It’s me Femi Dada from Smarthost Design Technologies. Sorry for interrupting your holiday weekend, but you will for sure find this email worthy.

In light of the end of the world (EOW) there are some viruses, malware and Trojans going on out there, I just want you to know of this and learn from my mistake. It all began when I got an email few days ago notifying me of people who have viewed my profile and another notifying me of friends’ notification on Face Book.

I clicked and my web browser was infected and all sites began being redirected to unintended sites. I have also noticed getting several pop up ads and several internet site request warning captured by my desktop firewall.

Even being an Information Technology (IT) Professional and this is what I often advocate and fight against, but even expert like myself is not immune from these threats, so I just imaging how difficult it would be for people who are not very savvy and aware of the signs or symptoms of a virus, malware or Trojan like this on PC or mobile devices.

Now here are 3 way to prevent what just happened to me.

1. Never click on email from Face Book, LinkedIn, Twitter or others that you are not familiar with asking you to click to view notification; simple go to the respective site and check those notification.
2. Be careful of those multi characters generated links that looks like this http://xyhfys.validomainname.com (where xyhfys) is just random character and the valid domain in a real domain name.
3. Make sure that you have premium antivirus, antimalware protection software that is up to date. Do now use free version (it lacks key components)

Please be careful as you enjoy your holiday and maybe even as you try to put in some work in like I do working remotely and planning for the year ahead. Pay attention to the email that you get because most of this issues and threats can be prevented by not clicking. Read more about Profile Spy Resurrects on Eve of Mayan Apocalypse on GFI labs website.

Thanks you and stay safe and have a wonderful holiday.

Femi Dada -IT Guru – Smarthost Design Technology.

301-576-1122 ext 101
http://Smarthostdesign.com

My Fellow Business Owners and Managers,

In the wake of the recent severe weather storm, if you are like most people we began thinking about what we could have done differently to prevent and minimize damages. In this short article I will like to share with you one of the most significant preventive measure you could have done if not already done to prevent your business critical infrastructure (computers, servers, network switches, phone systems, backup devices) from and hard crash, disaster and loss of data.

Although, there are other measures but the one I would focus on here is simple and easy to implement and that is installing an UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) device systems. UPS is a simple device you may have seen one before. It’s a device that plugs into the power outlet to help regulate and maintain clean sufficient power for a short period of time to valuable sensitive electronic systems.

When used on servers, network switches and computers, it prevents flickering, fluctuations of the power supply disruptions during a severe weather storm like the one we just had and could save thousands of dollars in computer repair cost, data recovery and lost time from downtime. When properly implemented, the UPS system will shut off computer; servers and network devices gracefully preventing damage that could happen from improper shutdown of these technology investments.

Here are few of my recommendations:

APC website http://www.apc.com/products/category.cfm?id=13

Tripe-Lite website http://www.tripplite.com/en/products/ups-battery-backup-systems.cfm

Best practices recommend that you support your critical systems with a UPS system that is able to hold your requirements for about 15 to 20 min for a complete shutdown of the systems being protected.

If you are not sure about how to go about this, I will be happy to help you with a free Network or Power supply and assessment. I can be reach at 301-576-1122 ext. 101

Smarthost Design Technologies is a technology services provider that focuses on the unique needs of small businesses in the Maryland, Washington DC and Virginia Metro area with over 7 years of industry expertise working with businesses with less than 50 employees. Read about more tips and techniques from my blog http://smarthostdesign.com/blog

*****

Hello,

Femi here president of Smarthost Design Technologies in Lanham Maryland – An Information Technology (IT)services provider that specializes in solving small-mid size companies technology problem including backup and disaster recovery solutions.

What is Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011?

SBS 2011 is a leading small business network server operating system (OS) built on windows server 2008 R2. The Windows SBS 2011 is the server of choice for small and mid-size organization looking for an all-in-one solution to reduce complexity and increase manageability of client – server technology in a small and mid-size business environment.

