What is a Blockchain? Infographic

So, what is a blockchain?

Before we dive into the What is a Blockchain? infographic, let me first explain why I created it. Or, you can simply scroll down to the infographic and bypass my incredible words of wisdom. Words of wisdom that have surely never been typed before…anywhere, ever.
I frequently take on new tasks, both personally and professionally, blatantly involving pieces and/or processes that are outside of my current skillset.
Why would anyone do this? Because I want to cram as much information into my brain as humanly possible before I can’t cram it in anymore.
What if you suddenly became incapable of learning? Wouldn’t you miss the option to be able to do so? I know that I would.

If you’re able to learn something new and/or grow your skillset, why in the world would you choose not to?

I think we can all agree that at times learning a subject or a process is a breeze, other times, not so much.
The point I’m really getting at here, is that with no prior experience in the solutions industry, I’ve had to work through the challenges of learning a plethora of products and services that I was completely ignorant to less than a year ago. Without diving into my feelings too much here, I can tell you there have been headaches, tears, and even points where I was fairly certain that my brain was so crowded and overworked that it just up and left the building.
However, after the chaos has settled from the information warriors battling their way into the crevices of my brain, the satisfaction of the new knowledge and how it applies elsewhere is indescribable. That satisfaction holds especially true for me in the solutions industry.

Our industry is packed with relevant, exciting, world-changing information that spans across nearly every other industry, and I feel so lucky to play even a tiny part in that.

I created this blockchain infographic to better understand what a blockchain is, while reading Chuck’s post: How much do you know about blockchain and is it just hype?
I find it easy to dive into a good book and paint an entire world of characters in my mind; but nothing helps me grasp intangible objects quite like a visual. So, if you’re struggling with the concept of blockchain, my goal is that this visual will help you in the same way that it did for me.

What is a Blockchain? Blockchain explained in an infographic. Prefer a PDF? Grab it here. 

How to Clean, Optimize, and Prolong the Life of Your Computer

Today is National Clean Out Your Computer Day.
You can interpret cleaning out your computer in numerous ways, but I interpret it as a full cleanse, optimize, and keep organized for as-long-as-humanly-possible type of operation, both internally and externally.
So today rid yourself of the junk (apps, files, maybe games, etc.) that you’ve kept for way too long and/or don’t use/need. Since the methods for this vary based (mostly) on your operating system, I’ve put together a collection of articles that will help you clean out, optimize, prolong the life of your computer. Enjoy!

5 Steps to Clean, Optimize, and Prolong the Life of Your Computer

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Why IT Managed Services offers a Solution for Tech Struggles

Why IT Managed Services offers a great solution for businesses.

Technology is everywhere (and growing) with no end to the constant stream of data and code. Data runs the world. So what does a business do when they cannot keep up with their technology needs, whether financially or talent-wise, on their own? Why is IT managed services a great solution for many Buffalo businesses?

High-demand skills and availability

Oftentimes, businesses have needs in very specific, high-demand, skill categories. High-level database administrators, Integration experts, IBM Middleware specialists, Cloud Consultants and Salesforce admins/developers can be difficult to find and retain. Talent retention issues are often exacerbated in the IT market. There is a growing need for “follow the sun coverage” with 24/7 availability across countries and time zones. This can be very taxing for small IT departments.

A growing expense

Your business might not need a full-time, highly skilled employee to manage your technology needs. It takes a huge amount of time and financial investment to find talent. The “fully loaded” cost of an employee, given the overhead components and cost of attracting the talent, do not end up costing any less than an IT managed services contract. An IT Managed service model offers structure, stability and excellent consultant skills, and they can be lightweight and scaled to suit individual business needs.
A managed services provider (MSP) can act as a safety net by providing several consultants with broader and deeper skills. These consultants can be called upon when needed, especially when there is a concern for overlap with a small IT team. Your MSP can also provide great skills around a very specific technology. If you are in the process of migrating, or not sure if you are going to keep a new application, managed services provides support for the short-term. There is no reason to invest in an expensive or highly skilled employee, when you are realistically only going to be utilizing a specific technology for 6 months to a year. IT Managed Services plans can be built to aid in the transition to a new platform and phase out over time.
From a technology perspective – IT managed services just makes sense. It reduces the burden on IT Managers, and allows the C-suite to focus on what you do best – running your business.

