What giant companies WON’T put in the cloud

In our interviews with CIOs at large enterprises, we found that adoption levels vary from simple experimentation to heavy use of cloud apps and infrastructure in public and private settings. Yet even among the most cloud-focused businesses, there are resources CIOs won’t consider migrating to the cloud – at least not yet.
giants cloud primary

Certain tactical capabilities can easily be acquired in the public cloud, but not everything falls into that category. Some enterprise systems aren’t ready to be run in the public cloud because of safety and reliability concerns, says Joe Spagnoletti, CIO at Campbell Soup.

Spagnoletti emphasizes that Campbell’s is not trying to do everything in the cloud. Projects are "highly targeted to the things we're trying to change. Double entry bookkeeping hasn't changed for a long time," Spagnoletti says.

At Dow Chemical, IT has built a cloud-based infrastructure that includes systems hosted by vendors as well as its own private cloud. On the applications side, while the majority of its applications are in a cloud environment, only about 10% are in the public cloud. Looking ahead, about 30% to 40% of applications are expected to be in the public cloud within three years, says Paula Tolliver, CIO and corporate vice president, business services.

Dow’s private cloud delivers a lot of the benefits of cloud, and it positions the company for future public cloud migrations. As the company does its lifecycle planning and weighs future investments, it starts with a cloud mindset. What likely won’t go to the cloud? ERP. Dow doesn’t have any plans to move its core SAP systems to the cloud. Doing that would mean major upheaval, Tolliver says. “What’s the financial incentive for us to go?”

Neither is Family Dollar rushing to move its core business systems to the cloud.
Family Dollar runs a variety of cloud set-ups, including SaaS applications and infrastructure-as-a-service through Amazon. Systems that have been moved to the cloud include HR applications for training, hiring and screening of new employees; SharePoint, through Amazon, for store operations; and the Familydollar.com website, which is run through Amazon. In general, the systems that lend themselves to cloud need to be used most of the day, don’t have a batch processing cycle, and aren’t terribly data intensive, says Family Dollar CIO Josh Jewett.
josh jewett

Josh Jewett
Still, most of the company’s core IT resides on premises. ERP and data warehousing, for example, are internal largely because so much data runs through these systems that “there isn’t a good business case” for passing it in and out of the company continuously, Jewett says. “You have to move it through a skinny pipe. That takes a lot of time, and partners may charge by the megabyte or terabyte. If you’re talking about close to a petabyte of data, not only is it hard to move but it’s cheaper to keep it on premises,” he says.

Jewett doesn’t anticipate having to do a major upgrade of his ERP system for a few years, and at that time, he’ll revisit its cloud potential.

Legacy investments are also keeping Progressive Insurance from a broad move to the public cloud.

Progressive today relies on the cloud mainly for SaaS applications that aren’t core to running the business, such as HR management and expense reporting, says CIO Ray Voelker, who estimates that 20% of the company’s business process applications are hosted and run in a SaaS model. On the infrastructure side, Progressive uses IaaS largely for experimentation at this point. “Given the highly regulated industry within which we operate, we need to keep our data private,” Voelker says.

More widespread use of the public cloud is a ways off, if ever, at Progressive. “We’re likely to continue to watch the move toward hybrid clouds very closely as that technology continues to develop and mature,” Voelker says. He could envision a hybrid cloud architecture that combines public cloud resources – such as weather data in the public domain -- with internal Progressive data such as usage-based driving records.

But Progressive is in no rush to move its data into a public cloud setting. Voelker says it would be “a whole new ballgame” if Progressive were some midsized business that didn’t have an extensive data center footprint. “We already have assets we own that we can leverage.”

Similarly, Western Union has selectively deployed cloud apps, including Salesforce.com, Workday for human resources, and several from Adobe for online customer experience, data management and analytics. “We’ve made some reasonably safe bets with vendors who are recognized leaders,” says Sanjay Saraf, CTO at Western Union.


The company is taking a prudent approach in terms of how it leverages cloud for infrastructure. Western Union is wary of moving too fast because it must comply with hundreds of local, national and international financial regulations. “Money movement is complex,” Saraf says. “I’m not so hell-bent on cutting costs but on modernizing the technology.”

For analytics, Western Union wanted to ramp up quickly on Hadoop last year and tested some cloud scenarios with Cloudera and Amazon. Ultimately, the company decided to keep analytics in-house with an internal Hadoop ecosystem. “Data is so core to what we’re about, we decided to bring it in,” Saraf says.

