7 Things to Know About WordPress

  

  

 delicious  

  

WordPress was once viewed mainly as a blogging platform. But it has developed into one of the most popular website publishing tools on the Internet. Tech Crunch recently reported that about one fifth of new domains in the U.S. run on WordPress. And it also may amaze you to learn that one of the most popular publishers in the world uses WordPress.

Here are 7 things you should know about WordPress:

1. Updating your content is simpler than ever before using WordPress. With its dynamic page creation you can update your site effortlessly without needing a large amount of storage
2. You can set up a free subdomain within minutes. You can register at Wordpress.com to get a free website (e.g. www.yourname.wordpress.org). This is great if you don’t have the cash to invest on external hosting and domain services.
3. WordPress also has what they call their ‘famous 5-minute install’, which makes it simple to install WordPress if you currently have a domain and a hosting service. What’s more, no coding expertise needed.
4. Are there minimum requirements? Yes, if you are hosting your own website outside of WordPress, there are a few requirements to bear in mind. To get the appropriate support down the road, you will have to make sure you have the correct MySQL and PHP versions on your server.
5. There are scores of great looking templates (known as “themes”) available from various sources on the Internet. Many are free, some are not. Either way, choosing the best design for your website is quick and easy.
6. WordPress offers centralized management for all your pages, posts, multimedia assets, and reader comments. It’s also really easy to manage users and user profiles.
7. WordPress encourages e-commerce. There's an plethora of plugins that have already been created that allow you to accept payments, promote, and more on your website. The straightforward plugin search keeps these options at your fingertips.

Terminal IT Support

Not All Tech is Successful

  

  

 delicious  

  

In recent years iPads, smartphones, and Kindles have been some of the most desired gadgets on the market. But not all tech is created equal. Companies can’t predict what's going to become popular, no matter how much they love it. Here are some that never quite caught on.

Famous tech failures

• Apple TV: This product gives users the capability to purchase entertainment from iTunes then stream it to the device of their choice. Good idea? Possibly, if it wasn’t so limited to iTunes. 

• Sony Mylo: You might not recall the Mylo. That's because it came and went without eliciting much response from consumers. This Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device enabled consumers to connect to the Internet, send e-mail, and hold online chats. It also came with Skype for free Internet calls. Unfortunately for Sony, the iPhone and its enormous app store simply overwhelmed the Mylo.

The Segway peters out

• Segway PT: The Segway PT scooter hasn't fully been a flop. Nonetheless, it never caught on in the manner its manufacturers supposed. This two-wheeled transportation machine was meant to be a must-have for commuters traveling to work and for family members taking short trips to their local supermarket. Unfortunately, the scooter makes people look kind of silly when they are riding it. Maybe this is why the device hasn't develop into a mainstream replacement for cars.

The CueCat doesn’t purr

• CueCat: The CueCat was a digital barcode reader created by Digital Convergence Corporation. In the shape of a cat, this device allowed the user to scan a bar code and be quickly guided to a company’s website. This didn't go over well, but it may have paved the way for the now common QR code.

Terminal IT Support

3 Great Tips for Using Microsoft Outlook Effectively

  

  

 delicious  

  

If you use Microsoft Outlook on a frequent basis, odds are that you probably take it for granted. Outlook has been around for many years, helping us manage our email and our schedules. It may seem simple, but it is in fact a very dynamic and robust program. In order to make the most of your experience with Outlook, let’s take a look at a few of its unknown functions.  Below we’ve outlined only 3 of the often-overlooked functions that help you work more efficiently.

Eliminate the Clutter

Outlook's “Conversation View,” which lists messages and responses under one heading, can reduce the time it takes you to find a key email, but often these conversations can become jumbled with repetitive quoted material. You can solve this problem quickly by right-clicking the conversation, and then clicking on the "Clean Up Conversation" option. This will remove all the recurring quoted parts of the messages in a conversation.

Say it in a Picture

Using screenshots in your emails is always a good way to efficiently help convey your message, especially for IT support problems. Inserting a screenshot into your email is very easy with Outlook.  All you have to do is click the “Insert” tab and then choose the “Screenshot” option. From here, Outlook will create images of all the windows open on your desktop.  Choose the appropriate one and it will be inserted into your email.

Take Out the Trash

Occasionally it is hard to let go of those old emails.  We tend to keep them in the trash folder for months or even years.  The truth is that those messages take up a lot of precious space. Thankfully, setting up automatic trash emptying is easy with Outlook.  Outlook will automatically empty your trash upon exiting the program if you click the  “File” tab and then choose “Options.” From here, choose “Advanced” and look for the Outlook “Start” and “Exit” options. Check the box next to “Empty Deleted Items” when exiting Outlook. Now your trash will be empty every time you exit the program clearing up lots of valuable space!

