Dmitry Sotnikov

With Dell’s acquisition of Quest and all the IT reorganization that followed, it is actually not that easy to find these two popular free PowerShell tools any longer. So here are the links that work today (January 30, 2015): PowerGUI The download is freely available from Dell’s PowerGUI community. The community itself also got moved from http://powergui.org to http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/powergui. Dell Software is still maintaining the product – as I am writing this the latest version is 3.8 released in April 2014. Quest / QAD cmdlets This one is a little more tricky to find: https://software.dell.com/register/71110 If this link for some reason changes, all Dell’s freeware and trial links can be found in this catalog: http://software.dell.com/trials/ Happy PowerShelling! ... (more)

Checklist for Cloud Service Operations

I knew one software company that failed their SaaS transition because they chose to cut a few corners with the operations. Since they were software engineers, they did not really want to spend time on such mundane tasks as security, auditing, backups and so on. One day they let a disgruntled employee go, the guy went to an internet cafe, logged into the hosting account with the shared admin credentials, and deleted all customer data. There were no backups or data replicas to bring the data back, no personal admin accounts or procedures to prevent such an incident from happening, a... (more)

Cloud Service for Local SharePoint Insight

Quest Session at Cloud Expo A new (free!) service became publicly available on Quest OnDemand - Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint Reports. This is a great free service which provides some pretty neat reports on your intranet SharePoint environment. You go to the site and it launches a nice Silverlight client. Then all you need to do is provide a URL of your site collection (e.g. http://myserver.mydomain.corp/sites/super) and get insight on what is posted at the site: What is neat is that no data actually leaves your environment. All stats are calculated and displayed loca... (more)

Jelastic Launches Next-Generation Java Cloud

I’ve been recently involved helping a new European start-up just launched a new Platform-as-a-Service capable of running and automatically scaling any Java application. Here’s a quick write-up on why I think Jelastic is really onto something, a service to try and a company to watch. Say, you’ve got a great Java application which you want to put on the internet and make it available to the world. Believe it or not, up until today, what sounds like a trivial task simply could not be done. You effectively had to choose between lack of scalability, necessity to manually set up and m... (more)

Web Application Development with Struts Framework and TomEE

Apache TomEE supported in Jelastic PaaS is a Java EE server, which provides you with the best technology stack that can be deployed to a simple Java EE container. It's lightweight and at the same time is a full-blown application server, which remains simple and avoids architecture overhead. Today you'll see how easy it is to deploy Java web apps into TomEE. In the following tutorial you'll learn the basics of web application development with the help of the Apache Struts framework, which is an absolutely free open-source solution for creating Java web apps. Create environment 1... (more)