Comments OffAs part of our 2010 growth plan we decided it was time to expand our footprint in the Dallas INFOMART. Currently we occupy four suites in the building on the second floor. Our new expansion space is on the sixth floor. Here is a proposed layout (changes are almost certain), let us know what you think!
Alexander Muse , February 4, 2010
Recently two Architel’s have been mentioned in the news that have nothing to do with Architel the IT company (i.e. us). First, in December Nortel filed chapter 11 along with fourteen subsidiaries including Architel Systems (Case No.: 09-10149). Several folks have asked if that Architel was us, it is not. The second was when Jerry Jones of the Cowboys sued Architel Holdings LP, again this is not our company. Fortunately, Architel is doing well and NOT being sued by anyone or in Chapter 11.
Architel is the 2010 sponsor of the monthly Startup Happy Hour. The regular get together of between 20-80 entrepreneurs began in 2008 when Alexander Muse, my business partner sent an email to a few of his friends suggesting they invite a few entrepreneurs to the High Tech Bar in our building for a get together. Over the past couple of years more than 2,500 entrepreneurs have shared a beer (or two) with us. As part of our 2010 community engagement effort Architel is becoming the official sponsor of the event.
Are you an entrepreneur? Do you work for a startup or small business? Looking for a job? Looking for a partner? Looking for angel investment? Come on by for a drink and some fellowship with like-minded folks from North Texas. The event is in the INFOMART (1950 Stemmons Freeway) at the corner of Oak Lawn and I-35. We get started around 5PM, hope to see you there. Just RSVP here.
Alexander Muse , June 11, 2009
Two weeks ago our team headed to San Francisco to attend Google IO, their annual developers conference. The most exciting thing we saw was Wave. I am fairly confident that Wave and the new email protocol it is based on will be very important over the coming years.
You might be surprised if you realize that the current email protocol is 40 years old – older than the modern internet. If you had to start over today and wanted to build ‘email’ what would it look like. I can guarantee it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the current protocol and implementation. Google has spent the last four years developing Wave, but instead of trying to sell it to us they decided to give it to the world for free. This is ground shaking. The most advanced communication platform delivered to the world for free.
I was in the audience as the Wave team demonstrated Wave and it was amazing. They received a standing ovation – guys were holding their laptops over their heads – it was as if Bono had just given a free concert and explained you could come stay at his house anytime. Literally amazing. I can’t really explain why Wave is so important – maybe you should just check it out for yourself (it will take 80 minutes):
Rafe Needleman explains it very well in a post titled, “Hands-on with Wave”
Google just opened up to a limited audience its very interesting communications experiment called Wave (news stories). Our hands-on evaluation: there’s a lot to like. It really is a more contemporary take on communications. But it will knock many e-mail users off-balance.
Even Wave’s own Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen told me, “It takes a little getting used to,” and, “We’re still learning how to use it.” Imagine how everyone else will feel.
If you want to try Wave, you’ll have to wait. Google is making access to the service available to some developers and press, but full availability will not be until “later this year,” Google says. The version we tested was very raw, still in development. Many features were not implemented and the system threw us a few errors. But the framework and philosophy is clear to see, and that’s what this evaluation is based on.
Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail…
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
Wave is real-time e-mail. What that means is that when you’re writing a reply to a message (or “wave”) that you receive in the system, the recipient can see what you are typing as you type it. It will come as a relief to most that the real-time feature can be disabled if you click on the “draft” button (not working in my trial) while writing. But real-time visibility is the default.
You can put your replies anywhere in the message. You can also do this in regular e-mail, but in Wave, your comments are easy to pick out since the app bounds reply text in colored boxes with authors’ pictures embedded in them. Those of us who prefer to reply to e-mail messages at the end (or the beginning) and not piecemeal can just reply as usual. But when you want to write a surgical point-by-point reply to a message, Wave makes it easy.
You can drop pictures straight into Wave messages (a neat trick in a browser-based app, made possible by Google Gears), and smart assistants will let you convert addresses to maps, automatically fix spelling errors, and expand contact names.
But Wave is not e-mail. In this image, I am watching co-developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen type replies to my query. The teal tag shows that Jen is typing right now; Lars, who just finished typing above Jens, had his own, separate color.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
But it’s the reply-anywhere feature combined with the real-time function that’s most interesting. It makes Wave the first useful blend of e-mail and instant messaging that I’ve seen. Unlike Google’s previous attempt to meld the two communications modes into one app (Gmail has Google Talk in its sidebar), this one really works. An asynchronous e-mail conversation between two people can can stay that way, or it become real-time when both parties are online, and the dialog stays in place in the e-mail for later viewing. Switching between the e-mail and IM mode is seamless. In fact, the concept of the two different modes vanishes in Wave.