Editor’s Note: Giants in the Cloud was written by Network World assistant managing editor, features, Ann Bednarz, based on interviews conducted by CIO Magazine managing editor Kim S. Nash, CIO.com senior editor Brian Eastwood, Network World senior writer Brandon Butler and Computerworld technologies editor Johanna Ambrosio. This package, based on an idea from CIO executive editor Mitch Betts, was edited by Network World executive features editor Neal Weinberg, designed by Steve Sauer and illustrated by Chris Koehler.

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Six browser plug-ins that protect your privacy

Want to avoid ads and keep your Web wanderings private? One of these six browser apps could do the trick.

It's no stretch to say that ads are what make the Web go 'round. The content you're reading right now? Paid for by ads. Google, Facebook, Pandora, YouTube? Driven by ads. This is not a new concept: TV and radio have relied on commercials since their earliest days. Because, let's face it, something has to pay for all the free programming and services.

Data integration is often underestimated and poorly implemented, taking time and resources. Yet it

Of course, there are ways that users can quell the seemingly endless stream of buttons, banners, video interstitials and more. All you need is an ad blocker: a browser plug-in designed to filter out those unwanted distractions and interruptions.

For many users, though, there's another concern that is more important than simple annoyance: privacy. Some sites do more than just plaster their content with digital billboards. They log your visits (usually via IP addresses) and even track your movements to other destinations. Although the driving motivator is usually just broad-based data-gathering, it can be unsettling to realize you're being followed online.

In response, some plug-ins go beyond mere filtering, promising full-on privacy protection against cookies, trackers, third-party scripts and widgets, and other unwanted invasions.

In this roundup I chose six products: AdBlock, Adblock Plus, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery and Privacy Badger. There are dozens of other, similar, tools, but these represent a good cross-section of what's available. They're also among the most popular picks in the Chrome and Firefox extensions libraries.

While a few of these plug-ins have companion apps designed to extend protection to mobile devices, for purposes of this roundup I focused on desktop browsers. I concentrated on two browsers, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, which have a combined market share of nearly 80%, according to Netmarketshare.

I installed one plug-in at a time, then visited a wide range of sites -- including, but not limited to, Crackle, Facebook, Giveaway of the Day, Huffington Post, Hulu, TMZ, Tucows Downloads and YouTube. These sites represent both mainstream and lesser-known destinations -- some notoriously ad-heavy, others focused expressly on video or downloads. Certainly different sites will be affected differently by different ad-blockers, but overall I got a good picture of what day-to-day browsing looks like with each one.

I looked at these sites with each plug-in toggled on, then again with it toggled off. The idea was to make sure none of them were overzealous in filtering, messing with either the content or page layout.

What about speed? In theory, ad blockers and privacy filters should make pages appear faster, as they cut down the amount of content that needs to load. However, this can be difficult to gauge in real-world testing, as there are so many variables that determine how quickly a Web page appears. And if the difference boils down to just a half-second or so, does that really matter? In any case, I looked for any major anomalies, such as pages that were especially fast or especially slow with or without a particular plug-in running.
A few considerations

Keep in mind that a blocker may not always be able to distinguish invasive Web elements from benign ones. For example, some can prevent social-media buttons from appearing, thus thwarting your attempts to "like" or tweet about something.

There's one other consideration, and that's the funding behind the blocker. While most of the apps that I looked at are free or open-source, supported exclusively by donations, at least one, DoNotTrackMe, employs a freemium model (charging a subscription fee if you want advanced features), while Ghostery asks you to provide usage data. Of the six tools reviewed here, only Adblock Plus has an "acceptable ads" feature that allows advertising from Google and other paying companies, and it's turned on by default. But you can easily disable it if you want a totally ad-free experience.

Speaking of which, it's one thing to protect your privacy, but should you really turn off the ads that pay for so much good online stuff? It's food for thought, and if you want a big-picture discussion of ad-blockers and how they may or may not impact the Web as a whole, you may want to read Robert Mitchell's Ad blockers: A solution or a problem?.

Price: Free; accepts user contributions

Compatible with: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari

Not to be confused with Adblock Plus (which originated as a Firefox extension), AdBlock currently works with Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera browsers.
Adblock Rick Broida AdBlock offers some useful toggles from its toolbar pull-down menu.

