Tech Times Monthly Newsletter

MTSi Is Pleased To Announce Its New Partnership With EMC, The World’s Leading Storage Provider!

EMC is dedicated to helping you reduce the complexity of your and better manage your storage investment.

Contact MTSi today to see how EMC can help you achieve optimal performance at the lowest cost!

Windows 8 ‘Release Preview’ Coming Out In June

A new test version of Microsoft’s flagship Windows 8 operating system — expected to boost support for tech gizmos and let PC makers kick the tires of the forthcoming OS — will be made available to the public in the first week of June, the company said Monday.

Microsoft President Steven Sinofsky announced the “Release Preview” of Windows 8 during an on-stage appearance at a developer event in Japan called Windows 8 Dev Days, spreading the news through a brief tweet on the Building Windows 8 Twitter
Read More

Current Tech Tip

When was the last time you checked your backup job? Really check it? Did you perform a restore to make sure the data you thought you were backing up is really there?

New innovative ways of backing up data have solved many of these age old problems. For starters the cheapest backup method for most personal users is an external hard drive. Somewhat easy to setup and very cost effective. The downside is if the drive is portable or used over an extended period of time (many years) you may have issues with the drive going bad. If you’re using this method it’s a good idea to regularly check the drive and keep it optimized.  You can also replace the drive after or with a larger, faster drive. For business or server backups, the best, most reliable backup is an offsite remote backup service. Using a remote offsite backup service enables data to be encrypted & securely transmitted to a backup provider. This will allow access to your data, 24/7. The software included, allows you to monitor & manage your backup jobs & get alerts when jobs fail or there is a problem. It’s not the least expensive method, but think of it as an inexpensive insurance policy for your business or critical data.

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General steps for setting up an email account on an iPhone

To set up an email account on your iPhone: 

1. Enable ActiveSync on the mailbox. For our Hosted Exchange Customers Please Read the Knowledge Base article on How do I activate ActiveSync service for the user? for instructions. For Non MTSi users ask your Exchange Administrator to enable this for you.
2. Add the Exchange account on your iPhone, following the instructions below.
3. Find settings for a particular user (username, exchange domain, server address). The correct account information can be found in CONTROL PANEL or My Services under Services > MS Exchange Server > ActiveSync for MTSi customers. For Non-MTSi customers user the login username and password provided by your Exchange Administrator.

Important notes

• When you configure a device to sync with Exchange, all existing calendar and contact information on the device is overwritten. Additionally, iTunes will no longer sync contacts and calendars with your desktop computer. However, you can still sync your device wirelessly using MobileMe services.
• You can configure more than one Exchange account per device for iOS 4.0 and higher. Only one Exchange account can be configured for older iOS versions.

Adding an Exchange account on the iPhone

To add an Exchange account on your iPhone:

	1. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, then tap Add Account.2. On the Add Account screen, tap Microsoft Exchange.
	3. Enter the account information, then tap Next. The correct account information can be found in CONTROL PANEL or My Services under Services > MS Exchange Server > ActiveSync for MTSi Customers. For Non-MTSi customers user the login username and password provided by your Exchange Administrator. Email: Enter the complete email address. Username:  Enter the complete email address. Password: The password for the Exchange account. Description: A descriptive title that identifies this group of settings. Note: Optionally you can enter the Domain (Can be found in CONTROL PANEL > Get Started > Advanced Settings for Exchange.) and the Username (Can be found in CONTROL PANEL or My Services under Services > MS Exchange Server > ActiveSync page) for MTSi Customers. For Non-MTSi customers Domain name provided by your Exchange Administrator. Note for older iPhone versions: If you have iPhone 2.0 or earlier, you need to use the format domain\username in the Username field, and leave the Domain field blank. We recommend updating to the latest version of the iPhone operating system. 4. The Exchange server address is configured automatically. If the server address can’t be determined, you will be asked to enter it. (The iPhone and the iPod Touch support Microsoft’s Autodiscovery service, which uses your username and password to determine the address of the front-end Exchange server.)
	5. After the Exchange account is successfully configured, the server’s passcode policies are enforced. If the current passcode doesn’t comply with the Exchange ActiveSync policies, you will be prompted to change or set the passcode. The device won’t communicate with the Exchange server until a compliant passcode is set.6. Next, the device offers to immediately sync with the Exchange server. If you choose not to sync at this time, you can turn on calendar and contact syncing later in Settings > Mail, Contacts, and Calendars. By default, Exchange ActiveSync pushes new data to your device as it arrives on the server. If you prefer to fetch new data on a schedule or to only pull new data manually, go to Settings > Fetch New Data to change the settings. To change how many day’s worth of data is synced to your device, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, and Calendars. The  default setting is three days. By default, the iPhone enables the Always BCC Myself setting. This means you will receive all messages sent from your iPhone in your Inbox. If you want to change this setting, navigate to Settings > Mail, Contacts, and Calendars > Always BCC Myself. 7. To complete the setup process, click SAVE and wait for the iPhone to test your incoming and outgoing mail settings and connect to your mailbox.