Wave’s message handling really shines when a conversation is between more than two people. Using Wave and its specific, color-coded replies, a group of people can have an actual discussion in e-mail, in real-time if wanted, without getting bogged down in long multi-message discussions–or worse, in threads that end up forking so that different people are discussing different things.
The Wave in-box pane shows you when there are new messages in your threads by bolding the subject lines, and when somebody is actively typing in a wave, you can see the text come in live, in the two-line preview every message gets. That’s really cool, although it can be overwhelming.
Speaking of being overwhelmed, the first time I had two people replying to me in an individual message at the same time, in different places in it, my head almost exploded. It’s a lot of raw information coming it at once, and it’s very different from the old e-mail or the instant message experience.
A lot of what Wave does is made possible by the fact that Wave messages don’t live primarily in the desktop Wave client (which is actually a rich browser-based app), as the traditional design of e-mail dictates, but rather on the Wave server. Messages aren’t just dropped off at your Wave client; persistent links to messages on the servers come with them. When you edit a wave with the Wave application on your computer, it’s immediately reflected back to the Wave server, and from then out to other users who are viewing that Wave in their apps, immediately.
Wave servers synchronize with each other as needed. In fairness, this is not radically different from how Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange work, but Wave has no legacy support for old e-mail architectures whatsoever, and isn’t bogged down by the old methods–like the practice of delivering messages to users and then severing the links to those messages.
Other benefits you get from this include the capability to add new recipients to a wave at any time, and for Wave to know, when that happens, what each user has read and what they haven’t. Users’ views into Wave will highlight what’s new to them when they open a message.
And, taking a page from Twitter Search, Wave’s search function will be real-time (it wasn’t when I tried it). If you are searching for a word or phrase in your inbox of waves, and someone updates a message thread with your search target, that message will pop up in your results the moment they type in the change. (You can save searches in the navigation bar, a nice feature.)
At the moment, the only people Wave users can communicate with are other Wave users. Wave addresses look like e-mail addresses, but there’s no gateway between Internet e-mail and Wave, so messages send from standard e-mail clients to Wave will bounce. This is a serious limitation, and one Google hopes developers will rectify by writing gateways between Wave and standard e-mail servers, not to mention IM services and other social and workflow systems like Facebook, Bugzilla, and so on. A Twitter interface is already being shown.
However, as Rasmussen told me, Wave is currently spam-free since it’s not linked into the global e-mail system. He doesn’t want to open up Wave to standard e-mail until he can ensure that this system won’t be overrun, too.
In fact, the reason Wave is being released in the way it is right now–as an early developer-only experience–is to encourage programmers to write extensions to it. The e-mail gateway is particularly critical, and Google may develop it itself. Without it, Wave is yet another new communications medium that will have a hard time getting off the ground since it duplicates many capabilities people are already accustomed to. Wave is technically a radical departure from e-mail, but for the end users it will still be used for a lot of the same things e-mail is.
Google’s Wave team hasn’t yet done much integration with other Google developers’ projects, although Wave was introduced to the company through a detailed video demo. As Rasmussen told me, “To say we’re ‘working with’ other Google groups would be a stretch.” Obvious integrations we’re waiting for include Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Voice.
The merger of e-mail, instant messaging, and collaborative editing is overdue. Aside from the inertia of technology, there’s no reason we should we need different applications–an e-mail client (or site), an instant messenger, and a collaborative editor–for variations on the theme of textual communication. I give Google a lot of credit for kicking off this experiment.
When Wave comes out, try it immediately. It really is an eye-opener.
Alexander Muse , November 9, 2008
The guys from across the hall, the same ones that brought you SimpleTicket, have a new application for Google’s new Android mobile phone platform called ShopSavvy. ShopSavvy is a shopping assistant developed for Google’s Android mobile phone platform and is one of T-Mobile’s featured applications in their 2008 US and UK launch. Users can scan the bar code of any product using their phone’s built-in camera. ShopSavvy will then search for the best prices online and through the inventories of nearby, local stores using the phone’s built-in GPS. ShopSavvy won Google’s Android Developer Challenge and is available in Google’s Android Market. Check out a demo of their application:
Alexander Muse , October 23, 2008
Most small companies have four or five servers that are mission critical to their business operations. Given that, most small companies can afford to have a complete mirrored fail-over environment. Some small companies can afford to have an extra server around in the event of a failure of one of them. The problem with an extra server is that it can take as much as a day to get it up and running place of the primary server that failed. Architel has a solution.
