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Restaurants operate on slim margins. Table turnover rate can be the difference between a good month and a bad month, and customer loyalty can be shaken by one bad experience.
By using new technology to modernize operations and eliminate inefficiencies, restaurants can speed table turnover and increase their profits. With a better dining experience, they can also boost customer loyalty and even reduce employee turnover, because servers earn more working in a well-run restaurant.
Mobile point of sale (mPOS) can drive better numbers across the board. By replacing traditional pay stations with mPOS, restaurants can streamline orders and payment, freeing up servers to be more attentive to diners.
With mPOS, servers don’t have to wait for an open register or card reader halfway across the restaurant. Payments can be processed immediately, the table cleared quickly and the next guests seated promptly. Just a few minutes saved per table adds up to a meaningful boost in a restaurant’s daily sales. For customers in a rush, mPOS means they don’t have to wait around for their credit card to be returned.
Every time a server takes an order down on paper and walks it over to the kitchen, restaurants lose time and diminish the quality of their service. With mPOS, there’s no more handwriting orders or forgetting how that steak was supposed to be cooked. A good mPOS system will deliver real-time updates on daily specials and menu items when servers need them — while the guest is ordering, not after the order has been sent to the kitchen.
Deploying mPOS in Your RestaurantDeploying mPOS in a restaurant doesn’t require deep technical expertise or a large upfront investment. Many POS service providers offer mobile options to add to your existing system, with intuitive apps that can run on just about any smartphone or tablet. But when it comes to choosing mobile devices for a busy restaurant, not all devices are created equal.
Here’s seven reasons why Samsung’s rugged Galaxy XCover Pro is a top choice for your restaurant’s mPOS deployment.
1. It’s Tough Enough for the TablesideThe Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro is built for tough environments, so it’s ready to take a few bumps and spills in the hands of restaurant servers or delivery crew. To demonstrate the XCover Pro’s rugged credentials, Samsung tested it against MIL-STD-810G standards, including vibrations, rain, humidity, extreme temperatures and a series of 5-ft. drops. It’s also IP68-certified to withstand immersion for up to 30 minutes.
2. The Battery Can Do a Double ShiftFor restaurants operating long hours, battery life is critical to mPOS. The Galaxy XCover Pro features a 14-hour battery that can handle a double shift without any interruption for charging. If that doesn’t cut it, the battery can be easily switched out as needed so you can keep on processing payments and seating new diners.
3. You Can See More and Hold LessDespite its military-grade toughness, the Galaxy XCover Pro is thin, light and ergonomic, so it will fit perfectly in an apron pocket. With a high-resolution 6.3-in. edge-to-edge screen, servers won’t have to squint, and they can navigate the ordering and payment processes fluently.
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5. You Won’t Break the BankAt a fraction of the cost of other ruggedized handhelds on the market today, the XCover Pro is cost-effective, so it can be rolled out to all of your servers. Reliable 24/7 customer support — plus nationwide reach and availability through a network of distribution channels — means the same type of device can be used across an entire restaurant chain.
6. It Supports Contactless Payments 7. Device Management Is Easy and SecureFor restaurant chains planning a large-scale mPOS rollout, device management and security are key.
With Knox Configure, Samsung phones and tablets — including the XCover Pro — can be customized in bulk and tailored to your needs. You can create custom devices with unique profiles, settings, restrictions and preloaded apps. Device configuration updates can be pushed out simuntaneously. Devices are ready out of the box, so you can skip setup wizards and app downloading.
What’s more, Knox Manage allows you to remotely lock and wipe lost devices. IT admins can remotely manage device settings through the cloud-based command center. Knox Manage also gives administrators remote access so they can troubleshoot and check users’ policy compliance to make sure devices are being used as intended.
Learn more about Samsung’s Galaxy XCover Pro and see the latest business offers. Looking for a rugged tablet with a larger screen? Samsung has you covered with the Galaxy Tab Active Pro: It’s rugged, mPOS-ready and supports Samsung DeX to extend your restaurant productivity.
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3 Ways To Speed Up Time Machine Backup (With Tips)
Time Machine is Apple’s computer backup system. It’s built into every Mac. The app’s purpose is to make backup easy: you set it up, and then it works without you thinking about it. After the initial backup, Time Machine only has to deal with the files you created and edited. It’s designed to work quietly in the background; you’ll probably never notice that it’s working.
