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Enterprise Systems | Separating Truth from Hype about Unified Communications

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Separating Truth from Hype about Unified Communications

We reveal three facts to keep in mind during any unified communications evaluation. 5/27/2008

After so many years of broken promises, unified communications (UC) has taken the spotlight in a huge way. Recent major announcements from industry luminaries, including IBM, Microsoft, and Avaya, have set the marketplace on fire and are leaving many companies scrambling to hop on the bandwagon. By integrating all communications — voice, video, instant messaging, and presence information — enterprises will soon simplify and improve communications. In addition, enterprises will be able to embed real-time communications into line-of-business applications to increase operational efficiency and business agility.

However, when the stakes are this high, so is the marketing hype. Enterprises must separate spin from substance when evaluating unified communications.

In this article we reveal three facts you should keep in mind during any UC evaluation.

Reality #1: For UC to be successful, companies must fundamentally change the way they manage their existing voice communication

You may be wondering: “If unified communications is so great, why is it just emerging now? What has changed in the past few years?”

While technological evolution certainly plays a part in unified communications’ arrival, technology has notlead to the breakthrough. In fact, the most radical factor that instigated unified communications’ tipping point was a change in the way enterprises began managing their VoIP communications.

Compared to other enterprise applications, today’s PBXs and even IP PBXs are “islands of communication.” No matter how many “solutions” you drop into your enterprise network, it is impossible to realize the expected ROI of unified communications when you route intra-company voice traffic over the TDM network while IM, presence information (status indicators that convey the ability and willingness of a person to communicate), and video traverse the IP network because it adds millions of dollars in unnecessary operating expense. To avoid this pitfall, enterprises must transform VoIP into a managed application on the IP network.

This radical shift in the way enterprises manage their voice communications has three key benefits:

• Companies can integrate voice onto the wide area network (WAN)
• Enterprises can uniformly enforce their real-time communications policies
• Companies can optimize and manage real-time sessions to ensure compliance with service level agreements

Integrating all intra-company real-time traffic onto the WAN lets companies control, secure, and manage multi-vendor VoIP and unified communication environments from a single point in the network. Uniform policy enforcement is absolutely necessary because companies must be able to maintain strict control over users, access, sessions, services, and policies as well as ensure compliance and deliver business results.

Bringing voice communications onto the WAN gives companies a single, centrally managed policy-enforcement system that can control routing, security, monitoring, and interoperability across all locations. This functionality is particularly attractive to large, global corporations that must manage a workforce comprised of many branches, each with its own multi-vendor environments.

Given IT’s regulated service level agreements, it is imperative to have complete visibility and span of control to manage real-time applications and services throughout the enterprise.

Reality #2: There is no single compelling application for unified communications — there are many

Most discussions about unified communications examine the productivity gains in too narrow a context. People need to lose the “magic box” mentality promoted by vendors and look at the benefits of unified communications within the context of a business process instead of looking for bells and whistles. Think about how voice-enabled applications will streamline business processes and improve your customers’ experience.

Unified communications will enable organizations to embed a range of powerful, new communications capabilities into existing business applications. For instance, many service-based businesses embed rich multi-modal collaboration applications, such as presence information, into ERP and CRM applications to improve interactions with clients and customers. This feature allows sales agents receiving calls from customers to immediately route them to the appropriate subject-matter experts when necessary. Enterprises can utilize any number of Web services and tools to develop new and creative ways to unlock their proprietary applications’ potential.

Reality #3: Enterprises should not wait for vendor-driven standards before deploying unified communications

Vendors argue that companies should wait for standards to be developed before deploying unified communications. The roots of this stance are clear when you consider that these companies effectively blockaded unified communications because they built proprietary systems that were incompatible with their rival’s solutions. Instead of waiting for these slow-moving giants to agree upon a standard (a process that could last years), companies should instead look to established telephony standards to lay the foundation to their unified communications strategy.

The IETF standards to integrate real-time communications — SIP/TLS, RTP/SRTP, SIMPLE, etc. — are here today and supported by all major vendors. All the major IP PBX and unified communications vendors support these standards on the server if not the line (client). IBM Sametime, Microsoft Office Communications Server, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and the vast majority of the other IP PBX suppliers can be integrated onto the WAN with nominal to very high interoperability, depending on the capability of their real-time communications infrastructure.

