtualization and cloud would begin to impact the network -- and they're just starting to.

"It's transformed every part of IT," Kerravala said. "It's changed the way software vendors license, it's changed the way servers are built. But as you move down the stack, we're just starting to see the impact on the network now."

Next: The Power Of Network Virtualization

Network transformation via virtualization will come to the fore, the analysts agreed. Software-defined networking and the OpenFlow switching and communications protocol are two examples of how the actual networking technology is changing. The same holds true with VXLAN, which targets how virtual machines move over distances.

The common themes in those new technologies, noted Kerravala, are the same as the technologies that brought virtual computing into vogue from its predecessors in Internet computing, client/serving computing and mainframe computing.

"Each has lowered the cost of computing, increased the value of the network and increased the level of integration between compute and network resources," Kerravala said.

Each also solves limitations of current network infrastructures, which are hampered by a latency-heavy three-tier architecture, the inefficiencies of Spanning Tree Protocol technology, older products that don't easily support virtual and cloud environments and poor management tools.

All of those factors will force enterprises to change how they evaluate networking technologies in the future, he said, not a speeds-and-feeds-based discussion on the number of ports on a switch.

"That kind of stuff is almost table stakes," Kerravala said. "What they need to look at is how many virtual machines can I support, what is the end-to-end latency. You can't evaluate technology on old school metrics."