Key Benefits of SBS 2011:

• Simplify Small Business IT
• Increase Business Productivity
• Help Protect Business Data
• Reduce IT Costs
• Grow Your Business

Read more.

Hello everyone,

The Microsoft in my opinion the most attractive promotion is back for 2012. The Big easy promotion is one awesome way that Microsoft makes it more affordable for businesses of all kind to embrace the most productive, intuitive and efficient business software on the planet. I am talking about Microsoft Office, Microsoft windows Server operating systems and server application such as Microsoft SQL server, Microsoft Exchange servers Microsoft CRM Server, and Windows Desktop operating systems and more.

What I like most about the Big Easy is that it rewards you the buyer with Rebate Dollars that you can use in turn to pay for the implementation of your solutions through a certified partner line us.
But wait, this promotion is running from March 5, 2012 until June 30th 2012. To learn more visit the Big Easy promotion website. Lastly contact us to make sure that you order the Promotion SKU needed to qualify for the BigEasy Promotion 2012.

-Femi Dada

Smarthost Design Technologies

I am happy to share with you a successful redesign implementation and deployment of Appliance Builder Wholesalers secure network integration with preexisting Avaya VOIP solution connecting two sites while reducing cost of communication. Read more

The kind of email system you use makes a difference. Full access and full control of your email account – even when on the go – can be essential tools for people who work in the field. But just the same, you might need a few tweaks to a less fully featured system to keep operations efficient and cost-effective.

Whether you work from an office or are productive while on the go, email most likely plays a big factor in the way you go about your business. Unbeknownst to many, some types of email systems have certain limitations that by extension can also limit the level of productivity of your business, and especially for people in the organization who must also work while out in the field.

One major issue for many people is synchronicity. Many people need their emails to be accessible on their mobile phones, PDAs, or other mobile devices, and they need them to be properly synchronized with their desktop workstations. The need to constantly update conversations and email threads from mobile devices to desktops with certain types of email can prove to be tedious and unproductive– and some email system types don’t include this ability at all.

Depending on the way you use your email, especially when on the go, having full access and full control of your account can define how productive you and others in your organization can be. Besides providing a much better degree of synchronization and integration with mobile devices, certain types of email systems also have features for sharing and collaboration features that allow you to set schedules and share files from your mailbox, as well as central storage for emails that allows you to access your account seamlessly with any mobile device, regardless of where you are located.

Of course, having a full-featured email system might not be best for everyone. The key is to know whether adapting a more bare-bones system is cost-effective for your business (especially in the long run). Sometimes the top of the line may be needed, and sometimes all you need is a bit of tweaking on your less fully featured system. Not sure which is best? Call us and we’ll be glad to sit down with you and assess what kind of email system is best suited for you and your business.

Your reputation and your company’s reputation are important. When people talk about you or your company, depending on what’s being said, it can have either a helpful or a damaging effect. In the online world this can be even more challenging, as the proliferation of websites and social media tools make monitoring these comments more difficult to do. Here are some tools to help you make sense out of the sea of information—so you can keep track of and manage what’s being said about you or your business.

Besides your own eyes and ears, there are plenty of tools—for free or for a price—available to help you monitor your presence online. The simplest of these is your familiar search engines such as Google or Bing. By simply searching online, you can find where your name or your company’s name appears in various websites. With Google in particular, you can set up “alerts” which will email you when a specific word or term appears in their website index.

What words or terms should you use? Start with your name, or your company name, then try the name of your products and/or services, and maybe even the names of your employees, directors, and other stakeholders. It might also be helpful to search for the competition as well. As results come in you can refine your search by expanding or narrowing the scope of terms you would like to search or be alerted on. If you want to be able to search across all different search engines and not just one or two, you can use Monitor This.

Next you can use specialized website or social media monitoring tools to search only specific sites or services as opposed to the entire Internet. One example is Greplin, which allows you to search all of your accounts or accounts that you own. This is very helpful to be able to execute highly filtered searches on specific information in your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, or your blog. Another option is Rollyo, which allows you to set up your own specialized search engines that cull content from public or open websites of your choosing.