The Bottom Line

Unified communications offer tremendous potential for enterprises as large gains in productivity and the optimization of business operations can be seen clearly on the horizon. Creative IT work flourishes in this environment and smart companies will find ways to improve their internal and external operations with new, integrated enterprise applications.

Successful implementations require companies to not only understand architectural and organizational hurdles, but also think about how to leverage their own expertise with the platform’s flexible, innovative potential.

- – -

Rod Hodgman is the vice president of marketing at Covergence. You can reach the author at rod@covergence.com.
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• What are the basic principles of IT project management?
• Why do IT projects fail so often?
• How do I determine if a project is going to fail once it’s in motion?
• When should a project be canceled?
• How can I ensure that my projects are successful?
• What are some common project-management methodologies, and which work best for various kinds of IT projects?
• Some companies have project-management offices. What’s their purpose, and should I create one?
• How much authority should a project manager have?
• What certifications are available for project managers, and are they important?
• Our business moves very fast while our projects seem to move slowly. What strategies can we use to get our projects up to speed?
• Regulations, laws and standards are common in my industry. How will they impact my IT projects?
• I want to send my project managers through project-management training. What should I make sure they get out of it, and how do I know the training will be worthwhile?

Managing an IT project is like juggling chunks of Jell-O: It’s neither easy nor pretty. Information technology is especially slippery because it’s always moving, changing, adapting and challenging business as we know it.

Traditional project management, as it’s used in construction or manufacturing, deals with solid, tangible elements. Instead, IT project management is complicated by shifting business needs and demanding stakeholders. Because good IT project management is difficult to execute, we’ve come up with a list of common questions and answers to explain its importance and make it easier to master.

What are the basic principles of IT project management?

Projects are short-term efforts to create a unique product, service or environment, such as removing old servers, developing a custom e-commerce site, creating new desktop images or merging databases.

All projects are constrained by three factors: time, cost and scope. For a project to be successful, these three constraints (often called the Triple Constraints of Project Management) must be in equilibrium. If any constraint is out of balance, the project is heading for disaster.

All projects, IT or otherwise, move through five phases in the project management lifecycle: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Each phase contains processes that move the project from idea to implementation.

Why do IT projects fail so often?

According to The Standish Group, which tracks IT project success rates, only 29 percent of IT projects conducted in 2004 were completed successfully. The numbers are depressing for a variety of reasons.

IT projects fail because they’re just plain harder. They include the usual project-management challenges, such as deadlines, budget constraints and too few people to devote to the project. But they also face unique technology challenges, from hardware, operating system, network or database woes, to security risks, interoperability issues, and the changes manufacturers make to their hardware and software configurations.

IT projects fail at the beginning—not the end—due to a lack of sufficient planning. An IT organization must consider the resources it needs to devote to a project, the skills required and the people who need to be involved, and realistically consider the time it will take to create, test and implement the project deliverables. Otherwise, the project will be a mess. The IT organization will never complete it on time, on budget or with the required functionality, which are three common factors for project success.

Third, IT projects fail because they’re rushed. Because so many companies today rely on IT for a competitive advantage, they speed through development efforts and systems implementations in order to be first to market with new, IT-based products, services and capabilities. Organizations often feel that, to remain competitive, they must cut costs and maintain business operations, but that adds to the pressure on a big, expensive project such as an ERP implementation or a platform upgrade. A project with inadequate planning, risk assessment and testing is doomed from the start.

Finally, IT projects fail because their scope is too unwieldy. A project with a large scope can usually be better executed by breaking it down into a series of smaller, more manageable projects. For example, a project to convert all of an organization’s historical records, forms and transactions from paper to an online digital database can be incredibly complex and time consuming. A series of smaller projects allows for more manageable endeavors, such as first converting the existing records to digital, and then a second project to use the digital database internally, and then a third project to bring the database to the Web. These smaller projects can be completed sequentially and with more flexibility than a large, complicated and cumbersome project. To learn how JP Morgan Partners made a massive modernization project more manageable, read “A Project Win for JP Morgan Partners.”

How do I determine if a project is going to fail once it’s in motion?

During the project’s initiation, you should establish the criteria for success and failure. For example, to be considered successful, a project may have to adhere to certain quality standards (such as Six Sigma or an ISO program), fall within a certain budget, meet a particular deadline and/or deliver specific functionality.