The app keeps your files safe, allows you to restore them one at a time or in bulk, and can be used to set up a new computer. It works well. I use it to back up my iMac to an external hard drive. After the initial backup was finished, I never noticed when the incremental backups were performed again every hour.
However, there are times when you will want to minimize the time required by a backup.
For example, you may need to perform your first backup before taking it to be looked at by an Apple Genius. You were instructed to back up your data first. You were surprised to learn that your initial backup can take many hours, and you haven’t got enough time to get it done before your Genius appointment.
Fortunately, there are various ways to speed up a Time Machine backup. We outline them for you below.
Spoiler: Our final tip promises the most significant speed boost—but in my tests, I didn’t see the speed gains it promised.
1. Make the Backup Smaller
The more data you need to back up, the longer it will take. You can halve that time by halving the amount of data to be backed up. You don’t want to miss anything important, so exercise care.
Delete Anything You Don’t Need Before the Backup
Do you have any applications installed that you never use? Consider removing them before you back up your Mac. The same goes for data: if you’ve copied or downloaded anything onto your hard drive you don’t need, you might trash it.
Once you’re there, you can see which apps use the most space. Delete any that you have no use for, especially those near the top of the list.
Exclude Files and Folders that Don’t Need to Be Backed Up
Obvious candidates here are large files you have stored elsewhere or large files that can be easily recreated or downloaded. Here are some examples:
Clean Up Junk Files
Apple provides a list of utilities to free up disk space by deleting junk files and unwanted content. It also gives the option of storing rarely-used files in iCloud rather than on your drive.
Here you can perform the following tasks:
Store in iCloud allows you to decide which types of content will be stored in iCloud automatically. You’ll still see the files on your hard drive, but only the content of recently accessed files will actually be stored there.
Optimize Storage will free up disk space by automatically removing video content you’ve already watched, including movies and TV shows.
Empty Trash Automatically will permanently delete files that you moved to the Trash more than 30 days ago.
To locate and delete even more junk files, consider using a third-party cleanup app. One we recommend is CleanMyMac X. It can delete system and application junk files. Another is Gemini 2, which can find large duplicate files. We explore and review a wide range of alternatives in our roundup, Best Mac Cleaner Software.
Don’t Get Carried Away
Finally, a warning. When cleaning up junk files, take some quick wins, and then move on. The law of diminishing returns is at work here: spending more time on cleanup will free up increasingly smaller amounts of space. The scans you performed to locate junk files can be time-consuming; they can potentially take more time than to just back them up in the first place.
2. Back Up to a Faster Drive
One of the bottlenecks in a backup is the external drive you back up to. These vary quite a lot in speed. Choosing a fast drive will save you a significant amount of time—your backup may become up to four times faster!
Back up to a Faster External Hard Drive
Most external hard drives today spin at 5,400 rpm. In general, they’re suitable for backup purposes. In our roundup of the Best Backup Drive for Mac, we recommend the Seagate Backup Plus. It offers desktop and portable versions. The drives spin at 5,400 rpm and have maximum data transfer rates of 160 and 120 Mb/s, respectively.
For twice the price, you can purchase a faster drive. These spin at 7,200 rpm and should back up your Mac 33% faster.
How much time would this save? Probably hours. If the backup takes six hours on a standard drive, it will take just four hours on a 7,200 rpm drive. You just saved two hours.
Back up to an External SSD
For even bigger time-saving, choose an external SSD. You may have experienced the huge speed boost you gain when you use a solid-state drive as your main internal storage. You’ll see similar gains when using one as your external backup drive.
Most decent spinning hard drives have data transfer rates in the range of 120-200 MB/s. In our roundup, Best External SSD for Mac, the SSDs we reviewed have transfer rates between 440-560 Mb/s. In other words, they are two to four times faster. Using one will slash the amount of time required for a backup. A backup that would have taken eight hours on a platter drive may now take just two.
But, as you’d expect, there’s a price to pay. The 2 TB spinning hard drives we reviewed ranged between $70 and $120. The 2 TB external SSDs in our roundup were much more expensive, ranging between $300 and $430.
Depending on your circumstances, you may find the cost justifiable. If you need to back up huge files every day, an external SSD will save you many hours of waiting.
3. Give Time Machine More of Your Mac’s System Resources
The backup will take less time if Time Machine doesn’t have to share your Mac’s system resources with other processes. Here are a few ways to achieve that.
Don’t Use Heavy Apps During a Backup
If you want the backup to be as fast as possible, stop using your Mac until it’s finished. Don’t use other applications during the backup—especially if they’re CPU intensive.
Apple Support warns that running antivirus software during a backup can slow it down, especially if it’s checking every file as it’s copied to your external drive. They recommend that you configure the software to exclude your backup drive from being scanned.
Unthrottle Your Mac’s Resources
This tip promised to save more time than all the others put together, but I was disappointed in my tests. However, many others have seen a significant increase in backup speeds using it, and you may have more luck than I did. Perhaps they were using older versions of macOS.
Your Mac is designed to give you an excellent user experience where your computer feels responsive, and everything just works. To achieve this, macOS throttles disk access to make room for more critical tasks. Your apps will feel smoother, and your battery will last longer, but your backups will take significantly more time.
You may be willing to disable the throttling if it means your backup will be completed more quickly. There’s a terminal hack that will do just that. As a result, you would expect the backup to be much faster.
And that’s many users’ experience. Here is one blogger’s experience from 2023: the initial estimate given to him for backing up 300 GB of data was just over a day. The special terminal command reduced the time to just an hour. He concluded that this method should make your backup at least ten times faster.
Here’s how you do it. It’s a little technical, so bear with me.
Open the Terminal app. You’ll find it in your applications’ Utilities folder. If you haven’t seen it before, it allows you to control your Mac by typing commands.
Next, you need to enter the following command into the app. Either type it carefully or copy and paste it. Then press Enter.
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
The “0” at the end of the line indicates that the throttle should be turned off. Next, you’ll be asked for the password you use when you log into your Mac. Type it, then press Enter. A slightly cryptic message will be displayed, indicating that throttling is now off.
Turning the throttle off should drastically change your user experience. Your Mac will feel sluggish when backups are performed. More power will be used, and your computer’s battery won’t last as long, but your backup should be noticeably faster.
Once the backup is complete, don’t forget to turn the throttle back on. That will happen automatically next time you restart your computer. Or you can do it manually with the Terminal. Type the same command, this time ending it with the number 1 instead of 0, which indicates you want to turn it on rather than off:
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=1
Reality check: I wanted to see if I could confirm these results and get a sense of how much faster copying files would be on my Macs. So I copied files of various sizes on two different machines. I used a stopwatch to time each operation, then compared the throttled speed with the unthrottled. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the speed increases promised.
Sometimes the unthrottled backups were just two seconds faster; other times, they were the same speed. One result was surprising: when copying a 4.29 GB video file, the throttled result was just 1 minute 36 seconds while the unthrottled was actually slower: 6 hours 15 seconds.
I was curious and decided to keep testing. I used Time Machine to back up 128 GB of data on my MacBook Air, which took 2 hours 45 seconds. I turned off throttling and backed up once more. It was slower again, taking three hours.
It may be that something has changed on recent macOS versions so that this method no longer works. I searched for more user experiences online and found reports of this trick not working up to two years ago.
It’s Time To Abandon Cash Lanes And Barcode Scanners
It is time for retailers to move on from cash lane technology and outdated barcode scanners.
Customers who take the time to visit your brick-and-mortar store want to be rewarded with a satisfying experience. They want your store associates to serve them effectively and quickly and send them on their way without making them queue up at a cash register.
The sooner you shift your investments to mobile devices for all your retail associates, the faster you will increase profitability and eliminate wasteful spending. The cash lane is long overdue for retirement, and that’s actually great news for retail brands — at least for the ones who start making the switch to mobile devices now.
Significantly Better Employee ExperienceYour employees, like your customers, regard their mobile devices as extensions of their brains. Digital natives or not, they’ve become accustomed to engaging in day-to-day communications, research, planning and entertainment using their mobile devices.
So when they start working for your store and are asked to leave their phones in the break room, chain themselves to a cash lane and wield barcode scanners that haven’t changed much since the analog era, they are instinctively aware of the enormous gap between consumer and retail technology. They can’t come up with a good reason why this disconnect exists, and you probably can’t either.
Retailers who admit there’s a problem are increasingly finding a solution in 1:1 programs, in which every store associate is outfitted with a mobile device. This gives employees the opportunity to work with more modern hardware they already know how to use. Moreover, mobile devices can be used for so much more than scanning barcodes. Sales associates can use them to take payments from customers anywhere in the store. That means they can finally untether from cash lanes and help customers at their point of decision on the floor.
Having mobile devices also changes the manner in which employees can help those customers. Suddenly, they have all the information they need at their fingertips, whether they’re a veteran employee or a brand new hire. Retailers are finally learning what schools discovered several years ago — mobile technology can be a great equalizer by dramatically impacting an individual’s chances of success.