Please note that not all Exchange features are supported. For example, the following features are not available:

1. Folder management
2. Opening links in email to documents stored on Sharepoint servers
3. Task synchronization
4. Setting an “out of office” autoreply message
5. Creating meeting invitations
6. Flagging messages for follow-up

More and more companies are sending documents via email rather than faxing them or mailing them. When these documents require a signature, it can be a bit time consuming to get them printed, then signed and back over to a PDF with the signature. Well you can create your very own electronic signature and use it to sign PDF documents.

How to create your own Electronic Signature:

The very first step involves creating your signature. There are a number of ways to accomplish this.   

Note to MAC users: Use this link if you use an Apple Computer.

1st Option. Open MS Paint on your windows PC and using the mouse draw your signature. Be sure to crop the image to some reasonable size like 2″ long x .75 inches high.

2nd Option . If your an iPad or iPhone user you can download a program like Sketch Pad and create your signature. After creating it you save the image and transfer it to you PC.

3rd Option. Other method would be use an online tool like Live Signature  to create your signature image file.

4th Option. You can use Google Docs to create your signature.Watcht his video to Create Signature with Google Docs on how to do this.

Step Two would be to insert this signature image into Adobe Reader or other PDF application (such as PDF X-Change)

1. Using Adobe Reader X open the PDF document you need to sign.

2. Go to View Menu and select Tools.

3. Click on the Sign Button.

  
4. Under the Sign window select Place Signature. This will allow to add a signature by selecting your image.

5. Now place your signature on the document where needed.

That’s it your done….

Sending out Documents You need Signed by Clients?

Quick Tip!

If you are a company who sends out documents to clients that require a signature you many want to consider web based signature service companies who have offer such a service. Allowing you to sign or send documents that need to be signed all electronically. A few companies are Docusign,  EchoSign  or Right Signature – they all working very much the same.

You upload a PDF or Word document that needs to signed and specify the email addresses of the party or parties who need to sign the document. The recipients can open the document inside their web browser, add their signature (with the timestamp) and done.

You can then download the signed document on to your own computer. There’s no software to install and no sending fax messages back and forth. The three companies mentioned Docusign,  EchoSign  or Right Signature are paid services but trial users can send up to 5 documents for free.

MTSi Tech Team

JC

What are Managed Services?

Managed services let you offload specific IT operations to a service provider, known in tech parlance as a Managed Services Provider. The managed service provider assumes ongoing responsibility for monitoring, managing and/or problem resolution for selected IT systems and functions on your behalf.

Managed services providers can offer services such as alerts, security, patch management, data backup and recovery for different client devices: desktops, notebooks, servers, storage systems, networks and applications. Offloading routine infrastructure management to an experienced managed services professional lets you concentrate on running your business, with fewer interruptions due to IT issues.

Managed services providers usually price their services on a subscription basis. Depending on the services they provide, pricing is usually based on the number of devices, with different packages priced at different levels. Some provide customer support onsite when required.