Terminal IT Support

Your Small Business and Data Security

  

  

 delicious  

  

When looking at data security, many people think they have plenty of systems and precautions in position to keep their information safe. Sure, you may have antivirus software and you may even update it regularly. You may also believe that you’re too small of a company to be a target of a hacking attempt. Only big firms that have thousands of clients need to worry about cyber criminals, right? Wrong. Hackers and cyber criminals have actually escalated their focus on small businesses. We would like to help you understand the dangers your small business could be facing.

Small firms: low-hanging fruit

The truth is, hackers have realized that small businesses are easier targets, and are increasingly preying upon them. They are able to infiltrate their systems at a considerably faster rate, and with a better percentage of success as well. This means a cyber criminal can assault multiple targets in the time it would take them to lay siege to a better-guarded system with a higher level of data security. How can it be worth their while to steal from a mom and pop business? In the present modern world, practically every business makes use of digital payment processing methods. When your customers pay using a credit card, this data must run through your system to be verified. This represents a goldmine of information for hackers, as they can lift this data without being noticed. With your customers’ credit card numbers, addresses and names, they are able to make counterfeit charges on their accounts.

How hackers gain access to your data

How can they get this delicate data? Though you might be protected by software meant to firewall your systems, hackers still have numerous points of entry. Email attachments are a significant offender, and openingonly one piece of malware can leave you exposed. Believe it or not, in the first quarter of this year alone, industry experts have detected over six million distinctive malware programs. Attackers don’t need to be sophisticated to be dangerous: when trying to breach your data security, some hackers have a low-tech technique instead. They could contact your employees directly, and pretending to be a network administrator, request their password to improve security. This is called “phishing.” While you may believe your employees know better than to be seduced by such an evident tact, it takes merely one lapse in judgment to leave your systems open to attack.

The buck stops with you

Many people assume that since credit card companies are usually accountable for any fraudulent charges that occur from a hacking event, that data security isn’t crucial. While this may be true for a consumer, for a business owner the result may be very different. Consumers will hold you responsible personally should their information be stolen. Damage control after an attack can cost an organization thousands of dollars and in some cases a single attack can spell the end of business in general.

An ounce of prevention…

Data security is extremely important and any additional precautions you can take would be wise. Use strong passwords and update your existing security systems regularly. Educate your employees on safety measures they can take, such as creating strong passwords and never giving out login information. Hiring an outside consultant to help you ensure you and your client’s information is safe is another good idea. Simple measures can give you peace of mind that your systems are safe, and your clients will know you have their best interests at heart.

Terminal IT Support

The Importance of Company Culture: Part 2

  

  

 delicious  

  

Earlier this week we explained the reasons why your company’s culture influences your brand. A healthy company culture will have a very positive impact on your daily operations and the way the public views your company. Measuring the cultural health of your company is one thing, but where do you go from there. Below we’ll look at some ideas to improve or give your company a cultural facelift.

If you have established that the culture of your company could use some adjusting or refreshing, there are several questions you will want to consider first:

• How do you want your company to feel? Fun, creative, open, accepting, respectful, etc?
• How can you mirror you company values in the culture?
• How is information shared with employees? Are they left in the dark often?
• Do you reward employees and how? 
• Does everybody in the company feel heard? If not, how might you improve this?

These may lead to more questions. To get answers try brainstorming with your co-workers. Listed below are some ideas to get the ball rolling:

Suggestion/Thought box – This is an good way to permit people to share opinions regarding the current events within the company. The employee could decide to make the suggestion anonymous or not, and any suggestions or concerns could be addressed in monthly company meetings.

Empower employees – Treat employees like peers; let them have ownership over their jobs. Don’t micromanage! Transparency can encourage empowerment as well. Don’t just tell your employees when there are successes, let them know when things aren’t going so well too. Their support may help you triumph over the hard times.

Flexible hours – Giving people some flexibility to get their work done exhibits confidence. Trusting them to manage themselves will lead them to respect you more.

Dress code – Have a more casual dress code. It’s amazing what permitting people to express themselves can do for a company’s culture. Consider themed days: silly hat day, Hawaiian shirt day, or anything that gets people thinking creatively and brings happiness to the day.

Celebrate – Your business is the sum of everyone in it. Celebrate your team with group activities.  For instance, cater lunch for everyone, have a movie or game day, or just throw a party. This can produce more cohesion within your team and encourage cooperation.