Tailored, Effective Customer ExperienceOf course, having access to more knowledgeable, versatile associates on the floor means huge benefits for customers as well. For starters, it justifies their decision to go into the store in the first place. Retail brands that don’t offer value in store beyond what the customer can get by researching online will see their brick-and-mortar sales continue to be overtaken by competitors and online channels. Equipping your sales associates is the key to stop some of the bleeding and reverse course.
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The more targeted information you can arm your employees with, the better they can serve customers. If a customer has researched or bought your products online, you can and should surface this information on your store associates’ mobile devices. That way they can meet the buyer where they are in the purchasing process and add value to the information the customer has already gathered.
That’s the kind of experience that customers notice and come back for. If your competitor is outdoing you in this regard, they’ll quickly annex any trust and goodwill customers had in your brand.
Benefits to the Bottom LineSo how does a 1:1 mobile program benefit the bottom line? For starters, with store associates empowered with the information and tools they need to help customers make the right purchases the first time, return rates go down. Your training costs also decrease, because every employee can hit the ground running rather than taking one to three weeks to get up to speed and start making sales, thanks to the familiarity of the mobile device you’re providing.
And there’s an even more direct benefit — you can stop paying to upgrade your scanners and, instead, enjoy the frequent, automatic software updates that come with mobile operating systems. Your system is always secure and up-to-date with no cost and virtually no downtime needed.
Let the Competition Be Your InspirationNow, imagine you have beaten your biggest competitor to the punch and implemented a 1:1 program, retired your cash lanes and begun serving customers in a thoroughly tailored, modern way. How long do you think your competition will survive when you are selling more efficiently and effectively than them on a daily basis, while also keeping your employees happier? Why would any customer or employee choose their in-store experience over the more personal and knowledgeable approach you are delivering?
Modernizing your retail environment is a necessity. Smart devices have been a mainstream technology for well over a decade, and other industries have been quick to replace outdated proprietary technology and processes with the flexibility and functionality of mobile. I promise you, there are competitors in your retail niche who have taken notice and are making moves toward a mobile sales approach right now.
Discover how stores of all sizes can enhance the retail experience for associates and consumers through Samsung’s innovative retail solutions.
Bootracer Review: Utility Will Time Your Pc Boot, But Won’t Speed It Up
There’s nothing more frustrating than turning on your computer and watching programs slowly load up. You sit there, not sure exactly how long you’re going to have to wait, as all those resource-hogging startup programs take their own sweet time. Well, wonder no more: BootRacer can take the mystery out of your PC start-ups.
BootRacer main menu gives some detailed information about the startup time.
After a free download and install, the program will be ready to time your next PC restart. (BootRacer remains free for personal use, but business users must pony up after trying the program.) Though you can’t see it, it starts timing the moment the PC starts the boot-up process. Those who aren’t quick at entering your password or logging in don’t need to worry. BootRacer subtracts the time it takes for user input to make an accurate assessment at how quick your PC performs.
Once the desktop is up, a small dual timer appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The timer on the top ticks down the seconds until your PC is done booting up the necessary files to be responsive while the timer on the bottom counts up the total time it takes to boot.
Rank your boot time against those of other PCs running BootRacer.
A summary screen appears when the PC is completely done booting to review your time and score. Digging deeper, you will see a breakdown of what section of the boot-up took the most time and a star rating compared to other PCs that upload their results. You can choose to submit your own results to both claim your global rank as well as help improve future versions of BootRacer.
Options are scarce. You can choose whether you want BootRacer to run every time you boot-up or only single tests, if you want the timer to show, and what statistics to record. A history page will give you every previous boot results and the change in time from the previous boot. You can add notes to each result or upload them to the global rankings.
A detailed history of your startups can show computer degradation over time.
BootRacer is great for testing just how the decisions you make with your PC affect your start-up time in the long run. PCs tend to slow down as registries and programs begin to muck up the works, and now you can track it. However, that’s where BootRacer’s usefulness ends. There is an option to “Speed up!” but it just links you to SpeedUp 2013, another program that claims to fix everything slowing down the start-up process. (PCWorld hasn’t reviewed SpeedUp 2013, but 2012 received a middling review, partly because the $30 program performed tasks that free programs handle just as well.) BootRacer doesn’t do anything to fix an issue itself.
