Installing Small Buiness Server 2003 can be difficult at times. With the proliferation of RAID and data protection hardware, finding the right drivers and installing them can be diffiult as well. When InstallingSBS Server on a server that has RAID configuration enabled, often times you can run into the error: During the initial installation, you may receive the following error:

Found a great video on YouTube that demonstrates the Hyper-V technology. It’s a great demo on an Intel / HP platform that reviews the platform and it’s capabilities.

Video Posted by channelintel

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.

Core Scenarios for Hyper-V

Hyper-V provides a dynamic, reliable, and scalable virtualization platform combined with a single set of integrated management tools to manage both physical and virtual resources, enabling you to create an agile and dynamic data center. Hyper-V enables:

• Server Consolidation
  Businesses are under pressure to ease management and reduce costs while retaining and enhancing competitive advantages, such as flexibility, reliability, scalability, and security. The fundamental use of virtualization to help consolidate many servers on a single system while maintaining isolation helps address these demands. One of the main benefits of server consolidation is a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), not just from lowering hardware requirements but also from lower power, cooling, and management costs.

  Businesses also benefit from server virtualization through infrastructure optimization, both from an asset utilization standpoint as well as the ability to balance workloads across different resources. Improved flexibility of the overall environment and the ability to freely integrate 32-bit and 64-bit workloads in the same environment is another benefit.

At Empower we are seening that quite a few small and medium sized businesses are either evaluating or adopting the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. It is a robust platform for may CRM processes and need. If you are asking yourself, what is Microsoft CRM, below is a quote from their site.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is a fully integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system. Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you the capability to easily create and maintain a clear view of customers from first contact through purchase and post-sales. With tools to enhance your company’s sales, marketing, and customer service processes—along with native Microsoft Office Outlook integration—Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers a fast, flexible, and affordable solution.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps you drive consistent and measurable improvement in everyday business processes.

Today I found a great clip on youtube.com posted by user: rfosterfletcher, his website is http://www.caltech.co.uk/. It is a great walk through of the sales process using the CRM platform.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is hands down, the absolute best spam filter / gateway I have ever used. It rocks, and if you don’t believe me, shoot me an email at jholbrook@empoweris.com and I will get you a 30 day trial.

I spent the better part of today learning how to properly configure my Barracuda Spam Firewall. During the configuration, I decided that it would be in the best interest of Empower to integrate LDAP connectivity in order to help protect against dictionary spam attacks and aid in auto white listing of Valid Email addresses. Auto white listing will also aid in the training of the Barracuda Spam Firewall Bayesian filter.

That is when the fun began. I was attempting to do the LDAP integration and I began to beat my head. I kept getting test unsuccessful. I hit the web to find out what I was doing wrong. When it comes to Barracuda, I think the best place to go is their support forums. I found the posting for the most part relevant and informative. Anyway enough of that. The documentation i had to go on that comes stock with the Barracuda was not working for me. When i look at the LDAP log I was getting two main errors: