Security: It’s the Small Things That Matter
by Blake Britton, Axxys Technologies, Inc.

When (If) we think about data security for our businesses we tend to believe if we have a firewall and antivirus in place we are protected . . . if this were only the case. There are so many other aspects of data security that we have to consider on a day-to-day basis. Here are a few of the most commonly overlooked areas of business data security.

Mobile Devices
Do you have a formal policy for cell phones? Is there a lock feature or PIN they must enter in order to access the phone? What is your action plan if they lose the phone or if it gets stolen? Can you remotely “wipe” the phone through your Exchange server? These are things that need to be considered if your employees are receiving company email or if they keep company and client contacts on their phone. There are many features in exchange 2007 and 2010 to assist with securing or protecting the mobile device. Also, if you have iPhones in your organization we would recommend using the password lock feature. The key is to have a formal procedure and to ensure your staff knows that management needs to be notified immediately if a device is lost or stolen.

Password Change Policy
How often are end users required to change their password? 30, 60, or 90 days? Ever?  We recommend at least 90 days, but 30 or 60 is much better. One of the main reasons we encourage frequent password change is employee turnover. In the event an employee is terminated and they know someone else’s password within their organization there is a chance they can still access the network remotely using another end users credentials. It is simply a lot more practical to change passwords at regular intervals as opposed to each time an employee is terminated. One last note, always encourage your team to never share their credentials with other end users.

Remote Access
Do you allow remote access? Is it secure? Is it open for everyone? If you are like most businesses and remote access is allowed and encouraged from a productivity perspective it is best to keep access simple and manage what users can use the service. Another factor to consider is knowing what information they can access and pull off the network remotely. Remote access is necessary but you need to be sure you have a strong policy for managing it and ensuring the service can be turned off for users who are no longer with your company. We also recommend that you test your external IP addresses for any vulnerabilities.

We cannot express enough how each of these topics are not IT decisions, rather they are BUSINESS decisions. We do not need to tell you how important your data is to your business, but if you are not looking at security best practices on keeping sensitive data secure then you need to be. Take a look around your business and consider how many mobile devices are leaving the door each day with either data stored locally or with the ability to access the data remotely. Ask your team members if the data is secure and how it is secured. Make sure you are comfortable with the answer, if not then reach out and let us help.

File Storage: How to Use It So You Won’t Lose Your Data
used with permission from the Cisco Small Business Site

File storage systems that provide automated, secure backup and additional storage capacity can play an essential role in your business’s success. The best file storage systems seamlessly help protect valuable data, make it easy for employees to share files, and require minimal maintenance.

You have three main options for file storage systems: external hard drives, online backup/storage, and network attached storage (NAS). Here is a quick look at all three options.

External Hard Drives
In some businesses, an external hard drive may be attached to each computer. The drives serve as backups to a computer’s internal hard drive file storage.

External drives may also provide additional file storage for video, high-resolution images, and other large data files. These hard drives are generally inexpensive and simple to install. However, files stored on them are not easily accessible to others in an organization. Moreover, most external hard drives don’t offer automated, redundant backup to other drives. If a big file is stored on an external drive, and the drive crashes, the data is lost forever.

Online Backup and File Storage
Some businesses backup their files to an online backup and file storage service. These services are often inexpensive and easy to use. But backups — especially initial backups — can be extremely slow. If a computer’s internal hard drive crashes, a business has to wait for the online backup service to send hundreds of lost files on DVD.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Network attached storage (NAS) is the ideal system for backing up, sharing and archiving files and getting additional storage space.

A NAS appliance typically includes multiple hard drives and is connected to your network. NAS appliances deliver many important benefits, as they:

• Offer a significant amount of additional storage capacity that is easily accessible to anyone within your organization, at high speeds.
• Provide a central place for shared files.
• Offer various levels of security, thereby restricting sensitive data (such as employee records) to those with permission to access it.
• Can help ensure that your organization meets government regulations regarding data security, such as HIPAA, PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, and GBL.
• Can store multiple computer backups in one virtual data vault. Your files are backed up as soon as they are updated or created. This streamlines backup management while helping to ensure that you do not lose valuable information.
• Include multiple, redundant hard drives for backup and storage. If one drive fails, the data is available on another.

NAS File Storage Solutions from Cisco
Cisco offers a variety of affordable, secure, reliable file storage systems. Find out about the Cisco Small Business portfolio of network storage solutions.

Cisco Small Business Continuous Data Protection can be combined with Cisco network storage systems. Continuous Data Protection constantly makes synchronized copies of updated files and works unobtrusively in the background. Learn more about Cisco Continuous Data Protection.

Technology Financing
by Christopher Elliott
used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

Your growing business is ready for new PCs or software. How do you buy it?

It’s a common challenge for small businesses. New technology purchases top the list of capital expenditures in a survey of small businesses, with 43% of respondents saying they planned to make a buy in the next six months.

But that’s easier said than done.

“Increasingly, small businesses are delaying necessary upgrades,” said Laura DiDio, a research fellow for the Yankee Group. “We only see about a quarter of companies doing an upgrade every two to three years. Half of the companies are on a four, five or even a six-year upgrade path.”

How important is new equipment to your business? About a third of small businesses surveyed for a IT toolbox study found that they expected to increase staff productivity through the purchase of new computer equipment.

Getting money is a major obstacle for small businesses — some 16% of small businesses report having been denied for a loan or line of credit. The American Express survey, for example, cites several barriers to securing financing, including:

•the size of their business was the biggest challenge.
•the overwhelming paperwork requirements were an obstacle.
•the limited knowledge of financing resources.
•the lack of documentation to support their loan application.

And when it comes to financing IT purchases it’s often more difficult to secure financing because lenders are uncomfortable financing software and implementation services.

So when it comes to technology purchases, here are your choices. (The last option is Microsoft Financing, a new financing program designed for small businesses.)

1. Pay with cash
•When to use: Smaller purchases such as a new personal computer (PC) or a few software licenses.
•Advantage: You pay for it up front, and there are no further finance charges or fees.
•Disadvantage: Your business has to come up with the money immediately, which can cut into your budget for other important items, like payroll. Even a few thousand dollars is enough to be a deal-breaker for some companies.

2. Use a line of credit
•When to use: When technology costs more than $5,000, for, say, a complete IT infrastructure, including servers, PCs, LAN or WAN access, security applications, storage, peripherals software, licenses and support contracts.
•Advantage: You don’t need to come up with the money right away.
•Disadvantage: Your company’s line of credit is finite, and you may want to save it for something more important, such as payroll or an emergency expense — especially if there are other options available.

3. Leasing
•When to use: If you are only purchasing PC hardware and want to upgrade it every couple of years.
•Advantage: Leasing also preserves your company’s credit. There can also be tax advantages to leasing computer equipment, but it is best to consult with a professional accountant to find out how your business would specifically benefit. Some leasing agreements also allow you to trade your old leased equipment out at the end of the term for new equipment.
•Disadvantage: The agreement is typically limited to hardware so you’ll still have to find funds for software and/or implementation services on certain leases. Note:When you dispose of the equipment prior to the end of the depreciation term, you can lose your tax write-off.

4. Microsoft Financing
•When to use: For larger purchases, such as when you want to •get everyone in your company on the same hardware or software version. Or the solution includes a large amount of software and/or implementation services.
•Advantage: Microsoft Financing addresses some of the other shortcomings of traditional loans, such as technology and services that are usually not covered. This new financing program will finance technology purchases that can start as little as $3,000 and offers fixed payments for the loan term.
•Disadvantage: Your business is still
•taking out a loan, so some of the disadvantages of a traditional loan still apply. Check with your accountant to find out if this option makes sense for your company.

Whether you decide to pay for your new purchase with cash, take out a traditional loan, or opt for the Microsoft Financing plan, experts say timing is essential. Wait too long to make an upgrade and your company could fall behind, lose business and risk becoming uncompetitive.

“Each successive version of a new operating system improves reliability and performance by between 20% and 30%,” said DiDio, the Yankee Group analyst.

What’s more, the business applications are more scalable, reliable, secure, longer-lasting and with better features and functionality. And it has the potential to give your company a boost — for greater efficiency and, ultimately, profitability.
 

Sweeping OUT my Inbox
by Jane Cage, COO, HTS

Do you live in your inbox? I do – and sometimes it gets a little crowded. I find myself using messages as a to-do list and a record of communication. When I can’t figure out where an important piece of information should really live, I email it to myself. There are times when there are more messages FROM me TO me than any other sender in my Inbox. I’m glad to say that Office 2010 is helping me to change all that. What is making the difference? First, Outlook 2010 has some great new features that have made me more productive and more organized. Second, Microsoft OneNote ships with every version of Office 2010. Here’s what makes it all work:

First, the Outlook features. Viewing messages by conversation has been the single most helpful feature in wading through my inbox – no longer do I have to follow a thread of emails through many lines. Every related email appears together. Once conversations are grouped together, CLEAN UP comes into play. Clean Up removes “redundant” emails from conversations, folders and subfolders? What is a “redundant” message? If the message is completely contained within one of the replies, the previous message is deleted. Now, I only have to read one email and I know that I am seeing the entire string.

Second, OneNote – OneNote is a free-form information tracker that lets you track and store text, images, video and audio. I can clip information from any internet screen and paste it into One Note with a reference link back to the site. OneNote links to Outlook so that I can store meeting preparation notes, create tasks and to-do lists, and lets me organize info in any way that is logical and convenient to me. If you have never used it, you should give it a try.

I recently did a 30 minute webinar that highlighted some of these great new features. Take a look and drop me a line at jcage@heartlandtechnologies.com and let me know what you think. I bet you’ll agree that Office 2010 can do the same for you that it did for me!

The Future of Cloud Computing
By Tommy Wald, President & CEO, RIATA Technologies, Inc.

I remember when I started my career in computing in 1983, when our primary form of computing consisted of centralized mainframe/midframe computers accessed by simple dumb terminals. Since then our industry has swung from a centralized form of computing to a decentralized form of computing in which the majority of the processing power is on the desktop.

Well guess what? It appears the industry in now heading back to the same form of centralized computing in what is commonly referred to as ‘Cloud Computing’.

What is Cloud Computing?
According to Wikipedia: A way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of having local servers that handle specific applications. Simply stated “Cloud” is a metaphor for the internet.

In a Cloud environment, users do not have or need knowledge, control, ownership in the computer infrastructure. They simply rent or access the software, paying only for what they use. This is compelling since it eliminates capital expenditures for IT.

Companies Leading the Charge
Google is one of several large players making substantial investments for delivering Cloud services. Their data centers and network are made up of millions of cheap servers that store staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the world wide web.
Google has been investing more than $2 billion a year in data centers for cloud computing and is considered by far the leader in this technology. Their ‘Google Apps’, which include gMail, gDocs, iCalendar and others, are available for FREE with limitations and are rapidly being adopted by millions of individual users and small businesses.

Amazon is another big player in the emerging Cloud industry. Their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon EC2, provides a platform for dynamically sizing computing capacity and facilitates the development of web-scale applications. This platform reduces the time provision and implement new servers from weeks to minutes and provides the added benefit of paying only for capacity that is actually being used.

Microsoft’s ‘Azure’ is yet another platform that provides an Internet cloud computing platform hosted in Microsoft’s data centers and provides a range of functionality to build applications. The Azure platform is designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web services and applications on the internet.

Each of these companies are investing billions of dollars each year in developing their own specialized data centers designed to deliver on the promise of Cloud Computing.

Benefits of Cloud
What do Cloud Services offer an organization? Cloud computing will lead to an increasing benefits in the areas of virtualization, usability, standardization and scalability.

There are 3 major uses of Cloud services which include:

• Software as a Service
• Infrastructure as a Service
• Platform as a Service

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications operate in the Cloud. Popular examples of this are SalesForce.com, Great Plains Dynamics, and Exchange. Customers can utilize greater computing power while saving on cost, space, power consumption and facility.

Infrastructure as a Service is the total outsourcing of the server and server infrastructure. This is a model in which all servers are hosted in the data center. Businesses do not have to purchase servers, software or equipment. Maintenance, upgrades, licensing and uptime are managed by the provider.

Platform as a Service provides all the facilities necessary to support the complete process of building and delivering web applications and services, all available over the internet.

Key benefits of Cloud Services includes:

• Reduced Hardware equipment for end users
• Improved Performance
• Lower Hardware and Software Maintenance
• Instant Software Updates
• Accessibility
• Less Expensive (Amazon example)
• Better Collaboration
• Pay for what you use
• Flexible

Cloud is Not All Good.
These benefits are all very attractive and compelling until the Cloud goes down which could be caused by telecommunications breakdown, server farm disaster, data recovery issue, or security breach. Security appears to be the key issue facing Cloud adoption at this time.

Other potential issues that may delay adoption of a Cloud computing model include:

• Multi-tenancy clouds may clash against security, privacy and compliance requirements
• Economics of the new charging model may not stack up
• Risk of vendor lock in
• Some degree of reliability and control is sacrificed
• Integration of Cloud applications may prove difficult and expensive down the line
• Standardized models and workloads may limit custom applications

Cloud Services Today
Today, many companies are only using cloud computing for small projects. Trust hasn’t been accepted and details such as licensing, privacy, security, compliance and network monitoring need to be finalized for the trust to be realized.