Basic services often start with a monitoring service, which notifies you of problems, which you resolve on your own. At the upper end of the spectrum, service providers offer fully managed services that cover everything from alerts through problem resolution.

Typically they perform an initial assessment of your current IT environment and management requirements to help you decide what services and service levels you need.

Why Should You Care?

Just like larger companies, small businesses need technology to operate efficiently and to compete effectively. But as reliance on IT grows, the resources to support an increasingly complex IT environment may not. In many small businesses, IT resources are scarce, and can be quickly overwhelmed with the day-to-day responsibilities of keeping the IT infrastructure that the business depends on up and running.

If you fall behind in keeping up with things such as backups, patches and security, the odds are that you’ll face an IT outage or another problem down the road that will negatively impact your business. For instance, if your e-mail server, customer relationship management system, financial application or network goes down unexpectedly, you face substantial productivity and revenue losses as a result.

MSPs act as an extension of your IT department, taking care of routine IT infrastructure monitoring and management around the clock—freeing up your IT staff to focus on higher-value projects. By proactively monitoring and maintaining your systems, an MSP can help you avoid many technology problems in the first place. Should an issue occur, an experienced MSP can troubleshoot and resolve it more efficiently.

Unlike traditional outsourcing situations, where you surrender complete control of your IT assets, you decide what you want the service provider to take care of, and what you want to handle. You retain full visibility into the process and management of your systems. In addition, the MSP subscription model gives you more expense predictability than a consultant-type time and billing model.

MTSi offers a full range of managed services, if you would like more information please give us a call or visit our website.

MTSi Tech Team

JC

credits to laurie.mccabe

Viruses and Malware and how to prevent infection!

If you are a PC user, you know what an infected computer looks like. Pop-ups that you have not requested, your browser takes on a mind of its own, taking you to every website but the one you want. Offers for Antivirus software that looks suspect and promises way too much, and all they need from you is your credit card.

The inevitable question: How did this get on my PC? Who knows!!

Perhaps the important question is: How do I protect my PCs and network from un-necessary risk of being infected by this stuff?

The simple answer to the first question is true. It is much harder to determine the source of a specific incident of infection than it is to implement a prevention strategy. So first a brief explanation of what these things are and generally how they find their way to your computer.

All day long you and your computer conduct millions of transactions of data a second, that’s right, Comcast offers 16 Megabits per second download speed on the majority of their Internet products. That is 16 million bits of data per second worth of traffic hitting your private network, potentially carrying good news and bad news to your computer. The Internet is modeled as a free and egalitarian community, so it is up to all participants, including you and me to provide the level of protection against the bad news that we need. I like to think of my connection to the Internet as being similar to the front door to my house. Your router on your network is your front door and your firewall is your mail slot. Too simple a firewall is like having too large a mail slot in your front door. It lets in way too much unwanted traffic. A good firewall is like having a personal security guard at your door. A quality firewall, like a Sonicwall or Cisco, to name two, is like having a really smart security guard at your service. So, the first step to mitigating un-necessary risk to infection is:

Firewall Protection – Get a firewall that has packet level inspection and filtering. Get one that has a subscription to anti-virus and anti-spam protection and subscribe to these services.

So we now have a strong perimeter setup on our house. What could possibly go wrong now? Well, anyone who has raised a teenager or connected their parents’ computer to the Internet knows that risk seems to go up exponentially. We have all observed that novice users who approach the e-mail and Internet use with little or no caution seem to get hit by viruses and malware much more often. That is because on most systems we sacrifice security for freedom. None of us wants to be told “Don’t do that!” and we suffer the consequences. When we click on a link in a web page or open an e-mail, we are in affect tapping our private security guard at the front door and saying “step aside and let this data come through, I can vouch for it” when usually we really can’t. For instance, it looks like an important e-mail from UPS, but really it is envelope full of suspicious white powder. Or, someone in your home or office brings in code on a USB stick; the firewall doesn’t get a chance to inspect that before it enters your PC. This is where a good anti-virus program can help. What an anti-virus and threat protection software does is it sits at the very crossroads of your data stream in your computer, comparing all the billions of packets of data you move between the various components in your PC with a definition file it crafts and updates sometimes daily, looking for known threats, and taking action to delete or quarantine them before they can execute and infect your system.

