March 2009
In this issue:

● Is Your Check Engine
Light On?
● Is Your Business
Disaster Ready?
● Outlook To-Do Bar
● How Big is Your
Mailbox?

Outlook 2007 includes new productivity features like the To-Do Bar, Instant Search and more

E-mail is a big part of more and more jobs, with some workers now required to respond to dozens of mails each day. So, naturally, the tools used to manage e-mail keep getting better.

Look no further than Outlook 2007 for the evidence. The latest version of the venerable messaging program that ships with the Microsoft Office System takes its built-in e-mail/calendaring/task management tools to another level.

If you’re already an Outlook user, here are five reasons to upgrade to the latest version.

Just for Laughs

Quote of the Month

The first day of spring
is one thing, and the first
spring day is another.
The difference between
them is sometimes as
great as a month.

‾Henry Van Dyke

Is Your Check Engine Light On?

Most cars today are built with a degree of technology that lets you know if something under the hood isn’t quite right. You can get any number of lights and sounds to warn you of impending problems or remind you to do something. In the old days (1970′s) we called them idiot lights, today however, I like to call them Indicator lights because of the technology that is behind them.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had these lights and warnings for our PC’s and Servers? In some sense we do but they are not as “in your face” as a gong and bright red light on your dashboard. Normally they sit in your system tray in the lower right hand corner of your screen. Unfortunately, they tend to get crowded out of view and don’t always give you good information (i.e. is something really wrong, or is someone trying to sell me something?)

One of the things we do for people is monitor all of these “Indicator lights”, from desktops to servers, we watch AntiVirus, AntiSpyware, Updates/Patching, Error Log Files, Daily backup execution and a host of other indicators to make sure your systems are running in top form on a continuous basis.

“Why is this important” you may ask. If you are a business person, focused on delivering the best to your customers and prospects, while keeping everything running smoothly, then you don’t want to be worried about whether your server is going to go down (it will, eventually) or that you have huge holes in your firewall.

This month I am offering our business readers in the Atlanta area the opportunity to get a BackUp and Disaster Recovery assessment for a nominal fee, $1.00 (Yes, one dollar). Normally we charge up to $1,000 for this service, so act quickly, we only have room for four Backup & Disaster Recovery assessments on the schedule in April.

Mike
mikego@sf-it.com

Is Your Business Disaster-Ready?

Hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural events are disasters in every sense of the word. Lives are lost, property decimated and entire communities disrupted.

For your small business, these events can be just as devastating. But there’s a great deal you can do — both to prepare before a disaster strikes and afterwards, to get your business back on its feet quickly. Here are 10 tips to better protect your business and, if damage occurs, what you can do to speed your recovery.

The first five tips will help you protect your business:

1. Identify what you need to protect. Many businesses spend far too much time piling up the sandbags without considering what really needs the most protection. Your first step in adequately preparing your business for a disaster is to identify what matters most and take steps to address that. “If you run a food service business, if you lose electricity for 24 hours, you can lose $50,000 to food spoilage,” says Donna Childs, co-author of “Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business Guide.” “Look into backup power supplies and make sure any possible damage is covered in your insurance policy.”

2. Develop a specific disaster plan. Next, map out precisely who will do what if some sort of disaster occurs. Who will be in charge of evacuation or of making certain that important documents and data are safely secured? Designate a meeting spot outside of your business. Share the plan with your employees and keep it up to date. “The last thing you want is trying to figure out what to do while a disaster is unfolding,” says Childs.

3. Get your insurance in order. This means more than just knowing where your policy happens to be. Specific issues include:

· Check your policy endorsements. Vanilla insurance may not cover specific areas that matter to your business. Add them on as need be.

· Consider business interruption insurance. Akin to disability coverage, this insurance is designed to compensate you for lost income after a disaster. (The compensation amount is based on how much revenue you would have earned in a given time period.)

· Set up direct deposit. Do this so you don’t have to wait for the check in the mail — which may or may not come. Instead, your insurance company will be able to deposit any benefits directly into your bank account.

· Assign a point person for insurance issues. This person should keep all of the pertinent information and contact data at the ready.

4. Consider cash. Even solid insurance coverage will have deductibles. If you can, earmark some cash to pay those and other expenses. (I’ve talked to a few small business owners who have, literally, $5,000 in a safe that’s kept on the premises.) If that’s not in the cards, open up a line of credit with your bank for a ready money source. To be extra safe, Brian Drum, chief executive office of Drum Associates, a survivor of the 9/11 tragedy and business preparedness advocate, recommends tapping into the line of credit. “If you wait for the disaster to occur, you might not be able to access it.”

5. Buddy up. The most amenable landlord on earth can do little about office space that’s been reduced to ruins. Address that potentially-crippling problem by “buddying up” with another business — a non-competitor who’s willing to offer a conference room or any available space to help you out. By the same token, if they’re the ones taking the hit, make your space available to them.

Finally, here are tips to help you get back on your feet as quickly as possible.

How Big is
Your Mailbox?

From a purely technical standpoint, once a mailbox gets over a GB in size, it starts to become a minor challenge in terms of supporting it, speed of access and search, and management in general. Once a mailbox gets to be over 2 GB in size, we start to run into some very serious limitations that will manifest in support, management, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Believe us when we say we are VERY heavy Outlook users, but using a few simple techniques, it is not much of a challenge at all to keep our own mailboxes under the 1 GB limit we need to keep us ‘light on our feet’ with our own mailboxes.

First: archive! Outlook has a built in archive feature that will remove things from your mailbox and put them into a long term storage file. Our technique is to add to that archive file daily until it gets to be between 1 and 2 GB in size, then burn that to a DVD (so that it isn’t taking up space on the server). This can easily be set up to happen automatically in Outlook, and you can get very granular in your control of what gets archived, how old it has to be before archive, etc. Just ask us for help to get this set up.

If you are already in the ‘danger’ zone with your mailbox size, we can assist you to remove items from your mailbox into a file manually based on a number of different criteria (usually by date). We can even automate a ‘mass export’ of multiple mailboxes by date from the server if you have many users with large mailboxes. We can put these ‘history’ files on a DVD or somewhere accessible so that if you do need to look up historical information for any reason, you can get to it.

Finally, once you get everyone on the server down to a reasonable size, we can also assist you with setting up some mailbox limits so that they don’t get out of control again. We can set up warnings, and even prevent people from sending and receiving mail when their mailbox gets too large. Most companies start to warn in the 1 GB neighborhood, and then get more severe with the restrictions around 1.5 GB. This ensures they stay well below the 2 GB limit where they can really get into trouble in a disaster recovery situation.

With just a few simple steps to keep things in check, you can ensure your performance stays optimal, and one of the most important business tools around (Outlook) works efficiently and error free without any interruption.