Investments in Cloud solutions are expected to triple by 2012, from $16 billion to $42 billion. So eventually, these issues will be addressed and organizations will increasingly adopt Cloud solutions as part of their overall IT strategy. Many experts predict that Cloud computing will be the foundation of the next 20 years of IT technology.

Conjure Up Some Virtual Magic
used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

Do you remember wondering as a kid how a magician could put one scarf in a hat and then pull out ten? And wishing you could do the same, maybe with a candy bar instead of a scarf? Well, magic might seem in short supply these days, but thanks to virtualization, your childhood wish just might be possible.

Okay, full disclosure: Virtualization won’t work on candy bars. But it can turn one server into many, and since servers cost a heck of a lot more than Snickers, that’s a pretty neat trick.

Consider those servers sitting in the backroom. Without virtualization, each of these physical boxes is functioning as a dedicated server, meaning it is dedicated to running a particular set of applications and “client devices” (that’s IT-speak for PCs and peripherals, like printers, fax machines, and scanners). With virtualization software, one physical server can become multiple “virtual” servers, each capable of independently handling its own set of applications, devices, and users.

You may be wondering, how is this possible? More likely, however, you are asking yourself, what’s in it for me? Here’s what: Virtualization can help save a small business a pile of money!

Consider this startling fact: At any given time, you are using only about 10% of the computing power of a dedicated server. However, that server is usually still consuming about 70% of its peak power requirements. It also means you’re not getting a very good return on your server investment. Think about it: Would you buy a delivery truck that was going to sit idling in your parking lot during 90% of the business day?

With virtualization, the server utilization rate zooms from about 10% to about 60-70%. That’s an enormous increase, and the resulting consolidation helps lower energy costs and a much more palatable ROI.

But the advantages of server virtualization extend much further. With a dedicated server, if the machine goes down, so do all the devices and business critical applications it runs. In a virtualized environment, other servers can pick up the load if one crashes. Here’s how: The virtualization software detects the imminent failure of a physical server and moves its applications — for example, Microsoft® Exchange for e-mail — to a different server. This means your devices and applications are virtually always running, so you won’t lose productivity and sales because of server crashes. And it means that critical data is always available to your employees, which is especially important if you have a mobile workforce.

Still need convincing that virtualization can help your business? Consider the impact it had on HotSchedules, an Austin, Texas-based small business that provides online labor-scheduling systems and workforce productivity tools for the restaurant and entertainment industries. This 25-person company provides restaurant managers with real-time access to staff schedules and employee scheduling preferences from any Internet-connected computer. With an annual growth of more than 100 percent, HotSchedules now hosts more than a quarter-million users and about 4 million individual user sessions a month.

To accommodate their growing user base, HotSchedules added more and more physical servers. But soon the company was running out of space to house all the hardware, and the power costs of running all those boxes was exploding — from $3,000 a month in 2003 to more than $11,000 a month by 2008.

The mushrooming data center costs were actually limiting the company’s ability to grow, notes Matt Woodings, Chief Technology Officer at HotSchedules. The company was quickly getting mired in issues of scalability. Potential customers, including large national chains, were wondering: Could a small business like HotSchedules meet the needs of all their restaurants?

Enter virtualization, in the form of Microsoft’s Hyper-V™, a virtualization feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. Woodings evaluated other virtualization solutions, including VMware’s ESX, but selected Hyper-V because of the familiarity of Microsoft technologies and the cost advantages of integrating the Microsoft software. Notes Woodings, with other solutions the “learning curve would have been very high…Hyper-V was a cost-effective solution with everything in place.” Working with Dell, their IT partner, HotSchedules implemented Hyper-V easily and made a smooth transition to the virtual world.

HotSchedules now hosts up to 19 virtual machines on each of its physical servers, positioning the company for future growth without the overhead of buying, housing, and powering additional physical servers. In fact, with Hyper-V the company expects to handle their anticipated growth with 12 physical application servers instead of 120. This translates into real savings. Not only have power costs shrunk, the company has saved an estimated $60,000 by not having to buy additional physical servers.

Perhaps most importantly, virtualization has addressed the scalability issue, allowing HotSchedules to maintain its stellar growth. “With Hyper-V, we can fully compete on prices, while keeping our existing competitive advantages of better products and better service,” says a satisfied Woodings.

