Saturday, September 29, 2012

Make your business more potent with Digital Signage

The world has become a better place to live in, thanks to advancement in technology. New and evolving technologies for video-based communications are introduced virtually each and every day. Whether they are for content development, distribution, or display, these innovative technologies are dramatically impacting the way we access and view business message or information, as customers as well as employees in the workplace. Digital signage has changed the face of advertising. It is much better than static boards.

Digital Signage is one of the new forms of advertising that has created ripples in the market. Today, digital signs -- flat panel TV screens showing advertising and informational content -- are all around us. It can be found on the highway, in the supermarket, in the bank, at your doctor's office. They have become a part of the everyday landscape. Today's digital signage is much more than just an ordinary display. It has gone from simply replacing paper signs, billboards etc  to become an interactive and engaging portal, offering a whole new way to engage consumers, employees, citizens, and more. It has helped to build trust and better communication between companies and customers. The main reason why so many companies are using digital displays is because it offers more benefits compared to static banners. They are able to show interactive business message or information to customers based across the globe. But to make it more engaging and effective, you should use the best digital signage software. It will help you to get the most out of your advertising campaign. Another reason why a lot of business owners prefer to use digital signage because it is quite affordable and it will not make hole in their pocket. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of business owners, departmental stores and other organizations who are not familiar with the importance of digital signage software, when it comes to promoting their products or services through the medium of digital displays. If you are using high quality digital signage software, you will be able to easily manage and modify the messages being displayed on your display boards. This will make your promotional activities more flexible and interactive. There are so many programs that you can use for your system, and you can find these programs by checking out different digital signage companies. So, the best thing that you can do if you are looking for digital signage software is to look for a trustworthy company that can provide it for you. With sound digital signage, you will be able to create new markets for your products and services. And you can also reach out to your audience quickly with minimum resources.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Anatomy of a Website Address

It's natural to begin with www. when you think of a website and to end with .com/.org/.net. Web addresses are everywhere. But what does it all mean and why is it important? You're about to find out.

"Web Address" is the layman's term for the technical term URL, which stands for Universal Resource Locator.

Let's use the URL of this online document as an example:

http:// www. infopathways .com /documents/WhitePapers/ web-address-makeup.pdf

http:// stands for "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol". http:// tells the computer to transfer a webpage (hypertext) from the internet to your computer. Now a days, you do not need to type "http://" before the rest of your web address because computers assume it. However, it is often necessary to create a properly working hyperlink (a clickable link on a webpage or in a digital document). You may also see https://, which represents a secure, encrypted webpage, often for sites that contain and/or collect confidential or sensitive data.

www. stands for "World Wide Web", and is also abbreviated as WWW or W3, and is often referred to as the "Web". Do not confuse the World Wide Web with the "Internet", as they are not the same. Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. The Web is made up of text documents hyperlinked together and is just a part of the Internet. The WWW denotes the subdomain. This is normally considered the default of a web site, but can be one of several subdomains for a site. Not every subdomain in a URL has to be "www". Subdomains are the third level domains that can be used to organize your web site content. In products.yoursite.com "products" is a subdomain within "yoursite.com". Subdomains can use the same design/layout as your primary domain, or it may be completely different.

infopathways in this instance represents a unique Domain Name used for one website. Every website has to have a registered Domain Name. Often the name chosen will represent the company, the product, the service, and/or location in some way.

.com (commercial) is the most common "Top Level Domain"; other common TLDs include.org (non-profits),.edu (educational),.gov (government), and.net (network). By top level, we mean it is at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet.

/documents/WhitePapers/ represent folder levels within our website's Root Folder (aka: the main folder holding all of the web files that make up the website... pages, images, documents, css, and other code). By looking at the full URL, you can begin to visualize the file structure of the website. In this instance, "WhitePaper" is a folder inside of "documents" which is a folder inside the main Root Folder.

web-address-makeup.pdf represents our final destination, the page or file we are looking at. This is the file name of the page or document. In this instance, we are looking at a PDF (Portable Document Format) File. You may often see that the home page of a website has a file name of index.htm, index.html, index.asp, etc. All represent a file type; HTML is the most common and stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language", which is the name of the type of code used to build the web page. Today, there are various web-languages that make up the final code of a webpage.

How will this knowledge benefit you?

Many of these elements, though good to understand, may not impact the way you surf the web. However, there are important facts to reinforce:

When dealing with money online (banking, credit card or PayPal purchases, etc.), it is extremely important that the site read https ://. That "s" could mean the difference between a secure transfer of money or a scam artist taking you for all you've got.