Install good Anti-Virus Protection – Make sure it is active and up to date. Make sure it is fast and as thorough as you can stand. I say this because there is some performance cost associated with good protection.

Finally, keep your Operating system and application software patched and up to date. This is something that eludes most users as a security risk. So, let’s look at this for a moment. Software manufacturers make code that interacts with the various components in your system to craft packets of data that get sent out over the internet and received from the internet. From time to time vulnerable security holes are discovered by programmers and users and brought to the manufacturer’s attention. The manufacturers then issue a patch or fix to secure the code to do only the job it was intended to do. Those faceless nameless trouble makers that exploit these security flaws study the patches and craft evil programs that take advantage of the fact that most of us are ignore updates and patches. This accounts for most of the problems we encounter, because it is much easier for them to write code that takes advantage of known security holes than to find that needle in the haystack that has not yet been discovered.

Apply Software Security Updates and Patches – Use Microsoft Update on your systems. Look into programs like Secunia PSI, that monitors your other applications.

Although there are no guarantees that you will be 100% risk free, I am confident that the frequency of infection will be greatly reduced.

MTSi Tech Team

DK

When to use the BCC field:

If you add a recipient’s name to the blind carbon copy Bcc box in a message, a copy of the message is sent to the recipient, but the recipient’s name is not visible to the other recipients of the message.

Use the Bcc feature to remove extra people from an email conversation when you deem that they no longer need the extra email or if the conversation topic has changed.

For example, if you are one of five people who receive a question and you want to answer it, move the other four people to the Bcc line and write something such as “Bcc’ing Joe, Jeff, James, and Jennifer. Here’s the answer…” Future messages will then be between only you and the original sender.

Don’t use Bcc to let a third party (such as your manager) know about a sensitive message. The Bcc recipient might not realize that he or she has received a Bcc and might respond to everyone, exposing that he or she received a Bcc message. This might come across as sneaky behavior on your part. Rather than using Bcc to inform a third party of an issue, forward the message after you send it.

MTSI Tech Team

JC

What are Quick Steps?

New to Outlook 2010, Quick Steps give you the ability to perform multiple actions in one click. They are a useful tool to help you keep a clean inbox and to generally be more efficient at using Outlook. Any time you find yourself repeatedly doing the same steps in Outlook, try creating a Quick Step.

 Note    Quick Steps only apply to mail items (e.g. items in your Inbox).

Quick Steps

New to Outlook 2010, Quick Steps give you the ability to perform multiple actions in one click. They are a useful tool to help you keep a clean inbox and to generally be more efficient at using Outlook. Any time you find yourself repeatedly doing the same steps in Outlook, try creating a Quick Step.

 Note    Quick Steps only apply to messages.

It is considered best practice to have the following Quick Steps. For more information, see Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps:

*Personal and Defer Quick Steps are not default Quick Steps.

Optional Quick Steps

In addition to Quick Steps listed above, depending upon your job and your general day to day activities, you might want to create the following types of Quick Steps:

After you start creating Quick Steps, you will find that there might be other ways that you can optimize the number of clicks required to get something done. Whenever you find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly, try creating a Quick Step. And as projects change, update your Quick Steps so that they are only the things you really do.

MTSi Tech Team

JC

Let’s face it Email has become a critical part of our business and every day communications. For the most part most people like to hold on to emails for a long time. So this creates the need to have a backup in case of disaster or hard drive failure. Microsoft Exchange users have the ability to fire up a new Outlook client and connect to their mailboxes and WOW their email’s are back.

