Small Business Tech Tips

Your company’s domain name, or it’s address on the internet, is an important part of your brand, image, and message.  It is akin to a piece of property or some other form of capital that you want to protect.  That is why it is important to know the vital details about your domain name, including the technical information around expiration dates, Internet Protocaol (IP) and IP location information, domain registrar and Domain Name System (DNS) name servers.

DNS is naming sytems for computers and resources connected to the internet or a private network.  With your DNS name server identified, you will have the ability to find the domain name’s IP address, subdomains, and even the phyiscal location of the server that is hosting it, as well as that servers name.

All of this information can get very confusing and difficult to navigate through, but fear not as there is a handy tool that can consolidate all of this information onto one handy online resource.  Who.is.

Follow that link the Who.is website and perform a search on your website.  Find out where you server is located (if you don’t know) and make sure you are aware of when your domain name is set to expire, so you can make sure you renew your website before someone else has the chance to snag it!  Do some research on Alexa to check how your website ranks out of all them in the US!  Ever wonder what the #1 website is?  Here’s a hint – check with Alexa first before googling it!

Welcome back to my series on Must-Have applications for the Android Phone OS platform. This edition will cover useful utilities for using your phone as more than a phone.

If you haven’t had a chance you can read Part 1 here.

Wi-Fi Analyzer

This app lets you analyze Wi-Fi networks around you to find open networks and to determine signal strength anywhere you can bring your phone. Use it to determine where to place your router in your home, use it to determine what channel your router should be on in the busy Wi-Fi airwaves of today.

PdaNet

PDA Net allows you to connect to the internet on your computer through your phone.  With PDA Net installed… as long as you have internet on your phone, you can use the data plan on your phone through your laptop for no additional charge!!!

That means if you have unlimited data on your phone, you can use your phone to access the internet as much as you want through your computer.

Droid Light

The droid light is exactly what it sounds like. It can be used top control the LED for the camera on your phone turning the phone into a pretty powerful flashlight or signaling device with one click.

Chances are when the powers out you will not have a flashlight on hand but you may have your phone with you.  Now all you need to do is turn on the droid light and you’re all set.

Ring Droid

Ring Droid allows you to create any ringtone you want. Literally anything you want. It will allow you to modify wav, mp3 and voice recordings with any start and finish time code you want. The possibilities are endless!!!!

 GPS Test

GPS test app is great for testing your phone’s gps feature and seeing real-time data from the GPS. It can show you what satellites your phone can see, which ones it can communicate with, the speed, position and altitude data raw and more.

Neat for figuring out problems or for navigating in the woods with a map and no cellular service.

Stay tuned for more killer app coverage. Up next… GAMES!!!

As you most likely have noticed, there is a huge storm cloud of controversy in the internet regarding two pieces of legislation up for debate in early February in both houses of the United States Congress.  Wikipedia even took down their English language site for 24 hours in protest of these bills.  Google has blacked out their logo on their homepage.  Online surveys are circulating through Facebook and Twitter.  It seems like there are more questions than answers swirling around.  What are these bills, and what do they mean to people and business alike?

SOPA, an acronym for “Stop Online Piracy Act” is a bill proposed in the United States House of Representatives.  PIPA, an acronym for “Protect Intellectual Property Act” is a bill proposed in the United State Senate.

At the heart of the matter of both bills are the protection of copyrighted information as well as intellectual property from online piracy, with the goal of stopping people and websites from sharing, distributing, hosting and disseminating copyrighted materials, mostly from foreign websites.

These all seem like legitimate and common sense concerns and subsequent actions for the U.S. Government to take to protect U.S. citizens and businesses, but the controversy isn’t about what they aim to protect, but moreover how they propose to protect it.

The backlash coming from Wikipedia and many other heavily used social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube is that both pieces of legislation use language that is very vague, and puts website owners at risk of being shut down down due to ‘infringements’ that they have little or no control over.  Also, large corporations could potentially use these bills as a thinly veiled mask to squander their competition.  Wikipedia noted this on their SOPA and PIPA learn more page:

“SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won’t be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won’t have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn’t being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won’t show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.”

Here is an example where I could see this having an adverse effect on individual small business owners who never had any motive to infringe copyrights, but none the less could get their website shutdown and blacklisted because the proposed policies of these acts.

