Online Forms Made Easy
Formatta E-Forms Suite
With 15 remote offices, my
company was wasting a
lot of time, money, andpaper on internal request forms. Each
office was required to send check
requests, vacation requests, and so
on, to our home office in Austin, Texas.
We needed an online forms solution
that could streamline this process
and offer some of the components
that other solutions lacked, such as
a way for users to sign documents,
track versions of a form, and export
data into Excel and SQL Server. We
decided on Formatta E-Forms Suite,
which bundles four components—the
Formatta E-Forms Manager, Formatta
Filler, Formatta Server, and Formatta
Designer 7.0—into one package.
E-Forms Manager lets our IT staff
update existing forms, and when a
user signs an updated form, previously downloaded forms are automatically updated. This is a huge
time-saver when you have over
130 users and document versions
floating around. The solution also
integrates nicely with our existing
Active Directory environment,
which eliminates having to create
additional security for end users.
You can also use LDAP or Formatta's own authentication. The
Server component encrypts the
signing process, and this means I
don't have to use SSL when I publish forms. The Designer component lets me import existing PDF
forms or create new ones and
convert them to online forms,
with minimal modifications. I've
been looking for a solution like
this for two years, and Formatta
is the only vendor that provides
everything I need in one package.
Reader: Carlton Whitmore, Systems analyst
Product: Formatta E-Forms Suite
Company: Formatta
Contact: www.formatta.com
Connect to Remote Computers Behind a Firewall
NetworkStreaming's SupportDesk appliance 300
We were looking for
a better way for our
company's Help desk to provide remote support to our
traveling workforce. We ran into
difficulties when we had to remotely
connect to and fix computers for
employees who were connected at
client sites behind a firewall, which
is a common problem with many
remote-support solutions.
Our solution had been to walk users through step-by-step instructions to troubleshoot and fix the problems themselves. But with NetworkStreaming SupportDesk
Appliance 300, I can connect to any machine that has Internet access
and take over the machine quickly. Our users love the product because
it makes their lives so much easier. A user can be in a meeting or out
to lunch while a support technician accesses his or her computer and
solves the problem.
Unlike other products, SupportDesk lets us connect to remote
computers even when they're behind a firewall, and it doesn't require
us to leave a port open solely for SupportDesk. Additionally, if a connection is lost, SupportDesk automatically reconnects with the support
desk technician responsible for that job. Another benefit is that we
don't need to preinstall a client on a user's machine. A client is installed
while we're connected, and when the session is closed, the client is
automatically uninstalled.
Reader: Asif Shaikh, Senior technical support
engineer
Product: SupportDesk Appliance
300
Company: NetworkStreaming
Contact: www.networkstreaming
.com
A Free Tool That Monitors, Inventories, and Reports
on Your Infrastructure
Spiceworks IT Desktop
I started using Spiceworks IT
Desktop when it was still in
beta. It's a free tool that provides a remarkably complete view
of all devices connected to my network without using any agents. I
manage 50 workstations and 14
servers, so I'm a long way from
having the budget, manpower, and
time that the enterprise-oriented
tools require. Spiceworks gives me
information on computer hardware configuration; all software, services, and hotfixes on each computer; all connected devices; offline
servers; low disk space; plus hardware and software and low-toner
alerts. All this information is presented in an interface that's easy to
understand. I'm also really impressed with the quality of the support
forums and the energy of the moderators whenever I have any questions about the software. This is a great tool for anyone who needs all
the basic information on his or her systems without spending a ton of
money or time learning a commercial tool. IT Desktop will serve me
well into the future.
(Editor's note: Spiceworks isn't limited to just a monitoring and
inventory solution. The software can run reports for all installed software, trouble tickets, and disk usage. You can use predefined reports
or create your own from scratch. All reports can be exported to PDF or
Microsoft Office Excel formats.)
Reader: Jonathan Chorney,
Systems administrator
Product: Spiceworks IT Desktop
Company: Spiceworks
Contact: www.spiceworks.com
Combine Data from Multiple Sources for
Troubleshooting Anomalies
Ascendview's WildMetrix
As a consultant, I've seen
my share of products that
help troubleshoot anomalies in network infrastructures, and
they all have their good points and
bad points. But Ascendview's Wild-Metrix has one thing that no other
product I've seen has—the ability to
combine data from any source onto
one time-oriented graph, including
performance counters, event log
entries, and SNMP events. One of
my clients was having problems
with in-house ASP Web applications that would crash and then require
restarting Microsoft IIS. Without WildMetrix, I had to use Microsoft's
Performance Monitor and wade through the different pieces and was
left with nothing to correlate them with. But with WildMetrix, I can take the same performance counter data and correlate that data on the same
graph with individual Web page counters and determine what a specific
Web page was doing to cause an application to crash. I've also used the
software to determine when an Active Directory Group had its membership changed by correlating the security event logs on the domain
controllers with service account failures from the system event log.
On one occasion, end users reported intermittent slowness with
Exchange Server. WildMetrix was able to correlate event logs and system counters to determine that several antivirus and defragmentation
runs were running simultaneously, which caused a low level of free
RAM for the server. Without WildMetrix, seeing all of this would have
been nearly impossible.
Reader: Buzzy Winter, Senior certified
consultant
Product: WildMetrix
Company: Ascendview
Contact: www.wildmetrix.com
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