As HotSchedules discovered, by working with a Microsoft-certified IT partner, a small business can take advantage of server capabilities on par with those in big-businesses. Microsoft offers a range of products to help a small business virtualize its IT infrastructure. Hyper-V provides a platform on which you can consolidate multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine. You can download Microsoft Hyper-V Server for free to access server virtualization capabilities, or if you already have Windows Server 2008 or plan to upgrade, you will have Hyper-V already built-in. Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Workgroup Edition combined with System Center Essentials 2007 enables increased physical server utilization, rapid provisioning, and centralized management of physical and virtual machines. Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 provides comprehensive systems management capabilities such as monitoring and alerting, software distribution, update management, and software and hardware inventory management. Microsoft partners provide complementary business continuity solutions, which reduces downtime and improves availability. Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essentials Business Server 2008 include Windows Server 2008 Standard technologies which support virtualization with Hyper-V and improve your business functions.

How many solutions today can give your business greater capacity and, at the same time, help lower your costs? Microsoft Virtualization can, which is a pretty neat trick in anybody’s book. It just might even beat pulling candy bars out of an empty hat!

Better Together?  Better Believe It!
used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

When I was much younger, I had a 1971 Mustang fastback I nicknamed “Sleek.” I loved that car, so much that I hung onto it way past its useful life span. I became my local mechanic’s best friend, bringing my treasured wheels in every few months for yet another repair.

I finally wised up and traded it in for a brand new Mustang. As soon as I drove off the dealer’s lot, I kicked myself for not having traded up sooner. My new ride was built better and had standard features that weren’t even available as options on my previous car. I could count on it to start up on even the coldest Chicago mornings (and trust me, they can be very cold). What’s more, it had more acceleration than old Sleek, an important attribute when trying to pass someone on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

So, here’s the question for you: Have you hung onto your business software for too long, as I did with Sleek? If you’re still running Windows XP or an older version of Windows, it’s time to take a good look at the options for upgrading. See what new features, new speed, and new reliability can mean for your workplace.

Let’s start with the obvious. Your previous Windows platform has been a loyal and trusty performer. But like Sleek, it’s coming to the end of its useful life. I can even tell you the end of support date for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows 2000: July 13, 2010. Support for Windows Vista RTM ended even sooner – April 13, 2010.

To be sure, Microsoft isn’t going to leave you out in the cold. There’s an updated Service Pack (SP3) already available for you, but the question is, why not take a look at all the business advantages and great new features Windows 7 has to offer instead of messing around with another service pack?

In fact, let’s take it a step further. Why not upgrade to Windows 7 Professional and Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2008, and really put your business on the fast track? It will help you boost your productivity, increase your security, and enhance your IT flexibility.

Windows 7 Professional and Small Business Server 2008 will help your employees get more done. They’ll have new Accelerators to accomplish routine tasks more easily, and they’ll find critical information faster using Windows Desktop Search, which combs through both their computer and the server. Perhaps best of all in today’s mobile world, your employees will be able to work from almost anywhere. They’ll have virtually anytime, anywhere access to business e-mail, contacts, calendar, files—and even business applications—from any Internet connected PC, thanks to the improved Remote Web Workplace. This can make a huge difference in productivity. Just ask Therese Rodda, the owner of the 15-person Friendship Heights Rehabilitation Center in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Like many small businesses, Friendship Heights had evolved without any real IT infrastructure. The staff shared six desktop computers that were not networked and used a POP3 e-mail service, which required the staff to download their e-mail to a local computer. No one had remote access to the practice management software or access to Web-based e-mail.

“I spent about 40 percent of my time orchestrating the office’s administrative duties,” says Rodda. Working with Microsoft Small Business Specialist, Rodda found an “all-in-one” server solution based on Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium. It provided all the technologies that Rodda needed in a single, easy-to-use solution, including e-mail and calendaring, remote access, support for mobile devices, Internet connectivity, multiple antivirus engines, enforced network security, shared document libraries and workspaces, and data backup and restore capabilities.

Rodda later added Windows 7 Professional, and praises its productivity features. “With Windows 7, it’s easier to get work done because you can have multiple windows open on the screen at one time. Because of improved power management in Windows 7, the Tablet PC uses battery power more efficiently, so the charge lasts longer. I work at different offices, so another nice thing for me is that my default printer automatically changes to match the one installed wherever I’m working. ”You’ll also find that Windows 7 Professional plus Small Business Server 2008 help safeguard your work. You’ll have built-in features to help protect against malware, spam, and phishing, all working to safeguard your computers from things that go bump in the night. Of course, unwelcomed intrusions from the outside are only half your worries—the protection of your critical business data is perhaps the bigger concern. Using the Encrypting File system, you’ll be able to encrypt files and folders that contain sensitive information, such as customers’ credit card numbers or employees’ Social Security numbers. You also be happy to learn how easily you can restore previous versions of accidentally deleted or changed files. With Advanced Backup, you’ll even be able to schedule periodic data backups, thereby saving your data, files, and even the image of your entire system to a network location or a local drive. Finally, you’ll rest easier knowing the health status of your PCs and servers, thanks to the ongoing monitoring provided by Microsoft Windows Server Update Services 3.0.

