Cortex Release 8.4 - now available

Cortex 8.4 is now available for existing customer upgrades. Please refer to the Cortex Support Site to download the detailed release notes.

The release introduces some brand new features including trial customer accounts, OU management, Windows Mobile and the integration of Exchange 2010.

If you are interested in upgrading your existing Cortex instance, please contact Cortex Support to arrange a suitable time to install 8.4.

The Cortex Development Team are now working on our next release, which we plan to implement at the end of April.

Forget Password Feature

Cortex 8.4 allows the end-user to select and save answers to specific questions on their user account. Once these answers have been saved, the end user will be able to reset their forgotten password by themselves rather than contacting their customer administrator. This feature provides greater empowerment to the end user, and has the potential to reduce the number of password resets that a Customer Administrator has to manage.

A new page has been added to the Change Password menu where the user can select predefined questions or create their own question.

This feature can be enabled or disabled on the Cortex Control Panel depending on the Service Provider's requirements.

Release 8.4 Development Update

We are now in the final testing stages of Release 8.4 and are now planning the handover to the Cortex Support Team. Over the festive period, we will be updating the latest help guide, preparing the Release Notes and before releasing the code for implementations and upgrades from mid January 2010.

Release 8.4 contains the following features:

- Support for Exchange 2010 provisioning
- Support for BlackBerry 5 provisioning
- Support for HyperV provisioning and reporting
- Trial Customer Accounts
- Further enhancements to our new content management system
- Forget Password feature

If you are interested in scheduling an upgrade in 2010, please contact cortexsupport@ems-cortex.com

Cloud Computing Defined

If you have 15 minutes spare, take a look at this presentation by Simon Wardley, aside from giving an interesting perspective on Cloud Computing, it's also really well presented:
Cloud Computing - Why IT matters

The New BPOS

Microsoft have recently lowered the price of their BPOS offering, and are at a rapidly increasing rate adding new features and benefits.

Where does that leave the Exchange, and SharePoint hoster?

Microsoft are leaving out the middle of the market.

The middle market is hard: They have internal IT guys afraid for their jobs, some complex systems and are used to having account managers – someone to work with, and help them look like a hero to the business.

This is where there is opportunity. As a hoster you can take advantage of Microsoft’s massive advertising campaign. Every CEO, CTO and CIO will at least know about the hosting offering if not understand it. Due to your ability to customize to a customer’s specific requirements and host additional servers/software over and above Exchange and SharePoint you have a key point of differentiation.

You are supposed to be more expensive, you are offering local tailored services with a real understanding of the applications and requirements of your local market or vertical.
Hosting companies give excellent value for what they do:
Relieve the stress of maintaining hardware
Maintaining business critical applications in a cost effective manner
Offering a 99.999% uptime for often as little as $20 - $50 a month.
Offering expensive and complex applications traditionally only fully utilised by large enterprises to small and medium businesses as well as the enterprise market.
Providing a phone number and a face.

As a proven presence in the market – through either webhosting, being an ISP or perhaps a Managed Services Provider customers are likely to come to you first, over and above BPOS and Google.
Your willingness to engage the customer directly, rather than just a webpage will build the customers confidence and allow you to capture this market.
The market is clamouring for this sort of service. We have all heard customers ask about Virtual Desktops, Software as a Service and Hosted Exchange.

There is a huge market being marketed to by Microsoft – get on the gravy train.

Webinar for provisioning of Terminal Services/XenApp and XenDesktop

Control Panel Webinar for provisioning of Terminal Services/XenApp and XenDesktop.

Offering Hosted Desktops is a hot topic these days, but delivery is complex, intensive and time consuming without adequate supporting systems.

Let us show you how you can automate provisioning, reducing your overheads, time to market and increasing customer satisfaction:

- Allow customers to provision their own desktops and applications

- Delegate out password resets and day to day admin tasks down to the end user

- One Control panel manages Admin of TS/XenApp and services like Exchange, SharePoint and Online Back-up

- Automation leads to scalability – host more users with the same staff

- Create private applications for use by a single customer or shared applications to be used by many.

- Share a single farm among many customers safely and securely

Offering services based on Terminal Services/XenApp allow you to differentiate in this market. Choose applications your customer base knows and wants – create a niche for yourself.

Grow Quickly – most providers have limited or no automation – Grow your customer base by giving them control, a real low touch cloud offering with all their applications viewed and managed through a single pane of glass..

I look forward to seeing you on the 8th or 9th of December

US Webinar: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/435579713
Europe Webinar: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/483117560

Management of User Chevrons

Currently only users who have been assigned with specific Cortex standard roles are displayed with chevrons on the Cortex UI. These chevrons are used to easily distinguish what type of administrator rights the user has been set up with and are great when faced with a user table consisting of 10+ users.

Feedback from our customers has requested that the management of the chevrons is extended to include individual customized security roles. We saw this as a real benefit to the overall end user experience and from 8.4, service providers will be able to assign the chevrons to their own customized roles.