Michael Cocanower
President, itSynergy |
Welcome
This month our focus internally has
turned to Microsoft’s Sharepoint® Product as
we officially launched the second in our
‘QuickStart’ Engagements, the itSynergy
Sharepoint® Starter Site.
This Quickstart engagement is designed to
be a turnkey solution to give our customers
everything they need to not only get
Sharepoint up and running in their
organization, but to get it configured so
that they are actually USING the product.
Most people don’t know, but Windows®
Sharepoint® Services is a free add on for
Windows Server, so you already own it. By
using our new Quickstart engagement and
spending a little bit of time with our
Sharepoint designer, you can leverage your
existing investment in technology to
streamline your business operations. |
Some key scenarios you can have with the
itSynergy Sharepoint® Starter Site are:
► A central company site to
store and manage calendars, events,
project information, policies and more
for employee access.
► A dashboard for displaying
business information and intelligence
for decision-making.
► A process to manage
information that is significantly more
efficient and reliable than email.
► An organized process for
managing workflow.
► A tool to search across the
organization for data and information.
► A document and content
management website to manage the
development of content, alert users and
manage the approval process.
► A portal or extranet to
securely manage information and content
to and from your clients or customers. |
We are offering the itSynergy Sharepoint® Starter
Site for $1,995, however for existing customers that
sign up before September 30, we are discounting that
to $1,495.
Have a great month! |
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6 Wireless Threats to Your Business
by Christopher Elliott
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center
 |
If you think a promiscuous
client is a scantily-dressed customer, you're in trouble. And I'm not
talking about having an affair.
Think an evil twin is a
horror-movie villain? Wrong again. The horror you should be bracing
yourself for is not on the silver screen — and it's not from a rolling
pin flung at you from across the kitchen, for that matter. Rather, the
trouble is in the airwaves and targeted to Wi-Fi users. |
Both the "Promiscuous
Client" and the "Evil Twin" are two of the latest wireless threats to
your small business. If you haven't heard of them, you probably will
soon.
"What would happen to your
business if your strongest competitor gained access to all of your
data?" asks Greg Phillips, chief executive for AirTegrity Wireless,
Inc., a Stateline, Nev. wireless security company. "Unfortunately, it is
a very real possibility if appropriate controls against these new
threats are not exercised."
So what's out there? |
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Excellent Customer Service
by Jeff Wuorio
reprinted with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center
 In the business world, good
customer service often isn't good enough anymore.
Customers and clients are
becoming increasingly disenchanted with the merely adequate. For them,
extraordinary service is the rule, not the exception. Anything less, and
they're happy to vote with their feet and their wallets.
That makes extraordinary
service necessary, not just desirable. And that, in turn, mandates a
strategy to help ensure that your business matches that standout service
standard on a daily basis.
Here are seven ideas and
tips to help your business establish and maintain an ongoing climate of
service excellence. |
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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. |
This month, one of our itSynergizeTM Managed Backup customers
asked us to provide them with some documentation on the security of the data
that is backed up by our solution. We promptly responded and talked about how
the data that resides on the backup device is encrypted with up to 256 bit
encryption (which has never been broken), how the encrypted data is transferred
over an encrypted connection to an offsite data center, and how the encrypted
data is replicated to a second data center over another encrypted connection.
That’s a lot of techno speak to say the solution is very secure. So secure in
fact that even if someone were to steal the backup unit from the customer’s
premises, the data on it would be totally inaccessible to them because of the
multiple encryption layers.
No doubt you’re thinking to yourself about how that is all fine and dandy,
but wondering how it applies to you. Well, as we were thinking about the
security model of our backup system, it seemed rather comical to us because we
don’t have a single client that encrypts data on their server. In other words,
our customers data is FAR more secure AFTER it is backed up than before.
At that point, we started thinking about the bigger picture of security. It
is not a huge leap for us to say that virtually everyone has a false sense of
security when it comes to their data. It is important to remember that security
is a process and not an event.
When was the last time we worked with you to thoroughly review and audit the
security of your systems? When was the last time we performed an external
penetration test of your systems to see how far we could get (a service we offer
for only $199)?
We know it can sometimes be scary to start a conversation with us about the
security of your systems and data because it removes the false sense of
security. The good news is that we can help so that whatever we identify as
vulnerabilities in your systems we can also resolve. Just ask! |
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September 2008
In this issue
□ Welcome
□ Wireless Threats
□ Excellent Customer Service
□ Engineering Corner
□ Referral
Program
□ Summer Storms
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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.
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Summer storms and your UPS
(Uninterruptible Power Supply)
devices and surge protectors
by Michael Appollo, CTO, NST
We hope you have
have successfully weathered the summer storms. Now is a good
time to check your UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)
devices and surge protectors because there is a good chance
they have take some voltage hits and suffered power outages.
Larger UPS
devices, otherwise known as Battery Backups, may have power
indicators that tell you how much battery capacity is left.
Smaller devices may not have such indicators. If they are
connected to a computer, chances are good they came with
some software that gathers that information. Opening the
software can give you some general idea of the overall
health of your UPS. Either way, you can't always believe the
lights and software; the best test of a UPS is to
periodically unplug it fromt the wall and seeing how long
the items plugged in still run. Most UPS devices will beep
until power is restored, so this is normal behavior.
Read more |
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Quote of the
month
The
whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into
windows.
-Sydney J. Harris
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7310 North 16th Street,
Suite 130
Phoenix, AZ 85020-8203
Telephone: 602.297.2400
Fax: 602.297.8703
Email: info@itsynergy.com
www.itsynergy.com |
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