TxMQ’s Managed Services Solution

TxMQ offers IT managed services to suit most customers’ needs. Whether you have a recent investment in new technology – and need some support ramping-up, or you’re migrating your legacy apps to the cloud – or simply need some additional coverage during internal employee vacation periods and time out of the office, TxMQ has plans to fit your budget. Programs can be as short as 6 months and can be customized to gradually reduce the commitment you need from our team. We understand that sometimes you need our full support, while other times, basic over-run support will suffice until you can fly on your own. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit our website www.txmq.com/managed-services.

Gone in 60 Seconds or 1:00? Plan for Project Management

The Difference 60 Seconds or 1 Minute Can Make in Your Project Management

You walk up to the microwave to heat up your lunch. You know it takes 1 minute, but do you hit 0:60 or 1:00? Does it really matter how you punch in the numbers? The outcome is ultimately the same. Project management and proper planning – the “in-between” aspects of making your lunch – are what determine the end result.
In this situation, it doesn’t matter how you get there. You can heat up your food by putting in either number (since they ultimately are equal to the same amount of time). However, if you look at this scenario in terms of a project, the small differences in how you get to your intended outcome can result in failure. Planning and execution can ultimately make or break your project.
Most projects have a set of requirements and an identified outcome that needs to be achieved. We take the time to define what is needed to achieve said outcome and take several steps to prepare and plan our projects. This may require defining stakeholders, solidifying the project management team, creating the budget, allocating time and estimating risk. If you simply plan your project around a desired outcome and don’t care about the steps needed to get there, your project is sure to fail.
As an example, there are many different development standards in the marketplace today (agile, waterfall, v-model, etc.). Organizations are only focused on the outcome of a project and not the specific path required to get there. It is up to the project manager and project management team to help an organization understand that, although 60 seconds is the same as 1 minute, you still need 0 through 59 to get there.
It is not always easy to get your stakeholders and senior management on board with budget and time for a project. Some projects may not even get off the ground due to these constraints. Do not let this deter you from properly planning your next IT project. It is better to have a project rejected than to have an approved project fail for lack of planning.
For assistance with your next project, whether it be through staffing a project management team, or seeking IT consulting on your company’s next big move, TxMQ can help!

Emergency Changes… Are you Prepared?

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Emergency change: when something on a system, application, or physical device is changed immediately in order to prevent an incident. It can be the result of an incident or of failed change.
Take my word for it; I’ve seen it first hand. Emergency changes are risky.
They are quick, “on the fly” production changes that usually don’t contain back out plans. For this reason, and for many more I won’t dive into just now, it’s critical to have outlined processes for emergency changes.
Risky or not, many organizations often don’t take pen to paper to write out these necessary processes to approve emergency changes. In such instances, I’ve found that people push through emergency changes as new code and skip the approval process all together. Why? Because the approval process by which to submit and review those emergency changes virtually does not exist.
No red tape and no CAB review bureaucracy… sounds like CAB-utopia, right? Wrong. The consequences are far reaching, and they might just catch up to you.
So what’s the bottom line?
Use your CAB to review each and every emergency change that occurs using an after change review. The CAB should assess whether or not it can work to prevent similar emergency changes in the future. It should strive to discover the root cause through deep analysis and should likewise explore ways to eliminate those moving forward.
And, if a large number of emergency changes occur each week, raise those red flags and dig a little deeper.
Maybe you have no clear policy for Emergency Change.
Perhaps you have not identified the true root cause of an incident.
Or maybe you have yourself a trending Emergency Change that needs addressing.
Whatever the case, whatever the cause, emergency changes come up quite a bit in Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. Don’t let them slide by.  Are you prepared?
Let’s start a conversation.
 