You get the green light once your PC is all ready to go,
For the PC enthusiast who loves to monitor every aspect of their computer’s health and performance, BootRacer is a must-have. For those simply trying to speed up their boot times, installing this will probably be more depressing than anything. It won’t do much to help, but it will confirm you do indeed have glacial boot-up times.
Can Planting More Trees Keep Cities From Heating Up?
Major cities across the country, from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, are heating up. Local governments have turned to green infrastructure, specifically the tried and true method of planting trees to help mitigate rising temperatures in urban areas filled with dark pavement and concrete that soak up the sun’s heat, making a summer’s day in the city almost unbearably toasty.
One of the factors that cause urban environments to reach sweltering temperatures is a lack of vegetation. Trees alone could make a big difference: One model suggests that urban temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, the hottest city in the US, could be reduced by over four degrees Fahrenheit if more trees provided cooling canopies over the scorching hot city.
These ambitious tree-planting efforts are usually announced with much fanfare but are not as straightforward as planting a few saplings and calling it a day. Now, pandemic-related slowdowns are making completing these plans even harder in cities where heat waves are not just uncomfortable, but deadly.
“I think that there’s typically this sort of blind faith that we place in trees, that they will provide all of these wonderful social benefits,” says V. Kelly Turner, assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA. “But the environmental benefits that trees provide are entirely context-dependent,” she says. Patchy adoption of sprawling tree planting plans may not lead to the cooling bliss we desire in urban places.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Green New Deal” from 2023 calls for the planting and maintenance of 90,000 trees by 2023.
In 2010, Phoenix had a similar idea to double canopy cover in the city to get about one-quarter of the city shaded by 2030. But planting trees in a bustling city is easier said than done. By 2023, the effort was not ramping up fast enough to hit the goal even before the pandemic.
“There definitely was a slow down during COVID, particularly in community plantings,” said Mark Hartman, the chief sustainability officer of the City of Phoenix. He says that community tree planting events accounted for about 1000 trees per year in addition to the thousands planted by the city government.
For some of the warmest parts of cities like Phoenix, anything to help control the heat is desperately needed. According to sustainability researchers at Arizona State University, the urban parts of Phoenix can be up to 15 degrees warmer at night than its edges and the surrounding desert. City engineers took a thermometer to the streets and found during the day, bare pavement can reach over 160 degrees, technically hot enough to cook an egg (but with disappointing, inedible results). Unsurprisingly, walking across a griddle-hot pavement to get to work, school, and do your daily tasks takes its toll on your health.
In the lowest-income parts of Phoenix, with their high concentration of immigrant families and people of color, people are frequently walking, but the streets in those neighborhoods are not lined with leafy oaks, ashes, and elms that garnish more affluent neighborhoods. In a 2007 study, researchers at ASU used satellite data to quantitatively show something somewhat obvious to the naked eye: Higher-income neighborhoods have a lot more trees.
The same study showed that socioeconomic differences lead to a disparity of the surface temperature among neighborhoods The temperature in neighborhoods that are at the bottom 10 percent of income distribution is, on average, 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than those that are at the top 10 percent, which makes it all the more important that the tree planting programs make sure the areas with the lowest canopy cover get trees first. Hartman says the Phoenix city streets department has moved to planting trees “exclusively” in areas that are “high heat vulnerability, high walking high pedestrian corridors.”
While trees, theoretically, are a “green” solution to unbearable summer city weather, in practice, many barriers arise, namely keeping track of just how many trees have already found their roots and convincing landowners to keep planting saplings along their private property. In some cases, cities are already doing a good enough job that they are running out of space, like in Washington, D.C. where they are currently at 38 percent canopy coverage but are hoping to amp coverage up to 40 percent. Public property alone isn’t enough for new trees in Washington D.C., as well as in cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, and now, residents will have to plant trees on private property to help reach their canopy coverage goals. In many cases, that means landowners need to take care of those trees since they technically don’t belong to the city itself.
On the other hand, New York proved that ambitious canopy goals are not out of reach. In 2007, during the first of his three terms as mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg launched a public-private partnership whose goal was to plant a million trees in 10 years—and it got there two years ahead of schedule.
At the end of the day, trees are a good starting point, but we still have so much to learn about how well they work to cool down our steamiest cities. “I don’t think we know the answer, because the programs are not mature enough to have any measurable difference,” says Turner. It takes years for trees to mature into full-fledged shade-providers, and many of these programs have not reached their initial goals yet. In the future, she says, cities will need to ask not only if they hit a numerical goal for planting trees, but how well those trees, however many, brought about the cooling benefits that the community needs.