Another approach is to use an indicator such as the “15-15 Rule.” The 15-15 Rule states that if a project is more than 15 percent over budget or 15 percent off schedule, it will likely never recoup the time or cost necessary to be considered successful.

Certain management techniques can also help identify whether a project will be a success or failure. For example, the Earned Value Management technique allows an organization to measure a project’s completion, schedule variances, create schedule and cost performance indexes, and forecast a project’s likely completion date and financial impact upon completion. If, using the Earned Value Management technique, you see that a project is costing so much money that it’s going to produce a quarterly loss, then you know it’s not a success.

For more warning signs, check out “How to Kill an Enterprise Project.”

When should a project be canceled?

IT projects are canceled for a variety of reasons, though chief among them is poor planning. Cost overruns by more than 15 percent, late milestones and poor quality are also viable reasons for scrapping projects.

To determine if your project should be canceled, at the start, determine what circumstances would call for a project’s cancellation. You might consider time and cost overruns, or shifting business conditions. For example, if your company experiences a significant or sustained dip in revenue for whatever reason, you may decide to cancel the project to save money. You might also decide to cancel a project if its scope has grown or changed so significantly that the project is no longer recognizable or has morphed into something else.

If scrapping it sounds daunting, you might wish to create smaller projects that give some return for the sunk costs. After all, smaller projects are more likely to succeed than large ones.

How can I ensure that my projects are successful?

Organizations should create or adapt a standard approach to managing projects. Managers can quickly determine which ones are proceeding smoothly and which are not when all projects follow the same processes and approaches, and use the same metrics for measuring project performance. A standard approach to project management establishes ground rules and expectations for the project team. It also provides project managers, functional managers and the operational staff with a common language around project management that eases communication and helps ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Using a mishmash of project-management techniques makes it impossible for an organization to measure the success of its projects. And if they can’t measure their projects, they can’t determine which processes and methodologies are working and which ones need to be improved.

What are some common project-management methodologies, and which work best for various kinds of IT projects?

There are three leading approaches for managing IT projects. The first is based on traditional project management. It works with any IT project regardless of the technology involved or the duration of the project work.

The second approach is called Extreme Programming. It’s sometimes abbreviated as XP (not to be confused with the Windows operating system.) Extreme Programming is a project-management approach designed specifically for software development. XP uses a software development model that involves the users, customers and programmers in four iterative phases: planning, coding, designing and testing.

Scrum is the final leader in IT project management. This approach, named after a rugby term, also uses iterations of planning, coding, executing and testing software. Scrum employs its own vernacular and has some rigid rules about meetings, hitting milestones and the duration of planning activities.

Some companies have project-management offices. What’s their purpose, and should I create one?

Many companies have adopted a project-management office (PMO) to centralize and coordinate all project-management activities, including IT, across a company. PMOs establish ground rules and expectations around how projects should be conducted for the project manager, the project team and the stakeholders. PMOs corral requests for changes to the scope of a project and provide training, tracking software, project plan templates and process forms to the project manager and the project team to help ensure that projects proceed smoothly and conclude successfully. In some companies, PMOs prioritize which projects are going to get done and when. They also say which resources will work on which projects to prevent departments from fighting over resources.

A well-rounded PMO is often led by a well-versed and experienced project manager and is staffed with support personnel who relieve the manager of busy work (keeping minutes from meetings, coordinating project records, communications and meeting with stakeholders.)

PMOs can exist inside or outside of IT departments. Some companies like to have one uber-PMO for all projects (whether they’re IT initiatives, research and development efforts or new product launches) that’s independent of all of those departments. Project managers typically report into PMOs. Dedicated project managers are often part of the PMO’s staff, but employees who are named project manager for a given initiative are not usually part of the PMO’s staff because they have some other day-to-day responsibility in addition to their newfound project-management responsibility.

The bad news about PMOs is that they can stifle project managers’ leadership and management styles by dictating the methodologies project managers must use and by making them follow specific (and often tedious) procedures for documenting work.

How much authority should a project manager have?

Project managers need to be able to dictate the resources they need to complete a project successfully. If they don’t have the authority to make the decisions about staffing, processes and methodologies that affect a project’s success, their hands are essentially tied. By the same token, you don’t want to give authority to an ineffective project manager.

