Ed Horley will also be giving an update on the status of Forefront, NAP, Vista SP1 and several other items of interest that he is allowed to share from the Microsoft MVP Summit.

The Presentation that will be given:
Managing and Controlling your Physical and Virtual IT Infrastructure all
from a single pane of glass.

Presenter: Kevin Ansell - District Manager with Avocent Corporation
Kevin has over 30 years of experience in the IT world. He has managed
Data Centers, been a Consulting Systems Software Engineer, Professional
Trainer. Small Business Owner, and Sales Executive for a broad range of
Software and Hardware technologies.

Target Audience:
Anyone in IT responsible for the Management of the Physical and Virtual
IT Infrastructure. IT Managers, Network Admins, Windows Admins, Server
Admins, Virtual Machine Admins, etc..

Please rsvp if you plan on attending.

We will also plan on doing Ubuntu as a VM under XP and Vista for those not adventurous enough to try Linux as a base OS on their laptop.

Teneros specializes in High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Exchange.

The Teneros Application Continuity Appliances for Microsoft Exchange assures high availability and disaster recovery protection of both mission critical email application and the valuable email data.

If an Exchange server fails or an entire Exchange site goes off-line, Teneros appliance will take over email operation from the downed Exchange server.  When an email server fails, on-site failover to a Teneros high availability appliance can be automatic or set to require manual selection.  If a site goes off line, the IT team can initiate failover to a Teneros disaster recovery appliance located in a remote location across the WAN.

Simple setup:  No intrusive software installations on the Exchange server.

No changes to AD on failover and failback Prevents replication of database corruption.

Low TCO:  The IT Admin doesn’t have to manage an additional Exchange server in the remote DR site.

Alexander LAN, Inc. has been developing software utilities to prevent, recover from, and resolve the cause of system failures since 1991. Its latest release, Alexander SMK (System Management Kit), was introduced for Windows and Linux in 2005. SMK automatically alerts IT staff when changing conditions threaten system stability before it is too late. It also provides both Asset Tracking and Power Management, all from a simple browser.

They will have a full server license of Alexander SMK with 5 client licenses plus some shirts to give away at the meeting.

•     Why SBS?
•     Licensing
•     Hardware recommendations
•     ISP issues
•     Routers/Firewalls
•     Basic Backup
•     Wizards
•     Myths dispelled

•     Remote Access
•     Security
•     Exchange
•     SharePoint
•     ISA
•     Requested Topics

If time permits we will try and also go over Virtual Center to manage the two servers.  We will also attempt to use the VMotion product to migrate a VM from one server to another.

Presenters: Mike Hansen, Ed Horley, Dan Felder and Scot Mehl

If you have not played with iSCSI this will be a great time to get an introduction to the technology and what it offers.

In addition, we will have a 64-bit Windows Vista box to play with so we can see all the new bells and whistles that Microsoft is putting into Vista.

Dino has been with Network Engines as a Sales Engineer, since April of 2005. Before joining Network Engines, he worked in the IT Professional Services arena since 1998 working with a variety of consulting firms. His strengths include network assessments; audits project planning, implementations, network migrations and analytical problem solving. Some of Dino interests include pre sales engineering, designing, deploying, project management, and large-scale assessments.

Network Engines appliances are designed to ease the deployment, enhance manageability, and increase security of mission critical software applications. Our heritage of providing technology products and services tailored to supporting the entire lifecycle of our customers appliances has made us the appliance partner of choice for software market leaders.

In addition, we will cover SQL Server 2005 launch, follow up to last months topic of Virtual Machines, talk about Sony's Rootkit DRM and chat about general user group business.

Presenter: Darren Mar-Elia, Microsoft - Business Unit CTO, Quest
Software

Lasso will be giving away T-Shirts.

Autonomic Software, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, is tackling one of today’s most critical security problems impacting virtually every enterprise.  Autonomic Software provides a comprehensive and proactive solution to overcome today’s challenges in Security Patch Management, Asset Management and Software Distribution.  Through the development of an N-tier, agent-based and cross platform solution, the Autonomic Network Security Administrator (ANSA) provides clients with the ability to automate and control their present networks.  The beauty of the ANSA solution is found in its elegant simplicity to implement, configure and use.  Autonmic Software has transformed the daunting tasks of patch management, asset management and software distribution into a highly automated, policy-driven best practice.  Autonomic Software is a company who understands the challenges of doing more with less.  We have provided organizations across the United States the ability to spend less time maintaining their current IT environment and more time improving it.

Presenters: 
Tony Gigliotti- CEO
Steve Hassfeld- CTO

 Presentation Topic:  Vulnerability Management Seminar

Giveaway: FREE IPOD! 

Presentation Description:
The widespread growth of the Internet and pending acceptance of its
infrastructure as the de facto platform for business communications have
paved the way for businesses to further improve their operations by
shifting voice traffic away from expensive and inflexible telephone
circuits to versatile Internet data pipes. The process, known as voice
and data convergence, brings two previously disparate networks together
under one common infrastructure. This presentation will cover a range of
common pitfalls often associated with voice and data convergence, and
will describe how Stack's solution can help securely and reliably
converge voice and data applications on a common infrastructure.