What it does: Blocks ads, of course. With AdBlock running, you shouldn't encounter any banners, pop-ups or video ads. However, the plug-in makes no claim to prevent tracking.

How it performed: Because AdBlock isn't compatible with Internet Explorer, I confined my testing to Chrome. The tool offers some useful toggles from its toolbar pull-down menu, including options to pause the plug-in, disable it for just the current page or disable it for the entire domain. This last could come in handy if you discovered a compatibility issue with, say, a site's comment system. I never encountered any such issues.

Rather, AdBlock worked exactly as advertised, keeping ads at bay virtually everywhere I went. It made for a blissfully ad-free viewing experience at Crackle and YouTube. Hulu actually detected the presence of AdBlock and flashed a message asking me to enable ads for the site. After about 30 seconds, however, the message disappeared and the show began playing. So while I didn't have to actually watch the commercial, I didn't enjoy uninterrupted viewing.

Also, AdBlock tallied just five blocked items at TMZ.com, while Adblock Plus counted 14. Why the difference? It's tough to say, because neither program indicates exactly what's been filtered. The only visible difference was that, while AdBlock reformatted the page content to compensate for eliminated ads, Adblock Plus left a few empty spaces.

Bottom line: If you want a mostly ad-free online experience, this does the trick. But AdBlock isn't quite as privacy-minded as Adblock Plus, and Internet Explorer users will have to look elsewhere.

Don't let the name fool you; Adblock Plus is not a "pro" version of AdBlock. Rather, it's a very similar tool that just happens to have a very similar name. (In fact, the former predates the latter by a few years.) It's somewhat controversial because it accepts money from some large companies to allow their advertising through as part of its "acceptable ads" policy.
Adblock Plus Rick Broida Adblock Plus (commonly known as ABP) eliminates banners, pop-ups and videos from the sites you visit.

What it does: Adblock Plus (commonly known as ABP) eliminates banners, pop-ups and videos from the sites you visit. It also disables tracking, though not by default.

How it performed: It's easy to understand ABP's popularity, as it performed extremely well on virtually every site I visited. However, though slightly prettier than AdBlock (at least when you pull up its action menu), ABP lacks a couple of the handy tools found in its competitor. For example, you can't fully disable ABP without venturing into the settings, while AdBlock lets you "pause" it with a simple click.

ABP effectively filtered the ads from the videos I played at Crackle and YouTube, but when I tried to stream an episode of "Party Down" from Hulu, ABP left me staring at a blank window. No ads played, but neither did the episode. After a refresh, it played the episode -- but didn't filter out the ads.

It's curious that one of ABP's most highly touted capabilities, tracking protection, must be enabled manually. In fact, it was only by accident that I discovered it wasn't active: A link on the Features page directed me to the options screen where you add the protection.

Bottom line: Though perhaps not the best add-on with "Adblock" in its name, ABP is definitely the best choice for Internet Explorer users. It keeps ads and commercials away, and optionally stops trackers as well.

Disconnect aims to keep you in control of your personal info and does so primarily by blocking all tracking requests. It has the slick design of a commercial product -- and in fact comes from a commercial software developer -- but relies on a pay-what-you-want model (and lets you portion your contribution to charity if you wish). The developer also offers apps for Android and iOS.

Disconnect's visualization view shows a nifty interactive graph of the relationships between the current site and the various trackers.

What it does: Though positioned as a privacy tool, Disconnect also blocks ads. But it won't do anything about the commercials that appear in, say, YouTube videos.

How it performed: Once installed, Disconnect treats you to a treasure-trove of information via its drop-down window. For any given page you visit, you get a summary of all the advertising, analytic, social and content requests made (and blocked) while it loads. For each of the categories you can click to reveal a list of the actual companies or sites that made those requests. It's informative and interesting, to say the least, but probably superfluous for most users.

Likewise, Disconnect's visualization view shows a nifty interactive graph of the relationships between the current site and the various trackers. It's neat, but not something you're likely to use (or need) often. Of greater use, the status window shows how much time and bandwidth you've saved by using Disconnect.

Instead of an on-off toggle, Disconnect gives you the option of "whitelisting" the site you're currently viewing, effectively permitting all the ads and other stuff -- though it still keeps a running tally of all those items, which is cool. Also, you can manually allow individual sites and services, assuming you'd want to for some reason.