If improved productivity and better security haven’t convinced you to upgrade, then consider this: With Windows 7 Professional and Small Business Server 2008, you’ll get more IT control and enhanced flexibility. It’s hard for a small business to compete against the IT resources of bigger companies, but with this upgrade you’ll help level the field. You’ll appreciate the enhanced diagnostics and “troubleshooters,” which make it much easier to fix common IT problems yourself. What’s more, your entire IT environment can become more dependable. With Domain Join, adding PCs to your network becomes much simpler. And thanks to Group Policy Control in Small Business Server 2008, your IT person can more easily manage users and their machines. In fact, your IT person can get a daily view of all your PCs and servers from the Administrative Console feature, enabling proactive attention to potential tech issues, and he or she can view, diagnose, and fix many PC problems from one place using Action Center. It’s never been easier for a small business to have IT chops comparable to the big boys.

Epicurean Cutting Surfaces, a 34-employee business in West Duluth, Minnesota, upgraded to Windows Small Business Server 2008, and among the many improvements the new server brought, perhaps none pleases IT manager Lucas Mistelske more than the enhanced reliability. Mistelske can see immediately if anything needs addressing, including patch management on individual machines. “I’m saving 20 minutes a day on just making sure everything is OK,” he says. “When something needs attention, I receive alerts by phone or e-mail, so I don’t even have to be at the console.” The new Windows Small Business Server 2008 management tools and “green-check” reports also help improve system reliability. “The green-check report gives me an instant health view of all our software, including third-party packages,” Mistelske says.

Still not sold? Worried about all your critical applications that were designed for Windows XP? Fear not—with Windows XP Mode in Windows 7 Professional, you’ll have the flexibility to seamlessly run many older productivity applications. And with Microsoft SQL Server, which is available with Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium, you’ll rest easy knowing your line-of-business applications are running on a dependable, dedicated server.

So, now is a great time to maximize the return on your IT investment. I’ll bet you’ll have the same feeling I did, when I finally traded up for that new car: Why didn’t I do this sooner?

Tips For Easier Printing in Windows 7

In general, printing in Windows 7 is the same as it has been for the past several Windows operating systems. You still perform the same installation and user actions to execute a print job. But there are a few new enhancements that strive to eliminate common user and IT hassles:

• Easier printing to devices found in multiple, recurring locations such as the home and office
• Access information about installed print devices and have an easy way to take action
• Achieve greater stability around print drivers

Let’s look at a few of these new features.

Location Aware Printing
New with Windows 7, the OS (operating system) automatically sets and remembers your default printer based on your current network location. So now when you go between the office and home, your default printer will change automatically, making it simple to access and use the printer you have in each location. Say farewell to manually changing printers every time you move from one place to another!

Device access and management
As with previous OSs, a device icon will show up in your Devices and Printers folder when you install a new device. But with Windows 7, you can now access helpful product information and take action on the device by simply double clicking the device icon. This new service provides you with whatever information the printer manufacturer has made available, which can include documentation, tutorials, configuration and setup, supplies re-ordering and support access.

Driver isolation mode
This tip is mostly for IT folks, but anyone who has to administer printer drivers will also appreciate this feature. With Windows 7, print drivers can be loaded in driver isolation mode; ensuring print drivers don’t crash the print spooler (which is pretty much the most common source of failure). HP drivers can help you increase stability and reduce the support issues associated with spooler crashes. You can also avoid issues with corrupt application and file or other driver actions, especially for shared spoolers on a server.

Windows 7 and HP’s Universal Print Driver
While exploring some of the new printing features in Windows 7, it is a good time to look at some of the innovative print solutions that HP delivers for LaserJet printers, AiOs (All-in-Ones) and MFPs (multifunction products). One of those key solutions is HP’s UPD (Universal Print Driver), which is a free download that allows users to utilize a single driver to discover, connect to and print to a broad range of networked and direct-connected LaserJet devices. The UPD supports PCL5, PCL6 and PS and is now available for Windows 7, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It provides the same driver features as HP’s product-specific drivers and allows your users to easily achieve their desired output across the HP LaserJet product family.