Stack3 offers a suite of secure convergence solutions that simply the
convergence of voice and data applications. They specialize in delivering
infrastructure simplicity to companies that are looking to deploy
enterprise-grade security and voice solutions on an SMB budget. Their
product line consists of:

- The Secure3 Gateway is a VoIP-ready unified threat management
appliance expressly designed to secure the perimeter of the enterprise,
while shaping traffic to prioritize real-time transmissions, such as VoIP.

- The Voice3 PBX is a private branch exchange (PBX), combining automated
attendant, conference bridging, unified voice mail, call queues,
intercom & audio paging, intelligent call routing and VoIP, that can
interoperate with standards-based telephony equipment.

Paul is responsible for marketing and successfully delivering
secure convergence solutions to our customer and partners. Paul brings
over 18 years of information technology experience to Stack3. He most
recently managed channel organizations at Bytemobile and Propel
Software. Paul’s career includes professional services management and
software engineering positions with BEA, Novell and Bell Labs. Paul
holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of
Pennsylvania and a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from the
American University of Paris.

Established in 1991, NSI Software, Inc. (NSI) is a leading developer of patented, award-winning and the most widely deployed data replication technologies and services. The company's award-winning product, Double-Take(tm) combines continuous real-time replication and failover to provide high-availability, centralized backup and disaster recovery.  Double-Take is used by industry leading financial services, legal services and government organizations, among others, to cost-effectively protect data and applications locally or remotely with minimal impact on network or system performance.  Double-Take offers protection on servers and NAS enabling organizations to replicate and protect mission-critical data residing throughout their environment. NSI Software has deployed over 60,000 licenses at customers including over half of the Fortune 500.

Nicholas Schoonover has been implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for the Microsoft Windows server platform for 8 years at Small, Medium and Enterprise-class customers. He presently holds the titles of Senior Systems Engineer and Database Protection Specialist at NSI Software.

The presentation and demo will cover the following agenda:

- Windows Server protection using Double-Take
- Benefits of Double-Take vs File Synchronization, DFS, SAN, Clustering
- Technical Overview
- How replication really works for database applications.
- Demonstration of data protection for Microsoft Exchange 2003

Presenter: Cheryl Erlich, Director of Strategic Alliances
Cheryl Erlich joined Commtouch in February 2003, and due to her success with managing major accounts, was promoted to her current position as the Director of Strategic Alliances. Prior to joining Commtouch, Cheryl was a Territory Manager for Check Point Software Technologies where she was responsible for major accounts in Northern California and Nevada, and was named Channel Manager of the Year in 2000. In addition to her many years’ experience in selling security solutions to large corporations and government offices, Cheryl is also a Check Point Certified Security Administrator and holds a BA in Spanish and Rhetoric & Communications from UC Davis.

This month we welcome Mark Harris - Executive VP of Sales & Marketing, and Bob Barnes - VP of Operations both with CallTower. CallTower provides outsourced VoIP services to small and medium sized businesses.

The CallTower Solution is the hosted and managed communications bundle based on Cisco’s voice technology platform, AVVID. The CallTower VoIP solution provides the end user with all their voice and data needs from one vendor and with one single point of responsibility. This includes all equipment, services and management.

The November meeting will be in conjunction with the eBig COMM SIG.  Please check the calendar for info.

Neon Software, Inc. is a privately held California corporation based in Lafayette, California. Founded in 1989, Neon Software develops intelligent software tools for securing, managing, troubleshooting and monitoring multi-protocol networks.

Craig is responsible for Neon Software's corporate direction, overseeing sales, marketing, operations, and product management. An experienced and respected veteran, Craig spent 10 years at Dantz Development, achieving greater than 90% market share for key products.

The Mirra Personal Server made its debut at the prestigious DEMOmobile conference, where it won a DEMOgods award. Since then, the Mirra Personal Server has been awarded “Product of the Year” from Morningstar Advisor; “Technology Innovation Award” from CPA Technology Advisor; “Top 10 Startup” from NetworkWorld; and “Rookie of the Year” from MobileTrax. Mirra began shipping to customers online and through select Best Buy Co. stores in December 2003, and through Dell, Amazon and D&H in the summer of 2004.

Rob Tobias is the Director of Marketing for Mirra since its inception. He was involved in the early product research and definitions. Prior to Mirra, Rob has held executive marketing positions in startups BuzMe and Mixman. He has also run his own marketing consulting company with clients such as Silicon Image, C-Cube, Intellon, Colligo, Texas Instruments, and Advanstar. Rob has a BSEE from UC Davis and MBA from Santa Clara University.

In his presentation, Rob Tobias will give a brief background of the Mirra Personal Server, discuss the latest release of the software and give a demonstration of its capabilities.

