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I know the fact that MS has extended Windows 7 Professional downgrade rights is an old story now, but I haven’t seen too many blogs about it. I think it’s worth a quick post, particularly as it makes my last Windows 7 post is so out of date!
See here for a the low-down on the [...]

I had a great discussion about Windows 7 today. Two things were immediately obvious. One is a little scary, but the other is pretty exciting (for geekettes like me, at any rate).
The scary thing is that for those XP houses that don’t have Software Assurance on their desktop Operating System licenses, options are starting to [...]

I spotted a link to this webcast on LinkedIn – although a little long, I enjoyed it, particularly the IT Service Management oriented approach to SAM and Lifecycle Management.
http://www.absolute.com/resource_center/webcasts/gartner2010?aa=true

These are some of my top tips for making managing printers that little bit easier. They’re not exclusive, of course.

Educate your users about all the different functions of a multi-function device – particularly scanning, ’storage print’, where you print to an ‘in-box’ which allows you to print out a large number of documents at once [...]

Printer management is tricky for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to pretend I know all the answers. But what I thought I would do is discuss a few of the issues that make it so tricky, and provide a few tips and tricks that can make things easier.
That’s MY printer syndrome
People get [...]

So as promised, here are my top tricks for effective management of support, maintenance and subscriptions. They are in no particular order!
Storage
Support, maintenance and subscriptions are all types of contracts. You should scan them in for your own reference and as a back-up, and send the originals for storage by the legal department in their [...]

As we’ve seen, software deployment and upgrade maintenance functions tend to follow the same set of processes. We’ve also seen that because software is just code that can be updated and changed easily over a long period of time, it has a much longer lifespan than hardware does generally.
But software will come to the end [...]

The software lifecycle is truly circular – unlike hardware which may be repaired only once or twice in its life, software will often go through many iterations of improvements (bug fixes, new functionality etc).
Most of the activities involved in the upgrade of existing software are exactly the same as those involved in creating and deploying [...]

Unlike hardware, software never wears out, although it does need to be updated regularly to ensure it keeps meeting the needs of its users as well as patch any security holes that may be discovered.
In my previous post on the origins of software, I looked at the main groups developing software and some of the [...]

Before we try and understand software lifecycles in depth, I thought it might be useful to think about where different types of software come from – why are they developed and what are the drivers for change.
Software seems to originate in three different ways:
Commercially produced software: Almost all organisations, no matter what their size, will [...]