Generally, the more experience a person has as a project manager, the more autonomy that project manager can expect. While this varies from organization to organization, the power structure within an organization often dictates the project manager’s authority.

• What are the basic principles of IT project management?
• Why do IT projects fail so often?
• How do I determine if a project is going to fail once it’s in motion?
• When should a project be canceled?
• How can I ensure that my projects are successful?
• What are some common project-management methodologies, and which work best for various kinds of IT projects?
• Some companies have project-management offices. What’s their purpose, and should I create one?
• How much authority should a project manager have?
• What certifications are available for project managers, and are they important?
• Our business moves very fast while our projects seem to move slowly. What strategies can we use to get our projects up to speed?
• Regulations, laws and standards are common in my industry. How will they impact my IT projects?
• I want to send my project managers through project-management training. What should I make sure they get out of it, and how do I know the training will be worthwhile?

What certifications are available for project managers, and are they important?

The jury is still out on the importance of certifications. On one hand, just because you’re certified in project management doesn’t mean you’re a good project manager. On the other, if you’re looking for a job in project management, having a certification distinguishes you from those who don’t, and shows that you have documented, proven experience in project management.

That being said, there are three leading certifications for project managers: Project Management Professional, Certified Associate in Project Management and Project+ Professional. All of these certifications demonstrate the project manager’s level of experience, education and knowledge of project management. The three certifications in order of prominence are:

• Project Management Professional (PMP). This is given by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and requires project managers to document their project management experience and the outcomes of the projects they have managed, and provide proof of educational experience. This documentation may be audited by PMI. PMP candidates must also take a 200-question, four-hour exam.
• Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM). This certification, also from PMI, is for project managers with considerably less project management experience than their PMP counterparts. CAPM candidates must also document their experience, education and supervisors on their exam application.
• Project+ Professional. This certification is from the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), the same group that certifies A+, Network+, Server+ and other professionals. It requires that candidates pass an 80-question exam with a score of 499 or better in a 90-minute time period. The Project+ exam does not have the same pre-exam requirements as the CAPM or the PMP. This exam is ideal for candidates who aspire to manage larger projects or move into project management, or for recent college grads pursuing a career in project management.

Our business moves very fast while our projects seem to move slowly. What strategies can we use to get our projects up to speed?

Slow and fast are subjective terms; what may seem slow to your organization may be entirely zippy somewhere else. It’s important to determine what’s a reasonable time frame to complete an IT project based on the scope of the work, the expected deliverables and the conditions of the project.

That being said, you can determine if your projects are in fact moving slowly. Do you have historical information against which to compare current projects’ speed, or have your projects always taken this long to complete?

Second, ask if your projects are effort-driven or of fixed duration. Effort-driven projects can be “crashed” by adding more resources to reduce the project’s time line. Crashing a project, however, adds costs. If your project is of fixed duration, like testing software for two months before releasing it, there’s not much that can be done to reduce the project’s time line without increasing risk.

Regulations, laws and standards are common in my industry. How will they impact my IT projects?

Projects that must comply with laws and regulations require more up-front planning. For example, in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley, you have to do a lot more documentation when you’re developing a new business application or implementing new supply chain software. When project managers consider the regulations that govern their industry, from manufacturing to health care, the regulations become project constraints and result in more overhead. Factoring laws and regulations into projects also expands their scope and adds to their costs.

I want to send my project managers through project-management training. What should I make sure they get out of it, and how do I know the training will be worthwhile?

To get a good return on your investment, first identify what you want the project managers to know at the end of the project. Examine your projects and determine where the pain is. Are your projects failing in scheduling, planning, executing, communications? Everything? By determining where your projects need help, a project-management training provider can help your managers deliver better projects. There are plenty of off-the-shelf training solutions, but often an on-site class unique to your organization allows you to create a custom solution with more time focused on areas that need improvement and dismiss the areas your project managers have already mastered.

---

Joseph Phillips, PMP, Project+, is the director of education for Project Seminars. The author of numerous books on project management, Phillips has served as a project-management consultant for organizations creating project offices, maturity models and best practices. He can be contacted through jdp@projectseminars.com.

The IT department is dead, author argues

New Nicholas Carr book predicts utility computing will replace internal IT shops

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World, 01/07/08

Sponsored by:

The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path. So predicts Nicholas Carr in his new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.

