E-Newsletter January 2009

Our team spent a portion of last week working with an Altigen engineer to implement our own in house system. We will be doing our 'official' cutover as soon as our new voice recordings are complete, but we have it fully operational in house and I am VERY excited about all of the new functionality we now have access to. I am excited for our customers to see a demonstration of some of the advanced functionality during our upcoming recurring business reviews.

As we look forward into 2009, we have no plans to slow down - in fact, quite the opposite. In furtherance of that goal, I'd like to solicit your assistance with helping us to grow. One of the first things on our to do list for 2009 is to expand our custom application development department. Jose Ramirez, the Director that oversees that department is looking for some good talent. It is a tough job market out there across virtually every industry. We're trying to do our part to help, so if you know if any GREAT programmers that focus on the Microsoft platform, please have them send their resume in to us - we'd love to talk to them. We'd also be very interested in acquiring another company in that space, so please pass along those leads as well if you know anyone that might be interested. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Have a great month and Happy 2009!

Ideas to Help You to Use
SharePoint Effectively in Your Business
Top 20 ways that SharePoint can solve your common business needs. And I want to emphasize that these 20 are only a few of the many ways to utilize SharePoint .
 

	1	Store all your emails on a secure and centralized Website for easy archive.
	2	Keep a central task location for assigning tasks to team members. These tasks will automatically show up in your team's Outlook 2007 To-Do List. Those tasks will also link to your projects so you can easily find out what tasks are still open for each project.
	3	Organize large events and store the related documents, assigned tasks, and generally post anything and everything related to the events. It will also integrate with Outlook for added efficiency.
		Read more

7 Things to Know about Virus Writers
by Monte Embysk
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

I spend a growing percentage of my time getting rid of unwanted e-mails that contain viruses. If I open one of them, it potentially could overwrite files and disable my antivirus software.

What exactly is in the heads of these virus writers? Anything?

I took my inquiry to Sarah Gordon, an expert on the psychology of hackers and virus writers. She did her best to answer an overly broad question. Gordon is a senior research fellow at Symantec's security response unit, and previously was a researcher for the antivirus research and development team at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

She meets face-to-face with hackers and virus writers on occasion, to understand why they do what they do, and conducts research at international hacker conferences such as DEF CON. To see Gordon's background and some of her research papers, visit her Web site at www.badguys.org.

Read more

System Engineering Corner Notes from the Network Engineering Department: Note to readers: As our network engineers work with all of you across our entire customer base, they observe trends and issues that many people have in common, or that many customers will find helpful to know about. This section is designed to give them a mechanism to communicate those issues to you, with the hope that YOU might benefit from.

Look Behind the Curtain

Did you know that the internal system we use to track every customer issue, our progress and notes on that issue as well as current status is completely exposed to our customers to access? If you've never used our customer portal, you should really check it out.

You can access the customer portal through our website at http://www.itsynergy.com  - just click Client Extranet in the upper right corner. Enter your email address and password, and you're in (if you don't know your password, just ask - we'll get it to you).

Once logged on, you will immediately be presented with a list of every service ticket in our system for your company. You can click on any service ticket to read our notes, add updates, check current status, etc. Additionally, there are also links along the top of the screen allowing you to create a new ticket, search through invoices, and also run reports specific to your environment.

This system is linked in real time to the application that all of our employees use to track all of their daily activities. They will see your updates immediately and vice versa.

We often get emails from customers asking for an update on one of their issues. If you'd rather not wait for a return email, check out our customer portal - it's available 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.

January 2009
In this issue

 □  Welcome
 □  Use SharePoint Effectively
 □  Virus Writers: What to Know
 □  Engineering Corner
 □  Referral Program
 □  When Your PC Crashes

itSynergy Referral Program

Can we buy you dinner and send you to the movies? How about make a donation to your favorite charity in your name? Earn rewards for referring new customers to itSynergy. For more details, please visit here.
 

Get a Second Chance when your PC Crashes
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

It's a common scenario. You're working at your computer when all of a sudden, with no warning, the PC freezes. Nothing seems to be working. The screen goes dark. You may even be unlucky enough to see the dreaded blue screen informing you that a critical error has occurred and Windows® will be shut down.

You've just been the unfortunate victim of a system crash. If this happens to you, it's likely that you've recently added a new program, device, driver or application that your machine doesn't like, and this is its way of making its feelings known.

Sometimes, a simple reboot of the PC resolves the issue. But sometimes it doesn't. You reboot, Windows loads and the computer crashes again, or continues to behave weirdly.

What can be done to end the recurring nightmare and return your computer to a more stable state?

Quote of the month

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

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Suite 130
Phoenix, AZ 85020-8203
Telephone: 602.297.2400
Fax: 602.297.8703
Email: info@itsynergy.com
www.itsynergy.com