You also need to be cautious of spam emails. Many a time, an email may look legit - they ask you to click the link to reset your password or to log into your account. Look at the web address very carefully before you enter any data. For example, banks should never email you out of the blue to reset your password or to have you log into your account to check something. Again, these are often from scam artists looking to collect your sensitive data and deplete your account. If anything looks suspicious, such as the grammar of the email, the graphics, or if the web address is spelled incorrectly, get out and disregard the email.

Friday, September 14, 2012

The Fabric Lining for Your Cloud Computing

The cloud is still an airy place that many are hesitant to ascend to. But no one can deny the huge growth in successful cloud computing in the past few years. It offers companies more freedom at less cost, and will soon be the most popular way to do business. However, with this jump into the cloud, traditional Ethernet is no longer the best solution. Many who use virtualization and cloud computing are switching to a new technology called Ethernet fabric.

In traditional Ethernet, a data center will have a group of switches to accommodate the high number of ports needed. Generally, the network is organized with some switches at the top of racks, some in the middle and some at the ends. They are all connected which forms a hierarchical Ethernet tree of sorts, and allows for traffic flow only on a north south axis. For two decades, there has been a three layer design with an access layer at the bottom, an aggregation layer in the middle, and a core layer topping the tree. Routing is only happening in the core layer, so to talk to a server on a different part of the network, you would have to travel up through the three layers and then back down again. Adding on server clusters will allow some traffic move east to west, but this branching out of the tree create more latency and restricts the bandwidth. On top of this, each switch has to process it's own information and be configured individually, which takes extra time.

With Ethernet fabric, you will find a simpler way to have better performance, and higher levels of availability and utilization. Basically, it is a flat, double network, self-healing fabric which is designed to work beyond the three layer limitations or traditional Ethernet. It doesn't use a spanning tree to stop the occurrence of loops and uses every single self-forming inter switch link to insure the shortest path is travelled. The self healing comes into play when a link becomes unavailable -- all other traffic on all other inter switch links in the fabric continue. The fabric is also flexible and can be designed in any format to fit the needs of your workload. Along the same vein, it is elastic and can efficiently scale up or down as needed. With advanced Ethernet fabric. you can managed the system from the domain rather than the device, and you can make decisions based on policy instead of repetitive procedures. The fabric with the addition of virtualization-specific enhancements will make VM automation within the network and IT automation a breeze.

Brocade is one of the leading producers in Ethernet fabric and have recently helped a Belgian media company, called De Persgroep, to upgrade and better manage its datacenter networking. Using an Ethernet fabric and Brocade's VDX 6720 switches, they were able to eliminate the need for a jumble of network wiring to a massive switch, add to the number of physical network ports, open the company's capacity for growth, and severely reduce bottlenecks.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Credentials and Experience in the IT Sector

As with any career path or profession, the IT industry's ranks of professionals are riddled with different expertise levels, college degrees, doctorates and certificates, each designed to readily define and assess just what a particular individual is capable of, professionally.

Given the diverse mix of disciplines, technical knowledge and duties expected from IT personnel, the areas of software, hardware and network infrastructure understanding has made the setting up of such industry markers a necessity, one which works for organization leaders and individual IT experts, in helping each other note what one is really skilled with and knowledgeable about.

But as with any career path or profession, the old "credentials VS experience" standard is also prevalent in the IT industry, with different organizations and entities having their say over which is more valuable - credentials or actual field work experience.

Though no clear cut answer can be given to such a conundrum, the weight of certain certificates, matched with ample work experience, have proven to be effective in pointing out true professionals from the rest, with the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certificate being one of the world's most respected.

The Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert Certificate

The CCIE Certification Standard is essentially designed to validate the actual skills and professional capacities of IT professionals, specifically targeting the key disciplines involved in managed network services.

Ascribed to be the highest certification standard awarded to qualified personnel, the standard is known for its comprehensive and extensive evaluation of network management skills, delving into the areas of security, network storage and data retrieval standards, service provider operations and more.

Qualifiers for the certificate are not required any prerequisites to qualify, only that their theoretic and field knowledge be at expert-level to readily pass and fulfill the validations and testing tools involved in getting the certificate.

Even the number of years an IT expert has under his or her belt isn't exactly an "issue", but as the overall IT landscape has proven, years' of experience and technical know how have proven to be important in passing the CCIE certificate's qualifier exams and assessments.

With less than 30,000 CCIE Certificate holders in the world, to say that getting a CCIE Certificate is easy would be an understatement, given the fact that theoretical knowledge on the rudiments and dynamics involved in managed network services isn't enough to really help qualifiers pass the certification's standards.

To some extent, the CCIE Certificate comes to combine the ideal that is experience AND technical knowledge, all in one.

I'm part of the management and development team at Presidential Training, one of the fastest growing CCIE Training providers out there. With a competitive set of training tools and services, you can be assured that our price to technology ratio is one of the most generous in the market today.