Carr is best known for a provocative Harvard Business Review article entitled “Does IT Matter?” Published in 2003, the article asserted that IT investments didn’t provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same.

The Harvard Business Review article made Carr the sworn enemy of hardware and software vendors including Microsoft, Intel and HP, as well as of CIOs and other IT professionals.

With his new book, Carr is likely to engender even more wrath among CIOs and other IT pros.

“In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form,” Carr writes. “It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people.”

Carr’s rationale is that utility computing companies will replace corporate IT departments much as electric utilities replaced company-run power plants in the early 1900s.

Carr explains that factory owners originally operated their own power plants. But as electric utilities became more reliable and offered better economies of scale, companies stopped running their own electric generators and instead outsourced that critical function to electric utilities.

Carr predicts that the same shift will happen with utility computing. He admits that utility computing companies need to make improvements in security, reliability and efficiency. But he argues that the Internet, combined with computer hardware and software that has become commoditized, will enable the utility computing model to replace today’s client/server model.

“It has always been understood that, in theory, computing power, like electric power, could be provided over a grid from large-scale utilities — and that such centralized dynamos would be able to operate much more efficiently and flexibly than scattered, private data centers,” Carr writes.

Carr cites several drivers for the move to utility computing. One is that computers, storage systems, networking gear and most widely used applications have become commodities.

He says even IT professionals are indistinguishable from one company to the next. “Most perform routine maintenance chores — exactly the same tasks that their counterparts in other companies carry out,” he says.

Carr points out that most data centers have excess capacity, with utilization ranging from 25% to 50%. Another driver to utility computing is the huge amount of electricity consumed by data centers, which can use 100 times more energy than other commercial office buildings.

“The replication of tens of thousands of independent data centers, all using similar hardware, running similar software, and employing similar kinds of workers, has imposed severe economic penalties on the economy,” he writes. “It has led to the overbuilding of IT assets in every sector of the economy, dampening the productivity gains that can spring from computer automation.”

Carr embraces Google as the leader in utility computing. He says Google runs the largest and most sophisticated data centers on the planet, and is using them to provide services such as Google Apps that compete directly with traditional client/server software from vendors such as Microsoft.

“If companies can rely on central stations like Google’s to fulfill all or most of their computing requirements, they’ll be able to slash the money they spend on their own hardware and software — and all the dollars saved are ones that would have gone into the coffers of Microsoft and the other tech giants,” Carr says.

Other IT companies that Carr highlights in the book for their innovative approaches to utility computing are: Salesforce.com, which provides CRM software as a service; Amazon, which offers utility computing services called Simple Storage Solution (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with its excess capacity; Savvis, which is a leader in automating the deployment of IT;
and 3Tera, which sells a software program called AppLogic that automates the creation and management of complex corporate systems.

Carr points out that many leading software and hardware companies — Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, Sun and EMC — are adapting their client/server products to the utility age.

“Some of the old-line companies will succeed in making the switch to the new model of computing; others will fail,” Carr writes. “But all of them would be wise to study the examples of General Electric and Westinghouse. A hundred years ago, both these companies were making a lot of money selling electricity-production components and systems to individual companies. That business disappeared as big utilities took over electricity supply. But GE and Westinghouse were able to reinvent themselves.”

Carr offers a grimmer future for IT professionals. He envisions a utility computing era where “managing an entire corporate computing operation would require just one person sitting at a PC and issuing simple commands over the Internet to a distant utility.”

He not only refers to the demise of the PC, which he says will be a museum piece in 20 years, but to the demise of the software programmer, whose time has come to an end.

Carr gives several examples of successful Internet companies including YouTube, Craigslist, Skype and Plenty of Fish that run their operations with minimal IT professionals. YouTube had just 60 employees when it was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Craigslist has a staff of 22 to run a Web site with billions of pages of content. Internet telephony vendor Skype supports 53 million customers with only 200 employees. Meanwhile, Internet dating site Plenty of Fish is a one-man shop.

“Given the economic advantages of online firms — advantages that will grow as the maturation of utility computing drives the costs of data processing and communication even lower —traditional firms may have no choice but to refashion their own businesses along similar lines, firing many millions of employees in the process,” Carr says.

IT professionals aren’t the only ones to suffer demise in Carr’s eyes. He saves his most dire predictions for the fate of journalists.