To help individual Outlook users protect their valuable data Microsoft has made available some useful tools. One of which is called Outlook Personal Folders Backup Tool. Users of Office/Outlook 2002/2003/2007 can download this utility from Microsoft

The Personal Folders Backup tool is designed for use in Outlook 2002 and later and the operating systems that support each respective Outlook version. The tool provides a quick and easy way to back up the Outlook information of your choice to your hard disk or network server or share.

After you back up your information, you can copy these duplicates of your Outlook data to a removable media such as a CD or DVD. The backup files are exact copies of the original files and are saved in the same file format. You can receive periodic reminders to back up your files.

Using the PST Backup tool

 Tip   Before you begin the backup process, you might want to check the size of your .pst file. If you have multiple folders in your .pst file, you must select the top-level folder to determine the total file size for all the folders.

To Install the Tool:

1. Quit Outlook.
2. Download the tool from the Microsoft Office Online site by clicking the Download link and following the instructions in the dialog boxes.

Instructions for Download:

1. Choose Run or Save the file to your Hard Drive
2. If you chose run go to step 5. If you saved the file on your hard drive double-click the pfbackup.exe program file on your hard drive to start the program

3. Follow the instructions on the screen to complete the installation.

             

What can be done when you forget your password?

We have so many passwords.  Passwords are an important element to securing access to our personal information.  Because of this, it is good practice not to write down our passwords in a place where others can find them.   After all, you would never leave your car keys in the ignition when going shopping. So it is all the more important to have a strategy for recovering them.

Operating System:

Windows designates an account as the Administrator of the system.  Your home computer typically belongs to a home group or workgroup, so there is a “local” account that has complete access to all the settings and files on the computer.  If the local administrator account password is lost, it is possible to reset this password to no password through the use of a bootable disk.  Once the password has been reset, the owner can login and set it to a new one.

Windows can also be organized in a Domain.  This is typically found in business environments.  When a user forgets a password, the Domain Admin can reset the password at the Domain Controller (Server.)  What if the Domain Admin password is lost?  It is more difficult to reset the Domain Admin password, however it is possible.  It is much more problematic, because services that use this account to authenticate may stop working until they, too, are updated with the newly set password.

E-mail:

If a user subscribes to POP mail, either through their Internet Service Provider or another e-mail provider, there are 2 ways, recovering the password from Outlook Express or Outlook using a password recovery tool, or contacting the provider and have them reset the password.  It is important to realize that the e-mail provider will not have a record of your password, but they will be able to reset it.

Webmail, such as Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL, usually use security questions that will help you gain access to a password reset.  It is important to keep this in mind when setting up a webmail account that you use security information you will remember when that inevitable time comes.

Exchange mail uses Domain credentials to authenticate to the mail server.  The Domain Admin will have the authority to reset a user password.  This is true for remotely hosted Exchange, as well.

Application Passwords:

Many business applications use username and passwords to control access to data.  If an administrator of the software loses their password it can become a difficult and costly process to recover or reset.  It is important to manage these passwords in a methodical way.

Passwords are a necessary part of any security system.  It is important to have a recovery plan well before that day comes when one is lost.

MTSi Tech Team

DK

In case you might be wondering why Hard Drive prices are sky rocketing even during this Holiday Season, I thought I would share the reason. The major floods in Thailand are the cause. Along with the massive localized physical damages to these regions, these floods have caused phenomenal price increases in hard drives (seems miniscule when you think about it).

Why has this effected hard drive pricing? You guessed it Thailand produces 25% of the world’s hard drives. Many hard drive manufacturers and component suppliers are located in Thailand, causing world wide shortages and price increases.

We have seen internal hard drives prices increase 180%in all sizes. External drives along with internal notebook drives are seeing huge increases as well. Since hard drives are used by everyone in the technology field including Giant Data Centers like Amazon we could expect price increases to reach every aspect of technology.

Price increases are expected to continue into second and third quarter of 2012. These increases will no doubt effect manufacturers of notebooks, workstations, server, and the like.

In the market for a new hard drive, now’s the time to buy….

MTSi Tech Team

JC