Shortcuts, Eco-print and enhanced security
To help make printing easier, the UPD allows users to save settings of recurring print jobs as shortcuts for easy re-use. Simply configure your settings for the intended output and click Save As on the Printing Shortcuts tab of the UPD. This will save the settings for that job type for future use. And the UPD comes standard with the Eco-print (two-sided print) shortcut, which makes two-sided printing a snap.

Additionally, if you want to enhance the security of your print job and reduce the waste of uncollected output, you can configure the UPD to print each job with a Personal Identification Number (PIN). This will enable the device to prompt you for a PIN in order to retrieve the print job. And this can be saved as a shortcut for convenient re-use.

HP EasyColor, available in the UPD, can even make smart decisions for you, so you can just hit print. When you’re printing a document that has several color elements of different types (think bar charts, company logos and photos, all in a presentation), the technology analyzes each section and automatically adjusts print output for the best results.

For more information including a demo video or to download the UPD, please visit the Universal Print Driver site.

As your trusted technology partner, we feel duty bound to try before you buy. How can we make recommendations to you about products we don’t know how to use? It’s a dirty job, and sometimes risky, but someone has to try stuff first – so we do. Our experiences at being early adopters are sometimes frustrating. We figure our pain is your gain. I have a confession to make – it’s not that way with Office 2010. Office 2010 is love at first sight!

Our IT manager had us install the advance release version of Office 2010 last week. Usually there is a little pushback on new releases from our staff because “things are different”. That has not been the case this time. Every user has been thrilled with the new features in 2010. The single most appreciated element has been the ability to group email by conversation. It’s true that you could make that choice in Outlook before but this is a huge leap forward from that early sorting ability. Now, when I choose to view my email by conversation, the 10 email messages that went back and forth on a topic while I was at lunch are suddenly rolled up into one single entry in my inbox with a right-pointing triangle next to it. When I click on the triangle, there are all the emails that have been sent, replied all and replied again in perfect order for me to follow the thread. It almost seems revolutionary that I can have such organization in my inbox. In a funny way, I feel better about myself because my inbox is actually “neat”. But, as the infomercial says, wait – that’s not all. Once I realize that the email string is not relevant to me, I can click on the IGNORE CONVERSATION button and the string disappears along with any future emails that hit my inbox related to that topic. Now, the other nine friends who received the email that requires them to respond within 10 minutes to everyone on the list so that something good will happen to them – bye-bye! I can concentrate on what is important and ignore what is not.

Outlook 2010 has also reduced the number of steps it takes to organize email that you want to retain as well. The new QUICK STEPS feature lets you build a kind of workflow that can run with a single click. Now I can move my travel confirmations to my travel arrangements folder and mark them as read with one stroke. Even better, I can choose REPLY AND DELETE – answer the question someone has asked and have the original email deleted when I hit the send button. Do these sound like small things? Maybe so. But, if you live in your inbox the way most of us do, life has just gotten a whole lot easier.

Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Publisher and the often overlooked One-Note have received major facelifts as well – but more about that in a future edition. All I have to say is this – if you are on the fence about whether you should upgrade your version of Office, hop off now on the side of more productive and intuitive use – you’ll find yourself in love – just like me.

Straight Talk On Business Intelligence
used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

You run a small or midsize business. Maybe it’s not rocket science…then again, maybe it is. There’s nothing small (or even midsize) about the complexity of managing your own business – it’s big-time. On any given moment of any given day, you might be working furiously to track the effectiveness of your sales efforts, monitor your inventory, juggle receivables against payables, and reduce inefficiencies in production.

You’ve got all the data – somewhere. It’s in this sales report, that stock list, those account ledgers, these production updates. In other words, it’s siloed here and siloed there. Wouldn’t it be great if it could all be pulled together, so you could analyze it holistically and make truly informed, real-time decisions?

Well, here’s the good news: You can, thanks to business intelligence. We know what you’re thinking: “I can’t afford some expensive, complicated technology. Business intelligence? That’s for the big guys, companies with armies of IT guys.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Regardless of the size or type of your business, you’re already compiling reams of data and you’ve no doubt acquired the software that is the foundation of business intelligence. If you have Microsoft Office and Microsoft SQL Server, you’re already on your way to a Business Intelligence solution. (What’s that you say? Don’t want to invest in another database?) Ever hear of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express? It’s . . . drum roll . . . FREE! And if you have Office SharePoint Server, you’re even further along the way to a stellar business intelligence solution.