Let’s say that my mother has an at home business where she sells cookies or arts and crafts to her friends and community.  She also has a small website that she owns to take orders online.  My mom would now have to have the expertise of a web developer to ensure that nothing on her site or in her sites meta data links anywhere online to anyone who possesses or distributes copyrighted material on their sites.  This as many say would be almost impossible, if for example there was a video linked to her page from a site that was deemed to be in violation of SOPA and/or PIPA.  That link now makes mom’s site in violation as well.  Let’s take it a step further.  What if Cindy down the street wants to sell crafts online now too, and sees my mom as a competitor.  Cindy’s tech savvy teenager works in collusion with Cindy to launch a cyber-attack on my mom’s website.  He hacks into the website and embeds a ton of violated sites into my mom’s cyber presence.  Mom’s site is then shut down and blacklisted and Cindy wins – until someone does turns around and does it to Cindy’s site as well…

This example is a little far-fetched for sure, but these are the types of examples of questions that both individuals and large global companies and websites alike want answers to.  As they are written now the language of these bills are not providing enough answers to these key questions, and thus the controversy.

If you’ve tried to access Google or Wikipedia this morning you’ve noticed that the pages are blacked out. Many of the highest traffic sites have coordinated an effort to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act commonly referred to as (SOPA). The proposed law would limit access to sites that host copyright protected content illegally such as The Pirate Bay.

Critics of the act say it would go to far and would be the first step in full fledged censorship for the internet. A reasonable scenario would go like this. If a site’s servers are hosting copyright protected content and allowing users to access it illegally, search engines would be obliged to block them from listings. Sites like Paypal would not be allowed to receive payment from any transactions associated with the site.

Press buzz about SOPA has ramped up in the past few weeks but the similar Protect IP Act (PIPA) passed in The House in October and is up for a vote on January 24, though Congress has asked for a delay on the vote.

I find myself searching for this answer all the time – How to turn on or off the pop-up email previews in outlook?  There is nothing worse than hosting a go to meeting and having a flashing preview of all your email for all to see and you can’t go shut it off because you are hosting a live meeting.

With Outlook open click on the File tab to access Backstage View and click on Options

Now in Outlook Options click on Mail then scroll down to Message arrival. Then uncheck Display a Desktop Alert and click OK. If you don’t want a sound to play when an email arrives you can uncheck that as well.

This will take care of the pop-up (and sound too).  Of course it helps if you remember to turn this off prior to starting your gotomeeting and turn it back on when it’s over.

From Wikipedia:

“Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity.“

This is all well and good. But what does it mean for you and your business?

Well let’s first discuss disasters. Disasters recovery can mean any of the following for a business:

1. The restoration of a file from simple accidental corruption or deletion by a well meaning employee;
2. It can mean the replacement of data on an entire drive that has given up the ghost;
3. It could mean replacing a broken server;
4. It could mean replacing all of the computers and data destroyed in a fire, earthquake, flood or other disaster.

As you can see there are many layers of disaster recovery- each carrying with it, its own level of concern for the business. For instance, in the first example above, depending on the file deleted, you may or may not want an immediate solution (i.e. the bookeeper has deleted your only Quickbooks file) or you may care less if the file is ever recovered (i.e. an employee deleted their desktop background image).

Disasters can have dire affects on businesses. A recent study revealed that of companies experiencing a “major loss” of data, 43% never reopened, 51% closed within 2 years of the loss and a mere 6% survived over the long term.

Disaster recovery is simply what do you do to deal with a disaster. How do you recover from one?

Well disaster planning and prevention is really the other side of the disaster recovery coin. You can’t recover, from what you don’t plan. Disaster planning, from an IT perspective, provides for :

1. Data backup
2. Geographic diversity in the storage of your data
3. Hardware failure recovery planning
4. Complete loss planning

Online backup services provide for #1 & #2 above. They can also help with #3 & #4 but because of your need for quick access to your data in both of these circumctances, online backup only solutions will be limited by the speed of your internet connection and it can take days to copy all your data back.

At Everon we offer a product called a TDP (Total Disaster Protection). Our TDP, provides you a plan in all four scenarios. Not only can it back your data up and send it offsite for storage and protection, but it can get you back up and running in 24 hours should you lose everything (scenario #4).