Other more generalized tools include RSS feed readers—which allow you to consume news or information feeds from news sites or blogs. Examples include Newsgator.com, Bloglines.com, Google Reader or Pluck.com. Other generalized tools include those that monitor specific newsgroups or message boards like BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, and MSN Money. Still others track changes to content of specific sites (Copernic Tracker, Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com), as well as their domain information (DomainTools.com and BetterWhois.com).

The really interesting new services actually give you an explicit idea of the status of your reputation—especially if you are a relatively well known name or your business has an established brand. In this category are sites like Amplicate, which monitors general feelings or impressions about brands, businesses, or services; Klout, which tries to measure the influence of individuals based on their social interactions; and SendLove.to, which focuses on celebrities and media personalities.

There are literally dozens more tools you can use to monitor and manage your reputation online. To find out more, a great resource is here at the Duct Tape Marketing blog. If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to let us know!

While the decision to have some of your IT resources “in the cloud” can be a complex one, one area we get asked about often is email and productivity applications. Below is a summary from two industry giants: one from Google and the other from Microsoft, and see how they compare:

Google Apps
Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space.

1. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability—Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages—potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service.
4. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important.
5. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android.

Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology.

Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new—being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier.

1. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business.
4. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them—they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook.
5. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices—specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones.

Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance—this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with.

Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.

The advent of social networking these days gives smaller businesses a bigger voice in the market, allowing them to rise to a level nearly at par with their larger competitors – and elevating the playing field to a battle of efficiency, cost effectiveness, and quality service rather than advertising and marketing budgets.

One of the most difficult challenges smaller businesses face is having a bigger presence in the market. While many of these companies offer good, quality services at much more affordable rates, they are many times overshadowed by larger firms that have bigger budgets to spend on marketing, advertising, and the like.

Things have changed, though, with the advent of social networking. What was once a simple, social, get-to-know-each-other tool between people on the internet has now evolved into a tool that small businesses can take advantage of in order to get their voices heard.

The gist of social networking for business is the simple concept of reaching potentially millions of people at a mere fraction of what is normally spent on advertising and traditional marketing. The wide reach of social media allows businesses to find their voices and showcase what they can do. The playing field then moves from an unfair balance of advertising budgets to a battle of service quality and value for money, as it should be – and many smaller firms can compete effectively in this arena.

There are many ways to tap into the social networking phenomenon to boost your online presence and aid in your marketing. If you are interested in knowing more about this, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you in developing strategies that fit your specific requirements and needs.

It is a misconception among many businesses that using a cheap, basic router/firewall is sufficient for day-to-day operations. But it is important to realize that there is more to it than just price – especially since more often than not, going cheap will only get you what you pay for (or maybe even less).

In business, protecting important information and data is paramount. This is why it is recommended for any sort of business to invest in a security system that will prevent any cyber-attacks that might be launched against you.

Unfortunately, though, it’s lost on many that a security system is not just made up of one single thing – software, better staff, better hardware, et cetera. A good and solid security system is composed of several factors working together to create a virtual chain that envelops your business and keeps it safe.

And one of the most underestimated links in this chain is the router/firewall. Many businesses are content using the most basic and cheapest option available on the market, without realizing that their security chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And if you make do with a cheap router/firewall, odds are you’ll get what you pay for – not much.

While basic routers might work fine for homes or individual users, it is a much different scenario when it comes to business operations where basic just doesn’t cut it. Plus, there’s more at stake with business data, so why take the risk with cheap routers that lack the proper security features?

With viruses, malware, and the cyber thieves behind them continuing to grow and evolve, it is important that you understand what it takes to protect your system and your data – and invest in the best solution. Remember that it can take only one incident, one infiltration, to bring your whole business down.

We realize that every system is different and every business has its own specific needs, so if you want to know more about getting the right router/firewall for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us.