Here are some things companies have done to give their culture a playful edge:

• Spontaneous Nerf gun wars
• Painting inspirational quotes on the walls
• Hitting a loud gong when there is a success to let the whole company know
• Foosball tournaments
• Lunchtime Yoga
• Lunchtime Crafting Club
• Monday Mad Libs, whoever wishes to contribute, does, and then the completed Mad Lib is emailed to the company

Terminal IT Support

Healthy Culture: How Your Business is Affected: Part 1

  

  

 delicious  

  

Strategy is generally at the forefront of a company’s focus. Strategy is not the only thing which makes a company successful. Culture also plays an important role. The culture of your company affects your branding, your marketing success, and daily operations, all of which directly affect how the world sees your business. The logos of brands like Apple, Google, and Starbucks are identifiable not only because they appear to be everywhere, but also these companies have strong cultures that shine through their employees, storefronts, and logos. These positive, strong cultures all begin within the walls of their offices.

Why Culture is so Important

A healthy office culture fosters creative thinking. When employees like the place they work and feel like they're part of the team it makes them challenge themselves in innovative ways. In a workplace in which people feel invisible or stifled they'll often do the bare minimum required. It is part of human nature to want to feel appreciated and important. A company is made of its people so whatever mindset prevails will show up in your brand and the products and service you provide. In the end, taking care of the culture of your workplace is everyone’s duty from the CEO to HR.

If you are not yet convinced, here are a couple of the obvious benefits of cultivating a healthy culture.

• Focus – The old adage is true; two heads are better then one. When all the people in a company are devoted to the same goal, everything runs more efficiently. This type of focus comes with a healthy culture; the workers will value the collective goal because they feel like they are a part of it. When individuals do not feel like they are part of the team, they don’t care about the goal, and this can lead to cynicism.

• Cohesion – The basis of cohesion is strong communication between team members, whether they are facing successes or roadblocks. Strong communication fortifies teamwork and makes operations run more smoothly. In a workplace with an unhealthy culture, people could be nervous to provide feedback about issues that arise or might not care enough to act quickly when issues do arise.

• Motivation – A motivated workforce gets things done. That might seem apparent, but companies that don't pay attention to the health of their culture could be suffering with regards to efficiency. Being motivated to work hard is a trait that should be present in every person in the company if the culture is healthy.

Measuring the Cultural Health of Your Company

You should assess your company’s culture a few times a year. How can you do this? First, consider how your workers are managed. It is true that a few individuals may never be happy but, in general, if the consensus is negative you may start thinking about adjustments to improve the culture to help your business. Tune in soon for a few tips on making your company culture better.

Terminal IT Support

Simplify Online Invoicing with These Services

  

  

 delicious  

  

Did you start your business because you love paperwork? Probably not, unless you’re a cpa of course. Probably, you started your business because you love the work, product, or service you sell. As a business owner, however, you can’t disregard the paperwork which comes along with owning your own business. The financial side of a business is crucial and the proper invoicing of your clients means cash in the bank and content customers.

Invoicing help online

Using an online invoicing service is a possible option for business owners who need a quicker, more dependable way, and often-automatic ways to invoice their customers. You can find a large number of available online options to choose from that can take that tiresome task of paperwork off your plate. Below we’ll evaluate just 3 of the solutions available:

A free but powerful invoicing service

Sometimes the word “free” is synonymous with “not very good.” Thankfully, that isn't the case with the free system, BillingBoss. Suitable for most small businesses that need to automatically invoice customers on a monthly basis and periodic once-off invoicing, BillingBoss packs a huge punch at no cost!

A power tool

AcceptPay isn’t free. It costs $30 a month, but it's a robust program. Offered by American Express, AcceptPay works with QuickBooks, will accept online payments, and of course, gives you an array of options when it comes to sending out invoices and collecting payments. The $30 investment is a small price to pay for such a powerful online invoicing tool.

Invoicing for the tech-savvy

If you need more control over your online invoicing, you might consider downloading BambooInvoice. This is another free service. What sets it apart, though, is that small business owners host it on their own servers, not in the cloud. Since it is an open source program, tech-savvy entrepreneurs can personalize it to fit their business's unique needs.

These are just a few of the available options online. Most services are free or extremely cost-effective. If you need to take the reigns on your invoicing process, think about employing an online solution.

Terminal IT Support

Microsoft steps up to take part in the war against cyber crimes

  

  

 delicious  

  

If the rumors are true, Microsoft is stepping up significantly to join the fight against cyber crime. Reportedly, Microsoft is developing a real-time feed that records current cyber threats and gives necessary steps to protect against them.

Microsoft currently has a process in place to take down dangerous botnets. Microsoft “swallows” the botnets and lets them infect accounts that are highly controlled by Microsoft’s team. Once the botnets infect the accounts, Microsoft learns the way they work and removes them as a threat.

This collected data is now given to ISPs, private and government agencies, & CERTs. While real-time data may not reduce the quantity of attacks by malicious code, the impact of sharing this data will likely be quite extraordinary. IT security companies should be able to respond more quickly to these threats and therefore be able to decrease the amount of damage they can cause.

Microsoft's live threat feed may have an even more important impact: It could lead the information security industry to share more data. For too long, companies have hesitated to discuss important security information that they fear could lead to a copycat attack. This is a misguided belief as cyber criminals are already trading information amongst themselves. It makes sense, therefore, for security professionals to also share real-time information.

The IT industry has for too long considered the sharing of the specifics of a cyber attack an invitation for a copycat attack. Hopefully Microsoft’s first small steps toward a more connected IT security force will take root and that sharing data and information is a more sensible choice than secrecy.

Terminal IT Support

False Positive

  

  

 delicious  

  

This week I had to deal with a laptop that was shutting down with a thermal issue, or so it said.

I booted up some temperature software and let it run.  Well, after an hour, I saw that it was stable, so I ran it through some tests. I ran Video, CPU, hard drive, memory, the full works.

It passed them all with flying colors, which struck me as odd. I left it running for a couple of hours running tests at random times just to see what would happen. Well the screen corrupted and the computer shut down.  On reboot it told me that it shut down from a thermal issue again, and again the thermal software gave no hint of trouble.

After a bit of looking around the net, I found that this was not an isolated issue.  This model of laptop, in this configuration was a problem for lots of people.  After contacting the manufacturer and getting nowhere, I informed the customer of what I had found and told them to call the manufacturer and either get a replacement or return it.

At the end of the day, it was one of those issues that no one wanted to admit was a problem, and left the customer in a bind.

So here is my suggestion, please try not to impulse buy.  It may seem like a deal at the time, but do a little research on the model you are looking at to see if it has an issue that is causing others grief.

Have a great weekend

Kris Hewes - Hardware Technician

SOPA, Megaupload, and the Cloud - Just How Secure is Your Data?

  

  

 delicious  

  

If you've been watching the news this week, or browsing the web, you're sure to have heard about SOPA and PIPA, two internet regulation laws making their way through Congress.  Their ostensible purpose is to protect copyright holders from piracy, but many experts and corporations have raised strong concerns about SOPA and PIPA and how such laws could impact the internet as we use it today.  Objections to these proposed laws culminated on Wednesday the 18th, with several voluntary black-outs of popular internet sites such as Wikipedia, Wired, Boing Boing, and Reddit. 

While the strong protests and unification in the internet community appears to have stopped SOPA and PIPA in their tracks, it wasn't even 24 hours later that the US Government flexed its muscles and showed just how far it can go under current law to do what it claims is protecting copyright.  In an impressively coordinated effort, the US Justice Department, working with local jurisdictions throughout the world, shut down and confiscated $50 million in computer equipment used by the cloud operator Megaupload.  Megaupload, founded in 2005, was one of the earliest shared file hosting sites, allowing users to upload and store data and share that data with other users.  Much like Rapidshare, Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive and other file sharing services, Megaupload provided a way for people to easily transfer and backup their data on the internet.

The US Government claim is that Megaupload was being used to illegally transmit copyright material.  Of course, this argument can be made for any cloud storage service, as what is stored is entirely up to the user and cannot be individually verified by the provider.  Legal misgivings aside, the important question for us to ask as users is, what happens to my data if my cloud provider disappears?  In the case of Megaupload, which Terminal did subscribe to and use for transferring company data, it appears that our data is retrievably lost, with no warning and no recourse.

While the US Government may feel that it is acting in the best interest of its constituents, the looming issue now becomes whether we, as consumers, should be trusting our critical data to any cloud service provider.  Knowing that the government can and will act without warning to disable and destroy any cloud operator means that no matter how redundant or reliable you think your provider may be, your data could still vanish overnight, stuck in a government warehouse and effectively lost in the red tape of months of litigation.

This week marks a dark point in the rapid growth of cloud services.  It will be interesting to see how some of the largest cloud providers react to these events and even more interesting to see how users respond to the realization that their data is not so safe in the cloud after all.

Brian St. Marie - Sr. Systems Engineer