(Original image by Perspecsys Photos.)
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Upgrading For Federal Reserve Bank MQ Integration

For financial institutions using WebSphere MQ V6.x or older to communicate with the Federal Reserve Bank, your time is running out… and fast. WebSphere MQ V6.x went End of Support on September 30th, 2012 and the Federal Reserve Bank is requiring upgrades to a current, supported version.

WebSphere MQ V7.0.0 and V7.0.1 went End of Support at the end of September 2015. For those of you wondering about WebSphere MQ V7.1, you might want to reconsider. While still technically supported by IBM, V7.1 is likely looking at another upgrade within the next 18 to 24 months.
From a business perspective, I recommend financial institutions upgrade to IBM MQ V8.x. At the very least, you could consider MQ V7.5.x.

IBM MQ V8.x, rebranded from WebSphere MQ is now full equipped with fix pack 3 and has proven to be very stable.

Further, MQ V7.5.0.5 and MQ V8.0.0.3, have deprecated SSLv3 connections due to the Poodle Exploit and reduced the number of supported Cipher Suites. (It is critical you understand the supported connection protocols and Cipher Suites supported by the Federal Reserve Bank.)
But MQ upgrades are only half the story.

If you haven’t been keeping pace with MQ updates, you’ve likely not been keeping pace with OS either. OS updates to supported versions are arguably equally as critical as MQ.

Interested in learning more about your options? Let’s start a conversation. Reach out to TxMQ today.