Let’s take a closer look at the process and tools for gleaning insights from your business data.

The first step is to pull together a list of the critical reports you need to run your business effectively. Think about the reports you already run today. Could they be made more intuitive? More timely? More readily available? You’ll want to get input from all the key people in your business and from any outside vendors who require reports, such as accountants or e-commerce consultants. (When you are talking to vendors about the reports, make sure you understand how they build the metrics to measure their business. There might be differences.)

Next, you’ll need to determine all the discrete pieces of information – or, as the geeks like to say, the “data points” – you’ll require to generate the reports. Once you’ve identified the data points, you’ll need to establish the sources for the data.

Okay, you know what data you require and where it will come from. Now you need to aggregate the information into a database, so it can be sliced, diced, and analyzed – in other words, so it can be turned into the reports you identified back in step one.

The next steps: Generate the requested reports and review them with all the stakeholders. This means going over the reports in detail with your managers, your vendors, and the folks “in the trenches” – in short, everyone you’re expecting to provide insights and act on business data. It’s critical that everyone understands how the numbers were generated. Moreover, missing items or errors in data sources often surface during these reviews, so you’ll want to listen carefully to all the feedback and make any necessary changes.

Now you’ve determined what information you’ll need, where the data will come from, and how the reports will be generated. Next you’ll need to set up systems for sharing the reports with the appropriate employees. This might be effectively done by publishing the reports to your company’s intranet portal. By sharing the reports online, you’ll be able to track the number of users who access the reports and determine which reports – and subsections of reports – are the most popular. You’ll also be able to post updates and revisions in one place and be certain that everyone is viewing the latest version.

All that remains is to automate the entire process, so that the reports are generated and shared for anywhere/anytime access. Now your people have the critical information they need to make better, faster, more relevant decisions that fuel productivity, profits, and growth.

Let’s do a quick recap. We know what we want: the ability to analyze data and spot meaningful trends, and to make these trends actionable by sharing them with employees. And we know what we need to get there: data software that will help us collect and analyze those reams of information, and collaboration software that will get the information into the hands of employees who can translate the insights into action.

Let’s take a look at the technology behind a Business Intelligence solution a little more closely. It begins with a database that stores all the information. This is the foundation of business intelligence: You need a robust database that will collect all that information about your business and enable you to find those nuggets that can be game-changers. The data infrastructure (to use its fancy IT name) needs to have powerful capabilities for creating reports and providing analysis. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 can help provide that. With SQL Server you get an incredibly powerful means of collecting and storing data, and it also allows your “report jockeys” to perform sophisticated searches, queries and analyses.

You might already be using one or more systems or applications to manage day-to-day operations, but getting information out of these systems can be a struggle. When you’re using a SQL Server database, you can use the built-in reporting tools to create standard reports that give you fast, accurate data to help manage the business more efficiently. You can set up access to the database from within SQL Server Reporting Services, and then get started with reports and basic data visualization using familiar Microsoft Office programs, like Microsoft Office Excel. Because everyone in your organization may already have Microsoft Office Excel, it brings out the analyst in everybody, by letting them do their own data exploration and strategizing, empowering them to make predictions, to visualize data, and to spot the connections between seemingly disParagraphte pieces of information. All while accessing the same source of the data.

And finally, there’s one more piece in a comprehensive BI platform – sharing the reports. SQL Server has done the vital work of gathering and analyzing the data, now you need to put that analysis in a form that your employees can easily share and readily understand. You need a way to facilitate collaboration and manage all those great ideas that are bubbling up, a way to generate forms and workflows that are peculiar to your business and to create dashboards and scorecards that are meaningful and intuitive. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 handles this part of the BI process and puts the insights into the hands of the people who can now do further analysis. It not only gets the information to the “doers,” it does so in the Office formats that your employees know so well. No puzzling over arcane reports and fumbling with unfamiliar functions. SharePoint makes sharing data a snap (they didn’t name it “SharePoint” for nothing), so collaboration across departments and functions is a breeze.

This means that your BI deployment reaches throughout the company, rather than being confined to a small cadre of IT mavens. With Microsoft BI fully integrated into your business, everyone has the ability to act on insights that can help drive down costs, boost productivity, and propel the bottom line.

Ready to get started? Contact us to learn more about implementing a full-fledged Microsoft BI solution.  In these difficult economic times, BI can be a game-changer, so don’t delay.