Servers for the Information Age

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
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Small Business Server Business Tips
Top 3 Ways to Maximize Your Small Business Server Consulting Profits

Over the past 7 years, Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) has gained traction as a widely-respected Small Business Server networking suite.

As a result, many small business computer consultants, systems integrators, and value-added resellers have jumped on-board the Microsoft Small Business Server bandwagon.

However, before you go ahead and bet YOUR company on Microsoft Small Business Server, consider the following three Small Business Server Business Tips… so you can maximize your Small Business Server consulting profits.

(1) Most small businesses in your area have never heard of Microsoft Small Business Server.

Although there may be hundreds, if not thousands, of small businesses in your area that would be excellent candidates for Microsoft Small Business Server, don t make the ultra-common mistake of assuming that the typical non-technical small business owner even knows what Microsoft Small Business Server is.

If you want to maximize your consulting profits and avoid commodity price wars, you re much better off leading off with a pitch for something that s more universally recognized… such as getting rid of computer viruses, stopping SPAM, or preventing computer security breaches.

(2) Sell your small business prospects on YOUR company first.

The real money in Small Business Server is NOT in reselling the Microsoft Small Business Server software. The real money comes from selling the RELATIONSHIP with the small business. So your company essentially becomes your clients outsourced IT department.

Remember, no small business owner is going to wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, craving Small Business Server. However, small business owners DO constantly lose sleep over what will happen to their companies if their computer systems fail them. Become the solution to the more primal, survival instinct and you ll get plenty of opportunities to sell Small Business Server, once you ve established a solid client/consultant relationship.

(3) Microsoft doesn t value computer consultants as much as they sometimes say.

Little known fact: the first version of Microsoft Small Business Server, planned in 1996 and released in 1997, was code-named “SAM”… because Microsoft s goal was for Small Business Server to completely bypass their reseller channel and be sold at “Sam s Club” warehouse clubs.

So the product team had the mandate to make the Small Business Server product SO simple that a non-technical small business end user could buy Small Business Server at the warehouse club and have the Small Business Server suite running in their office that same day.

Shortly after the first-version shipped, Microsoft realized that the most cost-effective way to reach small businesses with Small Business Server was through their reseller channel. And since then, Small Business Server resources have flowed toward the channel.

However, even today, you can often find 5-user versions of Microsoft Small Business Server in retail stores.

So the point: Microsoft isn t putting all its Small Business Server “eggs” in one basket, so why should you?!? Which brings us back to points one and two: Small business owners aren t actively shopping for a Small Business Server. So instead of “selling” Small Business Server per se, you re much better off selling a small business on YOUR company, BEFORE you sell Microsoft Small Business Server.

The Bottom Line

In this article, we looked at three Small Business Server business tips that every computer consultant, systems integrator and value added reseller needs to be aware when selling Microsoft Small Business Server.

About the Author

Joshua Feinberg is a 15-year veteran computer consultant and has appeared in CRN, VARBusiness, Microsoft Direct Access, TechRepublic, American Express OPEN, Entrepreneur, Inc, SCORE, Small Business Computing, and USA Today. To get Joshua s proven Small Business Server consulting profit strategies, sign-up for the free one-hour training seminar at http://www.SmallBusinessServerTips.com

Copyright MMI-MMV, SmallBusinessServerTips.com, All Worldwide Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Joshua Feinberg is a 15-year veteran computer consultant and has appeared in CRN, VARBusiness, Microsoft Direct Access, TechRepublic, American Express OPEN, Entrepreneur, Inc, SCORE, Small Business Computing, and USA Today. To get Joshua s proven Small Business Server consulting profit strategies, sign-up for the free one-hour training seminar at http://www.SmallBusinessServerTips.com

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
-
1) Where can I find a decent Intranet Application? 2) What about a good Groupware application? 3) What about a custom search engine for our intranet pages?

These questions are asked quite frequently in hundreds of forums.

One obvious solution is to approach a software development company and obtain a custom built product. However to take this approach one needs to first know what features and functionality is desired. Then on the other hand in some instances the need does not warrant the cost of commissioning a custom application.

A plethora of free open source web applications exist today. Regardless of the specific circumstances of the need these applications can quite often prove to be a valuable resource.

http://freshmeat.net is one of the best online directories of open source applications. A quick search on freshmeat.net for say “intranet”, “cms” or “groupware” will yield pages of results. Browsing these results any application marked beta, stable or mature is a possible solution. A large majority of the available web applications would also state PHP + MySQL as the platform.

Oh well I need to have some Linux Server and it’s way too hard is a common reaction. Fortunately this is not entirely true. If you wanted to host a large scale production site then the chances are that a custom Linux server may well be a requirement. However just evaluating on your own PC, or setting up a solution on your LAN for anywhere between 1 to 100 users can be easily realized without custom Linux servers.

The solution is in another open source free product known as WAMP server. The acronym stands for Windows Apache MySQL PHP server. WAMP is extremely simple to install and a good platform for either evaluating PHP + MYSQL applications or operating the same for up to a few hundred users.

Visit http://www.wampserver.com Or http://www.wampserver.com/en/ for the English version First it is important to note that most open source PHP + MySQL applications will not run correctly on the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. For this reason instead of the downloading the latest version of WAMP server click on “downloads” from the left menu and then click on “older versions at sourceforge” This will take you to https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=116092 scroll down and select “WAMP5 1.4.3″. Download the WAMP5_1.4.3.exe file and install it on your computer with default options.