Why Everyone Should Invest In An ITSM Tool

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We’ve all heard the question before: “Should we invest in an IT Service Management Tool?”
The simple answer is yes. There’s really no counterpoint. Small, midmarket and enterprise organizations will benefit greatly from purchasing and then leveraging an IT Service Management Tool (ITSM) tool.
What Is IT Service Management (ITSM)?
At a high level, ITSM is the backbone of your IT organization. It’s the teams, groups and departments that handle the front-facing communication and support of your IT organization. They’re the ones that receive support requests and provide them to your backend teams, developers, etc. Think about them as the face of your IT organization. They need a management tool to do their jobs effectively.
What An ITSM Tool Can Do For You
There are many ITSM tools out there such as HP Service Manager, Remedy, Service Now, IBM Control Desk, C2 Atom and many more. Each offers its own user interface and reporting structure. Some have additional add-on tools and features or different levels of packages to support your unique needs. No matter the tool you select, the majority will at minimum come with a configuration management database (CMDB) as the backend database for your tool, as well as a basic ticketing system. Both of those tools are critical to the business, so you’re already winning, because your requests and your assets are being tracked in one tool. You can easily escalate and assign tickets for support or enhancements and do some basic reporting as well as track your assets. At a minimum you’ve just saved time and resources by streamlining your ticketing process.
Is that enough to write a use case and convince your company to look at investing in an ITSM tool. Maybe not. But it’s doesn’t stop there. We all know that IT changes, software changes and upgrades need to be put in, and service managers need to track these changes and/or obtain approval. We also need to make sure we’ve properly documented backout plans to ensure there are no conflicting changes happening during the same window. An ITSM Tool can do this for you. The change-management system in most ITSM Tools can automate your change-request process with enhanced questions that can assess the risk of the change and send automatic approval notifications to impacted parties utilizing your flashy new CMDB to get information on who owns the system or utilizes the system and who may be impacted by the change.
What’s so great is that it saves your change information and backout plans for future reference and knowledge sharing. Some even have an integrated change calendar that will show you any overlapping changes or maintenance windows that may impact your change. You’ll also be able to relate a change record to an incident ticket if additional support is needed during the change or if the change causes an outage. This is a more effective way to track any trending or knowledge needed for future changes.
Most ITSM tools also offer a knowledge base as on out-of-the-box option, because knowledge sharing and transfer is key to successful service management. The ability for a developer or network engineer to provide relevant information back to the service desk in a searchable format can increase your first-call resolutions (FCRs), or the time it takes to identify how to escalate an issue. The knowledge base can also be utilized to share knowledge to your user community with basic troubleshooting or automated support for frequently asked questions, issues or known issues with workarounds. This will in turn reduce the numbers or reoccurring calls to your service desk for issues that can be easily resolved by the user, and will free up your service desk analysts to handle more technical requests.
The above-mentioned features – CMDB, ticketing tool and knowledge base – are your basic features of an ITSM Tool. But there are other out-of-the-box functions, plus additional add-ons you can purchase to serve other business needs. These can include trending analysis, reporting/metrics, software-asset management, hardware-asset management, project-portfolio management, event-management integration, self-service portal, automated workflows, SMS escalations or phone-calling tree automation, and application-programming interfaces (APIs) that integrate with other systems to read from or write to the ITSM tool.
Why Do We Need An ITSM Tool?
Look at your IT organization and think for a moment of the services you provide. You most likely have some sort of request process for the service desk via email, phone, instant message or even web requests.
How do the service agents handle these requests? How do they document and resolve these requests? What happens if the request needs to be escalated?
The process you have in place probably works as requests are handled, problems get resolved and that guy on the 3rd floor who wanted a new laptop eventually got one. So why would you need an ITSM tool if everything is great and it works? Don’t fix it unless it’s broken, right? Wrong.
Even if your process seems like it’s working, is it really? Are you tracking changes? Can you easily provide trending analysis on common issues? Do you have a CMDB that stores your people, processes, assets and the lifecycle for them? Are your requests being escalated and turned around in an acceptable service level agreement (SLA)? How are work efforts prioritized? What happens when an outage occurs? Are teams notified? Is the outage documented and follow up on? How many different systems/applications are you utilizing to ensure these efforts happen? How much time, effort, support and money are you spending on these systems/applications to provide the basic functionality of requesting IT services?
Investing in an ITSM Tool will almost pay for itself simply by reducing the cost associated with support, time, resources and reoccurring outages. It’ll enable you to streamline your support process and even automate some of your manual tasks, like tracking, metrics reporting, and communicating about the services you provide to the organization.
Purchasing An ITSM Tool Vs. Building An In-House Tool
Let’s say you decide that an ITSM tool will absolutely help your organization. The purchasing cost is now under review, but you have a team of developers on the payroll that might have some availability to take on a project and produce an in-house ITSM solution. Here are some of the pros and cons to consider before building the tool in-house.
Pros:

  • Everything’s done in-house
  • You don’t need to spend any money up front to acquire a product
  • There’s no licensing
  • Your dev team knows how to support it
  • It’s customized to your specific needs

Cons:

  • Your developers are being paid to work on this project when they could be doing other production development
  • As your environment changes, your in-house solution will need to be updated, which will eat up more development time
  • If your solution is web-based and browsers, scripts and other plugins are updated, it may not work as intended and require more development
  • Knowledge transfer of the tool and how it was developed needs to be documented. If your developer leaves, the next developer must be able to support or upgrade the app
  • You may need to write code to integrate other applications such as email or phone into your app. As those systems are upgraded, the code may need to be revised
  • Requirements for the app may change as the organization matures or grows, which will consume additional development time
  • If and when the app reaches the end of its lifecycle, there’s no support or upgrade options readily available
  • There’s no CMDB, unless your team plans on developing one
  • The system of record will not be easily transferrable to another system of record if needed in the future

These are high-level pros and cons, but each organization will have more specific and customized lists depending on the functionality and requirements needed. Given all the cons, why not let someone else who’s already invested time and resources do the work for you? The tools out there are robust, and some are open for additional customization or in-house development to fit your specific needs. There are also additional support options for these tools to assist your organization when issues arise or during implementation.
Don’t waste your resources or time trying to reinvent the wheel when someone’s already invented one and enhanced it.
Original image by Max Max
 