Bottom line: Disconnect insulates you from pretty much every site except the one you're viewing and filters out ads to boot. Even if you never bother with its pretty interface, you can take comfort knowing it's working behind the scenes.

The only straight-up commercial product in the group, DoNotTrackMe (DNTM) takes a freemium approach to privacy: You get the basic anti-tracking features for free, while a more robust Premium subscription, which adds features such as password management, costs $5 monthly. The developer also offers apps for Android and iOS.
DoNotTrackMe Rick Broida DoNotTrackMe not only blocks ads and trackers, but also provides basic password management and disposable email addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers.

What it does: DoNotTrackMe's name undersells its capabilities, as this plug-in not only blocks ads and trackers, but also provides basic password management and aliases (or "masks") for email addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers. (These last two options require DNTM Premium.)

How it performed: More features can mean more complexity, and DNTM has the steepest learning curve of any of the tools in the group. But it's worth the effort.

For starters, you must register for an account, even for something as basic as accessing the status menu in your browser's toolbar. Once you do, you're presented with four basic options: Accounts (the password/auto log-in manager), Wallet (storage of credit/debit card info), Masking (creation of aliases of personal info) and Tracking (or, rather, tracker blocking). This last is obvious enough, but the other features require a bit of exploring -- and probably some visits to the online help guides.

If all you want is the tracking and ad blocking, DNTM works well enough behind the scenes. Once you click through to the Tracking area of the options window, you'll see a list of the trackers blocked for that site -- with the option to turn off blocking for individual trackers or the entire site.

Then there's a link to the Tracking Dashboard, which opens in a new tab and shows a graph with the total number of trackers blocked over the past 10 days. Interesting info, but I feel that it should have been integrated into the tool rather than requiring a visit to a whole new tab.

I briefly tested the other features, such as password management, and they worked as advertised.

Bottom line: Though a capable ad- and tracker-blocker with some nice extras, DoNotTrackMe feels unnecessarily complex. Even so, the credit-card alias option makes a strong case for subscribing to Premium.






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Dear Google: It's not you, it's me

I've become too dependent on Google's services for storing my data. I think it's time we start seeing other people.

Dear Google,

I stand before you today a broken man, beholden to the whims and wiles of a distant, faceless corporate master. In case it wasn't clear – that's you, Google. You broke me.

You see, 10 years ago I was the master of my own destiny. My data was my own. When I checked my email it was downloaded to whatever computer I was using and stored locally... until I needed to format my drive and reinstall my OS (at which point I usually lost my mailbox file because I, of course, forgot to back it up first). When I took a picture, I stored it on my hard drive until I either burned it to a CD/DVD or accidentally deleted it.

Did I lose my data on a regular basis? Yes. Yes, I did. Text files with notes and to-do lists. Contacts. Calendar data. Save games. The MP3s of my entire CD collection that I had just finished ripping. Even source code. I lost it all, over and over again.

Sometimes it was my fault. OK. Usually, it was my fault – I simply either forgot to back up my files or I was too damned lazy and, somehow, believed that the magical backup fairy would take care of everything. Sometimes it was the fault of a failing backup drive... or a Zip disk that started clicking at me maniacally like some sort of demonic cicada.

But whatever the cause, I felt in control. My data was right there (hopefully). I never needed an Internet connection. I never relied on the 24/7 operation of some remote servers running in the cloud. I felt... powerful. My files were my own and I could, quite literally, reach out and touch whatever disk they were stored on.

Those days are long gone. Now, if my Internet connection drops out, I'm dead in the water. Dear heavens, Google, without an active connection to your servers I am lost, adrift in a sea of nothingness.

I don't have a local MP3/Ogg collection anymore – now I just use Google Play Music. Because it's easy.

I don't keep local backups of my contacts or email anymore – again... Google services. Because of that "easy" thing I was talking about earlier.

Hell, I don't even have a normal phone anymore, opting to use Google Voice and Hangouts for all my phone calling (and even texting) needs. Guess why? Easy.

All of which means I have traded control over my own data for a boost in simplicity. And you know what they say – "those who would give up essential data control to purchase a little temporary simplicity deserve neither data control nor simplicity." Or something like that.