Cleaning Up Databases To Save Time… And Money
Before a global consulting firm integrated new software into its
5-terabyte database, the company’s IT staff spent so much time cleaning
up their information that bigger projects had to take a back seat.
IT workers at Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting and
outsourcing company based in Lincolnshire, Il., had gotten used to
spending many tedious hours searching through their IBM Lotus Domino
servers and racking through confusing Domino logs to determine which
applications weren’t being used, costing the company lots of hard drive
space and money.
To solve this problem they recently started using DYS Analytics’ Control
Usage Investigator (CUI) software.
Now, Hewitt’s IT staff can work on other projects while the CUI program
cleans up their servers, says Scott Pitts, manager of Hewitt’s Knowledge
Management Infrastructure Group.
”(CUI) is saving us money,” says Pitts. ”We don’t need people to
baby-sit the servers anymore.”
The CUI program is DYS’ answer to an IT need to make messaging and
collaboration applications run more efficiently, says Drew Wolff, vice
president of products at DYS. He says CUI software monitors and analyzes
application usage, and traffic and performance levels throughout entire
networks, allowing organizations to determine which applications were
being used and which ones were simply wasting time and money.
Prior to adopting the CUI software, Pitts says his IT staff had to look
through Domino logs to figure out which applications and user ID’s were
no longer needed. This process was time consuming and expensive, he adds.
”It was too much to check through by hand,” says Pitts. ”The Domino
logs were hard to understand. We were not doing it efficiently.”
Matt Cain, a Domino analyst at META Group, Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based
analyst and research firm, says the CUI software solves a business
problem created by the excessive amounts of unused Lotus Notes
applications running on Domino systems.
”A tech-savvy business person can write his own Domino applications
easily, which ends up with lots of applications going unused,” says
Cain. ”Some companies have thousands of Lotus applications with 20 to 30
percent not being used, just taking up space. This creates a liability on
the system.”
And Pitt adds that by eliminating such idle applications, the IT staff at
Hewitt was able to free up a lot of hard disc space.
”We aren’t spending money on adding new disc space to the servers
because of databases that aren’t being used,” says Pitt.
The CUI software also allows Hewitt IT staff to work on other important
projects, instead of manually searching through the servers for these
unnecessary applications.
”We used to have to do about 20 percent of this work by hand,” says
Pitts. ”If there were less than five people using a database, it was
hard to tell that when reading a log.”
DYS’ CUI is designed to solve such problems.
The Wellesley, Mass.-based provider of application performance software
released the CUI product as part of its CONTROL! family of application
performance management solutions for collaboration environments this past
January. While DYS currently offers solutions for Microsoft Exchange, IBM
Lotus Domino, IBM Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (formerly
Sametime), and IBM Team Workplace, the CUI is used solely with IBM Lotus
Domino.
”CUI provides analysis reports of what’s happening with the
collaboration of an application so IT can ‘efficientize’ this (process),
reduce the cost of ownership and increase the quality of service,” says
Wolff.
He also notes that beside its database-clean-up capabilities, CUI also
picks out which user profiles are not needed. Employees frequently come
and go in organizations for a variety of reasons. CUI determines when an
employee has left the company, or is on a leave of absence.
”Instead of having to go out and buy new user licences from platform
vendors, IT can recycle or retire the ID for the next employee,” says
Wolff. ”This also saves on maintenance fees.”
Wolff also says CUI’s Application Rationalization abilities are aimed at
organizations with remote offices. The software determines which
applications should be placed on the remote offices’ networks, as well as
where it’s not efficient to install them.
Pitts says Hewitt has about 87 worldwide remote offices, and about 300
global Domino servers, with more than 20,000 desktops accessing Domino
applications. He says these networks are much easier to monitor with the
CUI software.
”We get monthly reports which help us keep track of what is being
replicated… and what replicated data is really needed,” says Pitts.
”CUI goes through and cleans up everything for us.”
Wolff adds the CUI software has a ”work flow process” designed to
assure that databases aren’t deleted before they need to be. A company
may only need an application at the end of the year, or a user ID may
simply be unused while the employee is out on a leave-of-absence. CUI is
designed to detect these special situations.
”As the company grows, people put stuff on the databases and it grows,”
says Pitts. ”Usually if you need to add (an application), you can delete
one too.”
CUI has security benefits, as well. The software looks at who is using
which database and which users are trying to gain access to certain
information, as well as who shouldn’t be accessing a database, Wolff
says.
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