Once installed and started a new icon will appear in the icon tray near the date/time on your task bar. Left click on this icon to activate it’s menu which allows you to restart or edit the configuration files.

Changing the web server port if necessary.

One common reason for wanting to edit configuration file is in case you already have a web server running on the same computer. In this case you would need to change the port address used by apache to something other than 80. In this case 8080 would probably be a good alternative choice.

——-Changing the web server port address Begin———– Click on the WAMP server icon and from the menu under “config files” select “httpd.conf”. A long text file will open up in notepad. In this file scroll down to the line that reads “Port 80″ and change this to read “Port 8080″, Save the file and close notepad. Once again click on the wamp server icon and select restart all services. One more change needs to be made before we are done. In Windows Explorer find the location where WAMP server was installed which is by Default “C:\Wamp”. Next goto the subfolder named “www“. Inside here you will see another subfolder named “phpmyadmin”. We are looking for a file named “config.inc.php”. In a default installation this file will be at “C:\Wamp\www\phpmyadmin\config.inc.php“. Open this file in wordpad and find the line that reads $cfg[’PmaAbsoluteUri’] = ‘localhost/phpmyadmin/’; Change this line to read: $cfg[’PmaAbsoluteUri’] = ‘localhost:8080/phpmyadmin/’; ——-Changing the web server port address End———–

Now open a web browser and access http://localhost . Or if you changed the port address to 8080 then goto http://localhost:8080/ You should be greeted by the WAMP welcome page. For each application that you wish to install create a new folder inside the “www” subfolder of where WAMP was installed. Lets assume that WAMP was installed at “C:\Wamp”.

Let say for example you wanted to install Mambo (www.mamboserver.com) 1) You would download the .zip or .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file and uncompress it using winzip or winrar into “c:\Wamp\www\mambo“. 2) You would access the wamp welcome page http://localhost/ or http://localhost:8080/ and access phpmyadmin. In here you would create a new database for mambo. 3) You would then access the wamp welcome page http://localhost/ or http://localhost:8080/ and from the list at the bottom of the page you would click on Mambo 4) You would then be greeted by the mambo installer which is a simple 5 step process. (the default username for MySQL is root and the password is blank as in an empty string)

Let say for example you wanted to install oscommerce You would download the .zip or .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file and uncompress it using winzip or winrar into “c:\Wamp\www\oscommerce“. 5) You would access the wamp welcome page http://localhost/ or http://localhost:8080/ and access phpmyadmin. In here you would create a new database for oscommerce. 6) You would then access the wamp welcome page http://localhost/ or http://localhost:8080/ and from the list at the bottom of the page you would click on Mambo 7) You would then be greeted by the oscommerce installer which is a simple process. (the default username for MySQL is root and the password is blank as in an empty string)

And so on and so forth.

Any PHP + MySQL web application which does not provide an automated installer is most likely not a very mature application.

Good luck

About the author:

TCWicks Is a software developer / systems analyst with over 10 years experience across many sub fields in Information Technology. He currently offers Web Design and Development Services through Zap Strategy

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
-
You might be trying to decide whether you want to host your website yourself rather than pay a hosting company. Maybe you just want to learn how it is done, or you want to save some money by doing it yourself. In this article I’ll discuss the most important part of hosting your website from home, the web server.

The word “server” sounds scary and because of this many people think only a professional hosting company can host a website. This is not true. A server is nothing more than software that runs in the background listening to requests from “clients.” The client in our case is an internet browser, like Internet Explorer.

How do you get a web server? Most Windows operating sytems come with a web server that just needs to be installed. There are also web servers than can be downloaded for free, like Apache. I’m not going to go over how to do this. In this article I’ll discuss the concepts and what’s needed to get your web server up and running and serving your site to the public after it’s been installed. Every web server is different but the concepts are the same. By going over the general concepts that are true for any web server, you’ll know what to look for regardless of the software you are using.

Like I mentioned before, a server is just software that runs in the background. A web server is a server that listens to requests from internet browsers for a specific page, finds that page in the computer it is running on and then sends it to the browser that requested it. Keeping this in mind, can you believe there are actually just two things you need to do to have your web server configured?

1) Tell your web server where to find your web site. Your website probably consists of multiple pages. You need to tell the web server the path of the folder where you keep your pages. For example, when someone types www.yourdomain.com/main.html, the server will look in the folder where all your pages live, and look for file main.html.

2) Tell your web server about your default page. This is the page that is displayed when someone types www.yourdomain.com in their browser without specifying a page. The web server already has some default page names like “index.html” so if you have a page with this name it will be displayed by default when no document is specified in the request. You may also add some more default file names to your web server. If you don’t want to name your file “index.html” you can tell your web server that your default page’s name is “mainpage.htm.”

This is basically all there is to configuring your web server. Although web servers have a lot of other features and settings, these are the two basic steps that will allow your web server to start serving your website. Of course, there is more to hosting your website from home, like getting a domain name, dealing with your router, but these topics are beyond the scope of this article.

I hope I’ve convinced you of how easy it is to set up a web server, which happens to be the most important step to hosting your website from home.

About the Author: For more information on setting up a web server and hosting your website from home please visit http://www.webhostingsteps.com

Source: www.isnare.com