The worst part of it? I saw this coming. I even warned myself – and others – about this very thing. And yet... here I am, a slave to the sweet, sweet Google fruits. Unable to break myself free of chains of convenient online data and services.

I'm not sure how. Maybe I'll setup a server with Own Cloud – or possibly something similar – so that I can still have a server, but with more control. Or perhaps I'll simply start using a wider variety of services so all of my eggs aren't piled into the Google-Basket-O-Eggs quite so highly.

Either way, Google and Google's services... I'm putting you on notice. Your days in my computing life are numbered. Yes. This my way of saying, "we should start seeing other people."

Except for Google Voice and Hangouts. I'm keeping those forever. That stuff is just too good to give up.

Hugs and kisses,

Bryan Lunduke

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Dell appoints server chief in leadership shuffle

Dell has appointed a company veteran to run its server unit following the departure of an executive known for his strong opinions.

Ashley Gorakhpurwalla was promoted to vice president and general manager of Dell’s Server Solutions unit. He is responsible for planning, development and delivery of server hardware and products.

Gorakhpurwalla, who has been with Dell 14 years and was previously vice president for server engineering, takes over for Forrest Norrod, who left Dell Oct. 1. Under Norrod, the server unit grew into a US$10 billion business. He was also responsible for building Dell’s successful Data Center Services division, which Gorakhpurwalla also now heads.
MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 25 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers

“Norrod recently notified Dell of his desire to take some time off and then pursue other opportunities,” said Erin Zehr, a spokeswoman for Dell, in an email.

Norrod established himself as a visionary in server technology. He was willing to experiment in new technologies and led Dell to be among the initial adopters of emerging ARM technology in servers. But he also felt it would take time for ARM to overcome software and adoption challenges.

Gorakhpurwalla will try to maneuver Dell through a server market in which buying trends are quickly changing. Companies such as Facebook and Google—which have mega data centers—are designing servers in-house and buying hardware directly at lower prices from manufacturers like Quanta and Inventec. That has impacted large server makers such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM, whose servers have less design flexibility.

Dell was the world’s third-largest server maker by revenue during the second quarter of this year, according to IDC. But Dell’s server business is threatened by smaller Chinese server makers such as Inspur, Huawei and Lenovo, which recently bought IBM’s faltering x86 server business for $2.1 billion.

Last month, Dell started shipping PowerEdge 13 servers with Intel’s latest Xeon E5-2600 v3 chips, code-named Grantley. Dell is still testing prototype servers based on ARM and no related product announcements have been made.

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10 (mostly) free Exchange admin tools

If you're in charge of an Exchange deployment of almost any size, there's something in here for you.

Troubleshooting does not have to be expensive, nor does daily administration of your mail servers and messaging environment. There are, in fact, a wealth of resources available for Exchange administrators to monitor health, administer users, migrate mailboxes to the cloud and even take care of old data that is stored insecurely and uncatalogued. But it's often difficult to know where to look for these software assists.

These tools are all aimed at Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 and up, including Exchange Online and Office 365, although I have noted where previous versions of Exchange are supported by each of these tools.

Out of the 10 tools shown here, nine are free; all should be part of any Exchange administrator's toolbox.

The Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer
This is an indispensable companion and really helpful for any Exchange administrator. The ExRCA, as it is called, is a site Microsoft runs that functions as a remote client for Exchange, Outlook, the Autodiscover service and more. It's like having a free laptop stationed at a remote site that you can control right from your desk.

You can test if remote clients can connect to Exchange, if your certificates are configured correctly, if your autodiscover records are provisioned correctly, if mobile devices can connect over ActiveSync properly and much more. Each test runs quickly and provides detailed feedback about all of the diagnostics that are performed with each submission. Free.

SMTP logging
If you're having pesky mail flow issues and, in particular, you're having trouble sending or receiving messages outside of your internal mailboxes, then turn on SMTP logging. This lets Exchange basically print a transcript of everything that it sees over an SMTP connection session, and makes it a ton easier to figure out exactly what an error is. A best practice is to enable SMTP logging only when you are having trouble, as the logs are so detailed that in high-volume mail settings, your disks could fill up quickly. There are three levels available; for troubleshooting purposes, choose the highest, but don't forget to turn it off after you've finished. This tool is free.