Mirra will be giving away an 80GB Mirra Personal Server at the meeting! It is a $399 retail value product and we will be having a drawing for it at the end of the meeting. You must be present to win.

If you are using a Mirra Personal Server now please come to the meeting. The group would love to hear about your experiences with them to date.

(Rob was unable to present due to a personal issue.  We will be rescheduling Mirra to come and present some time in 2005)

Steve Johnson is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Accordance USA LLC, a subsidiary of Accordance Systems, Taiwan, which was created in May 2004. Steve brings to Accordance over 20 years in the embedded hardware and software industry, where he has held executive and management positions with international technology companies.

Ed will be giving a presentation on SPAM Prevention using DNS.  It will also be an open discussion of tools and techniques to stop SPAM.  So bring your favorite list of SPAM filters, software and tools that you use to avoid getting SPAM.

Mercury Interactive, the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO), is committed to helping customers optimize the business value of information technology.

The topic for May’s meeting will be the Mercury Business Availability Center. Mercury will be demonstrating their systems monitoring software, SiteScope, used by IT groups to alert and report on infrastructure and application availability. The interactive discussion will be mostly technical in nature coming from IT and Operations perspective, discussing how to use SiteScope and Topaz to monitor business availability and provide better quality of service for IT customers.

You can check out their website here.

Sentrik Corporation develops security appliances that deliver industry-leading integration, automation, and return on investment to enterprise customers. Sentrik appliances enable security administrators to efficiently deploy and manage critical security processes, leveraging both existing solutions and emerging technologies.

Sentrik's ActiveScan product line includes a series of plug and play network vulnerability assessment (VA) solutions designed to help customers rapidly deploy and automate network vulnerability assessment processes. ActiveScan is available 24x7, regularly auditing networks, servers, workstations, and other network-connected systems for security vulnerabilities.

In case you have been living in a cave, Novell has made some big announcements in the past few weeks. They have agreed to acquire SUSE LINUX and are getting involved (again?) with the SCO lawsuit.

Dane Riley, Apple Higher Education System Engineer, will be joining us on
January 20th to discuss several Mac OS X topics.

More specifically he will discuss how we arrived at OS X today going through a brief history of the Mac OS.  Fast forward to today, Mac OS X Panther (10.3) has a unique Network architecture that makes it both useful and robust in today's networks.

Dane will discuss multi-homing, rendezvous (zero conf) and other networking topics.  Additional topics will include directory integration with Active Directory, LDAP and Open LDAP and how Mac OS X can easily and seamlessly integrate into existing directory infrastructures.

Dane will also discuss how Mac OS X Server can help manage Macintosh clients on the network in this environment, taking advantage of Xserve a key component to this scenario.  This will be a very informal and open to discussion throughout the presentation.

Holiday party and general meeting.  We are also going to kick off 'Gadget night'. We encourage you to bring your favorite gadget that you deem indispensable in your work or what you might consider a 'must have' (for whatever reason). They don't have to be work related; MP3 players etc. qualify. The idea is to share with others via a brief demo what's new and intriguing, providing others a peek at things they may not otherwise see.

November 18, 2003 Meeting

The presentation will include an interactive question and answer session, so don't miss it. Word on the street -- this product is a winner.

October 21, 2003 Meeting

WebNetTrak is a powerful telecommunication & network infrastructure design and management solution. The WebNetTrak solution is provided specifically for telecommunications and Global 2,000 companies that create and maintain voice and data networks.

WebNetTrak utilizes a powerful project management and infrastructure navigation application and Visio as a drawing engine. Visio equipment, cable and circuit stencils are modeled into the WebNetTrak service as smart objects complete with all the needed data attributes to do detailed network design and management. The WebNetTrak hosted repository coupled with our intelligent project management process ensures that your data and drawings will always be accurate and reliable from design through implementation. This means that the every engineering project can begin with confidence in the existing network documentation and that any spare equipment and bandwidth capacity can be fully utilized.

September 16, 2003 Meeting

Recent legislation like GLBA, HIPAA, SB-1386 and Sarbanes-Oxley all have components mandating the protection of sensitive personal and corporate financial information. Existing outward facing solutions do not adequately address these requirements.

The Tablus Content Alarm is an appliance that provides visibility into the transmission of sensitive information. Using linguistic analysis techniques the Tablus Content Alarm can detect the transmission of files or pieces of files that have been marked as sensitive. Deployment is as easy as connecting it to a span port on the network perimeter. You arm it by letting it examine files that are sensitive. nce armed it can detect the transmission of the whole file or pieces of that file via FTP, SMTP, HTTP, POP, or IMAP.

How can I be sure my private messages stay private when I send them over the Internet? How can I be sure that the message I sent was received by the other party and no one else? From the first moment that businesses began to communicate with each other over the public Internet, they have had to confront these basic security issues. These questions have been answered in a lot of different ways since then, but the solutions all had several characteristics in common: they were complex; they were difficult use and maintain; and they were expensive.  Come see how to make it simple and easy.