“As user-generated content continues to be commercialized, it seems likely that the largest threat posed by social production won’t be to big corporations but to individual professionals — to the journalists, editors, photographers, researchers, analysts, librarians and other information workers who can be replaced by . . . people not on the payroll.”

Carr’s argument about the future of utility computing is logical and well written. He offers a solid comparison between the evolution of electrical utilities in the early 1900s and the development of utility computing that’s happening today.

Carr’s later chapters — about the future of artificial intelligence and the many downsides of the Internet — seem less integral to his utility computing argument. And his discussion of Google’s vision of a direct link between the brain and the Internet seems far-fetched.

Nonetheless, The Big Switch is a recommended read for any up-and-coming IT professional looking to make a career out of providing computing services to corporations. If Carr’s predictions come true, strong technical skills will still be valued by service providers.

All contents copyright 1995-2008 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

Alesis MidiVerb4 Digital Effects Processor and more Multi-FX / Reverb / Delay at GuitarCenter.com.

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Build your own live TV station with MogulusPost to your WordPress.com blog »Enter your WordPress.com account info:Blog URL:Username:Password:Warning: password will be sent via http.cancel | Next »Title:Content:The video player will follow the above text.cancel |Step 3:MP4 Video Video | Posted by Robert Scoble | November 26th, 2007 6:01 pmMogulus is the most interesting of all the streaming services like Justin.tv, Ustream.tv, and Stickcam. Why? Because they built their system around a TV station metaphor. You know, multiple cameras. Switchers. Producers. Graphic overlays. Here Max Haot, CEO, shows off Mogulus and talks with us about how he used the system to do the live streaming from Om Malik’s NewTeeVee Conference. I watched at home and it was awesome — almost looked too slick at times.

Build your own live TV station with Mogulus | ScobleShow: Videoblog about geeks, technology, and developers

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–Under “Direct Mode”, through DVD menu.
–Under “Batch Mode”, through DVD Title list. Various kinds of video crop mode. eg. 16:9, 4:3, full screen and so on. Various kinds of video resize mode, eg. “Keep aspect ratio” and “stretch to fix screen”. Support splitting output video by DVD chapters, and titles. Fully support MTV DVDs and Episodic DVDs. Support customize output video file size and video quality. Provide flexible output profiles, user can easily customize the video properties. Support Dolby, DTS Surround audio track. Support convert DVDs/Video to any audio format including AC3, AAC, MP2, MP3, MP4, RA, WMA, etc. Support convert DVDs/Video to any video format including H264, MP4, WMV, AVI, MOV, RM, 3GP, flv, SWF, mpeg1, mpeg2, VideoCD, SuperVideoCD, DVD, etc. Support convert DVDs/Video to any (portable) device including iPods(iPod video, iPod touch, iPod video nano), Zune, PSP, iPhone, Apple TV, PPC, PDA, PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360, etc. Support customize your own (new) device profiles.

DVD43 – Download SitesLatest Version: 4.0.0DVD43 is a free DVD decryption utility that runs in the background and decrypts DVDs. This site will help you find sites that host DVD43 so you don’t have to pay money for a decrypter. This website does not host the DVD43 setup file and is not affiliated with the authors of DVD43.WHAT DOES IT DO?: DVD43 will decrypt (unlock) a movie DVD so that your copy program can read it. If the DVD structure is non standard, your copy program needs to take care of that. I have included a list of programs (at the bottom of this page) which work well with DVD43 in order of their capability (based on my testing).COMPATIBILITY: DVD43 is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista (32), Windows XP, and Windows 2000. HOW TO INSTALL: Run the setup file which installs DVD43 and leaves a happy face icon on your task bar. DVD43 will run in the background and decrypt movies on the fly. HOW TO USE DVD43: Insert the DVD you want to copy and wait for DVD43 to detect it (smiley face turns green). Start your DVD copy software and copy your movie.Download Site 1 (BetaNews) Download Site 2 (copybase)The software links above have been tested and do not contain any adware. Some adware toolbars rate the website rather than the software, so you can ignore warnings about these websites unless you are downloading something other than DVD43 from their site. COMPATIBLE SOFTWARE:1Click DVD Copy, Nero Recode, Intervideo DVD Copy, Roxio DVD Copy, Pinnacle DVD Copy and others.

DVD43 v4.0.0 – Download Sites

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