WorkSmart strives to be the premier provider in Information Technology services. With colleagues like Robert, this initiative is possible.

In order for you to get to know him better, we asked him a few questions. Here are Robert’s answers:

Hometown: San Jose, Ca.
Favorite Kool-Aid Flavor: Grape
Favorite Beverage: Poppy Jasper, A beer by a microbrewery in Morgan Hill, Ca.
Any cool or “hidden” talents? I was a Night Club DJ in college
If you could be on a TV show, what would it be? 3rd Rock from the Sun. It would be fun hanging with people that don’t get it…
Favorite TV Series: Firefly
Favorite Band/Music Artist: Live
If you have to choose a movie title for your life story, what would it be? “ He did what?”
Favorite Hobby: Camping
Do you prefer sneakers over flip flops? Definitely Sneakers
Favorite board game: Monopoly
Do you have or wish you had a catch phrase? What would it be: “Prove it!”
Favorite day of the week and why: Friday
Do you play any musical instruments? iPod??
What is the color of your car? Silver
Can you sing? That’s why they invented radio’s, So people like my don’t sing!!
What do you wish you were doing right now? Driving my dream car !!!
One place you could travel right now: Alaska!
At the beach, would you rather play in the sand, or play in the water? Water
Words of Wisdom: “ I hope that by the time my children are my age. They are as proud of me, as am I of them!!!

Still on an old Microsoft system? It might be time to move up and do an upgrade, as studies and tests are showing consistently better performance from the new Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. Your old system might be limping along, but there’s no harm in making things better and improving your productivity.

One of the standard expectations when using technology is the inevitable need to change and upgrade. Technology moves forward on the principle that things that already seem great can be made even better – and more often than not, the improvements are worth the change.

This principle applies to the operating system and SMB platform you may be using now. While it may have served you well so far (after all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it, right?), that doesn’t mean that things can’t get any better – and in a measureable way that improves your productivity. With systems like Windows 7 (which isn’t exactly ‘new’, since it’s been around for a good while) and Windows 2008 R2 gaining ground in the market and proving their worth, it may be time to start thinking about moving up and upgrading your current software.

Here are some thoughts to start the ball rolling: studies and tests have shown that Windows 7 and 2008 R2 outperform their predecessors in almost every conceivable situation. And considering Microsoft’s recent announcement that they will discontinue support for Windows XP by 2014, the possibility of needing to upgrade becomes more pressing. Like it or not, you will eventually get left behind as technology marches on.

Of course, we realize that it’s not as simple as waving a magic upgrade wand and that’s that. It’s important to understand the way you do business in order to accurately assess how an upgrade will affect your operations. So please contact us and we’ll be happy to sit down with you and find ways to implement an upgrade in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.

Hometown: Manchvegas NH
Favorite Kool-Aid Flavor: Cherry, but just the powder though – I eat it straight up
If you could change your name, what would it be to? “DaMan”
Any cool or “hidden” talents? Does multiple personalities count?
If you could be on a TV show, what would it be? The Walking Dead
Favorite TV Series: Three way tie Dexter/House/the Daily Show
Favorite Band/Music Artist: Snot, Life of Agony, Social Distortion, Johnny Cash
If you have to choose a movie title for your life story, what would it be? “One Flew Over the Coo Coo’s Nest”
Favorite Hobby: Seeing how fast I can make my motorcycle go
If you could be any animal, what would you be? A Honey Badger / Wolverine hybrid
Favorite board game: Monopoly – Transformers edition
Favorite day of the week and why: Sunday because I spend the most time in the church of heavy iron that day with my lord and savior Sylvester Stallone
Do you play any musical instruments? Bass/ Violin
What is the color of your car? Red
Can you sing? I’ve been a hardcore/metal vocalist for ten years, and I’m a sucker for karaoke
What do you wish you were doing right now? Living life like Jason Statham in the Transporter
One place you could travel right now (doesn’t need to be realistic): Australia so I can box with a kangaroo, catch a Tasmanian devil, and hang out with Kevin “bloody” Wilson
At the beach, would you rather play in the sand, or play in the water? In New England the water is usually around 40 in the summer sooooo…water it is
Words of Wisdom (or quote you like): Spend more time accepting who someone is and less time trying to conform them, and you just may learn something

Hometown: Edinburgh, Scotland
Favorite Kool-Aid Flavor: Don’t Drink Kool-Aid
Favorite Beverage: Diet Coke
If you could change your name, what would it be to? Fred
Any cool or “hidden” talents? Nope
If you could be on a TV show, what would it be? Not Sure
Favorite TV Series: Don’t really have one; I flick through them all
If you have to choose a movie title for your life story, what would it be? WTF!!!!
Favorite Hobby: Video Games
Do you prefer sneakers over flip flops? Sneakers
If you could be any animal, what would you be? A fat, lazy Bulldog
Favorite board game: Monopoly
Do you have or wish you had a catch phrase? What would it be: Can’t say I do
Favorite day of the week and why: Friday, I think that’s obvious
Do you play any musical instruments? Nope
What is the color of your car? Red
Can you sing? Nope
One place you could travel right now (doesn’t need to be realistic): Thailand
At the beach, would you rather play in the sand, or play in the water? Water

Hometown: Cinnaminson, NJ
Favorite Kool-Aid Flavor: Grape
Favorite Beverage: Nothing hits the spot like an ice cold Mt. DEW
If you could change your name, what would it be to? I’d just change the spelling of my first name to D-u-g
Any coolor “hidden” talents? I have a pretty in depth knowledge of rollercoasters and amusement parks

If you could be on a TV show, what would it be? Border Wars – it’s awesome to see what those guys do!
Favorite TV Series : “The Walking Dead” – who doesn’t love Zombies?!
Favorite Band/Music Artist: “Count the Stars” always puts me in a good mood!
Favorite Hobby: Hockey and rollercoasters
Do you prefer sneakers over flip flops? Sneakers
If you could be any animal, what would you be? Rhino
Favorite board game: CedarPointopoly
Do you have or wish you had a catch phrase? What would it be: Oh, Come on!
Favorite day of the week and why: Saturday – hang out with the family.
Do you play any musical instruments? My air guitar skills are unmatched by anyone
What is the color of your car? Blue
Can you sing? Nope, but I sure do pretend I can!
What do you wish you were doing right now? Riding a rollercoaster
One place you could travel right now (doesn’t need to be realistic): West Coast Coaster tour!
At the beach, would you rather play in the sand, or play in the water? Sand
Words of Wisdom: Yesterday’s burn will be tomorrow’s lesson learned.

The kind of email system you use makes a difference. Full access and full control of your email account – even when on the go – can be essential tools for people who work in the field. But just the same, you might need a few tweaks to a less fully featured system to keep operations efficient and cost-effective.

Whether you work from an office or are productive while on the go, email most likely plays a big factor in the way you go about your business. Unbeknownst to many, some types of email systems have certain limitations that by extension can also limit the level of productivity of your business, and especially for people in the organization who must also work while out in the field.

One major issue for many people is synchronicity. Many people need their emails to be accessible on their mobile phones, PDAs, or other mobile devices, and they need them to be properly synchronized with their desktop workstations. The need to constantly update conversations and email threads from mobile devices to desktops with certain types of email can prove to be tedious and unproductive– and some email system types don’t include this ability at all.

Depending on the way you use your email, especially when on the go, having full access and full control of your account can define how productive you and others in your organization can be. Besides providing a much better degree of synchronization and integration with mobile devices, certain types of email systems also have features for sharing and collaboration features that allow you to set schedules and share files from your mailbox, as well as central storage for emails that allows you to access your account seamlessly with any mobile device, regardless of where you are located.

Of course, having a full-featured email system might not be best for everyone. The key is to know whether adapting a more bare-bones system is cost-effective for your business (especially in the long run). Sometimes the top of the line may be needed, and sometimes all you need is a bit of tweaking on your less fully featured system. Not sure which is best? Call us and we’ll be glad to sit down with you and assess what kind of email system is best suited for you and your business.

Your reputation and your company’s reputation are important. When people talk about you or your company, depending on what’s being said, it can have either a helpful or a damaging effect. In the online world this can be even more challenging, as the proliferation of websites and social media tools make monitoring these comments more difficult to do. Here are some tools to help you make sense out of the sea of information—so you can keep track of and manage what’s being said about you or your business.

Besides your own eyes and ears, there are plenty of tools—for free or for a price—available to help you monitor your presence online. The simplest of these is your familiar search engines such as Google or Bing. By simply searching online, you can find where your name or your company’s name appears in various websites. With Google in particular, you can set up “alerts” which will email you when a specific word or term appears in their website index.

What words or terms should you use? Start with your name, or your company name, then try the name of your products and/or services, and maybe even the names of your employees, directors, and other stakeholders. It might also be helpful to search for the competition as well. As results come in you can refine your search by expanding or narrowing the scope of terms you would like to search or be alerted on. If you want to be able to search across all different search engines and not just one or two, you can use Monitor This.

Next you can use specialized website or social media monitoring tools to search only specific sites or services as opposed to the entire Internet. One example is Greplin, which allows you to search all of your accounts or accounts that you own. This is very helpful to be able to execute highly filtered searches on specific information in your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, or your blog. Another option is Rollyo, which allows you to set up your own specialized search engines that cull content from public or open websites of your choosing.

Other more generalized tools include RSS feed readers—which allow you to consume news or information feeds from news sites or blogs. Examples include Newsgator.com, Bloglines.com, Google Reader or Pluck.com. Other generalized tools include those that monitor specific newsgroups or message boards like BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, and MSN Money. Still others track changes to content of specific sites (Copernic Tracker, Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com), as well as their domain information (DomainTools.com and BetterWhois.com).

The really interesting new services actually give you an explicit idea of the status of your reputation—especially if you are a relatively well known name or your business has an established brand. In this category are sites like Amplicate, which monitors general feelings or impressions about brands, businesses, or services; Klout, which tries to measure the influence of individuals based on their social interactions; and SendLove.to, which focuses on celebrities and media personalities.

There are literally dozens more tools you can use to monitor and manage your reputation online. To find out more, a great resource is here at the Duct Tape Marketing blog. If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to let us know!

While the decision to have some of your IT resources “in the cloud” can be a complex one, one area we get asked about often is email and productivity applications. Below is a summary from two industry giants: one from Google and the other from Microsoft, and see how they compare:

Google Apps
Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space.

1. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability—Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages—potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service.
4. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important.
5. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android.

Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology.

Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new—being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier.

1. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business.
4. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them—they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook.
5. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices—specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones.

Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance—this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with.

Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.

The advent of social networking these days gives smaller businesses a bigger voice in the market, allowing them to rise to a level nearly at par with their larger competitors – and elevating the playing field to a battle of efficiency, cost effectiveness, and quality service rather than advertising and marketing budgets.

One of the most difficult challenges smaller businesses face is having a bigger presence in the market. While many of these companies offer good, quality services at much more affordable rates, they are many times overshadowed by larger firms that have bigger budgets to spend on marketing, advertising, and the like.

Things have changed, though, with the advent of social networking. What was once a simple, social, get-to-know-each-other tool between people on the internet has now evolved into a tool that small businesses can take advantage of in order to get their voices heard.

The gist of social networking for business is the simple concept of reaching potentially millions of people at a mere fraction of what is normally spent on advertising and traditional marketing. The wide reach of social media allows businesses to find their voices and showcase what they can do. The playing field then moves from an unfair balance of advertising budgets to a battle of service quality and value for money, as it should be – and many smaller firms can compete effectively in this arena.

There are many ways to tap into the social networking phenomenon to boost your online presence and aid in your marketing. If you are interested in knowing more about this, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you in developing strategies that fit your specific requirements and needs.

It is a misconception among many businesses that using a cheap, basic router/firewall is sufficient for day-to-day operations. But it is important to realize that there is more to it than just price – especially since more often than not, going cheap will only get you what you pay for (or maybe even less).

In business, protecting important information and data is paramount. This is why it is recommended for any sort of business to invest in a security system that will prevent any cyber-attacks that might be launched against you.

Unfortunately, though, it’s lost on many that a security system is not just made up of one single thing – software, better staff, better hardware, et cetera. A good and solid security system is composed of several factors working together to create a virtual chain that envelops your business and keeps it safe.

And one of the most underestimated links in this chain is the router/firewall. Many businesses are content using the most basic and cheapest option available on the market, without realizing that their security chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And if you make do with a cheap router/firewall, odds are you’ll get what you pay for – not much.

While basic routers might work fine for homes or individual users, it is a much different scenario when it comes to business operations where basic just doesn’t cut it. Plus, there’s more at stake with business data, so why take the risk with cheap routers that lack the proper security features?

With viruses, malware, and the cyber thieves behind them continuing to grow and evolve, it is important that you understand what it takes to protect your system and your data – and invest in the best solution. Remember that it can take only one incident, one infiltration, to bring your whole business down.

We realize that every system is different and every business has its own specific needs, so if you want to know more about getting the right router/firewall for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us.