The July 2006 issue of Measure IT, the CMG monthly electronic newsletter, is
now available at http://www.cmg.org/measureit/. Measure IT is published as a
free service to both members and non-members alike, so be sure to tell your
friends and colleagues about Measure IT.

James Yaple provides ITIL Availability Management: Beyond the Framework:
Part 1. The goal of availability management is to optimize the functioning
and system efficiency of an IT infrastructure, services and additionally,
the service provider. The objective is to deliver cost-effective and
sustained system functionality (or "availability") to support achievement of
business (customer) objectives.

Michael Swanson tells us about 8 Great Myths of Software Asset Management.
"Best-in-class" companies spend less than half of what an "average" data
center spends in software costs! To look at it another way, an average data
center would have to negotiate all of its ISV software for "free" if it
wanted to achieve the cost structure of best-in-class companies. There are
many myths about how good these best-in-class companies are and how they got
there.

Jaqui Lynch gives us a Primer on Samba. The ability to share files and
printers between multiple systems has become a requirement for many
applications and systems. As datacenters become more complex, it's critical
for data to reside in one location and be accessed from multiple servers
without having to move the data around. This article will provide an
introduction to Samba, a file-sharing option.