I'm an enterprise architect. I also work closely with the vice president on strategically planning where Midas is going to take IT next. We research new technologies, and once we are comfortable with a technology, I plan out how it is going to fit into our environment and how to implement it.

Very important. We have a dealer portal Web site that our franchisees visit to check account balances, redeem national warranties, view their weekly sales revenues, take online training, participate in ad campaigns and partner promotions, purchase marketing materials for their shops, and keep in-touch via Business News and Bulletins. Dealers generate reports on specific retail customer sales and fleet sales, as well as their profits and losses, and they can see where their numbers should be based on other franchisees in their area. That piece of IT needs to be up and running all the time. We need to make sure there's no downtime, so that they can always service our customers, manage their business, and generate their reports—because that's what they depend on.

Midas is migrating from Lotus Notes to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, and we're working hard to make sure that we don't have any problems during the migration. So far, everything's been really solid and stable. With the 64-bit architecture in Exchange Server 2007, the speed difference is just amazing. We're very happy with it.

One of the key things we look at in making technology decisions is, can we avoid bringing in consultants to help us deploy this? If we do bring in consultants, can we still maintain this application in-house? We've noticed that after we've done our research, when we stick with a Microsoft product it's easier to maintain than others: open source for example, or AS/400 applications. And finding people who are experts in those other platforms is getting a little more difficult.

One thing that helped us a lot was virtualizing with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. We're now able to run four to five different servers on one physical host. We saved on hardware costs and reduced the footprint of our data center. With Microsoft virtualization we have cut the size of our data center in half. We expect to save more than U.S.$70,000 a year in leasing costs and $40,000 a year in utilities and maintenance.

We have one Sun server that does something with our old phone system. And it's funny because nobody touches it: "Don't turn it off! It's still running, leave it alone!" Beyond that, we're almost 100 percent based on Windows®. At one point we looked into using OpenOffice, and we weren't too happy with what we got from it. The feedback I heard from users was that some of the animation wasn't there that they could do within Microsoft Office PowerPoint®. And they couldn't use the same formulas in the OpenOffice spreadsheet program that they used in Microsoft Office Excel®. It would have been a big learning curve. So we stuck with Microsoft Office.

I can tell you that the Microsoft migration path always has plenty of tools to help you along the way—documentation, white papers—where other applications may not. When we migrated from Novell to Windows Server®, the Microsoft Web site had plenty of documentation on how to get us there. If you're going from Microsoft to Novell, it's a little more complicated.

We use server clustering with Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition. By connecting a clustered environment with our Storage Area Network, we're able to sustain almost 100 percent uptime. We identified critical servers by asking, "Is this something that a franchisee or a customer is always going to be connecting to?" That's a critical server. If it's an application that only a couple of people use four or five times a week, then we don't classify it as critical.

I'd go to Microsoft.com. I'd also take a look at TechNet magazine—that's pretty good. They're always covering the new stuff that's coming out of Microsoft. Also, ZDNet.