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SharePoint And Why You're Probably Using It Wrong

So you have SharePoint. You acquired it through a package you purchased with other Microsoft products, or you heard about it from someone and decided to stand it up and see what it can do. Either way you spent some time, resources and much-needed network capacity to put this in place.  Now what? That’s a question many organizations ask, and if you’re not asking this question you’re probably still using Sharepoint wrong. Let me explain why.
Many of the organizations I’ve spent some time with have SharePoint. Most have the Foundations version and have no idea why they would pay for the Enterprise license. Foundations is still a strong version and can be utilized to reduce company expenditures on other vendors for products such as hosting your intranet or conducting surveys, as a few examples. I’ve seen this time and time again.  A company has an external vendor that hosts its intranet. The design elements are minimal and the cost associated with development of a product that can integrate with the organizations email client or other applications can be costly.  Why would you spend that time and money when you have the capabilities and product sitting on your network not being utilized to its minimal potential? SharePoint can be your front-facing intranet/extranet site. It can be your employee daily landing page with links to tools, web-hosted applications, announcements, statistics, documents, pictures, knowledge, reports, presentations, surveys, and more.
Think about it for a moment: You probably have a team portal setup for each department or some of your departments.  It’s probably a basic SharePoint template with an Announcement section, Document Repository, Calendar, maybe a fancy logo and a tab at the top to go to the parent site. If this sounds like you, then you’re using Sharepoint wrong.  Remember, SharePoint’s a tool that has many capabilities.
With the basic features offered through SharePoint Designer and the default page and web part templates, you can customize each portal, page and web part to fit many of your business needs without spending money on development.  You don’t need a web developer to manipulate multiple lines of code to embed a video on your page or customize the layout.  You can assign rights to individual teams and with little training they can be off and running on their own – now designing portals specific to their function and needs. I’m not saying go and fire your web developers.  I am saying you can utilize the functionality of SharePoint so your web developers can focus on other projects. You can code pages in SharePoint and design web applications, custom API calls and external facing sites.  So keep those web developers around.
Now that I have you thinking about what you can use SharePoint for, let’s talk about why you might consider the Enterprise license. The first thing I think of when someone asks about the Enterprise license is Workflows. Workflows can be designed to do many, many, many, many automated things. Let’s say you have a employee-engagement survey.  You want to know how your employees feel about the organization or an application that just went live.  You use SharePoint and create a really cool survey that changes the questions based on the previous answers, then take that information and add it to a live, up-to-the-minute graph on your main page. How do you do that? Answer: Workflow.
Maybe you have a form that needs to be filled out, and when someone submits the form, an email needs to be sent to a group for review. How do you do that? Answer: Workflow.  If you haven’t already guessed why the Enterprise license is useful, the answer is: Workflows.
Another thing that comes to mind when someone asks about the Enterprise License is MS Office integration. Yes, I said it. MS Office Integration. It delivers the ability to collaborate on those projects or documents right through SharePoint, or create awesome Visio diagrams on your main page.  Maybe you really wanted to use an Access Database for something and need to easily query the results in a list. I’m here to tell you that SharePoint Enterprise license has MS Office integration.
A few other features you’ll miss without the Enterprise License include business intelligence, robust search features, custom social-media-style profile pages, more design elements, scorecards, dashboards and a better mobile experience.  All versions of SharePoint have Android and IOS support, however, I’ve found the Enterprise version has more features for navigation that work better with the mobile devices.
If you’re not already preparing a use case for SharePoint, and an argument for why you should upgrade your license, then you really should get out there on the Internet and browse some additional topics.  Check out what other companies are talking about.  Really think hard about why you have this product in your environment you’re not doing anything with. There are many resources available to help you start your SharePoint journey.  Why not start it today?
Art work provided by John Norris