Test-ExchangeServerHealth Script, by Paul Cunningham
Microsoft Exchange Server MVP Paul Cunningham has created a clever little PowerShell script that tests Exchange servers and database availability groups for errors and problems, and outputs that information into a nicely formatted HTML report that can be automatically scheduled to be e-mailed to you, perhaps every morning or weekly. It works with Exchange Server 2010 and can be easily customized to check for other issues specific to your own environment. Best of all, it's free if you become an "insider" on his website, which is also a no-cost proposition. Cunningham's website is a very useful resource for information about all versions of Exchange and Office 365. Free.

ManageEngine Free Exchange Health Monitor
This tool does many of the same things as Cunningham's script, but runs as a regular Windows application. It monitors various Exchange mailbox queues and the required Exchange system services, provides details for Outlook Web Access like page response and search time, and looks at your memory performance to see if paging is occurring. It also profiles usage details and you can set custom thresholds for various alerts; the tool will notify you when these thresholds are exceeded. It monitors both Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 servers. You can download it from the ManageEngine website, where you'll also find free tools to monitor Azure, SharePoint, Windows and more. Free.

ExFolders
If your deployment involves public folders of any kind, then the ExFolders tool straight from the horse's mouth at Microsoft should be in your toolbox. ExFolders works with permissions on public folders, including fixing them after other tools mess up those permissions, importing and exporting those permissions for migrations or other system maintenance, accessing other mailboxes and more. ExFolders can look at data on Exchange 2007 even though it runs on Exchange 2010. It is particularly handy for viewing deleted items in your public folder hierarchy as well as verifying that replication on the public folder hierarchy has taken place. Tip: Run it from the Exchange ServerV14BIN subfolder, or the tool will crash on you without any explanation. Free.

Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2010 (32-bit) and Exchange 2013
Jetstress puts a real load on the input and output components of your Exchange systems and is a great way to verify that your systems are ready for production use. You can set the user count and the profile of the user activity that your deployment represents, and then Jetstress will simulate both database (mailbox) and log file loads so that you can be sure you have adequate horsepower, and headroom for growth. You can even run it on production servers during off-peak times to see where you are on the performance spectrum and what upgrades you might need to run. There's also a 64-bit version for Exchange 2010.

Steve Goodman's Exchange Environment Report Tool
Another Exchange MVP, Steve Goodman, has created a PowerShell script for health-related reports. This tool gives you information about Exchange servers' update levels, the number of mailboxes per version level, basic information about Office 365 mailboxes, a breakdown per site of the number of mailboxes and much more. The tool works with Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 servers and can also pull limited information in the aggregate from any Exchange 2007 servers you may have. If you have a hybrid Office 365-Exchange on-premises environment, this script is a better fit for you than the other free PowerShell script profiled earlier; otherwise, it essentially comes down to which tool creates the report format you find most appealing or useful. Free.

Microsoft Exchange PST Capture 2.0
The bane of many an Exchange administrator's existence are these pesky PST files, full of corporate email messages, potentially sensitive attachments and valuable legal information, all just lurking around storage areas on desktops, workstations, network shares, SANs and more, and all uncataloged. Microsoft released the free Exchange PST Capture tool, now in Version 2.0, to help discover these PSTs through agents that are installed on systems throughout your network. The agents talk to the PST Capture Central Service, which keeps a central log of all PST files the agents find and then imports those PSTs into Exchange on premises or Exchange Online or Office 365 mailboxes as you see fit. Free.

The Exchange Thumbnail Photo Manager
Score one in the user satisfaction column: Mike Pfeiffer has created a nice forms application, backed by a PowerShell script, that makes it super easy to upload into Active Directory the little thumbnail photos that users love. With this tool, you pick the mailbox, pick the photo and then click Upload. As long as users have the correct roles assigned, you can delegate this task to human resources or departmental administrative assistants and make quick work of keeping your Active Directory photos up to date. Highly recommended. Free.

MigrationWiz
These days, much of an Exchange administrator's job can be migrations -- from one platform to another or, more likely, migrations of mailbox data from on-premises systems into the cloud. MigrationWiz makes short work of any of these migrations. It works with basically every version of Exchange still in operation, Office 365, Google Apps, Lotus Domino, IMAP, POP and seemingly all things in between. The basic license at $9 does just a single pass of a mailbox, but the $11 premium license does a first pass of the mailbox and then later syncs to catch any mail that trickles in after a migration cutover point. Between $9 and $11 per mailbox, depending on license level.

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