Architel will create up 10 ‘Hot Standby’ Windows or SQL Servers for a one time fee of $5,000. Each a complete duplicate of the primary server. In the event the primary server fails, our engineers would ‘engage’ the ‘Hot Standby’ until the primary server can be repaired.
Microsoft Windows 32 and 64 bit AMIs are supported. Usage charges are passed through (no mark up) starting at $.125 per hour. If you are interested, please contact sales 214.550.2000.
Alexander Muse , August 26, 2008
Since 2003 we have touted the fact that we ONLY offered one part number for our fractional IT service. Today I am proud (and a little sad) that no longer have a single part number. Our managed services clients, as opposed to our SMB fractional IT clients really didn’t fit in our old ’single part number’ model. Effectively immediately we offer various part number for services ranging from:
We are currently looking for specialty sales people to market each of managed services. If you are interested in applying please fill out our online application here.
Shannon Barrett , August 19, 2008
Have you received an email from a friend containing a free POSTCARD? Maybe you should think twice before you open it!
For the past month Architel has been encountering problems with client workstations being bombarded by the so-called XP Antivirus 2008.
The XP Antivirus 2008 is one of the latest counterfeit antispyware programs floating around the internet. XP Antivirus 2008 usually pops up after you installed a video codec that come with Trojan, malware and virus but recently we’ve seen it show up come via email with a subject line variatieon of “A POSTCARD FROM A FRIEND”.
XP Antivirus 2008 normally generates fake and misleading system popup error messages so end-users will be tricked into purchase XP Antivirus 2008.
All of our clients use anti-virus software but even the best AV software fully updated can be vulnerable. Getting infected by this virus will at the very least cause you hours of lost work and frustation. Most of the time a full system rebuild is required.
The best way to avoid being infected is to stay vigilant, avoid opening unsolicited attachements and if you have and question give us a call.
Alexander Muse , August 8, 2008
Looking to work for a dynamic, hot, awesome, progressive, young, super, forward looking company? Good luck! How about finding a place where you can make a difference? Where you can actually change things? Where the people running the business don’t assume they know everything (well almost everything)? Architel might be the perfect place for you. We completed our expansion at the INFOMART creating more than 25 open seats that need smart engineering and support folks ready to make a change. We also recruited an 8 year veteran of Buchanan Associates to augment our operations management and help lead Architel past $10MM in revenue next year. Open positions include project management, senior systems engineers, field technicians and operation technicians.
You can apply online here or stop by our offices on the second floor of the INFOMART some time (our office has the 9? Hulk in the waiting area – don’t worry, but please don’t make him angry)…
Alexander Muse , August 2, 2008
Architel® is seeking a highly skilled Microsoft engineer to support, manage and troubleshoot Microsoft servers, Microsoft Exchange and XP desktops. The position is home-based and pays between 200Php and 350Php per hour. Hiring bonuses for various certifications (see listing at end of job description).
DESCRIPTION
As a Microsoft engineer for Architel®, the candidate must:
Each day you will be responsible for various predetermined tasks. Each task must be documented in our ticketing system. You will also be responsible for taking support calls from our clients and helping to resolve their issues.
TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE REQUIRED
• Experience managing, troubleshooting and implementing Windows 2003 Active Directory Domains.
• Experience managing, supporting and troubleshooting Exchange 2003.
HIRING BONUSES
Are you a Microsoft Certified Professional? Architel® will pay hiring bonuses for engineers who have achieved the following certifications:
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) 2003 (four networking exams, one client operating system, one design exam and one elective exam for a total of seven). Bonus of 20,000Php after 90 days of employment with Architel.
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) 2000 (four operating system exams, one design exam and two electives for a total of five). Bonus of 15,000Php after 90 days of employment with Architel.
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) NT 4.0 (four exams including networking essentials, Windows NT Workstation, Windows NT Server and Windows NT Server). Bonus of 5,000Php after 90 days of employment with Architel.
Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA) 2003 (two networking systems exams, a client operating system exam and an elective exam). Bonus of 8,000Php after 90 days of employment with Architel.
Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician (MCDST) (50 hour course plus two core exams). Bonus of 5,000Php after 90 days of employment with Architel.
Only one bonus may be earned. Your MCP transcript must be shared before the 90th day of employment is reached. You will need your Transcript ID and Access Code.
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
ABOUT ARCHITEL®
Architel® provides IT support services small businesses (with between 20 and 100 employees) primarily located in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Our service provide turnkey support for businesses including day-to-day desktop support, server support, Exchange support and networking support. Our offshore employees work from home and enjoy the advantages of higher pay and reduced expenses associated with a daily commute. Learn more by visiting http://www.architel.com
Architel's RSS Feed