So what is disaster recovery? Disaster recovery is the ability to get back to work with the data you need, when you need it. Anything short of that, is not disaster recovery.

Call us today and see how we can help you protect your business. 1-888-244-1748.

Do you remember the good old days of Microsoft Word 97?  If you were like me you knew every trick of the trade when it came to things like headers, footers, margins, page breaks and the like.

Now in the newest release of Word I feel lost and confused.  The simplest formatting error sends me into turmoil.  I am working under a deadline, I have committed to getting a client facing document delivered, and here I am, trying to find a fix a formatting error that I have done thousands of times before in the old versions or Word?!?  It’s like my world is coming crashing down around me!

But before I nearly lost my mind, I came across this beauty…a tool called Format Painter.  Here is how it works:  On the File toolbar you will find it neatly tucked in the bottom right corner.

I find it works best when you are trying to format textboxes, paragraph settings, bullets and margins.  Essentially you click on an example of the formattign you want to emulate.  Then click on format painter and your mouse icon will turn into a cursor with the paintbrush icon next to it.  Then highlight the text or portion of the document you are trying to format and… Voilà!  Your world makes sense again!

Ever wonder what distribution lists you are on?  Are you getting all the right notifications in your email from all the right groups?  I will show you in this blog how you can see exactly what distribution lists in your network you are a member of to double check that all the right company correspondence is ending up in your inbox.

Most companies create distribution lists in their global address books.  A global address book is the shared address book across a network.  By grouping members together and adding members to various lists it allows everyone to communicate to targeted masses by sending to only one email address i.e. companyall@.  Not sure if you are on the right distribution lists, follow these steps to find out:

Go to Tools- Address Book (ctrl+shift+b)

When the address book window opens, select the Global Address Book from the drop down.  This will populate the window with all of your network email contacts and distribution groups.

Find your name on the list and double click.  This will open your contact info:

Open the “Member Of” tab and it will show you all the distribution lists you are currently subscribed to:

To see a total list of everyone on a particular list you can just double click on the group.  From here you can add or remove members.  Most companies have some strict permissions on who can modify the members of a distribution group so while you can open and view the members of a group you may need to contact your administrator to either add or remove members.

Are you supposed to be on a distribution group that you do not see in your list?  To double check you can go back to the global address book, find that group name, open it and view the members.  If you are not on the list, click on modify members, add your name and click ok.  Of course, as I stated above you might have to request you email administrator to add you to that group as well because of permissions.

Hope this helps keep you up to date from the right lists!

-Alison Swanigan

Ever wish for something a little more than those little red or green squiggles when it comes to tweaking your grammar in documents? Many years ago I stumbled upon a great free app called WordWeb as I was looking for a thesaurus program. After installing it I was impressed with how many useful things it could do: dictionary, thesaurus, word finder, and spell check to name a few.

WordWeb is a quick and nimble program due to its small size and simple interface. It will run on older PCs though Macs unfortunately are not supported at this time. You can quickly open it with an icon by your clock or via hot key for quick access. While there is a paid version I have been always happy with the free version that I use on a daily basis. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

http://wordweb.info/

As a Droid Power User since the first Motorola Droid came out, I have used hundreds of both good and terrible applications. Here is a list of killer must-have apps and why.

LookOut

This app found my phone’s apx location within 1 minute of logging in to the website. In addition to being able to locate your missing phone, Lookout scans applications, and keeps your phone secure while also giving you the ability to back up contacts, pictures and more to their site.

Where’s My Droid lets you send a text message (specific “attention word” your choice) to your phone from anywhere and it will set the phone ringer to max volume and start ringing so you can find it. This is helpful if you dropped it outside, in a couch, left it at a friend’s and so on. It can also give you a basic location by sending the GPS attention words.

Google Maps  <– Click here to see all the newest features and ways to use it

Google Maps comes with the Android OS and the latest version is really cool. With this app and using the phones built in Voice command feature you’ll never be lost again and can even track the location of your kids after school if need be. You can also find restaurants, stores and so on along routes while navigating.

The Voice Recorder

The microphone on the droid is pretty powerful. The screenshots below allow the application’s usefulness speak for itself.  You can record your grocery list and schedule it to play later on as a reminder.  Just think, you could remind yourself to take out the trash when you get home at 6 pm?

Stay tuned for more apps that you must have for your Droid powered phone!