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Configuration Tips

Blind to Cause and Effect. A messaging and collaboration environment is an accumulation of many individual services spread across numerous servers, and is often also reliant on third-party networks and capabilities. When something goes horribly wrong, it’s difficult to prove your proposed remedial action will fix the problem, let alone significantly reduce the risk of a recurrence. Trial and error is risky, costly, and time-consuming.

Not Enough Time To Do What You Know You Should. With patches, upgrades, and new system elements to integrate into your messaging and collaboration portfolio, you already have enough to do. Proactive monitoring for pending problems is relegated to the backburner, at least until there’s a fire! Fighting fires that could have been avoided strains relationships and undermines professionalism.

Human Monitoring is Haphazard and Not Cost Effective. Email is mission-critical in most organizations—when email goes down, the business comes to a rapid stop. However, few organizations have the resources to employ a full-time email administrator to monitor the environment, so whenever ad-hoc monitoring is done, it’s haphazard. But when email does go down, the IT department is shoulders the blame for poor service delivery. Talk about a no-win situation.

Notifications Getting Lost in the System. Notifications of pending problems with mission-critical systems such as email get lost in the overwhelming torrent of information reported to infrastructure management products, such as SCOM, HP OpenView, and Tivoli. While the notification is generated, poor usability and ill-formed lines of accountability result in no action being taken.

Overwhelmed by the Mundane Details. It’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed with the mundane details of keeping a messaging and collaboration environment up-and-running. Creating new users on Exchange. Connecting a BlackBerry for a new user. Changing membership of various security groups so people can access the business applications they need to get their job done. In fact, if you have more than a few thousand users, keeping up with the mundane details is a full-time job. Which leaves you no time to carry out the strategic projects on your plate—which bodes poorly for your career and your organization’s prospects.

Increased Control. Staying informed about what’s really going on in your messaging and collaboration environment through proactive and automated monitoring allows increased control. GSX Monitor and GSX Analyzer provide the real information on which to make decisions about optimizing performance. Similarly, handling routine service requests via an automated request and execution process removes haphazard variation and eliminates silly errors, keeping you in control. And because we handle a full range of messaging and collaboration products, your control is systemic rather than solitary.

Reduced Costs. There are many mundane tasks required to keep a messaging and collaboration environment running at an optimal level, and relying on manual processes carried out by IT administrators is the most expensive way to perform any of them. With our continual, proactive monitoring and reporting services, along with a system for handling service requests, mundane tasks are executed through automated processes—saving you significant money—and IT administrators are alerted only when the human touch is needed.

Eliminated Emergencies. Continual, proactive, and automated monitoring of your messaging and collaboration environment gives early warning of potential problems. Administrators are alerted through regular automated reports, or automatically notified if pre-defined problem thresholds are crossed. By resolving the identified problems before they escalate out of control, emergency mitigations are only required in real emergencies, not for petty problems that were left to fester through lack of attention.

Simplified Environment. We offer a holistic framework that brings together a plethora of different messaging and collaboration products. Through our integrated monitoring and reporting framework, we break down the silos between the different products and simplify your view of and interactions with the environment. Eliminating unnecessary complexity is at the heart of what we deliver, enabling you to focus on critical areas.

Improved Job Satisfaction. Getting rid of the mundane and boringly repetitive aspects of maintaining a messaging and collaboration environment has a positive impact on job satisfaction for IT administrators. Secure in the knowledge that proactive monitoring of performance and availability is being undertaken, and at peace with the automated manner through which standard service requests are being handled, IT administrators can invest their energy in helping the organization leverage the environment to improve business results.